著者

齋川 貴嗣

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2018, no.193, pp.192_60-192_75, 2018-09-10 (Released:2018-12-19)

参考文献数

75

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This article examines the ideological transformation of intellectual co-operation in the International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC) of the League of Nations in the 1930s. Since its establishment in 1922 as a consultative body to the Council, the ICIC had carried out various projects in the name of intellectual co-operation, which were taken over by the UNESCO after the Second World War. Although growing attention has recently been paid to the ICIC as a pioneer international organization for cultural exchange, most of the historical studies have been confined to European perspectives. In this respect, this article argues that the ICIC’s idea of intellectual co-operation was fundamentally changed in association with the expansion of its activities to non-European countries, particularly China and Japan.When the ICIC was established in 1922, the work of intellectual co-operation was regarded as a transnational enterprise that should be based on the universality of Western civilization and undertaken by individual intellectuals. However, the original idea gradually transformed. This is shown in the two notable projects that the ICIC had enthusiastically undertaken in the 1930s: the Mission of Educational Experts to China and the Japanese Collection. The Mission of Educational Experts to China in 1931 was the ICIC’s first experience to assist a particular government, and in cooperation with the Chinese government it facilitated the reorganization of the Chinese educational system with considerable emphasis on the construction and preservation of Chinese national culture. In the project of the Japanese Collection that started in 1935, on the other hand, the ICIC introduced Japanese culture in the West with the assistance of the Japanese government. Through these projects, the ICIC became aware that intellectual co-operation should be based on the idea of particular national cultures and implemented by governments.As a result, the ICIC formed and presented its two-faced self-image in the 1930s. Firstly, the ICIC was envisaged by intellectuals like Paul Valéry as the ‘League of Minds’ that placed high hopes on the capacity of Western civilization to integrate different nations in the world from a universal point of view. The ‘League of Minds’ was conceptualized in terms of the idea of universal Western civilization as an extension and sophistication of the idea of intellectual co-operation that the ICIC had maintained since the early 1920s. On the other hand, the ICIC crafted another self-image, the ‘League of Cultures’ that Rabindranath Tagore envisioned as an ideal form of intellectual co-operation. While emphasizing not the universality of Western civilization but the individuality and particularity of national culture, Tagore argued that the ICIC should be an organization composed of different national cultures. In this way, the ICIC was fraught with the tension between these two opposing perspectives on intellectual co-operation in the 1930s.The ICIC thus shifted its emphasis in the idea of intellectual co-operation from Western civilization to national cultures as well as from individual intellectuals to governments in the 1930s. This shift can be characterized as the ideological transition from intellectual co-operation to international cultural exchange. Nevertheless, the antinomies that the ICIC embraced, the tensions between the university of Western civilization and the particularity of national cultures as well as between individual intellectuals and governments, have also been taken over by the present UNESCO.