INTRODUCTION
The Hague Academy of International Law, which opened its doors in 1923, continues to operate as a successful institution, every year attracting a select group of legal scholars and practitioners from around the world. Its success has certainly been contributed to by the high quality of its itinerant faculty and the annual publication of their lectures in the seminal Receuil des cours series. However, a further, crucial aspect to extending its reputation as a prestigious seat of learning was the support given to it by the major American philanthropic foundations – Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller. While the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace originally provided the financial means to promote the Academy's international law programme after the First World War, following the Second World War it was joined by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in a coordinated programme to modernize the institution and increase its international influence. On a regional level this was in line with the foundations' aim to upgrade European higher education by introducing American methods to replace traditional pedagogic practices. However, the main reason existed on the global level: to use the Academy to make contact with and influence the elites of the newly decolonizing Third World. For a period of about fifteen years, from the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, the Academy became involved in a broad strategy begun by the Eisenhower administration to ensure a smooth transition from a colonial to a postcolonial world order. The foundations, through their instrumental support for this institution, followed closely and deliberately the path taken by United States foreign policy.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE THIRD WORLD
By the early 1950s the foreign policy of the United States was beginning to focus more on regions beyond Western Europe. The Marshall Plan had successfully contributed to the economic and political stabilization of its Western allies, and NATO was in place as the American security umbrella the West Europeans had been seeking. In contrast, the Communist victory in China and the outbreak of the Korean War sent strong signals that the American aim for a postwar free-market democratic world order was going to come under greater threat from developments elsewhere. In this context the pressures for an end to European colonial rule that were building across Africa and Asia, fuelled and encouraged by the arrival of independence for major new states such as India and Indonesia, represented a significant challenge. It is no exaggeration to claim, as one scholar has done, that “the rise of the Third World posed a fundamental challenge to Western global dominance – the most sweeping such challenge of the modern era.”Footnote 1
While Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had established an interventionist foreign policy in Latin America and East Asia, the move to incorporate the non-Western world within a US-led international economic and political order expanded significantly under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. The initial reasons for this were to ensure the supply of vital raw materials and military bases, the former to secure American economic growth and the latter to build a global security system to contain the Soviet Union. Yet despite Truman's “Point Four” speech in January 1949, which spoke of the intention to introduce a far-reaching technical assistance and economic aid programme for the underdeveloped countries, a noticeable shift in American concerns away from Europe only occurred after the election of Eisenhower in 1952.Footnote 2
In the late 1940s Eisenhower had expressed his belief in the possibility of a just postwar world order marked by cooperation and understanding, a state of affairs which the United States could bring into existence by working through the United Nations. Even when it became clear that the UN was effectively blocked by superpower rivalry, Eisenhower's mix of “vague liberal internationalism, Wilsonian idealism, and practical realism”continued to view the UN as a vital element within any effort to establish international norms of behaviour. Along with his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower understood that whatever its flaws, the UN remained at the centre of establishing a consensus on the acceptable behaviour of states. The looming prospect of numerous new countries arriving on the international scene made it imperative that decolonization be channelled in a pro-Western direction, thus ensuring an “orderly evolution” of international relations from a colonial to a postcolonial epoch. The UN remained the best means to strengthen a universal code of international law.Footnote 3
This goal placed the United States in an awkward dilemma, since too great a support for claims of freedom and Third World independence would lead to serious strains in its relations with its European allies. To try and accommodate the often polarized world views of colonizer and colonized, through the 1950s the US tried to steer a middle course that satisfied neither camp. Added to this scenario was the growing attention given by the Soviet Union to Third World concerns. A policy of supporting anti-colonial, anti-racist resolutions in the UN combined with an expanding aid programme led Dulles to exclaim in 1956 that the rival superpower “challenged the industrial and political supremacy that up until now the West could maintain over the underdeveloped nations of the world.” The Soviet model of rapid industrialization, which provided ample evidence of its technological prowess with the launch of the Sputnik satellites in October 1957, gave the USSR an ideologically powerful advantage over the West in the Third World during the late 1950s.Footnote 4 In contrast, Eisenhower's attempt to increase American aid programmes in response met with consistent opposition from both unconvinced Congressmen and a frugal Treasury Department unwilling to accept that American national security was at stake.Footnote 5 Meanwhile the ability of the US to dominate the UN agenda declined as the organization's membership increased from fifty-six states in 1953 to ninety-nine by 1961, and Khrushchev's calculated gambits to gather Third World neutrals behind his anti-colonial stance posed a formidable challenge.Footnote 6
FOUNDATIONS AND THIRD WORLD ELITES
American approaches towards trying to secure an “orderly evolution” in the Third World during the 1950s and early 1960s were not limited to a weak aid programme, military alliances and CIA-sponsored coups.Footnote 7 An added dimension in recent Cold War historiography has been the attention given to “soft power,” meaning the ability to extend recognition of shared values such that “if a country can shape international rules that are consistent with its interests and values, its actions will more likely appear legitimate in the eyes of others.”Footnote 8 As the importance of the Third World in the Cold War has been stressed more by historians in recent years, so too has “the impact that the United States exerted on the cultural systems and values of Third World societies.”Footnote 9 While the best example is President Kennedy successfully unleashing the idealism of the Peace Corps to regain an ideological advantage over the Soviet Union in the Third World, many other forms of “public diplomacy” were carried out through non-governmental channels to influence the development of the non-Western world along Western lines.Footnote 10 One of the prime areas through which to achieve this was education. As Lipin Bu has outlined, “when the newly independent nations emphasized education in their nation-building, both the United States and the Soviet Union eagerly offered them educational resources and political ideologies.”Footnote 11
While the US government was involved in this strategy, many of the practitioners were nongovernmental organzations (NGOs), universities and charities from the private sector.Footnote 12 It was in this field that the major American foundations played a vital supporting role. Although the foundations remained independent of government, the common interests that existed between the philanthropic and foreign policy elites ensured that they functioned as “silent partners” who “consistently supported the major aims of United States foreign policy, while simultaneously helping to construct an intellectual framework supportive of that policy's major tenets.”Footnote 13 During the 1950s the foundations backed US foreign-policy objectives by focusing on specific universities across Asia, Africa and Latin America in order to turn them into centres of excellence, effectively seed-beds for regional talent and the future (pro-Western) leading cadres of the newly independent nations.Footnote 14 An added dimension to this was that American foundations were prepared to support top-level institutions in Europe for the same purpose of training Third World elites. The Hague Academy of International Law was one such “beachhead” institution.Footnote 15
The Academy served both as a launching point for the introduction of American education methods into European higher education, and as a means to create a transnational “epistemic community” with a shared understanding of international order based on Western notions of development, democracy and the free market. Peter Haas has formulated the importance of such communities as networks “of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area.”Footnote 16 Through their channelling of financial support to key institutions, the foundations aimed to create “a concrete collection of individuals who share the same worldview (or episteme).”Footnote 17 Due to its strategic knowledge, a transnational epistemic community can carry considerable political influence in policy formation.Footnote 18 “The epistemic community members' professional training, prestige, and reputation for expertise in an area highly valued by society or elite decision makers accord them access to the political system and legitimize or authorize their activities.”Footnote 19
THE NETHERLANDS AS A “BEACHHEAD”
A long-time ally of the United States and with a proud democratic tradition, the Netherlands regarded the Atlantic Alliance as the strategic bedrock of its foreign policy throughout the 1950s and 1960s and supported American leadership as a welcome balance to French and German designs in Europe. With its economic landscape dominated by several influential multinationals such as Shell, Unilever, KLM and Philips, the Dutch were committed to a free-trade policy, and this reliance on foreign raw materials and markets ensured an internationalist outlook. Alongside this was the enthusiastic participation of the Dutch in international organizations, reflecting both their belief in the necessity of achieving international order through negotiation and the need to secure Dutch interests by arranging compromises between the larger powers. Further, the religious input into Dutch political and social life resulted in strong anticommunist sentiments.Footnote 20
The Netherlands had already attracted the attention of American philanthropic interests before 1939. In his impressive investigation of the influence of American institutions, both governmental and nongovernmental, on Dutch higher education, Jan Rupp has chronicled the gradual shift that took place throughout Dutch universities towards American research models and techniques of organization through the twentieth century.Footnote 21 This transformation, which speeded up after the Second World War, was especially fuelled by the influence the major American foundations had on the direction of research. Before the war the Rockefeller Foundation had given financial support to the Nederlands Economisch Instituut, and several of its leading personalities, such as Jan Tinbergen and Piet Lieftinck, were research fellows of the foundation in the early 1930s.Footnote 22 In the postwar years the Ford Foundation contributed to several institutions of higher learning such as the International Institute for Social History located in Amsterdam.Footnote 23 The Fulbright Program also ensured the further development of academic interchanges between these two countries. The Dutch were very keen to re-establish intellectual contacts torn apart by Nazism and the isolation of the war years. An article in Physics Today from 1948 reported the Dutch as being “very internationally-minded” and “eager to play [their] part in the resumption of international cooperation.”Footnote 24 Based on this long tradition of democratic rule, free-market economics and intellectual exchange, in 1953 the US Embassy noted without exaggeration that the Dutch were “perhaps closer ideologically to the United States than any people in Europe.”Footnote 25
The prime role mapped out by the foundations for the academy, to act as a sort of “intellectual cosmopolis” for the elites of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa, fitted perfectly with the international profile that the Netherlands sought to establish after the Second World War. Alongside the Academy's Atlanticist orientation, the Dutch were firm believers in the role of the United Nations, particularly in the area of development assistance, and during the 1950s and 1960s the demand grew within national politics for an increase in aid to the poorer countries. No longer a colonial power after the loss of Indonesia in 1949, promoting the socioeconomic development of the decolonizing regions became a politically progressive leitmotif of the postwar international identity of the Netherlands. It was a policy which also aimed to prevent communist advances by reducing poverty and improving living standards. Although financial aid from the Dutch was limited during the 1950s, technical assistance was willingly offered via the UN and supported by politicians from the left and the right.Footnote 26 The shifting strategy of the Soviet Union towards a greater influence in the Third World only heightened the need for such a policy, leading Jan Tinbergen in 1957 to call for a new “internationalist” social democracy focused on dealing with the development question.Footnote 27 Development aid increased from 200 million guilders in 1965 to almost 2 billion guilders ten years later. By 1980 the goal of providing 1·5 per cent of GDP for overseas causes had been achieved, a higher amount than any other country except Norway.Footnote 28 In these circumstances it is understandable that considerable common ground existed between, on the one hand, the foundations' pragmatic goal to foster socioeconomic development and political stability in the Third World and, on the other, the more moral Dutch wish to overcome the rich–poor divide.
The Hague Academy was not the only educational establishment in the Netherlands with a strong orientation towards the Third World. In 1950 the Netherlands Universities Foundation of International Cooperation (NUFFIC) was founded to support this goal by promoting international educational exchange with the underdeveloped world. Two years later the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), also in The Hague, was created specifically to offer postgraduate training for the emerging leaders of the underdeveloped regions of the world. Within a short space of time it became a prestigious symbol of Dutch intent in the field of development, literally “the flagship of Dutch cultural diplomacy.” The ISS concentrated on offering bachelor's and master's degrees in public administration, social policy and economic planning, the aim being to pass on Western techniques of organization to newly independent nations soon to embark on major programmes of industrialization. In terms of its international orientation qua academic influences, the ISS was from the beginning a part of the Anglo-American network.Footnote 29 Having established itself by 1956 as an independent university within the Dutch system, the ISS would receive substantial financial support from the Ford Foundation in the following years: $76,250 in 1957, $25,000 in 1958, $17,500 in 1959, $15,000 in 1961, $11,300 in 1962, $403,300 in 1964, $59,852 in 1966. While the smaller grants were generally used to maintain scholarship programmes and other facilities on an annual basis, the larger grant in 1964 was earmarked wholly for substantial training programmes and other development work in Asia and Africa. Similarly, $36,398 was given to the Nederlands Economisch Instituut in 1962 to support its higher-education programmes in Africa.Footnote 30 For the major US foundations, these Dutch institutions were ideal “third parties” with which it could work to achieve its goals in the development field since there was little or no discrepancy between the aims of the foundation staff and those of the Dutch administrators and (international) faculty. The Hague Academy operated according to a similar model of cooperation.
1923–1945: THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ACADEMY
An essential aspect of the Hague Academy of International Law is that its relationship with American foundations dated from its very inception long before the Second World War. Stimulated by the two major international peace conferences held in the city in 1899 and 1907, a committee of Dutch legal experts under the leadership of well-known lawyer Tobias Asser was formed in 1910 to pave the way for a new institution. Financial support was soon offered from the newly founded Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a logical extension of the funds that Andrew Carnegie was already providing for the construction of the Peace Palace in The Hague.
Asser's committee pursued a plan typical of the idealism that marked international relations thought prior to the First World War. The new academy would promote the standards of international law as the fundamental principles of interaction between states and peoples, thereby opposing the forces of nationalism and acting to establish a firm set of legal norms for international behaviour. The student population, as international as possible, would be made up of graduates from relevant professions such as the diplomatic corps, the military and civil servants. Funding from private sources would ensure independence and a lack of governmental influence. An initial sum of 30,000 guilders was provided by Asser (from his Nobel Peace Prize winnings of 1911) and the Dutch pacifist Dr. A. E. H. Goedkoop, with the Carnegie Endowment agreeing to provide an annual subsidy for the institution's continued operation. The Academy was eventually officially opened on 14 July 1923 (Bastille Day, significantly reflecting the French influence), and its unique internationalist identity was already established in its first year. In all, 353 students from thirty-one countries attended courses given in French by lecturers of fifteen different nationalities.Footnote 31
1945–1954: REGAINING ITS PLACE IN THE POSTWAR WORLD
Despite this background of long-running support, the first decade after the war was not easy for the Academy as it tried to regain its prewar funding channels from the United States. The Carnegie Endowment, which had previously provided $40,000 annually, had decided under its new president, Alger Hiss, to protect its declining capital and to shift its focus instead to supporting the study of international law at domestic centres such as Yale, Harvard and Columbia.Footnote 32 The Carnegie's subvention to the Academy therefore rapidly declined from $20,000 in 1947 to $10,000 in 1948, being terminated altogether at the end of 1949. During this period the Dutch member of the Academy's governing board (the Curatorium), Eelco van Kleffens, made several attempts to gain support, firstly in 1948 from the Rockefeller and then, following its negative reply, in 1949 from the Ford Foundation.Footnote 33 Formerly the Dutch foreign minister, by 1949 Van Kleffens was ambassador in Washington, DC and was certainly well-connected.Footnote 34 A fervent believer in the status of international law above the base interests of nation states, he had served on the Academy's Administrative Council before the war and continued to be a key figure during the 1950s.Footnote 35 Despite receiving sympathy for the Academy's cause, initial responses were negative. The Rockefeller had little desire to take over a position so recently vacated by the Carnegie. The Carnegie wanted the Academy to modernize, but was not willing to pay for it.Footnote 36 The final word on the issue at this time came from John Foster Dulles, a Rockefeller trustee. Consulted by Willitts following another request for support, Dulles, then in his phase of disillusionment with the UN, replied with disdain:
He then went on to say that the Communists regarded international law as the means by which those in power keep others in subjection. If there came into view a person who could deal with the problem of the whole philosophy of international law profoundly and wisely, he would favor support.Footnote 37
Undaunted, Van Kleffens turned his attention to the Ford Foundation. With increasing attendance figures demonstrating the Academy's resolute appeal, and the Ford Foundation's Study Group Report published in October 1949 indicating clearly the foundation's interest in international affairs, van Kleffens thought his chances were good.Footnote 38 However, he only received the prosaic reply that the foundation was “still reorganizing and staffing” and could not consider his request in the short term.Footnote 39
Van Kleffens did not relent. In March 1951 he wrote to Ford Foundation president Paul Hoffman to announce the Academy's candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Academy missed out on the prize – it went instead to the French trade unionist Leon Jouhaix, leader of the anticommunist Force ouvrière, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions – but the high profile gained from its candidacy had the desired effect. The Ford's trustees agreed in April to provide a grant of $22,000 for the 1951 academic year, albeit with the proviso that “the Foundation was not thereby committed to further support.”Footnote 40 Over the following years continued efforts were made by van Kleffens and other influential figures to secure Ford support on “a somewhat more permanent although revocable basis.”Footnote 41 At this stage none of the three major foundations saw much value in supporting an international law institute outside the United States. However, this would soon change.
1954–1956: THE ACADEMY'S POTENTIAL IS RECOGNIZED
Such was the financial plight of the academy that, with capital declining and closure a real possibility, the Executive Council decided to go against its principals of scholarly autonomy and for the first time request support from the Dutch government. As expected, it was not considered in the interests of the nation to lose this prestigous institution. A financial lifeline of 40,000 guilders (about $10,000) was made available to cover the Academy's debt in 1955 and 1956, with no conditions attached.Footnote 42
However, by the mid-1950s the pending consequences of decolonization were becoming a matter of increasing importance within global politics. Preparations for a major conference of Afro-Asian nations were already in motion in early 1954, and the resulting event in Bandung in April 1955 was a large step towards a post-imperial world order and “a powerful symbol of solidarity among former colonial possessions.”Footnote 43 Significantly, during this same period the Rockefeller Foundation reversed its initial standpoint towards the academy. After spending some time in The Hague during the summer of 1954, Rockefeller vice president Kenneth Thompson sent a detailed report to his superior, Dean Rusk, in September. Thompson, who oversaw the Rockefeller's interests in strategic universities abroad, was impressed by
the calibre of the students and the total environment established through intellectual and social relationships … Its significance is heightened because of the failures of established agencies like the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and the International Law Association to encourage a free and vigorous debate among responsible scholars of notably diverse viewpoints.Footnote 44
Thompson commended the Academy's intention to facilitate “the cross-fertilization of national views and opinions,” especially as most of the auditors were already or would soon be members of their respective countries' elites. However, he did ascertain certain administrative problems. While the Dutch ran the Administrative Council, the French-controlled Curatorium controlled “policy on educational and scientific matters.” The dominant personality was the Curatorium's president, 73-year-old Gilbert Gidel, a professor of law from Paris. Thompson noted that several members of the faculty were critical of this French dominance. Language was a problematic issue. Whereas before the Second World War every lecture was held in French, English was accepted after 1945 but, thanks to the resistance of Gidel, only in a minority of courses: two out of ten in 1947, four out of thirteen by 1952. Gidel also maintained the diploma exam as something exclusive for only a handful of students each year, leading to “an underlying sense of discontent” amongst those unable to fulfil their ambition.
Thompson then turned to possible reforms. Above all, he recommended a shift in emphasis away from the “mass lecture” towards a seminar system, to give all students a greater opportunity to contribute. Significantly he had heard “that the French, because of their national educational patterns, have long been opposed to the seminar as a means of instruction at the Academy.” However, “progressive forces” were gathering strength around Van Kleffens and others. Percy Corbett, a visiting American scholar from Princeton, felt the opportunity had to be seized:
The fact that the American member of the curatorium [George Finch of the Carnegie Endowment] has never attended a meeting or taken any part in its work is not merely regretted; it is deeply resented … Five hundred or more students are assembled at The Hague every year. They come from all over the world. If this country has any fresh thought to offer on the elements of an international order, and any interest in spreading such thought beyond its own borders, this channel seems to me open for a great deal of development.Footnote 45
Thompson was in no doubt that “the possibilities are so impressive and the organization so promising that I would suppose this question should merit the most serious attention.” In November 1955 the Rockefeller Foundation authorized a grant of $122,000, beginning in 1957 and to be spread over five years, to facilitate the creation of a Centre d’étude et de recherche du droit international et des relations internationales. The purpose of the centre was to provide a setting alongside the regular lectures where topical research projects in international relations could be investigated by a select student-faculty body in a looser, more stimulating framework. The centre would become the basis for developing the Academy's research profile.Footnote 46
Van Kleffens, active on the transatlantic lecture circuit, continued to promote the Academy's cause. Developing his thesis on the importance of sovereignty (Aspen Institute, 7 August 1956), at the Bilderberg meeting in May 1956 he spoke of “The Causes of Growing Blocks Opposed to the West, in Particular in the UN,” a subject he deepened further with a talk entitled “The Psychology of New States” given to the American Club of Paris on 11 April 1957. Van Kleffens was disturbed by the tendency of newly independent states to reject international law as one of the pillars of continuing Western domination, and greater efforts needed to be made to overcome this. “If one of your great American foundations would promote systematic study of these matters,” he said in Paris, “I feel sure it would render a great service to the world.” That the Academy could be instrumental in this he had no doubts. Dean Rusk, thanking Van Kleffens for sending him a copy of his Paris speech, noted that “I know [it] will be of much interest to some of my colleagues here at the Foundation.”Footnote 47
During the summer of 1956 the momentum picked up. Philip Jessup, visiting professor of international law and diplomacy from Columbia,Footnote 48 drafted an assessment report that was forwarded to the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations.Footnote 49 He gave an interesting insight into some of the informal networking that occurred in The Hague:
A good many of the students had been to previous sessions. There are very many small group organizations among them – regional or national groups and groups based on particular substantive interests. These groups I feel sure have real value … I had direct testimony on only one group but this one shows the possible valuable by-products of the Academy. I was told of it by Boutros-Ghali, the able young Egyptian Assistant Professor of International Law at Cairo whom I had seen there and who studied with us at Columbia last year. This was his fourth consecutive year at the Academy. He is a member of a group of 15–20, many of whom also come back year after year, all of whom are teachers of international law of grades less than full professor. They meet regularly while at the Hague to discuss teaching methods, substantive topics, and general academic and other problems.Footnote 50
Overall Jessup found “a well-balanced program and not at all the stuffy old-line dogmatic set-up which I had been inclined to think I would find.” Nevertheless, the introduction of more seminars and English-language instruction was deemed essential.
After the visit of Donald Price, the Ford Foundation vice president responsible for its European programme, and John Gardner, president of the Carnegie Corporation, a Big Three lunch meeting was held on 3 October between Gardner, Price, Thompson and John Howard (director of the Ford's International Training Division). While Gardner wanted any grant to have as a condition a major restructuring of the management and administration of the Academy, he was dissuaded by the others that the typically European structure of the institution should be respected, and “that the European sensitivities are such that no crude bargaining would have any other than an adverse effect.” They also resolved not to nominate the next American representative on the Curatorium: “Our position should be that they should have a first class American but it is not up to us to name the man.” The fact that it was Philip Jessup who was appointed was a major additional factor in securing foundation support.Footnote 51
Having discussed possibilities with the Dutch-controlled Administrative Council in The Hague, a decision was taken in 1956 by Howard's international training and research office to approve a grant of $80,000 (subsequently raised to $90,000) over four years. Doubts remained due to the following: “lack of effective American participation in program management,” “excess of casual students,” “inflexible and somewhat old-fashioned teaching methods (e.g. lectures rather than seminars),” “little attention to important post-war international problems,” and “little participation by Asian scholars or attention to Asian problems.” An emphasis was given “to increase, as far as feasible, the participation of students and lecturers from Asia, Africa, North America, and South America.”Footnote 52 The summer programme was expanded from four to six weeks, higher salaries and expense allowances were granted for the staff, and increased student scholarships made available. Ford's legal advisor H. C. L. Merillat noted the appealing symmetry in that a four-year grant starting in 1958 would elapse at the same time as the five-year Rockefeller appropriation from 1957, “bringing the whole future of the Academy up for consideration at the same time by American foundations.”Footnote 53
1957–1970: EXTENDING THE EPISTEMIC COMMUNITY
At the end of the 1957 session Hardy Dillard of the University of Virginia reported his experiences as the Carnegie Endowment lecturer for that year. Dillard was scathing about the established method of large-scale lectures (complaining that too little was done “to relieve the monotony of droning discourse”), the lack of case-study material and the disregard for “the needs, capacities, and interests of the student auditors.” Dillard did accept that these characteristics would be typical for European institutions of higher learning in general, and that the Academy furthered “the scientific development of international law.” Nevertheless, it was hardly a favourable assessment and seemed to confirm the fears that had previously prevented any Ford Foundation support.Footnote 54
Yet by the late 1950s the academy, alongside its importance as a training institute, had become valuable as a kind of “listening post” on global affairs where the East–West “cultural Cold War” was played out on the micro-level. In October 1958 the Department of State sent New York lawyer and former CIA deputy director Loftus E. Becker as an adviser to the US embassy in The Hague to increase informal contacts between embassy officials and Academy participants via an expanded “cultural diplomacy” programme.Footnote 55 Contacts between the embassy and the institute had occurred before, such as in 1956 when the military attaché, Colonel McAffee, attended as a student. But what really galvanized the organized American response was increasing activity on the part of the Soviet embassy in The Hague to “cultivate” the students from the Third World. Added to this, the establishment of cultural relations with the Eastern bloc meant that the Academy was also attracting more participants from Eastern Europe.Footnote 56 Its importance could no longer be judged according to academic standards alone.
In April 1960 the new president of the Curatorium, Arnold McNair, submitted a further funding request. In his application McNair rightly emphasized the point that students from fifty-three countries attended the 1959 session:Footnote 57
During the past 15 years the number of new countries emerging into independent statehood has steadily increased, and it is evident that this process is far from its end. One of the serious problems which face governments of these new States is that of finding persons who possess the knowledge of international law and relations, and the training, required to enable them to act as legal advisors, as diplomats, and as representatives at international conferences. From a long term point of view the Academy is making an important contribution to the solution of this problem.Footnote 58
Once again Philip Jessup was supportive, proclaiming that the institution was fulfilling its designated role “to bring the value of modern US thought on methods and substance to the attention of teachers and scholars in the other regions of the world.” Recognizing that it “is expected to become an important center for training government and civil service personnel from the new nations of Asia and Africa” and that it “is peculiarly dependent on operating grants,” the foundation's Executive Committee approved a further $100,000 over four years beginning in 1962.Footnote 59
In the early 1960s the Academy continued to expand its services in the field of international education. A grant from the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, founded in 1962 to promote consultation and training on development issues, enabled the academy to set up an annual Dag Hammarskjöld research seminar in 1963. This was exclusively reserved “for persons who have entered upon, or are about to begin, careers in government or diplomatic service, or in the teaching of international law in the countries of Africa and Asia which have become independent within the last two decades.”Footnote 60
In 1965 the Ford provided a further five-year grant of $295,000, intended for “the extension – and where necessary the modernization – of the scientific aspects of the activities of the Academy.” A sum of $34,000 was set aside for the installation of simultaneous interpretation equipment, thus finally overcoming the English–French language issue which was becoming an unnecessary hindrance to the Academy's teaching and research capabilities. More far-reaching was the $45,000 designated for a two-year study on the future potentialities of the institution.Footnote 61 This was carried out under the chairmanship of Columbia international-law professor Wolfgang Friedmann, with professor Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed as one of his colleagues.Footnote 62 The group stressed further modernization of the curriculum, extra scholarships annually for doctoral candidatesFootnote 63 and the appointment of five scholars in residence each year.Footnote 64
By this stage the Academy was able to count on the interest of several philanthropic organizations. In 1964 the Carnegie Endowment guaranteed support for the annual Carnegie lecturer position for ten years following 1966. The Rockefeller Foundation continued its support for the Centre d’études with a grant of $150,000 in 1961 and a $210,000 terminal grant to cover 1966 to 1972. Aiming to expand the curriculum in an esoteric direction in line with the trends of the late 1960s, the Rockefeller also provided $1,500 a year for “special courses” from 1965 to 1967 whereby “distinguished exponents of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Islam discussed the compatibility of the basic principles of international law with these great religious philosophies.” The Asia Foundation also “acted favourably on a request for funds which would defray the expenses of one lecturer and more Asian scholars who may wish to come to the Academy.”Footnote 65
However, the most important development in these years was the extension of the institute's activities outside The Hague. Numbers of participants from Asia and Africa were rising – 117 in 1968 as opposed to seventy-two the year before – but Friedmann's study group recommended the formation of an External Programme. This effectively involved the Academy selecting and hiring out abroad an international “itinerant faculty” who would reside in each applicant country for several weeks, to provide a local source of expertise on international legal issues “and to assist generally in the development of international law teaching.” The aim was to set up lectures and seminars covering topics specifically relevant to particular regions of the world, thus attracting participants from neighbouring countries with the added aim of “establishing mutual friendly ties.” Selected young diplomats, professors and civil servants “who are expected to occupy prominent posts later on” could then be brought up to date on recent developments in international law. The External Programme was described by the study group as “a specialised kind of technical assistance” which “would greatly enlarge the effectiveness of the Academy.” There was also another reason, reflecting broader concerns. In Friedmann's words,
Such an extension of the Academy's activities, as the world's most respected centre of international legal studies, would help to counter the fragmenting tendencies which are already apparent and likely to increase, comporting a definite danger that the unity and universality of international law would increasingly give way to several systems of international law divided by regional, political, economic and other factors.Footnote 66
Van Kleffens also looked to the Academy to “face one of the great legal problems of the times … Is International Law solely a product of the West?”Footnote 67 As a result it was able to secure $173,200 from the Carnegie Endowment to establish the External Programme for its first three years. The first session of the programme was held in Rabat in 1969 and others followed in subsequent years in Bogotá, Mexico, Tehran, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Yaounde and Bangkok.Footnote 68 Nevertheless, the identity of the Academy as a vanguard institution was not to survive the foundations' changing outlook on international affairs.
1970–1972: THE FOUNDATIONS WITHDRAW FROM THE ACADEMY
The late 1960s were a difficult time for American foundations. The 1969 Tax Reform Act and revelations of CIA-sponsored activity forced them “to take a defensive turn.” At the Ford Foundation a new regime was installed when McGeorge Bundy replaced Henry Heald as president in 1966. Under Heald the foundation had been spending part of its capital (over $600 million above net income by 1962) and Bundy needed to enforce a more sober approach.Footnote 69
In March 1970 the Ford's international affairs office proposed a terminal grant of $131,697 for the academy, to be spread over three years.Footnote 70 Partly this was in line with general foundation policy that support should always be temporary so that institutions could be encouraged to diversify their funding base. However, more important was the changing geopolitical context and the declining strategic value of an institute like the academy for US foreign-policy interests. By the late 1960s the hoped-for “orderly evolution” to a postcolonial international system, with the newly independent nations aligned alongside the West, was a distant memory. Following the Bandung conference Third World nations continued to organize their own international networks such as the Non-Aligned Movement (1960), OPEC (1960) and the Group of 77 (1964). The introduction of many new members into the UN during the 1960s also brought a definitive end to Western control in the General Assembly, leading the United States to fall back more and more on its defensive Security Council veto. The OPEC price hikes in 1973 and the declaration of a New International Economic Order by the Group of 77 confirmed a dramatic shift in North–South relations.Footnote 71 In these circumstances the effort to foster an epistemic community of Third World elites via the “Old World” Academy began to appear as a lost cause and no longer worthy of attention.
A planning document from 1970 explains the resulting transformation in Ford Foundation policy. International law was in danger of becoming irrelevant and having no answers when “confronted with the forces of human reproduction, nationalism, ideological conflict, and the revolutions in science and technology.” Traditional concepts and methodology were no longer appropriate for dealing with issues relating to multinational corporations or the exploration (and exploitation) of outer and inner space. While the activities of the Academy in improving legal education and training abroad remained important, “it seems desirable to allocate the limited resources available primarily to those international aspects of law that are addressed to major challenges to the international political process.” Although “the Academy has made serious efforts in recent years to move away from the traditional European approach toward more modern methods of legal education,” it was decided that it no longer fitted “within the current priorities.” The foundation's attention was instead now directed towards the American Society for International Law, which, “through its publications, meetings and multidisciplinary study panels,”
has taken the leadership in seeking to direct the attention of the international law fraternity to such major challenges as the new technology generated by the continuing scientific revolution … and the necessity to incorporate the insights of other disciplines in seeking solutions for problems traditionally styled “legal.”Footnote 72
In other words, ASIL was now the focus for building a new transnational epistemic community based more on looser professional networks rather than the more static, training-related outlook of the Academy. The institute in The Hague was also unable to completely shake off the fact that “many new states tend to see international law as a body of principles whose essential effect, if not design, has been to maintain the colonial stigma.”Footnote 73 Despite continued attempts to regenerate interest, including direct appeals by the former Dutch ambassador to the United States, Herman van Roijen, to his old friend McGeorge Bundy, no further grant was offered.Footnote 74 Once again, the major foundations demonstrated their coordination by collectively withdrawing their support, and the Academy's use as a European “beachhead” was over.
CONCLUSION: THE ACADEMY OF THE FOUNDATIONS
The history of the Hague Academy as a strategic institution for the foundations can be considered on global, regional and bilateral levels. Globally it provides revealing insights into both the coordination of American philanthropic and foreign-policy interests and the altering posture of the United States towards the Third World. Prior to the Second World War the Carnegie Endowment had used the Academy to promote conflict resolution and world peace, such that, as Carnegie Endowment trustee James Brown Scott remarked, the institute should be a neutral vessel through which “international law internationalizes itself.”Footnote 75 However, with the onset of decolonization the support became more instrumentalized. Between 1956 and 1972 the Hague Academy received $652,000 from the Ford Foundation and $482,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation alone to extend its impact around the globe. In some ways this was a success, since an epistemic community of politically influential, Westernized elites, supportive of the United Nations and its normative system of international law, certainly existed. However, this community became increasingly sidelined by emerging sociopolitical forces that rejected the Western conception of international order as a continuation of colonial rule by proxy. Without attention to Third World economic and political concerns, the focus on elites could not alone guarantee success. With the failure of the “orderly evolution,” by the end of the 1960s the Academy could not longer fulfil a decisive function.
On a secondary, regional level, foundation support was directly related to an “Americanizing,” modernizing transition from French (European) teaching methods, language and source material towards the introduction of American-styled seminars, independent study opportunities, informal student–professor contacts and one-on-one supervision. The introduction of the case-study method of instruction from the Harvard Law School, a new departure in European higher education at that time, was significant in this respect.Footnote 76 The support of reform-minded individuals in the Academy's administration, such as the transatlantic-orientated Van Kleffens, was crucial for this process. This ties in with the institute's place in bilateral relations. The Academy signified a confluence of American and Dutch interests, both in terms of the Dutch looking to establish a lead over their Continental rivals by securing substantial funds and introducing American pedagogical innovations, and in terms of the common concern over development issues. For the foundations The Hague was an ideal location, due to its reputation as a centre of legal practice and the fact that the Netherlands, as Van Roijen put it, “under the influence of historical, social, economic and other factors, has, through the years, generally worked for peace and stability in the world.”Footnote 77 The global orientation of the Academy, and the acquiescence of the Dutch administrators to this role, was confirmed by there being few Dutch participants in the Academy's sessions. Nevertheless, the Academy's prestige did not suffer and its international role did not decline due to the withdrawal of the foundations. Ironically enough, once its significance as an instrument for US policy towards the Third World disappeared, the institute gradually returned to its original incarnation as a French–Dutch consortium.Footnote 78
I would like to thank Idelle Nissila-Stone at the Ford Foundation archive for her generous assistance in this research, and Valentijn Bijvanck and an anonymous reviewer for their comments.
