Description
The founding documents of both the Policy and Economic Planning (PEP) think tank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) are suffused with a sense of civilizational crisis. The people building these new institutions, in 1931 and 1946 respectively, believed that scientific expertise and targeted educational programmes could address this crisis. PEP firmly believed that catastrophes such as the Great Depression and, later, the Second World War, could be mitigated by grounding government policies in scientific knowledge of human nature. The organisation imagined a network of like institutions across the world, all guided by its example. Unesco was conceived differently, as part of the postwar architecture of peace. Unlike PEP, it sought to shape the minds of populations the world over. Through this educational programming, Unesco imagined it would be possible to improve the general standards of civilization in the world’s "dark areas," places populated by the "darker races" and less privileged peoples. In this paper, I explore both the content and the practice of PEP and Unesco’s internationalism, placing emphasis on how both organisations deployed rhetorics of scientific knowledge to mobilise particular understandings of international organization and to advocate for “saving the best of Western traditions”.
