Article 247 of the Treaty of Versailles committed Germany to furnish “the University of Louvain [with] manuscripts, incunabula, printed books, maps and objects of collection corresponding in number and value to those destroyed in the burning by Germany of the Library of Louvain.”Footnote 1 The obligation that Germany restore books to a Belgian university library—destroyed during the invasion of August 1914—was a public acknowledgment that Belgian, and by extension Allied, intellectual life, would continue as before the war; it presupposed that the values of Western civilization had triumphed in the recently ended conflict.
The restitution of books to Louvain was highly symbolic, but far from an isolated act of cultural reconstruction in the aftermath of the Great War. In the immediate postwar years, myriad projects emerged to save both intellectuals and scholarly activity in Central and Eastern Europe. European intellectual life faced a significant and often existential challenge following the conflict; the collapse of empires led to, at its most extreme, civil war, famine and displacement, as it did in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution. In the successor states of Central and Eastern Europe, the destruction wrought by the recently ended world war was exacerbated by economic collapse which brought famine and disease to many countries in the early 1920s. Transnational agencies quickly mounted humanitarian interventions to feed, clothe and provide medical assistance to those affected.Footnote 2
While the story of humanitarian responses to the postwar crises has been well documented by historians in recent years, it is less well known that postwar relief also had a distinct and important intellectual dimension. Nongovernmental agencies sent books, laboratory equipment and periodicals to stricken countries in order to ensure that their intellectual life stayed afloat, while international agencies also sent money and supplies to scholars and writers who found themselves in exile in the early 1920s. Intellectual relief of this nature emerged during the war and reflected its perception as a cultural conflict involving the mass mobilization of scholars to support their respective nations’ cause, which led to the common juxtaposition of Allied Western civilization against German Kultur.Footnote 3 After the war, the scope of intellectual relief expanded to address the vast humanitarian crisis gripping Europe. While its agents frequently utilized the language of civilization (and its opposite, barbarism), postwar intellectual relief belonged to the broader humanitarian drive to arrest the spread of Bolshevism and support the postwar democratic order in Central and Eastern Europe. Intellectual relief was also a forum for national rivalries; on the one hand, nations like Hungary could claim the imperative of intellectual relief to demonstrate their travails following the war and its peace settlement and thus agitate for treaty revision. On the other hand, national antipathies—such as those between victorious allies and vanquished states—often inhibited the granting of relief.
This article will explore the origins and forms of intellectual relief in the immediate postwar period before paying particular attention to the intellectual work of the League of Nations and its Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CIC, founded in 1922). The League is important to this discussion as it gave permanent institutional structures for intellectual cooperation which were born in the period of Europe's humanitarian and intellectual crises. While the League did not have the resources to sponsor large-scale humanitarian interventions in the scholarly field, relief was a central concern that informed how the League developed its intellectual cooperation agenda, in terms of both activities and structures, from 1922.
This article also points the way forward to a phenomenon that became much more prominent in the later twentieth century, and which remains important today, that of intellectual exile and suffering during and after major conflicts.Footnote 4 Postwar intellectual relief forms an important and instructive precedent to international attempts to rescue intellectuals fleeing from totalitarianism in the 1930s.Footnote 5 It also provides an important precedent for the reconstruction of intellectual life that took place in Europe following the Second World War.Footnote 6
The article will first examine the emergence of intellectual relief. It will then discuss the foundation and workings of the CIC, before turning its attention to two related themes in the operation of the CIC: intellectual relief in different territories and enquiries into the health of intellectual life in various countries. It will demonstrate that intellectual life was seen as requiring specific aid in the aftermath of war, explore how arguments for intellectual relief were constructed, and analyse how relief was organized. While it claimed to stand for a universal good in the face of Bolshevism, intellectual relief also perpetuated the divisions of wartime, notably with respect to Germany.
The First World War left nine million combatants dead, killed a similar number of civilians in Europe, and brought about the collapse of four empires. It also profoundly influenced European intellectual life in three main ways. First, the conflict led to a “lost generation” of young scholars who died in the conflict, evidenced by the numerous memorials which emerged at schools and universities across Europe after the war.Footnote 7 Second, organized intellect—often seen as serving the interests of all humanity and thus being above national interests—was mobilized to serve the interests of nations at war, whether it be historians or philosophers producing propaganda, sociologists organizing the war economy, or, more ominously, chemists producing poison gases for the battlefield. Third, a consequence of all of this was that the international community of intellect, which had grown in size in the decades prior to 1914, was split in two during the war, with former colleagues recast as enemies.Footnote 8 This fracture in the organization of intellectual life continued into the postwar years and could be seen in the ‘boycott’ of German scientists who were prevented from joining newly formed scholarly associations which emerged after the war.Footnote 9
In a famous and resonant polemic in 1919, the French poet Paul Valéry wrote that “we civilizations now know that we are mortal,” much like civilizations of antiquity which had disappeared long ago and taken their vast resources of learning with them. For evidence of the decline of civilization, Valéry cited the example of wartime application of science to conflict, which led him to question whether “knowledge and duty” were themselves suspect.Footnote 10 In the same year, the French pacifist intellectual Romain Rolland produced a manifesto signed by 140 scholars and writers across the world which criticized the engagement of intellectuals in wartime and called on them to renounce wartime attitudes.Footnote 11 Narratives presaging the decline of civilization became common among scholars in the war's aftermath and famously featured in the work of Oswald Spengler, among others.Footnote 12 The “crisis of civilization” was an intellectual reaction to the events of the Great War and wider developments in scholarship, literature and the arts, many of which pre-dated the conflict but seemed to be confirmed by it.Footnote 13 In that respect the crisis was largely an imagined, intangible phenomenon. However, the postwar threats to intellectual life in Central and Eastern Europe proved a tangible, real-world crisis which gave substance to the imagined one.
Intellectual Relief in postwar Europe
The plight of displaced and starving intellectuals first emerged as a problem during the First World War and came to be seen as a distinct part of the wider humanitarian crisis that gripped Europe during and after the conflict. Intellectual relief can be defined in two related ways. First, and most pressing, it was an extension of general humanitarian relief, ensuring that intellectuals and intellectual workers were able to eat, clothe themselves and generally maintain good health. In other words, this can be understood as the provision of general relief to people engaged in intellectual pursuits. Second, intellectual relief can also be understood as the provision of specialist equipment, up-to-date books and periodicals to people involved in intellectual pursuits. This article is primarily concerned with the latter as it was the concern of the League of Nations’ work on behalf of intellectuals. However, that can only be understood through a wider discussion of intellectual relief and humanitarianism after 1918.
The First World War saw a number of large-scale humanitarian interventions, spanning the early years of the conflict and continuing into the mid-1920s. Branden Little has argued that the core dates for humanitarian interventions in this period are 1914–24, which extends beyond the “paradigmatic” end date of the war in 1918.Footnote 14 Recent scholarship focusing on the “wars after the war”—the continuation of violence in Central and Eastern Europe after 1918—has also challenged the traditional time frames of the war, and has argued that a “greater war” continued until 1923.Footnote 15 These humanitarian responses can be seen as one of the many consequences of the war that continued beyond the conflict's formal cessation and extend its chronology.
The First World War did much to change the way in which humanitarianism was practiced and understood. Keith David Watenpaugh has argued that “modern humanitarianism” was born in the period of the Great War. This was understood as the “permanent, transnational, institutional, neutral, and secular regime for understanding and addressing the root causes of human suffering,” unlike its sentimental, episodic and Christian nineteenth-century predecessor.Footnote 16 Bruno Cabanes has argued that the humanitarian responses to the war inaugurated the international recognition of many rights for the first time, such as the right to aid for victims of famine and disease and the right to identity papers and safe travel for stateless people.Footnote 17 During and after the war, humanitarian responses were organized either through the formation of new charitable organizations, such as the American Relief Administration (ARA) or the Imperial War Relief Fund (IWRF), or through the commitment of existing foundations to help address the humanitarian crises. Many of these organizations operated with the assistance and support of their respective states of origin and also required the cooperation of the states in which they operated. For example, the ARA was founded in February 1919 following an executive order by Woodrow Wilson with a $100 million appropriation from the United States Congress, and was responsible for the supply of 768,000 tons of food, clothing and other supplies to Russia between 1921 and 1923 when famine threatened 25 million people.Footnote 18 As Julia F. Irwin has noted, humanitarianism was far from neutral or purely altruistic; it was often used as a tool of statecraft and for propaganda purposes.Footnote 19
While, in a general sense, the primary aim of humanitarianism was always to feed, clothe and provide medical aid to those in need, the outbreak of the war in 1914 and its earliest humanitarian responses bore a distinct intellectual component. Professors and students from Belgian universities were quickly housed at institutions across Britain, France and North America and funds were raised for their upkeep.Footnote 20 The American Joint Relief Committee, established in November 1914 specifically to aid European Jews imperilled by the war, also provided funds for the upkeep of educational institutions during the war, before expanding its scope after the war to include “rabbis, writers, teachers and spiritual leaders.”Footnote 21 While elements of intellectual relief can be seen during the conflict, its scale and scope expanded dramatically following the war.
With famine afflicting large parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the ARA set up what it called “intelligentsia kitchens” in Austria and Poland in 1921, which were solely for the use of those deemed “intellectuals.”Footnote 22 In Austria, these kitchens served the needs of Austrian university professors and writers, as it was felt that following the steep rise in the cost of living there, “the section which will be hardest hit is the middle class and especially the intellectual group, since their incomes and earnings are far from keeping pace with the progress of depreciation and consequent increase in price of all commodities.”Footnote 23 In Poland, intelligentsia kitchens catered to the large body of Russian intellectuals who had fled Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution.Footnote 24 In Russia itself, specific funds were dedicated to the relief of intellectuals, which primarily meant the provision of food: $50,000 per month from the Commonwealth Fund of New York from March 1922, $230,000 from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund in December 1922, and a further $600,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation in February 1923.Footnote 25 This work was supported by other agencies such as the Commonwealth Fund and the Russian Red Cross.
In most cases, but not all, relief of intellectuals and professors was seen as distinct from student relief, which was often organized separately. For example, the Society of Friends opened kitchens for students in Germany before their work was taken over by the European Student Relief (ESR) arm of the World Student Christian Federation in 1921. Between 1920 and 1925 the ESR raised £500,000 from forty-two countries, which was, in turn, spent on projects in twenty-one countries.Footnote 26 By 1923 the ESR estimated that it had fed 25,000 students.Footnote 27 The ARA, working in conjunction with the YMCA and the World Student Christian Federation, also had its own schemes that focused specifically on feeding students which, by the start of April 1921, reached 23,360 students in seven countries.Footnote 28 The London-based Imperial War Relief Fund established a Universities’ Committee in 1920 to deal with intellectual relief, which aimed to send one British pound in cash or gifts in kind (but not books or periodicals) to those in need for each of the 60,000 students in Great Britain and Ireland. In its first year it raised £32,465 in cash and goods.Footnote 29 The Universities’ Committee was keen to distinguish between aid directed towards students, on the one hand, and towards university professors, on the other; in November 1921 it noted that the appeal on behalf of students had been much more successful but that “men distinguished in letters and science” also needed urgent aid.Footnote 30
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) also considered the issue of intellectual relief in the immediate postwar years. In 1922, the director of the Endowment's Division of Intercourse and Education, Nicholas Murray Butler, stated that “the plight of the intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe that has so often been brought to our attention grows worse instead of better and yet we are helpless to aid and no other agency is able or disposed to do anything whatsoever.”Footnote 31 A special appropriation of $500,000 was set aside by the Endowment's Division of Intercourse and Education at the end of the war for the reconstruction of the devastated regions of Belgium, France, Serbia and Russia. This money was mostly spent on exemplary and symbolic relief projects such as the rebuilding of the university library at Louvain in Belgium and the construction of new libraries in Reims and Belgrade.Footnote 32 The Rockefeller Foundation was also active in intellectual relief but limited itself to the medical sciences; it provided both literature and scientific equipment to “countries with low exchange and difficult economic conditions” such as Austria, France, Hungary, Germany and much of continental Europe.Footnote 33
The Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war also created a significant problem of displaced people.Footnote 34 The Bolshevik government viewed intellectuals with great suspicion, as the majority of Russian intellectuals had been opposed to the October Revolution, a situation that became more pronounced following the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. Deportations took place in 1922 and led to the arrival of many émigré scholars in Western Europe.Footnote 35 The Swiss writer Gonzague de Reynold, who was known for his Catholic and Swiss nationalist views, as well as being a member of the League's Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, called the emigration of Russian scholars “one of the saddest and most tragic spectacles to be seen in Europe since the end of the war … Since the flight of the Israelites, in history there has never been such an uprooting of intellectual life of a people.”Footnote 36 By 1923, Russian émigré scholars had established themselves in cities across Europe. They were especially numerous in Paris, Prague, Berlin and Belgrade, and the French, Czechoslovak and German governments all provided funds to ensure their well-being.Footnote 37 The support of the Czechoslovak government for exiled Russian scholars was explicitly anti-Bolshevik in its motivations.Footnote 38 In Paris, an émigré intellectual group was set up to maintain links with other exiled scholars as well as to begin resuming their traditional university functions while in exile. A significant number of exiled Russian scholars initially settled in Berlin with the aid of a $10,000 donation from the American Joint Distribution Committee, which was administered by the League's High Commission for Refugees.Footnote 39 Following the hyperinflation of 1923, Russian exiles in Berlin moved elsewhere, often to Paris or Prague.Footnote 40
Beyond the focus on feeding individuals involved in intellectual work, aid later came to focus on the practice of intellectual work itself; it shifted from nutritional sustenance to scholarly sustenance. This forms a second major axis to intellectual relief; it aimed to support and maintain the practitioners of intellectual pursuits, recognizing that this required the provision of specialist literature and equipment. A British Committee for Aiding Men of Letters and Science in Russia was formed in 1921 following a report written by H. G. Wells, who had visited Russia in the previous year and reported on the perilous state of intellectual life there.Footnote 41 The committee compiled a list of books needed by workers in Russia and appealed to British scientific workers to send them to Russia via the committee, to save the “flower of mental life.”Footnote 42 Aside from its work providing food, medicine and clothes for those in need, the ARA also distributed 25,000 textbooks, foreign scientific books and journals to the “depleted libraries of the higher schools.”Footnote 43 In Boston, a group called Friends of Russian Scientists was established in 1922 under the organization of the scholar of Russian literature H. W. L. Dana. It encouraged people to send aid packages through the ARA to distressed academics in Petrograd. Speaking of this initiative, Herbert Hoover said that “there is no question of the need of the Russian intellectuals—they as a class have suffered more than any other class in the Russian debacle.”Footnote 44 Another committee, calling itself the American Committee to Aid Russian Scientists with Scientific Literature reported that up to November 1922 nine tons of scientific literature had been sent to Russia, with forty universities, twenty-three learned societies, and 120 private individuals participating.Footnote 45 In 1922, the National Research Council in America sent duplicates of scientific texts published since 1914 to Russia using ARA distribution networks. By its reckoning, no American scientific publications had reached Russia since January 1915, and by 1922 Russian scientists were unable to afford them.Footnote 46
By 1922, when the League of Nations’ Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was established, two clear thrusts had emerged to intellectual relief. First was the provision of food and medicine to intellectuals, which was differentiated from other forms of relief. Second was the sending of relevant academic literature to needy individuals and institutions in countries that had been cut off from the international community of scholarship during the war and who, in the postwar years, faced economic hardships that meant they could not purchase these materials themselves. All of this occurred in response to the humanitarian crisis that gripped Central and Eastern Europe following the war, and was exacerbated by the Bolshevik Revolution and the exile of intellectuals across Europe.
The Meanings of Intellectual Relief
One might still question why, in the midst of a great humanitarian crisis, intellectuals and intellectual life were singled out as a distinct focus for aid. In certain cases, the need for intellectual relief was particularly resonant owing to the intellectual reputation and history of certain sites, such as Vienna. In a report written for the League of Nations in 1922, Gonzague de Reynold made the case for aid to Austrian intellectuals by arguing that, before the war, Vienna could “undoubtedly be considered one of the four or five great centres of European civilization.”Footnote 47 An appeal by the Universities’ Committee of the Imperial War Relief Fund on behalf of university lecturers in Austria made a similar argument, claiming that “men who are famous throughout the civilized world … are finding very great difficulty in carrying on their work.”Footnote 48
While certain sites evidently benefited from well-established reputations as centres of learning, a number of more general trends may be seen to underpin intellectual relief. First, relief was anti-Bolshevik, and part of the wider process of political stabilization that followed the war.Footnote 49 The victor nations of the war were fearful that the new states in Central and Eastern Europe—such as Germany, Austria, Hungary or Poland—could be overrun by Bolshevism, and this fear briefly became manifest following Bela Kun's short-lived takeover in Hungary in March 1919, while the Paris Peace Conference was ongoing.Footnote 50 At the peace conference, British prime minister David Lloyd George identified the new enemy as Bolshevism rather than Germany, and stories of Bolshevik atrocities—some real, others not—quickly began to make their way to Western Europe.Footnote 51 At the peace conference, the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, linked aid with staving off Bolshevism, remarking that “full stomachs mean no Bolsheviks.”Footnote 52 President Wilson said something similar, arguing that Bolshevism “cannot be stopped by force, but it can be stopped by food.”Footnote 53 In this way, intellectual relief was part of the wider anti-Bolshevik humanitarian effort that followed the war.
Bolshevism was, in this period, often presented as a threat to Western civilization, and in this way it could be seen as an extension of the wider discourses about the crisis of civilization that followed the war. Writing in 1926, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee saw the problem in exactly these terms, arguing that “the struggle in Russia since 1917 has been waged not so much between the two Western forces of Capital and Labour as between Russia herself and Western civilization.”Footnote 54 Certainly, many justifications for providing intellectual relief, as will be demonstrated below, use the language of “civilization” versus “barbarism,” which had been in common use during the war to justify the Allied effort against Germany and was now transferred to Bolshevism as a new postwar enemy.Footnote 55 Seeing intellectual relief as an anti-Bolshevik, reactive phenomenon helps to explain attempts to feed and house Russian intellectuals who had been forced to leave Russia following the Revolution, but it does not satisfactorily differentiate intellectual aid from more general humanitarian aid in the period, nor does it wholly explain the widespread phenomenon of intellectual relief beyond Russia.
Intellectual relief was primarily—with the notable exception of Russia—aimed at the new states that were set up following the end of the war. These states were all democracies, established to be (notionally) in keeping with the Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination. Wilson's ideas underpinned American entry into the war and were adopted by the Allies in the final stages of the war, ultimately conditioning the postwar order following the collapse of the German, Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.Footnote 56 In the “successor” states to the Habsburg Empire, sovereignty was assigned to the people based on national, ethnic and racial characteristics. This was a messy process, especially in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, which was the meeting point of the former Russian, German, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. The creation of postwar democracies was complicated by the juxtaposition of two irreconcilable ideas: the rights of the individual and the rights of the group (self-determination).Footnote 57 This created the rather contradictory situation where supporters of democracy could also be strong advocates of population transfers to ensure ethnic homogeneity within national populations.Footnote 58 When Lord Bryce published his two-volume work on Modern Democracies in 1921, he claimed that democracy had by then been accepted as “the normal and natural form of government,” but noted that the term itself had lost a clear, uncontested meaning, having become “encrusted with all sorts of associations.”Footnote 59
But what role did intellectual life have to play in the establishment and maintenance of postwar democracies? Some writers claimed that intellectual life was an important component of a functioning democracy. The postwar president of the successor state of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, made the connection between democracy, public opinion and intellect in his 1925 memoir about the war period (published in English in 1927).Footnote 60 In the aftermath of the war, Masaryk and other Czech leaders pursued a policy of cultural diplomacy that emphasized the “Western-ness” of the new Czechoslovak state. Most pertinently, this narrative claimed that the Czech people were traditional lovers of democracy (who had been oppressed under the Habsburg Empire) and that Czechoslovakia was a true democracy, especially as neighboring states became more and more authoritarian. As part of this cultural diplomacy, Masaryk developed an image of himself as the “nation's educator.”Footnote 61
In his war memoir, Masaryk argued that the intelligentsia played an important role in democracies, especially “the publicists in their ranks.” He noted that their members had frequently made a stand against “absolutism and theocracy.”Footnote 62 Education, especially national education, was important in new states which had formerly come under the control of a “foreign” government, as was the case with former Habsburg territories (Masaryk argued that Czechoslovakia needed to “de-Austrianize” itself).Footnote 63 In 1921, Bryce maintained that there was an important place for education in modern democracies; “in times when class strife is threatened there is a special need for thinkers and speakers able to rise above class interests and class prejudices.”Footnote 64 Education, in particular that found at universities, was essential to this process. However, while Bryce claimed that “the education of the citizens is indispensable to a democratic government,” it needed to be mixed with practical experience of the democratic process.Footnote 65 In a general sense, education and intellectual life were portrayed as important in creating good citizens in a democracy.
There was also a more specific way in which intellectual life could bolster democracy. Masaryk argued that democracies and new states needed educated experts to assist in the work of government and administration. They would not dominate government, but should be mixed with experienced politicians boasting a “practical capacity for dealing with parties, parliament and the government.”Footnote 66 An unnamed director of the ARA put this bluntly in a piece published in the A.R.A. Bulletin in November 1920. Referring to the deprivation being experienced by intellectuals and universities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, the article argued that “upon the brains of this intellectual class depends the future of these countries … Sooner or later these new nations must appeal to their intellectuals for aid in the restoration of industry, education, and public affairs.” Moreover, it claimed (like Bryce) that these intellectuals were politically conservative or, at the least, neutral: “In the denominated countries, the intellectual class is neither radical at the left nor reactionary at the right, but represents the sanest viewpoint and capacity remaining in these countries, and therefore invaluable for the solution of their present and future problems.”Footnote 67 The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace contributed $50,000 to the American Central Committee for Russian Relief (whose head was the former president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot) “for the relief of refugees from Russia and the Near East.” This was recognized as a necessity because the “future reconstruction of a Russian republic” would depend upon the contributions of “teachers, professional men and educated business people,” all of whom had been labelled “bourgeois” by the Bolsheviks.Footnote 68 While the terms “intellectual,” “intelligentsia” and “intellectual class” were frequently used (often interchangeably), the figures referred to usually encompassed university academics (as distinct from students) and sometimes expanded to include professionals such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, artists, musicians and clergymen.Footnote 69
Intellectual relief was, on occasion, justified as a means of achieving reconciliation with the former enemy, although this was still controversial. Many international agencies were reluctant to deal with former enemy states, with Germany coming in for particular opprobrium as the state seen to have both started the war and committed its worst excesses. Moreover, German intellectuals had written strident defences of the conduct of the German army in 1914, and many scholars in Allied countries (especially France) were loath to simply return to normal once the war ended in 1918. This meant that German scholars were excluded from many international scholarly organizations—mirroring Germany's exclusion from the League of Nations—in the immediate postwar years. However, other ex-enemy states, such as Austria, were less tainted by wartime narratives about the origins of the war and atrocities committed during it and thus they did not suffer from the same stigma.
The Anglo-American University Library for Central Europe (AAULCE) was established in 1920 to provide English-language material for academics in Central Europe who, owing to rising exchange rates and costs of living, could no longer afford academic material published since 1914, meaning that “intellectual workers are deprived of indispensable tools.” The founders of the AAULCE saw it as an opportunity for “reconciling the intellectual world.” Unlike the League's Committee on Intellectual Cooperation or the American Relief Administration, the AAULCE was explicitly concerned with postwar reconciliation between former enemies. “The reconciliation amongst the peoples can only come through the cultivation of mind and spirit, and it is clear that the great teachers of the world, by the free interchange of ideas, must be the leaders in such an endeavour.” In the spring of 1920, Prof. Everett Skillings toured eleven university cities in Central Europe, talking to academics and students, and helping to establish eight libraries for the AAULCE at Berlin, Budapest, Frankfurt, Göttingen, Krakow, Munich, Prague and Vienna. From these libraries, needy individuals or institutions could borrow the relevant material or have it sent to them. However, it was not only the case that these university cities sought academic literature; they also wanted to reestablish international connections which had existed prior to the war and had been severed because of it.Footnote 70
The League of Nations and the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
There has been a resurgence of interest in the League of Nations in recent years, meaning that the League's intellectual work, neglected for a long time, has attracted much more attention.Footnote 71 Historians have noted the importance of the League's intellectual work as a precursor to UNESCO, or have used it as a means of analyzing other themes such as global order more generally or the careers of notable individuals who were involved in it.Footnote 72 Problematically, the League never clearly defined “intellectual cooperation,” and this was complicated by the term's resonances in different languages. Speaking in 1930, the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray noted that the term “intellectual cooperation” sounded “absurd” in English but was “all right in French or Italian.”Footnote 73 In the same year, the American historian Waldo G. Leland observed that “international intellectual co-operation is a cumbersome term of fifteen syllables that has become popular since the World War, although it describes activities and processes that have existed from the most remote times.”Footnote 74 By this estimation, intellectual cooperation was not new; however, what was new in the 1920s was its frequent invocation as part of the broader process of preserving peace, and the permanent structures created by the League through which this could be managed.Footnote 75
In the years immediately following the end of the war, with intellectual life in crisis in many European states, a number of proposals were put to the League of Nations urging it to create a body dealing with intellectual work. The Belgian internationalists Henri la Fontaine and Paul Otlet of the Union of International Associations successfully lobbied the League to fund some of their activities after the war and for the creation of a permanent body to deal with intellectual work.Footnote 76 Similar proposals emanated from France, with Julien Luchaire, the inspector of public education in France and an expert in Italian literature, arguing for the establishment of a body both to promote international scientific progress and to ensure that national education was geared towards the promotion of peace. Another proposal, emphasizing international reconciliation through mutual understanding, was received from Austria.Footnote 77 In September 1921 the League's Council approved a memorandum by Sir Eric Drummond, its secretary-general, which argued that the League could not succeed in any of its aims without paying special attention to issues of education and intellectual work.Footnote 78
The Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was formally established by the League's Council in January 1922. The body was intended to be a small organization of twelve members which would deal with matters relating to intellectual life, education and science and to which the League's Council could refer specific issues.Footnote 79 Both its origins and its initial structure bore the imprint of competing national desires. The French historian and politician Gabriel Hanotaux had initially suggested that membership of the CIC be restricted to those from victor or neutral countries in the recent war, with seats on the committee being reserved for specific countries who would then nominate representatives. However, following pressure from the League's Secretariat, it was decided that selection should ultimately rest with the League's Council, and could include representatives of nonmember states.Footnote 80 Hanotaux later wrote that members of the CIC were “appointed in consideration of their personal ability and their reputation in learned circles, and without any discrimination as to nationality.”Footnote 81 In other words, membership was based on (an undefined) cultural authority, allowing the CIC an opportunity to be a tool of cultural reconciliation, as members from former enemy states could be appointed.
Twelve individuals were appointed to the committee in May 1922; many of them had international reputations and they straddled a range of disciplines from the humanities to the sciences. Membership was primarily drawn from European states and the committee boasted eminent names such as the French philosopher Henri Bergson, the British classicist Gilbert Murray, the Polish/French physicist Marie Curie, and the German physicist Albert Einstein. Representatives from beyond Europe included A. de Castro (Brazil), D. N. Bannerjea (India) and the astronomer George Ellery Hale (United States).Footnote 82 The CIC was far from a harmonious body; national rivalries and suspicions clouded its interactions. Bergson, who was the committee's chair, had been virulently anti-German during the First World War, whereas it was claimed that Bannerjee felt isolated as he was the only non-French speaker and as India had historically been “treated unfairly by the British.”Footnote 83
Hale's inclusion was important as the US was not a member of the League and this opened the way to greater international cooperation. This was also true of the selection of Albert Einstein. The inclusion of a member from an ex-enemy state, Germany, was made easier by the fact that Einstein had been a prominent pacifist during the First World War and was a physicist whose fame was truly international.Footnote 84 Einstein's inclusion suggested that the CIC was desirous of promoting reconciliation with former enemy states. However, this would prove problematic, as will be demonstrated below. The report of the CIC's first meeting in August 1922—which neither Einstein nor Hale could attend—dealt with pre-agreed areas for attention, such as bibliography and scientific and university cooperation. It also noted with some caution the potential for its work to sprawl beyond the capability of the committee to deal with it, especially as the committee only met once a year for five days in Geneva.Footnote 85
Despite the desire to rein in its scope, two new issues had emerged as a priority by the time of the CIC's first meeting in August 1922, and these took prominence in the official report: a “general enquiry into the conditions of intellectual life” and “assistance to nations whose intellectual life is in danger.” The report noted the threat posed to civilization and warned that many universities were in danger of closing their doors. It concluded with the ominous warning that “rarely does any great civilization die out suddenly; it more often disappears gradually through the progressive and more or less rapid extinction of its centres of learning. This was the case with the ancient civilization of the Roman Empire; and it may also be the case with our own civilization if we take no heed.”Footnote 86
“Abandoned, isolated and starved”—The League and Intellectual Relief
From the moment of its establishment, the CIC had great moral authority. Soon after its first meeting in August 1922, it began receiving requests for assistance from individuals, governments and non-state agencies, such as European Student Relief.Footnote 87 In response to the last of these, the CIC attempted to secure textbooks and laboratory equipment and, working with the ESR's distribution network, had them sent to Russia.Footnote 88 The CIC also supplied money to the ESR to buy books requested by Russian universities.Footnote 89 A wide range of materials was required, from laboratory equipment to periodicals to books (usually those published after 1914), demonstrating the cataclysmic impact of the war on the movement of ideas.Footnote 90
At its second session in August 1922, the CIC identified Austria and Poland as being in desperate need of intellectual assistance. It asked two of its members, Gonzague de Reynold and Marie Curie to report back on the state of intellectual life in each country. De Reynold's report was submitted to the League's Council in September 1922. It noted the historic importance of Austria as an intellectual centre, that inflation meant that the Austrian government was unable to subsidize universities as it had before the war, that some university libraries had been unable to buy books from abroad since 1917, and that writers could neither afford to publish nor sell their books. He warned that “intellectual life is threatened with extinction through being abandoned, isolated and starved.”Footnote 91 De Reynold argued that the League could play an important role in Austria, synchronizing the work of other agencies without great expense. Saving the intellectual life of Austria was “the sure basis, because [it is] a moral basis, of her economic reconstruction.”Footnote 92 De Reynold recommended that the CIC issue an international appeal to universities, learned societies and libraries, drawing their attention to the situation in Austria and urging institutions to send publications to them.
Marie Curie's report on the condition of Polish intellectual life painted a slightly different picture: intellectual life had been suppressed by various governing powers over the preceding two centuries and, in the aftermath of the war, the immediate economic crisis was also taking its toll. Curie noted that the situation in Poland was not as severe as that in Austria, but argued that Austria was traditionally better resourced, having had a vibrant and internationalized intellectual life before 1914, which had not been the case in Poland. However, Curie argued that “in the case of Poland there is no necessity for financial assistance or intervention as in the case of Austria.” Instead, she recommended that a commission of enquiry be appointed to undertake a more detailed study of conditions there.Footnote 93
In November 1922, the CIC acted on de Reynold's report and published an international appeal for the intellectual aid of Austria.Footnote 94 Using emotive language, it opened with the assertion that “no greater danger can threaten a civilization than the successive destruction of its homes of learning.”Footnote 95 It urged universities and learned societies around the world to send publications to their Austrian counterparts, to arrange professorial and student exchanges with Austria, to send food to Austria, and to enable Austrian scholars to take holidays abroad.Footnote 96 total, the CIC sent out 903 copies of the appeal to learned societies, academies and universities across the world, from Europe to North and South America, Asia and Australia. The appeal was disseminated in either French or English, with 416 copies being distributed to institutions (primarily those in Britain, North America or the British Empire) in English and the remainder (487) in French.Footnote 97 Privately, the League's secretary-general, Eric Drummond, cautioned, “we must be careful about committing ourself [sic] to helping intellectual work in one particular country.”Footnote 98
The appeal for the intellectual relief of Austria mirrored the economic and financial intervention undertaken by the League in the same period. Economic relief and intellectual relief went hand in hand. The League had a close relationship with the successor states who were the living embodiment of the postwar settlement and of the idea of self-determination. By 1922, Austria was in the midst of an economic crisis which led to a financial intervention by the League's Economic and Financial Organisation (EFO). The EFO coordinated the raising of an international loan as the League had no stabilization funds of its own; however, in the words of Patricia Clavin, “its ability to marshal evidence and to disseminate it to the wider network of governmental and financial institutions was central to the rescue.”Footnote 99 The CIC's intervention of 1922 can be seen in similar terms; it did not have the financial resources to organize a widespread relief effort in Austria but it did have both a moral authority and a well-developed global communications network enabling the dissemination of its message, which enabled it to effectively publicize the necessity for Austria's intellectual relief. Books received would be communicated to relief agencies to be, in turn, sent to Austria, or they would be sent directly to designated local Austrian institutions.Footnote 100
Inazo Nitobe, under-secretary-general with responsibility for the CIC, received letters from around the world from universities and learned societies detailing the books that were available for exchange. These were then communicated to Alfons Dopsch, the CIC's correspondent in Vienna, before an exchange of books was effected between the institutions concerned.Footnote 101 The CIC also forwarded some requests for books to other international agencies, such as the Universities Library for Central Europe, the Institute of International Education, and the European Centre for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Ultimately, the CIC hoped that national committees of intellectual cooperation—answering to the international committee in Geneva—would take care of this work in the future.Footnote 102 Other forms of assistance were also received: Kyushu Imperial University in Japan sent cash “in aid of our Austrian colleagues.”Footnote 103 The CIC's project was possible because of the moral authority of the League and also because of the international reputations of the individual members of the CIC, such as Murray, Curie and Bergson. They were uniquely positioned to appeal to an educated international audience.
The wide publicity given to the League's project for intellectual relief meant that petitions soon arrived at the CIC from other countries experiencing intellectual deprivation, such as Hungary. Following the publication of the League's commitment to intellectual relief in September 1922, which coincided with Hungarian entry into the League of Nations, Hungarian institutions began to contact the CIC, presenting lists of books and equipment that they required.Footnote 104 In the Hungarian case, appealing for intellectual relief was a means of highlighting the severity of the terms imposed on them under the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 which shrank Hungary to one-third of its pre-war size, made it pay significant reparations for war damage, and resulted in three million ethnic Hungarians finding themselves living in new states.Footnote 105 Following the ratification of Trianon, revisionism became Hungary's “civic religion.” Cultural diplomacy was an important means through which Hungary sought to make its case for treaty revision and it emphasized Hungary's cultural superiority in Eastern Europe (as well as the Western origins of their culture).Footnote 106 In this way, appealing to the CIC fit a broader revisionist agenda for Hungary.
One consequence of the redistribution of lands of the former Habsburg Empire was that a number of universities and libraries came under the control of Czechoslovakia and Romania. Hungarian critics of the Treaty of Trianon claimed that it had resulted in Hungary losing 745 public and scientific libraries, or four million volumes (of a prewar total of 9.5 million).Footnote 107 Notably, Kolozsvár University and its Hungarian professors had been driven into exile and been forced to refound their university in Szeged in 1921.Footnote 108 In 1922, a committee was founded, under the presidency of Count Albert Apponyi, to “ensure the scientific work of the Hungarian universities.” Apponyi had been responsible for a 1907 law that ensured the dominance of the Hungarian language in Hungarian education.Footnote 109 The committee argued that Hungarian culture was “our sole weapon and source of strength [and] the only safeguard of our future.” The committee raised funds domestically for the purchase of books and scientific equipment and issued appeals internationally to the League as well as to the Rockefeller Foundation and the German Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft.Footnote 110 Hungarian appeals for aid leveraged international interest in intellectual relief and the precedent of the League's appeal on behalf of Austria, but made it clear that Hungary's plight was a consequence of the postwar settlement.
By 1923, a League-sponsored report, written by the Polish historian Oskar Halecki, noted the impoverished state of intellectual life in Hungary. He claimed that Hungary was facing “a disaster as complete as that which followed her defeat on Mohács field,” a reference to the defeat of the Hungarians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1526.Footnote 111 In September 1924, following another letter by Apponyi to the CIC, the League's Council approved the publication of an appeal on behalf of Hungary which was similar to the Austrian document issued almost two years previously. However, this appeal was different in two fundamental respects. First, it was written in more sober language than the Austrian document; gone were the apocalyptic references to the death of civilization. Instead it noted that Hungary was “nearly ruined by the war” but was improving due to the League of Nations-sponsored loan, finally agreed after a contentious period of negotiation between Hungary, its neighbors and their allies in the League in March 1924.Footnote 112 Rather than trying to act as an intermediary as it had with Austria, the CIC asked “universities, academies and learned societies of the whole world to send their publications to the Hungarian universities, academies and learned societies, and to organize exchanges with them.” The appeal asked that all donations be sent directly to the Hungarian legation in their respective countries.Footnote 113 However, the CIC still received many letters from universities around the world, offering to send books to Hungary.Footnote 114
By 1925, the immediate crisis in Europe was passing. The economies in Central Europe were stabilizing, owing (in part) to the financial interventions of the League, and the existential threat to intellectual life had passed. Apponyi's Hungarian committee felt that the international response meant Hungary had “passed the stage of relief.”Footnote 115 Moral and economic intervention demonstrated the potential for ambitious programmes in the future, as well as for the CIC to be a forum for national grievances. The Romanian delegation to the League claimed that the “the reconstruction of Austria and Hungary through the collective efforts of all the other countries is one of the finest pages in the history of the League of Nations.” It wondered whether the methods adopted in the economic reconstruction of Europe might be applied to the intellectual reconstruction of countries “which urgently need it,” through the provision of an international loan for intellectual purposes.Footnote 116 While the proposal was approved by the League's Assembly, it did not meet a favorable response at the EFO.Footnote 117
The CIC's interventions on behalf of Austria, Hungary, and Japan—an appeal was also issued on behalf of the Tokyo Imperial University, whose library (and its 740,000 volumes) were destroyed following an earthquake in September 1923—were all made to support League member states.Footnote 118 In each case, it was difficult to quantify their success as the CIC facilitated exchanges rather than executing them; moreover, they did not keep cumulative records of the outcome of these appeals for intellectual relief. The CIC was more concerned with developing mechanisms to ensure a decentralized and smooth exchange of publications between states in Central and Eastern Europe should the need arise in the future. Crucial in this process was the foundation of national committees of intellectual cooperation.Footnote 119 The League had a particular interest in ensuring that the successor states of Central and Eastern Europe would be sustainable, as these were the living embodiment of the doctrine of self-determination. Intellectual vitality was simultaneously an economic and cultural problem, and economic stabilization allowed for the nations to begin purchasing academic literature from abroad once more. However, the question of intellectual intervention was more problematic when it came to non-member states such as Germany.
The limits of intellectual relief: Germany
Germany was, like Austria and Hungary, a vanquished state in the recently ended war, but it held a different place in the victors’ imagination. Not only was Germany seen as the primary aggressor in the events leading to the outbreak of war in 1914 (with this being given legal status in Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles), but German scholars and intellectuals had also issued truculent defences of their nation's behavior, specifically denying that it had committed atrocities in Belgium. This meant that at the cessation of the war, Germany was frozen out of the League of Nations and of many other international bodies. In the natural sciences, a “boycott” of German science would not be lifted until after Germany's admission to the League in 1926.Footnote 120 Germany's place in the international order was, in Daniel Laqua's words, “a key challenge for intellectual cooperation.”Footnote 121
At the height of the crisis in Austria, Germany was suffering from similar, if not worse, problems arising from spiralling inflation. Writing in Foreign Affairs in December 1922, Karl Kautsky reported that German “artists and writers” were “literally starving. And they are starving not only physically; they are finding it more and more impossible to satisfy their intellectual hunger, to purchase books, instruments and other scientific means of support.”Footnote 122 German academics began to organize themselves to ensure that national scientific life remained as strong as possible in the circumstances. In 1920 the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft was founded with the support of all German universities, academies, technical schools and scientific institutes, to give financial assistance to struggling libraries and to coordinate university research.Footnote 123 From 1922, with the onset of hyperinflation, the Notgemeinschaft also began drawing the attention of international audiences to the critical situation in German universities. This raising of awareness of the plight of German universities and intellectuals was broadly successful and assistance was received from a number of international bodies, such as the ESR and the Universities’ Committee of the Imperial War Relief Fund, which began to undermine the international intellectual isolation of Germany by former belligerents.Footnote 124 However, the League of Nations was an exception to this.
The CIC had a contradictory attitude towards nonmember states. On the one hand, it viewed its work as a means to involve countries such as the United States in the work of the League. Albert Einstein was appointed to the first CIC committee as an “acceptable” German as his wartime pacifism saved him from the opprobrium which other German scholars received in Allied countries. However, in March 1923, as the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr entered its third month, Einstein wrote to the committee to resign his position, citing the League's reluctance to aid Germany.Footnote 125 The CIC's attitude towards Germany also upset members like Gilbert Murray. In March 1924 he wrote a strident letter to The Times criticizing the committee, and in a letter to Sir Eric Drummond he described Germany's noninclusion in the CIC's appeal for intellectual aid as “an absolute disgrace to the League” and “a scandal.”Footnote 126
Across the academic world, the French and Belgians are usually seen to have perpetuated the exclusion of Germany with the greatest vigor. This partly explains the attitude of the CIC, which was chaired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was known for his rhetorical belligerence towards Germany during the war. Bergson wrote privately in 1924 that “in current circumstances, this complete cooperation [with Germany] is not possible.”Footnote 127 However, this hostility was reciprocated on the German side. Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, the president of the Notgemeinschaft, viewed the work of the CIC with profound misgivings, not only because of a general suspicion of the League of Nations as constituting a league of victor states, but also because Schmidt-Ott claimed to remember the hostile rhetoric, during and immediately after the war, of two CIC members, Bergson and George Ellery Hale. This made the Notgemeinschaft reluctant to deal with the CIC. The League's secretary-general, Drummond, claimed that Gonzague de Reynold had made a number of approaches to the Notgemeinschaft to solicit their help in setting up a national committee on intellectual cooperation, with each attempt coming to nothing.Footnote 128 De Reynold also sought their assistance in composing a report on the nature of intellectual life in Germany and in this he eventually had some success.Footnote 129 De Reynold wrote that “it is obvious that intellectual cooperation in Germany does not depend upon the Intellectual Cooperation committee alone.”Footnote 130 However, the CIC's reluctance to make an appeal on behalf of Germany, as it had with Austria and Hungary, went against its claims (best expressed in the Austrian appeal) to be motivated by safeguarding civilization, especially as German scholars presented Germany's plight as a matter of world importance, given Germany's prewar eminence as a nation that excelled in academic research.Footnote 131 In this context, the CIC reflected, rather than changed, the international order, and demonstrated the persistence of national animosities born of the war.
The Institutionalization of Intellectual Relief
The CIC's meeting of August 1922 had argued that intellectual life needed saving in certain instances and that a general enquiry into the state of intellectual life was required across Europe and the world to identify other countries where civilization was threatened. The appeal issued in favor of Austria had underlined the need for a wider enquiry. It elicited responses from many countries who claimed that their intellectual life was also imperilled. In Bucharest, the Academia Romana highlighted the privations suffered in the war by Romania, where libraries were left disorganized, laboratories had been pillaged during wartime occupation, and the postwar slump meant that the Romanian government could not afford to address the needs of academic institutions.Footnote 132 It called for an immediate enquiry to analyse intellectual life from the Black Sea to the Aegean.
The Austrian appeal also revealed the extent of intellectual relief being led by other agencies and the risk of duplicating relief activities. In June 1923, Maxwell Garnett of the League of Nations Union in Britain wrote to the CIC, criticizing them for being one body in a crowded field rather than taking a coordinating role.Footnote 133 Following the CIC's appeal on behalf of Austria, the Universities’ Committee of the Imperial War Relief Fund wrote of their disappointment to learn that such an appeal had been issued without their knowledge as they had been undertaking the same type of work for two years.Footnote 134 A similar letter was received from the Anglo-American Universities Library for Central Europe, who worked with the Universities’ Committee.Footnote 135
By the end of 1922, the CIC began to expand its activities based on both of these issues. First, it recognized that Central and Eastern Europe were particularly badly impacted by intellectual deprivation and sought to set up a permanent scheme of mutual assistance involving the donation or exchange of books and other materials. This scheme would be effected through the national committees on intellectual cooperation, which all member states were encouraged to form to gather information, identify national intellectual needs and then communicate them either to other national committees or to the CIC.Footnote 136 In this way, it was hoped that future intellectual relief would be structured and formalized rather than the result of ad hoc action.
In December 1922, the CIC drew up a questionnaire, about the nature and organization of intellectual life, to be circulated to national governments across the world. The hope was that this would provide an insight into the nature of intellectual life and identify countries in need of immediate assistance.Footnote 137 The questionnaire was primarily concerned with state control of education, the types of institution present in each country, and the extent of international cooperation. In this way it assumed that intellectual life was primarily embodied by institutions under direct state oversight, which was not the case in countries like Britain. At the same time, the CIC also employed scholars to publish reports on intellectual life in different countries, based on these questionnaires, published between 1923 and 1924 in a series called Enquiry into the Conditions of Intellectual Work in Various Countries.Footnote 138 These reports were primarily focused on higher education and the sciences, and presented tables detailing the number of students in higher education, and the number of universities and scientific institutions in a given country, while also presenting a historical narrative summarizing the intellectual development of each country. They included League members and nonmembers—such as the United States and Germany—alike.Footnote 139
Cumulatively these initiatives sought to take stock of intellectual life following the war and to formalize the mechanisms of intellectual relief. The preoccupation with higher education and the organization of scientific research tells us much about how the CIC understood intellectual life and its scope. By 1925, with the stabilization of economies in Central Europe and the signing of the Locarno Treaties which paved the way for German entry into the League, the immediate crisis was seen to have passed and the enquiries ended quietly. However, the published accounts left a permanent record of the state of intellectual life in Europe and beyond which could be a practical aid to facilitating future intervention by the League and other international organizations.
The mechanisms of intellectual relief were further solidified in the summer of 1924 when the French government made an offer to the CIC to establish and fund an International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in Paris. The offer was formally accepted by the Council of the League of Nations in December 1924.Footnote 140 The first director of the IIIC was the aforementioned French writer Julien Luchaire.Footnote 141 One of the IIIC's roles was to work with national committees on intellectual cooperation to enable clear communication between nations and the League, especially in instances where assistance was required. By 1924, eighteen countries had established national committees. Of these, only one, Brazil, was outside Europe, and many were successor states.Footnote 142 By 1937, this number had grown to thirty-eight nations, of whom fourteen were situated beyond Europe.Footnote 143 The establishment of the institute, in tandem with the national committees on intellectual cooperation, constituted a greater institutionalization of mechanisms to provide intellectual relief in the future, both by identifying crises of intellectual displacement and intellectual starvation and by creating structures to effect an efficient response. In this way, the League's early work on intellectual relief structured the emergence of permanent institutions that emerged thereafter. This is of particular note when considering that the IIIC would later be reborn as UNESCO after the Second World War. The establishment of the IIIC also posed difficult questions about the influence of individual nations, such as France, which both hosted the new body and provided the bulk of its funding. It demonstrated that intellectual cooperation would continue to be leveraged by individual states for the promotion of their national prestige.Footnote 144
Conclusion
The Locarno Treaties of 1925 paved the way for Germany to enter the League of Nations in 1926 and ushered in a period of reconciliation, international cooperation and optimism. However, in what Zara Steiner calls “the Hinge Years,” the League was fatally undermined by the onset of the Great Depression, the Manchuria crisis and the failure of the Disarmament Conference.Footnote 145 By 1933, Hitler had taken power and Germany had withdrawn from the League of Nations. Beginning in the same year, he began his assault on intellectual freedoms and a new wave of intellectual exile began, with Jewish (and other) scholars from Nazi-controlled territories seeking refuge in Britain, North America and elsewhere.Footnote 146 The story of intellectual exile in the 1930s—and the great transnational relief organizations—is much better known than the fledgling attempts of the early 1920s. The events of the 1930s are, however, part of the same transformation that was born of the First World War, namely the preoccupation with the international relief of organized intellectual life.
Post-First World War intellectual relief was a response to the upheavals of war which led to famine, epidemics, economic chaos and the mass displacement of people. International relief of intellectuals emerged in the war and became a distinct and significant arm of international humanitarianism in its aftermath, organized and justified in a different manner to other humanitarian interventions. Intellectual relief was justified by aid givers as a means of safeguarding centuries-old cultures and, by association, upholding democracy in successor states against the threat of Bolshevism. For the recipients, appealing to international organizations such as the CIC could be a means of articulating national grievances about the postwar settlement to international audiences, as in the Hungarian case. For the League of Nations, intellectual relief was an essential precursor to its mission to inculcate intellectual cooperation between member states with a view to easing national antipathies following the war. The organization of intellectual relief also demonstrated the speed with which the CIC acquired a moral authority, enabling it to draw appeals and requests from around the world, even when it did not have the funds to make good on them.
After the optimism of the nineteenth century, with international and global connections made possible by telegraph, steam-powered travel, the professionalization of disciplines, the growth in the number of universities and the formation of a huge number of national and international journals and associations, twentieth-century intellectual life was threatened by war and its many consequences. Intellectuals in exile, de Reynold wrote, carried the flame of learning with them when it was threatened at home; it was the duty of the civilized world to “help them to maintain that flame.”Footnote 147 His words would prove prescient just over a decade later.
