Building an International Identity

The Preparatory Commission of UNESCO worked, first in London and then in Paris, from November 1945 to December 1946. Within the Commission, the Preparatory Committee for the Social Sciences – composed of members of the secretariat as well as the members of national commissions to UNESCO – was established to sketch a general plan in the field of the social sciences to be submitted for approval at UNESCO's First General Conference, the agency's founding ceremony, which was to be held in Paris from November 19 to December 10, 1946.

Initially, the secretariat-part of the Committee was small and not very high-powered, but it was ambitious in its proposals.Footnote ³ It included the Norwegian professor of sociology Arvid Brodersen; the historian and social geography professor at the Cairo University Mohamed Awad; the British economist Percival W. Martin; and the nexus and soul of this heterogeneous group, the Harvard University Graduate School of Education professor, Howard Eugene Wilson.Footnote ⁴ The latter had been very much influenced by the “scientific progressivism” of the Columbia historian, James Shotwell, who, during the interwar period had advocated for the pacification of international relations through scientific cooperation at the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an agency of the League of Nations created in 1922 and based in Paris after 1926 (DeBenedetti Reference DeBenedetti1974; UNESCO 1946 a, 3). Following Shotwell's path, Wilson had been a prominent actor in the development of the UN Charter in 1945; and, from San Francisco, he had gone directly to serve as a deputy executive secretary for UNESCO, where he had responsibility for the administration of the Sections devoted to “Education” and “Media of Mass Communication” and he particularly took care of coordinating the first steps of what would become the Social Sciences Department. From the beginning, he briefed every member on the possible evolution of the Committee and instructed Martin, Awad, and Brodersen about the best strategies to ensure the support of national commissions, which had the capacity of approving or blocking decisions.

In May 1946, the secretariat produced and circulated a first draft for the Social Sciences Department within UNESCO and within the national commissions of the member states, and the common discussions of the document were organized in June (UNESCO 1946 a; UNESCO 1946 a, 5). These gatherings were organized privately in an ambience of “complete freedom of discussion” (UNESCO 1946a, 2). Curiously, they were chaired by two non-social scientists: the Brazilian chemist and government official Paulo de Berredo Carneiro, who presided over the sessions, and the British biologist and distinguished eugenist, Alexander Carr-Saunders, who acted as vice-president. One of the objectives during the preparatory meetings was to foster identification with the organization so that international attachments would become embedded in members’ self-definitions. A major fear was that pre-existing identification with their national academic community might dilute the commitment towards the new transnational team of researchers. For that reason, during the meetings, the British biologist and prominent member of the Eugenics Society, Julian Huxley (then executive secretary of UNESCO and future Secretary-General of the agency) very often expressed his scientific humanism and his vision that UNESCO was meant to produce a common universal framework overcoming national particularities to solve the main problems of humanity (Sluga Reference Sluga2010; Toye and Toye Reference Toye and Toye2010). This rallying oratory mixing interwar idealism and internationalism could also be found in the words of the members of the secretariat who attended the meetings such as the British LSE historian and political scientist Alfred Zimmern (adviser), the French philosopher Jean Thomas (deputy executive secretary) as well as Awad, Wilson, Brodersen, and Martin. From this rhetoric was expected to emerge the “glue” that would bind together the members of the secretariat as well as the scientists from different national commissions.Footnote ⁵ For instance, Awad spoke of the “cultivation of a common world view-point – the elimination of prejudices of one kind or another and the pursuit of the objective method in treating problems and questions in the social sciences” (UNESCO 1946 a, 6). Replaced in its context, however, this discourse on the world community and the world outlook was more than a practice of team-building, it was also a reaction typical of a generation which had seen the growing participation of scientists in the administration of public affairs and which had witnessed governments, both in democratic and authoritarian countries, extending their power and taking stances in spheres which were, before the war, the preserve of intellectual elites. Carneiro and Zimmern expressed their vision of UNESCO as a sanctuary for freedom of thought, whose power emanated from the people and not from the governments. The Brazilian, at the end of the first session, spoke of the creation of “an international brotherhood of social scientists formed completely independent of any political groups or political influence capable of undertaking research and of advising governments independent of local conditions and local political ways of thought” (UNESCO 1946 a, 16).Footnote ⁶ In that spirit, the idea was to coordinate transnational networks and research through the creation of international associations of social scientists, the publication of international inventories and handbooks of academic and research resources and of social science research organizations, the development of abstracting and bibliographical services, and the creation of an International Social Science Institute (UNESCO 1946b).Footnote ⁷

The national commissions for UNESCO also played a role in the preparatory meetings since they could not only submit propositions and plans to guide the choices of the Social Sciences Committee but also obstruct the decision-making process in case of disagreement.Footnote ⁸ Unsurprisingly, the most vocal members were representatives of the US, Britain, and France, three countries that had actually sent experts in the social sciences, while the other nations had contented themselves with sending diplomats from their respective embassies. Robert Redfield, the anthropologist and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, and Esther Brunauer, a historian and active member of American Association of University Women and specialist in international affairs for the State Department, acted as US advisers to UNESCO for the Social Sciences. The geographer C. B. Fawcett and the Annales historian Lucien Febvre served, respectively, as the British and French representatives. Concerning the philosophy of the future department, national representatives, very much like the members of the secretariat, were convinced of the idea of building a “world community of common understanding.” Redfield spoke of exercising the “muscles of internationality” and “developing the international mind” (UNESCO 1946 a, 13–14). Febvre insisted on giving the right of speech to peoples who had been deprived of it and on the need to prevent the “distortion of social sciences in the interests of ethnocentric patriotism and overzealous nationalism” (UNESCO 1946a, 14).

If they agreed on the general philosophy, the representatives were not as unanimous concerning the missions of the future department. While the representatives from Yugoslavia and China, claiming pragmatism and probably fearing UNESCO's hidden imperialism, wanted a department that would serve only as a clearing house for information or a coordination center for the social sciences; the US and French Delegates, following the proposals of the secretariat (and specially Wilson), pushed the Committee to support a department that could take action and undertake special research projects (UNESCO 1946b). In the end, while the latter, more interventionist, vision was selected, no clear decision was made concerning the concrete research projects to be undertaken. Of the four topics suggested by Martin in his first draft (national character, the cultural basis of economic organization, psychology and politics, and world government), none was approved. A project on the analysis of Nazi psychology that had been planned for a small group of psychologists who were to apply psychology to the study of Nazi Germany was delayed since it was judged to be inopportune. In the same way, the proposed creation of an international psycho-political institute for the application of psychology to international affairs was immediately shelved given its political character. Another project related to “devices for enabling the peoples of one country to get some insight into the psychology of other peoples” was withdrawn in view of the fate of previous projects (Martin Reference Martin1947, 16–20). The ideas of initiating a study on “nationalism” and the plan to undertake a project on religions were paralyzed due to the complaints of the delegates from Czechoslovakia, Mexico, China, and Greece warning against the political implications of such a study and the difficulties of getting them accepted at the General Conference. The only project that generated undisputed enthusiasm was the plan to study town planning and community development. However, the necessity to coordinate their actions with other agencies of the UN system delayed its implementation.Footnote ⁹

In the end, not many decisions were taken on the selection of topics that could, following UNESCO's Constitution, “favor the development of mutual understanding and peace among the peoples.” However, this was part of Wilson's strategy to speed up the creation of the Department. He proposed delaying the decisions on the more controversial aspects of content and insisted instead on dealing first with problems of international cooperation in the field. It was a well-planned move since all member states agreed on the necessity of laying the foundations for an international social science and that the new department should be established first and above all.

On the basis of these discussions, the preliminary suggestions were revised, combined, and distributed in printed form for the first General Conference of UNESCO held in the buildings of the Sorbonne University in Paris with representatives from 30 countries. On November 28, 1946, the sub-commission of social sciences, philosophy, and humanistic studies asked the secretariat to present the final report of the preparatory Committee (UNESCO 1947, 174–179). At the initiative of the delegate from India seconded by Julian Huxley and the French and the Chinese delegations, and despite the opposition of the United States, it was decided to separate the Social Sciences Department from the Division of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. Otherwise, the actual meetings went according to the Preparatory Committee: there was general approval of the principles, but still some divergence of views regarding the projects to undertake. As expected, the projects on international cooperation (lists of social research institutes, social science abstracts and yearbooks) were almost unanimously approved, but sensitive projects that could ignite disagreement among national commissions (the study of the economic and social history of World War II, the use of psycho-political techniques, the creation of an international relations study center, and the study of home and community planning) were deferred or rejected. It was understood that in 1947, the Committee would meet again to pass a resolution for a research line combining the study of “nationalism and internationalism,” “public opinion surveys,” “cultural aspects of population problems,” and “the effects of machinery upon civilization” (UNESCO 1947, 234).

After the General Conference, Wilson and Awad left (following the end of their contracts) and Brodersen accepted a position at the New School in New York, leaving the new Department without a head. With their departure, the common ethos that had animated the meetings slowly faded away and the new secretariat was left with the task of fleshing out the ideals of the founders, while creating their own identity. The history of the Tensions project, launched during this transition period, exemplifies how difficult it was to combine past identities, academic traditions and new internationalist ambitions.

US Psychologists or International Workers?

The Preamble to UNESCO's Constitution had set as the principal objective of the organization “the purpose of advancing, through the educational and scientific and cultural relations of the peoples of the world, the objectives of international peace and of the common welfare of mankind.” One of the greatest tasks the new secretariat confronted immediately after the conference was to translate the vague resolutions of the Preparatory Committee into positive and concrete work programs. In 1947, the Social Science Department launched the Tensions project with the aim of uncovering the causes of conflict and the factors favoring international understanding.Footnote ¹⁰ The project was initially almost exclusively staffed by US scholars who approached the problem of tensions and conflict through the lenses of the controversial “culture and personality” perspective. In the US, the “culture and personality” approach – and the related “national character” – studies had been developed in war-related agencies during World War II by psychologists such as Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and by cultural anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, and Edward Sapir (Gitre Reference Gitre2010; Gitre Reference Gitre2011; Herman Reference Herman1996). These scholars wanted to delineate regularities in culture patterns and in the character structure of the members of a culture in order to understand how to crack the morale of the enemy or how to induce friendly feelings in populations towards the Allied powers. Even if the “culture and personality” movement had originated in the interwar period in European circles, during and after the war, the work had been successfully transplanted in the US where it was pursued at several venues mostly as a way for anthropologists to show expertise in policy issues.Footnote ¹¹ This approach was also omnipresent in the first years of UNESCO's research in the social sciences. How did these academics reach such a prominent position in the Department? Did they manage to make their professional and organizational identity converge?

Redfield's good friend and colleague, the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils, was hired in 1947 as a special consultant in the Social Sciences Department to provide guidance for the new Tensions project.Footnote ¹² In 1947, Shils was a relatively young but influential sociologist with a well-defined agenda for his discipline and a sense of a mission in reshaping the academic profession in the US and beyond.Footnote ¹³ Suspicious of interwar utopian idealism and revolutionary ideologies, he was appreciative of the order-maintaining, pluralist politics of the British-American tradition. Given his command of German – Shils was well-versed in German historical and sociological thinking – he was sent during World War II to do work for the London branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. He did most of his service in the military unit of the Psychological Warfare Division's Intelligence Section where, along with Henry Dicks, a professor of psychiatry at the London's Tavistock Institute, he carried out interviews with German prisoners of war (Gilman Reference Gilman2003, 140; Pooley Reference Pooley2006 and Reference Pooley2007). One of the highlights of his wartime research dealt with the impact of propaganda and mass communication in populations.

At UNESCO, Shils was charged of writing a memo describing the general framework that the Tensions Project could use to account for wars. Shils thought that “culture and personality studies” was the appropriate framework for social science at UNESCO since “by providing a common focus of attention and helping to bring about the acceptance of a common conceptual framework, it will bring the scientists of the world closer together” (Shils Reference Shils1947, 1). Shils’ memo stressed the importance of psychological variables as triggers of conflict and downplayed the role of objective material situations since it was understood that political and economic factors only “precipitated tensions into violence, even though the ultimate predispositions towards hostility are generated outside those spheres” (ibid., 3).Footnote ¹⁴ Following a common assumption in “Culture and Personality” studies, Shils borrowed Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict's vocabulary and posited that psychological predispositions to conflict were transmitted through the “patterns of culture” (ibid., 4), and that personality and particularly hostile drives were formed in early infancy and childhood. The policy implications for UNESCO were clear: the organization had to instigate research on what kind of upbringing in childhood and adolescence predisposed adults to international understanding, on techniques of attitude change elaborated in communication studies, psychiatry, and clinical psychology, and on the study of national characters.Footnote ¹⁵ Among the techniques that he singled out as useful for future research at UNESCO were the studies of personality structure using observation and techniques of dynamic psychology (psychodrama, sociodrama, and group techniques), as well as intelligence tests and public opinion surveys.

Shils was also assigned to organize the recruitment of the first director of the Tensions Project. The secretariat had specified that the director should have (1) experience in social investigation and research including field-work, (2) a wide range of knowledge in the social sciences, (3) an absence of bias and prejudice, and (4) the ability to write in a lucid and effective style.Footnote ¹⁶ However, Shils had his own ideas of how to select candidates, and the peculiarities of the appointment process revealed how he planned to keep the top posts in the Social Science Department an almost exclusive preserve of “culture and personality” scholars and hence to create cohesion and a common worldview among the staff in order to maintain the predominance of social science in an Anglo-Saxon context. In the recruitment procedure, Shils established a stereotypical ideal of the best candidates for the head of the Tensions project. An essential required skill was, of course, their knowledge of “Culture and Personality” studies, and, many candidates were rejected because their knowledge of personality structure from a dynamic point of view was insufficient.Footnote ¹⁷ The chosen director should also have the “social graces” necessary to fit the job, and hence the appreciation of the social attributes of the candidates was an important part of Shils’ selection procedure. In that perspective, Shils was using values beyond those specified by the Secretariat to recruit what would be, according to him, good administrators.

He advised against Leland DeVinney, the director of the Social Science Section at the Rockefeller Foundation, because he had “no scientific imagination, no capacity to envisage new problems, no enthusiasm to attempt to persuade others of their importance.” In the same way, the sociologist Robert Merton's “pronounced tendency to withdraw from social situations” and the psychologist John Dollard's “fairly aggressive chauvinism” made them unsuitable candidates for the position. UNESCO's flagship program needed to be identified with a man with a universal outlook and social skills. Shils suggested two of his former colleagues at the OSS, Henry Murray and Henry Dicks, as possible directors. According to Shils, both shared the intellectual and social skills that were lacking in the other candidates. Murray, the head of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and author of the book The Assessment Men for the OSS, qualified for his “great sensitivity to certain aspects of social structure when he devised “quasi-real” situations for testing and training O.S.S. agents” and he was “a sophisticated cultivated man.” Dicks, a famed Russian-born, Cambridge-trained medical doctor and psychologist, author of the popular study of the psychology of a famous war prisoner, The Case of Rudolf Hess, showed his competence during the war “in his brilliant and at the same time very readable analyses of German military behaviour from the psycho-analytic viewpoint” and he possessed a linguistic facility (he spoke fluently Russian, German, English, and French) and a “knowledge of the world” that were difficult to match by other social scientists.

However, neither Dicks nor Murray were available in 1946: Dicks had just been invited to be the first Nuffield Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leeds and Murray had just got involved in the recently founded Harvard Department of Social Relations (the disruption of an administrative position in their academic careers, the low wages offered by UNESCO and the unattractive perspective of working in a city destroyed by war might also have played a role in their refusal), and finally, when Shils went back to London, Huxley suggested the psychologist Hadley Cantril as the first direction of the Tensions Project. This did not mean that Shils’ influence on the program disappeared: as we shall see, the focus on “culture and personality” studies remained intact.

Hadley Cantril, a former member of the US Office of War Information (OWI), an intelligence agency created during the war to promote patriotism and support the war effort, agreed to direct the Tensions Project for six months. Like Shils, Murray and Dicks, Cantril had expert knowledge of German social science and society. After completing a bachelor's degree in psychology at Dartmouth College (1928), Cantril had studied two years in Munich and Berlin in 1929 before returning to the United States to finish his PhD in psychology at Harvard in 1931. From there, he started his career as an academic, teaching sociology at Dartmouth (1931-32), and psychology at Harvard (1932–1935) and Columbia (1935-36). In 1936, Cantril joined the Princeton psychology department where he was to remain until his death in 1969. There in 1940 he founded the Princeton Office of Public Opinion Research to analyze European radio broadcasts and diagnose Nazi psychology (Herman Reference Herman1996). Like Shils, Cantril also participated in psychological warfare during World War II. He served as a psychological warfare specialist for the OWI (along with Nathan Leites, Margaret Mead, and Geoffrey Gorer) where he was in charge of the production of survey research techniques to the task of clandestine intelligence collection, including preparations for the US landing in North Africa. In his work, he shared with Shils the premise that tensions should be primarily studied from a psychological perspective (Cantril Reference Cantril1950). He stayed at UNESCO less than a year before going back to the United States to continue doing intelligence work for the US government.Footnote ¹⁸

Under Cantril's direction, the psychologist Nathan Leites was charged with revising Shils’ memo setting the priorities for the Tensions Project as well as co-presenting, with Cantril, the program of the whole Department to the General Conference. The choice of Leites was consistent with previous appointments. Shils had met Leites in 1935 and he was so impressed with him that he convinced his Chicago colleague Harold Lasswell to appoint Leites as a research assistant in Chicago's political science department. And, in return, as Shils himself acknowledged, it was under Leites and Lasswell's influence that he became more familiar with psychoanalytical ideas (Shils Reference Shils and Grosby2006, 58–61). Indeed, Leites, then a young scholar, was on the fast track to success and was considered one of the best specialists of his time on the USSR. During the war, Leites was, like Cantril, a member of the OWI and served as a senior research assistant for Lasswell's War Communication Division at the Library of Congress doing content analysis of communist publications. In 1946, when UNESCO appointed him as a consultant, he had just been recruited by the Social Science Department of the RAND Corporation, the well-known Californian military think-tank founded by the US Air Force, where he went back after a few months at UNESCO to write what would become a Cold War classic, The Operational Code of the Politbureau. In his revision of Shils’ memo, Leites, who had been trained and socialized to be a psychologist, reiterated the importance of psychological variables in the explanation of wars. He was especially involved in stimulating research in “group images” relying on intensive interviewing of representative segments of the population. In his correspondence, Leites explicitly exposed his concern about dealing with governmental actions which were “too delicate, in our opinion up till now, to be even merely sponsored by UNESCO” and suggested that they “would have to eliminate, instead of elaborate, the considerable part of [Shils’] Memo dealing with too delicate topics.”Footnote ¹⁹

Following the initial plans, Cantril initiated in April 1948 a series of studies entitled “Ways of Life” in which monographs were written on a common scheme that compared the family life, education, religion, etc. of eighteen countries.Footnote ²⁰ These monographs were used to check the validity of some of the assertions regarding the national character of some nations. According to Cantril, these monographs “may build up to a central synthesis revealing the underlying values and attitudes in which all people meet as human beings” (Cantril Reference Cantril1948, 238). This was followed by a series of studies in the field of national stereotypes initiated by Cantril and continued by the psychologist Otto Klineberg (Reference Klineberg1950) that involved three lines of research. One emphasized the nature of national stereotypes among children in five countries and the processes by which they were acquired and could be changed.Footnote ²¹ Another broad research line involved sampling adults in eight countries by polling methods to determine their stereotypes of other nationalities.Footnote ²² A third project was to bring together for several days a group of scholars to discuss the significance of national images for international understanding. A last group was investigating broad problems of attitude formation and change. The main assumption was often that the aggressive individual had some kind of mental illness and the type of program involved the promotion of mental health through changes in human attitudes or motivation; the specific methods recommended varied from providing an educational program to propaganda and cross-cultural contacts. However odd and unbalanced this initial construction of cooperation among international social scientists might appear retrospectively, it was consistent with a widespread idea among internationalist circles in Europe and the US that the war had revealed the abnormal psyche prevalent in some countries such as Germany or Japan and that psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology could help in the rehabilitation and therapy of these peoples – hence the emphasis on child psychology and education (Weindling Reference Weindling2010). It is interesting to note than in all the lines of research, Shils, Leites, Cantril, and Klineberg eagerly supported the investigation of national characters prudently couching their reflection in a tone of scientific universalism.

Unsurprisingly, external advisors find it difficult to identify Shils, Leites, and Cantril's ideas as the ones embodying the spirit of UNESCO. As early as 1947, there was mounting criticism on political and scholarly grounds about the domination of what was perceived as US-style psychology in the future Social Science Department. This came along with the progressive disillusionment with the universality claimed by psychologists and the increasing realization of how value-laden and culturally charged psychological theories and methods were. As of that moment, initiatives coming from high-profile US psychologists were met with lukewarm attitudes and even some ideas were straightforwardly rejected.Footnote ²³ Scholars from non-Anglo-Saxon countries resented the predominance of US scholars and the prevalence of new methods and techniques imported from American psychology. The mere idea that there could be a social “science” sounded problematic and hard to accept for many scholars from some non-Western countries. But even US scholars criticized the dominance of psychology and resented the lack of balance between the disciplines in the study of social phenomena and wars. Most of them acknowledged that since great advances in psychological techniques and therapeutic insights were made during World War II, the weighing in favor of psychology was quite understandable. “But” – the anthropologist Esther Goldfrank warned – “these exciting results should not lead to a less refined analysis of the over-all structure – economic, social and political. Without a good foundation, personality differences or likeness can easily be misunderstood, and therefore misinterpreted.”Footnote ²⁴ Many leading scholars in US universities contested the fact that the project eschewed overt political and ideological issues. For instance, Klaus Knorr, the realist International Relations theorist from Yale, was charged by the US Commission of UNESCO to comment, on behalf of the SSRC, on Shils’ memo. For his 44-page commentary, Knorr consulted some of the better known scholars including many realists from Yale such as Bernard Brodie, Gabriel Almond, Frank Coker, or Robert Dahl, to mention a few. Among the many suggestions of change included in the report, Knorr proposed that “the entire matter of economic insecurity might be explored systematically in its relation to political and social stability and psychological tensions.”Footnote ²⁵ But, amongst all the critics, the Chicago economist Jacob Viner was among the fiercest detractors of Shils’ report: “I would suggest that the project had better not start out from the conviction that wars usually or often are the result of psychological tensions but treat rather as a hypothesis itself to be subjected to investigation . . . I am rather skeptical as to the degree of utility of the psychological approach to the problem of the causes of war.”Footnote ²⁶ He rejected the preconception that hostile attitudes were based on “tensions” or an abnormal psychology and hence also the idea that the remedy against wars was the psychiatric treatment of those displaying such hostile attitudes.

However, some in the early secretariat supported the psychological approach to conflict as affinity with UNESCO spirit because it was – paradoxically – the less politically controversial of all the options. Indeed, despite the criticisms against US psychology, the Social Science Department staff was very reluctant to get involved in the study of economic and political factors leading to war since public advocacy on controversial political issues was seen as incompatible with UNESCO's values and the neutrality assumed to be the hallmark of the secretariat. For instance, Martin, skewing his training as an economist in favor of his perceived interests of the organization, wrote a short memo warning the members of the Tensions Project against the study of the economic aspects of international hostility, especially those related to economic inequalities between countries and standards of living that the SSRC had suggested. Martin asserted that rich countries –and notably he had in mind the USA – would object to those studies since it was largely in defense of living standards that the USA set up immigration barriers and exclusion laws, and imposed heavy tariffs upon imported goods. Also, according to Martin, it was because some segments of the population found their living standards unjustifiably low in comparison with rich countries that they were likely to adopt other ideologies such as communism. Therefore he warned against the possible diplomatic outcomes of having UNESCO studying living standards “it is sufficiently clear that any published study by an international organization focusing attention upon Japanese Exclusion Acts, unduly high tariffs and Communist minorities in certain of the Western countries would not be within the realm of practical politics.”Footnote ²⁷

The successive appointments of Robert Cooley Angell in 1949 and Alva Myrdal in 1950,Footnote ²⁸ two sociologists, as heads of both the Social Science Department and the Tensions project, brought some appeasement and a reconfiguration of the research priorities. The general research orientation departed significantly from the original plans set by Shils, Cantril, and Leites, since, despite their sympathy toward US psychology, both directors, Angell and Myrdal, felt that its focus on the individual hindered the development of other theories dealing with social and political factors. This was stressed in the extensive general correspondence within the Department but also in the correspondence with external consultants and advisors. The new appointments made by Angell and Myrdal were recruited from many disciplines and were more diverse in their national origins. There still was an elite coming from Western countries, however, European academics and, more particularly, Francophone scholars (such as the French J.E. Godchot and Raymond Aron, the Swiss-born American Alfred Métraux, or the Belgian Pierre de Bie) came again to be regarded as important in the study of social and international conflicts, proving that the social closure proposed by Shils did not come into effect.

International Scientists as Experts

The only hope of avoiding the criticism addressed to the US psychology community lay in a complete transformation of the identity of international social scientists. And the new project officers understood that this identity had to rely less on parochial academic traditions and be more autonomous in its relation with governments. In the late 1940s, the study of racial prejudice and racial discrimination became a new starting point for a definition of international science as expert-based consensual knowledge.

In December 1949, an external committee of international experts outside the Social Science Department was charged by UNESCO with producing a scientific manifesto that would advance the organization's campaign against racism worldwide. UNESCO's first “Statement on Race” resulted from a request by the UN Economic and Social Council to launch a series of studies to fight against racial prejudice and discrimination in response to mounting an international demand to address publicly the problem of race (Brattain Reference Brattain2007; Maurel Reference Maurel2010).Footnote ²⁹ Immediately after its release, the statement that insisted that there was a lack of scientific evidence for a classification of races, came under severe attack. It initiated an exacerbated debate on the meaning of “race” and the accurateness of the scientific results on human diversity. Many physical anthropologists and biologists especially in the United Kingdom charged its writers with being the victims of unscientific, anti-racialist ideology. Especially under attack was the flamboyant anthropologist and humanist Ashley Montagu, the rapporteur of the statement, who was criticized for his political fervor and his anti-racist zealousness. The shining example of these criticisms was Julian Huxley's description of the statement as the “most unsatisfactory and indeed unscientific in making sweeping but unproved assertions as to racial differences being entirely due to environmental and social factors.”

To appease the scientific community, a Division for the Study of Racial Questions was set up in 1950 within the Department of Social Sciences, initially as a subdivision of the Tensions Project. The head of this new unit, the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux, was charged with producing a “second statement” which would take into account the conflicting views of the scientific community on matters of human diversity and distance UNESCO from Montagu's perceived dogmatic views on race.Footnote ³⁰

Métraux was a Swiss-born American-naturalized anthropologist trained in France at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes under the famous anthropologist Marcel Mauss (Prins and Krebs Reference Prins and Krebs2007; Rivière Reference Rivière, Parkin and de Salles2010). During World War II, he had participated in the Yale Cross-cultural Survey (later renamed the Human Relations Area Files). And in the last months of the conflict, he had joined the Morale Division in the US Strategic Bombing Survey interviewing German civilians, refugees, and death-camp survivors. After the war, he was recruited by the United Nations Organization's headquarters in New York. In 1946, Métraux got his first appointment with UNESCO at the Natural Science Department where he led ethnographic surveys in the Amazon and in Haiti, and he was later transferred to the Social Science Department where he was charged with elaborating on the “second Statement on Race.”

Métraux occupied an unconventional position within the field of cultural anthropology. He was more than familiar with the American variant and moved confidently in its circles: his second wife, Rhoda Métraux was a co-author and lover of Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson (Mead's husband) recommended him for his early position as an anthropologist at UNESCO's Natural Science Department. However, Métraux was not a prisoner of culture and personality studies or, for that matter, of any academic tradition and he was willing to consider a large array of theoretical and methodological frameworks. Métraux's familiarity with French anthropology and his early involvement in UNESCO's failed ethnographic surveys in the Amazon and Haiti, had made him very aware of the limits of cross-cultural social engineering and very reluctant to adopt a single line of explanation for tensions in different cultures (Prins and Krebs Reference Prins and Krebs2007, 7).

Thanks to Métraux, a new community of anthropologists trained in France but with a familiarity with the history and social structure of less developed countries – especially of Brazil – came to occupy an important status at UNESCO. Many of the scholars involved in the new Division, such as Métraux himself, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lucien Febvre, and Lucien Bernot, had met in the late 1930s at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.Footnote ³¹ Métraux's special assistant for the study of racial problems at UNESCO's Social Science Department, the Brazilian biologist Ruy Coelho was himself a former student of the French anthropologist Roger Bastide in São Paulo in the 1930s (Maio Reference Maio2007). Métraux also opened up the Department to the influential community of English anthropologists (mostly for strategic reasons since the bulk of criticism to the first Statement came from the Royal Anthropological Institute of London). And he also tried, unsuccessfully, to get scholars from Asia and Africa involved in the new unit. The shift in the origins of the Social Science Department staff was crucial: even if these scholars were knowledgeable of US cultural anthropology; their cultural relativism and their openness to further pluralism distinguished them from some of their “culture and personality” counterparts.

The change in the department's culture reflected Métraux's leadership of the race study. Using a new vocabulary of consensus, scientific neutrality and arbitration, Métraux sent letters to national commissions, international societies and governing bodies of universities asking for suitable experts who would help him redraft the statement. Gathering suggestions and advice from every possible source, Métraux considered his own work to be that of a judge capable of weighing different scientific arguments before reaching any decision or building his own case. And indeed, Métraux's redefinition of UNESCO's identity as expertise for international workers seemed initially a good strategy: scholars were unlikely to object to being referred to as experts, experts in the 1950s were still highly regarded by the general public, and UNESCO could praise itself for being able to muster highly influential experts to draft its documents and resolutions. For Métraux, expert-based consensus was the best way to ensure neutrality and guarantee national diversity, and it was also a safe way to arbitrate between rival opinions in the very public and notoriously controversial issue of race. He wrote that with the new statement, “nobody will have cause to complain. We are doing our best to satisfy anthropologists, psychologists, preachers and poets.”Footnote ³² He hoped that this “scientific fairness” (Métraux's words) would improve UNESCO's reputation as a scientific, non-dogmatic institution.Footnote ³³ As he wrote to Montagu, “I do not think that we can present the former Statement as “The Truth.” It would be a very dogmatic way of looking at things and, even if this Statement were to be regarded as untouchable, I do not think it would be prudent or wise to proclaim it before the experts will have decided upon its untouchability. . . .We are taking the line that we are men of science and, as such, open to criticisms and suggestions.”Footnote ³⁴ For Métraux, the second statement had to reflect a consensus among the research community and UNESCO's scientific impartiality before serving as an instrument of fight.Footnote ³⁵ Those who accepted the invitation to redraft the statement, also accepted the new rules of the game and promised a new document “more balanced,” better “polished,” and more “authoritative” than the previous one.

In the end, Métraux decided to publish not only the final statement but also a full account of the proceedings involved in its preparation and an appendix including dissenting views. However, for this reason, the second statement turned out to be more confusing, problematic, and less consensual if possible than the previous one. His obsession with distinguishing himself from Montagu, his preoccupation with fairness, and his extreme caution did not accommodate well in a context of exacerbated tensions arising from different conceptions of the fields of anthropology, biology, and genetics, and of the status of physical anthropology in these fields, as well as from different views on the problem of racial discrimination and its relevance for understanding human behavior. Métraux's reliance on expertise and his ultimate refusal to decide which argument on race was legitimate and scientifically valid had dramatic repercussions in the progress of the anti-racist movement since the second statement reintroduced a biological definition of race and returned to the idea of a correlation between race, aptitudes, and mental traits.

Besides, the second statement had to face another difficulty: it was not an abstract document disconnected from public realities. It also had policy implications at the country level which were intractable to international workers, however committed they might have been to their identities as experts. And indeed, how could the scientific community reach consensus on an issue as contentious as the treatment of racial discrimination? The reactions to the second text revealed fierce opposition between governments, lobbies, and academic communities regarding the treatment of racial problems. These differences demonstrated once more the difficulty of setting an international consensus on policy making that could be presented as purely scientific and free of particular national connotation. As they unfolded, debates set into several opposing camps. Some experts recognized combatting racial prejudice through education and science, and insisted on the epidemiological dimension of racial prejudice, an “easily transmissible” disease that could in very short time “infect millions of people” (Métraux Reference Métraux1950, 387). This was the view of many UNESCO officers in the Education and the Social Science Departments planning a campaign against public ignorance in a vaster project to reform human behavior (Brattain Reference Brattain2007).Footnote ³⁶ Other scholars insisted on the empowerment of minorities through the extension of civil liberties and rights and accounted for the existence of racial prejudice as a “democratic deficit.”Footnote ³⁷ This was the vision of many US representatives who envisioned the “end of the racial problem” as an “internal Point Four” to promote equal rights and opportunities to minorities within the United States (Berger Reference Berger1954; Stedman Reference Stedman1954; Marshall Reference Marshall1954). Beyond education and civil rights, another more radical line of anti-racist policies emerged in the early 1950s as the result of the work done by anthropologists on Brazil. In 1951, as part of the study on race, Métraux commissioned anthropological enquiries in Brazil to obtain data on the actual situation of different populations in the country. Brazil and especially the state of Salvador de Bahia had been long considered case studies of a “Western” society in which racial relations were extremely harmonious. And the study of Brazilian interracial sociability was explicitly selected to suggest new policies to combat racial prejudice (Métraux Reference Métraux1952). In the pen of these anthropologists, the explanations of race prejudice and discrimination were tied with questions concerning the advance of capitalism in underdeveloped areas, the formation of modern states, and the structure of power between colonial rulers and its colonies. For instance, these anthropologists suggested that racism was not only a problem of ignorant or pathological individuals, it was also a by-product of the expansion of capitalism and imperialism and therefore required treatment at a more structural level.

Unfortunately, these arguments reintroduced into the debate over race, touchy considerations about Cold War, East-West confrontations as well as older quarrels between old metropolis and recently decolonized areas. They also contradicted, once more, Métraux's ideas that scientific expertise would bring about identification with internationalism. Anthropologists themselves were extremely aware of the political sensitivity of these statements and were, therefore, very careful to always qualify their controversial findings. The Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre prudently asserted that “some investigators reached the conclusion that the slaves, under the patriarchal, paternalistic regime, were probably better cared for by their masters than free labourers, black and white,” during the transition from the patriarchal regime to the laissez-faire system that took place in the nineteenth century (Freyre Reference Freyre1952, 8). Métraux suggested that, in the future, rapid urbanization and the growing competition between migrants moving into the industrial and capitalist cities could destroy the “racial democracy” were it not for the “liberal and open-hearted traditions” of Brazilian people (Métraux Reference Métraux1952, 6). Roger Bastide warned that race prejudice might change into class prejudice to justify white retention of the governing or controlling positions in society “if it was not for the democratic laws of Brazil and the development of industrialization, with the accompanying demand for more labour, [that] are helping to improve the position of the coloured people as a whole” (Bastide Reference Bastide1952, 9). Obviously these qualifications did not dupe anyone regarding the deep national implications the statement had, and their intractability at the international level.

In the end, despite Métraux's efforts to attain an expert-based scientific consensus, it was impossible to hide the political and ideological bearing of the statement and its policy implications. He was in a sense a victim of the confrontation of his highly naive vision of the role as the international social scientist as consensus-maker with the crude realities of a day-to-day functioning of a highly politicized international organization. However, in spite of their general failure, Métraux's were the first attempts to create an operational international identity which, unlike the one initially proposed by Shils, could be internalized by scholars from different disciplines and different nationalities.

From Duty to Identity: Loyalty Boards and Biographical Narratives

In the early 1950s, international events related to the Cold War shattered the organization by creating an atmosphere of anxiety and doubts about the loyalties within the secretariat and feeding suspicions about the neutrality of experts. During the Korean War, UNESCO's Secretary-General, the Mexican Jaime Torres-Bodet, after resisting multiple pressures and against the will of many staff members, was forced to take sides and support the effort of the US State Department in the name of the agency. In 1953, under the McCarran Act, US citizens were forbidden to accept any employment at UNESCO without previously seeking “security clearance” from the US Attorney General, and the new Secretary-General of UNESCO, the American Luther Evans, had to suspend the appointment of eight staff members suspected of engaging in “subversive activities” and refusing to testify before US “loyalty boards.” Also in 1953, the Swedish sociologist, Alva Myrdal, Head of UNESCO's Social Science Department from 1950 to 1955, suspected of pro-Communist sympathies, was denied a visa to enter the United States for a meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York. In 1954, the admission of the USSR, Belarus, and Hungary, and the readmission of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary at UNESCO provoked fears about the political polarization of the organization. At the height of this identity crisis, in 1955, the South African Government withdrew its membership from UNESCO in protest against the Social Science Department's activities against racial discrimination.

However severe the impact on the morale of the Department this crisis might have been (“Myrdal's incident” was relayed in the international press for weeks), surprisingly, it did not show through the internal memos or the minutes of the meetings. Neither was there a visible collective movement of disapproval, even if individual scholars did take sides in some events, for instance, to defend Myrdal. Nonetheless, this period of uncertainty coincided with a sudden increase of testimonies from workers – members of the secretariat and external consultants – of the Social Science Department, mostly solicited by Myrdal, reflecting on their experience of working for UNESCO. These narratives took the form of letters (sometimes short reports on missions addressed to the head of the department) but also of longer texts (articles and books) in which the authors expressed their attitudes towards the latent conflict between national, academic, and international identities. Many of these narratives were produced during (or immediately after) missions abroad, hence mixing their preoccupations about the meaning of international civil service and the broader implications for international social science. Through these texts, it was possible to retrace how international workers struggled to construct their international identities. In many of these narratives, the authors abandoned the contractual conception of their work for UNESCO as a professional role to be fulfilled to concentrate on a deeper level of experience and introduce a discourse of identity based on the constructed perception of the self in an international environment.

All the exercises of self-reflection required a positioning at three levels: relative to the academic community, regarding their own national government, and towards UNESCO. One of the first exercises was produced by Gardner Murphy, a psychologist from New York City College, who in 1953 published a book entitled In the Minds of Men, in which he recollected his impressions during his six-month stay in India as a UNESCO consultant for the Tensions Project. Murphy was then a well-known personality and clinical psychologist with an interest in parapsychology and a great number of academic distinctions. The scientific justification of the book was to provide a “road map” for social scientists involved in technical assistance to less-developed countries. However, his first-hand account was more personal than a traditional scientific book. In it he described the “difficulties and joys of working at the same time as a typical member of one's own national group and as a servant of an international organisation” (Murphy Reference Murphy1953, 10). The book revealed the tensions of an American psychologist confronted with the well-meaning task of providing technical aid in an atmosphere of suspicion among the Indian population and government, and his efforts to remain loyal to a discourse of the ethics of international aid and scientific inquiry. Many of his chapters provided a sympathetic and delicate overview of some of the many social and religious tensions between Muslims and Hindus in India from a psychological perspective, balancing his sometimes negative observations with praise to the force and strength of the Indian population as a whole and to the richness of its history and culture. However, the most instructive (as well as most speculative) part of Murphy's book was his final discussion of what constituted “acceptable and unacceptable help” from foreign countries and hence his definition of social science in international organizations involved in technical assistance.

However committed Murphy was to accommodating Western ideas to Indians needs, in practice, he had a quite elitist understanding of technical assistance. He believed that it had to be carried out by Western and preferably American social scientists since, according to him, Indians were not yet ready to develop neither their own social sciences nor their own ways of viewing social problems (ibid. 287).

However, Murphy's Western-centric and paternalistic visions of technical assistance colored by “culture and personality” overtones contrasted very sharply with that of other social scientists working for the Department. For instance, in 1950, two external consultants, the French sociologist, Jean Stoetzel, director of the French Institute of Public Opinion Research (IFOP), and a Dutch specialist on Japan, Fritz Vos, were sent to Japan to produce a detailed survey of the mentality of the youth in the postwar period. Initially, the study attempted to replicate the war-related research done by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the 1940s at the Council on Intercultural Relations (Bateson Reference Bateson1942; Bateson and Mead Reference Bateson and Mead1941). Making intensive use of interviews, the investigators brought to light the main types of attitudes towards institutions, in particular the family and marriage, the professions, the public authorities, and the various embodiments of government power. However, the conclusions reached were very different from Mead and Benedict's findings. In the resulting publication entitled, Without the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Stoetzel wrote about the inadequacy of Benedict's and Mead's studies on cultural patterns that gave the impression of a pattern of behavior common to the whole Japanese people.

Reflecting on their own limited awareness of Japanese culture and society, they acknowledged that “in the case of Japan we are dealing with a society quite outside our ordinary experience so that its philosophy of life, its hidden motives and its emotions and intellectual mechanisms (its “logic” if you prefer the term) are liable to be profoundly alien to us” (ibid., 30). The interesting thing about Stoetzel's dismissal of psycho-cultural explanations and the pretense to universalism of cultural anthropologists is that he made it rely on another view of the correct identity for international workers, which he called “an ascetical approach on the part of the research worker” and carried out “in a spirit of unqualified respect for the right of the Japanese to think and behave as Japanese” (ibid., 13). Stoetzel and Vos emphasized the impracticality of a unified international social science and the impossibility of a neutral transfer of theories and methods across borders.

Myrdal generated her own thoughts on the issue of technical assistance. In 1955, she published a paper entitled “A Scientific Approach to International Welfare” which, when complemented with her detailed and reflexive reports on her missions abroad especially to India and Japan, gave a sense of the dilemmas with which she was confronted as a social scientist and an international worker concerned with developing countries. She was particularly concerned that no international body had taken much trouble studying “to what extent technical knowhow in the social welfare field is exportable or importable at all” (Myrdal Reference Myrdal, Myrdal, Altmeyer and Rusk1955, 12). And she signaled the need of “a powerful storehouse of knowledge of social welfare techniques from the whole world,” a role that UNESCO's Social Science Department or a related institution could play: “Because who else would be interested in being the arbiter in the struggle for prestige which undeniably is involved when one country or another believes in the exportability of its own welfare prescriptions?” (ibid., 50).

She raised a cautious voice about the eagerness to apply new techniques that often resulted in their being applied “without due preparatory work to test out their validity and applicability in new social surroundings.”Footnote ³⁸ In that sense, as historians have noted, “Myrdal anticipated later critiques of postwar technical assistance” (Amrith and Sluga Reference Amrith and Sluga2008, 265). However, Myrdal's dilemma was not exceptional in the Department, and most members and consultants were insisting that local populations should be given a voice in their development process. They were worried that some solutions to specific problems of development at the local level were spreading far outside the initial area and taking the character of “an almost international gospel.” For instance, concerning the studies on “community development,” she wrote, “I cannot help but feel a certain apprehension that through this popularization, what is fundamentally a project for economic development . . . risks losing its reliance on indigenous forces and becomes an experimental field for outsiders.” In her mind, UNESCO's social scientists had to establish in India an international center for research on the social effects of industrialization that would encourage intellectual cooperation and would be very different from the “one-way traffic of cultural influence” of the projects led by the US government and the Ford Foundation.Footnote ³⁹

As framed by Myrdal, the new identity of international workers relied on two pillars: a commitment to scientific analysis and an aptitude for “moral sensitivity.” Revealingly, at the height of the identity crisis in the UN system, the International Civil Service Advisory Board (replaced in 1975 by the International Civil Service Commission) published in March 1954 a report on “standards of conduct in the International civil services” which was consistent with Myrdal's views. This document was written to provide support to the UN System in the effort to restate more cogently the independence of the secretariats in International Organizations. In it, the Advisory Board introduced the idea that international civil servants had a duty to maintain high standards of conduct including impartiality, loyalty to the organization, independence in relation to any external activity, and integrity. This last requirement, defined for the first time in ethical terms, included personal qualities such as honesty, truthfulness, fidelity, and probity. This external definition of organizational identity given by the Advisory Board reinforced for a time the constructed identity of some of the staff members of the Department. And, even if the search for UNESCO's soul and identity has proved to be, retrospectively, an interminable quest, Myrdal's efforts and the Board's document did manage to get the Department through a time of appalling tension within the secretariat.

On August 8th 1955, Myrdal, who had just been offered a position as the first Swedish Ambassador to India, felt compelled to resign as Head of UNESCO's Social Science Department after five years of absolute personal dedication to the organization. Her resignation letter addressed to the Director General of UNESCO, the American Luther Evans, detailed the mixed allegiances that had influenced her decision: “I need hardly stress that although I have found impossible not to follow the call from my Government to another post, it is with the utmost difficulty that I bring myself to say farewell to UNESCO. . . . My hope is, however, that the international interests of my country remain so firmly entrenched that, in carrying out my new duties, it will always be possible for me to uphold my loyalty to UNESCO and what it stands for.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In spite of her departure, it is difficult to question the depth of Myrdal's identification to the Organization and how efficient her commitment was. The day she was introduced to the department, she said that her new job as head of the department “was not a simple professional function but a true consecration to the task of UNESCO.”Footnote ⁴¹ By the time of her retreat to India, Myrdal had set the Social Science Department on an equal footing with other departments and even if the budget resources were still scarce, the department was growing bigger and the hired staff as well as the contacts with outside researchers continued to increase.Footnote ⁴² Most importantly, Myrdal had taken care of selecting staff imbued with the ideal of service to UNESCO and of creating a work environment based on constant communication that permitted the continuation of her work by her colleagues, even if she could not carry it on herself. Retrospectively, we can see that, in her resignation letter, Myrdal was articulating a concern that obsessed and was to obsess UNESCO officials up until now: how could national, international, and scientific identities be permanently reconciled?

Concluding Remarks

In this essay, I have reflected on the links between the different identities of some of the key members of the secretariat and shown how they shaped UNESCO's Social Science Department from 1945 to 1955. It is my claim that the evolution in the choice of topics and frameworks paralleled the changes in member's self-identification. This can explain a wide range of attitudes: their overconfidence in the power of “culture and personality” studies to account for conflicts; their naïve elevation of “scientific fairness” in the study of racial prejudice; and their lingering feelings of ambivalence and guilt for their involvement in technical assistance to “backward” countries. As I suggest, the creation of an organizational identity resulted more from a period of trial and error than from a preconceived plan, and it was mostly acquired and matured, at the end of the period I study, through a series of biographical narratives and reflections produced after missions abroad.

In the tentative definition of UNESCO's organizational identity, Shil's original sin (continued by Leites and Cantril) was to believe that identification could emerge out of the values and codes of the “culture and personality” specialists. Accordingly, Métraux's “scientific fairness” and Myrdal's “moral sensitivity” tried to redefine UNESCO's identity detached from the legal and political sovereignty of states as well as from the power of Western academic traditions. Métraux's devotion to scientific principles and rational judgment proved to be ill-adapted to the highly contentious debate on racial discrimination. Myrdal's more heroic alternative based on moral virtues, diligence, and self-sacrifice was not more realistic, but it avoided the dismantlement of the department at a critical moment. It is indeed interesting to observe that she elevated the language of moral sensitivity, inclusion, and protection in relation to developing countries, at a time when the political polarization of the early Cold War had dealt a serious blow to internationalist hopes, when decolonization was radically destabilizing the meaning of nation, and when social sciences were acquiring increasing prestige but remained local (essentially Western) products.

From a wider perspective, this essay indicates the necessity to rethink the history of the social sciences in international organizations from the perspective of the overlapping and contradicting identities of the individuals involved. Behind the reified notions of “UNESCO secretariat” or “UNESCO's social science,” historians can find scholars with different lives and research strategies whose stories matter because they contributed to the unity (or disunity) of intellectual and world communities.