On the Fraught Internationalism of Intellectuals

This chapter investigates the idea and practice of intellectual cooperation as a tool of international governance: an innovation of the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC). It shows how Austria’s involvement decisively shaped both the ICIC’s agenda and the future European intellectual order. From the mid-1920s onwards, cooperation included the newly emerging area of cultural heritage and its institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums, all of which had a rich imperial tradition in Vienna. The chapter also elaborates how interwar intellectual cooperation subsequently informed the strategy that UNESCO, ICIC’s successor organization, would adopt after 1945. This chapter provides a relational history of the development of international intellectual cooperation between Austria and the League of Nations, and aims to illuminate the opportunities, expectations, and realities of international intellectual cooperation from a regional, actor- and institution-oriented perspective. It reconstructs the ‘international’ of intellectual cooperation in the making.