International Organizations and Global Civil Society

Histories of the Union of International Associations

Daniel Laqua, Wouter Van Acker, Christophe Verbruggen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350182851
• eBook ISBN: 9781350055629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Union of International Associations (UIA) was founded in 1910, aiming to coordinate the relations and interests of international organizations across the world. Its long history makes it a prism through which to study the field of international organizations and its dynamics. Bringing together experts from fields including history, political science and international relations, architecture, historical sociology, digital humanities and information studies, International Organizations and Global Civil Society is the first scholarly book to cover both the UIA's early years and its more recent past. Key issues explored include the UIA's importance for the field of scientific internationalism, the relations between the UIA and other international organizations, and the changing position of the UIA when facing geopolitical challenges such as totalitarianism, the World Wars and the Cold War. This important book addresses a number of current scholarly concerns: the concept of "global civil society"; the development of international relations as a field of study; the investigation of transnational factors in modern and contemporary history; and the tracing of forerunners to the "information society".

Part I

The Development of the UIA

Chapter 1

Creating the UIA: Henri La Fontaine, Cyrille Van Overbergh and Paul Otlet

W. Boyd Rayward

This chapter explores the events and relationships that led to the foundation of the Central Office of International Institutions in 1907 and the Union of International Associations (UIA) in 1910. It investigates the tangle of potentially conflicting political orientations, personal ties and institutional affiliations of the triumvirs involved in the creation of these organizations: Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943), Cyrille Van Overbergh (1866–1959) and Paul Otlet (1868–1944). Paradoxically, they considered the Central Office and Union to express national expansionary interests – Belgium as a centre for internationalism – but also to reflect, and perhaps help regulate, an emergent form of what they called ‘international life’. They regarded the latter as a globalizing trend that had been abundantly documented in the two massive Annuaires de la Vie Internationale of the Central Office. Their collaboration involved the mutual accommodation of different personal circumstances arising from their educational backgrounds and the various organizations of which they were members.

Henri La Fontaine, the oldest of the three, was scion of a wealthy Brussels family and a law graduate of the Free University of Brussels. He interned with two distinguished lawyers, Jules Bara and Auguste Orts, both of whom were active in the Belgian parliament as radically anticlerical liberals.¹ He became secretary to the jurist Edmond Picard who, for forty years, was one of the leading philanthropists, cultural animators and controversialists in the artistic and literary life of belle époque Brussels. Admitted to the Brussels Bar, La Fontaine appeared with Picard on several cases before the Court of Appeals.

As a young man, La Fontaine joined one of the oldest and most prominent Belgian lodges, Les Amis Philanthropes of which he became twice Worshipful Grand Master in a career-long dedication to freemasonry. The lodge was politically liberal and anticlerical. It had also been an important influence – not long after the formation of the Belgian state – in the creation of the Free University of Brussels. La Fontaine became an active member of the Belgian Workers’ Party when it was founded by a number of his socialist colleagues in 1885. He was also among a small group of radically progressive intellectuals who launched the Université Nouvelle in 1894 to offer a revolutionary challenge to what they believed had become the Free University’s reactionary approach to the social and human sciences.² And, like his former maître Picard, La Fontaine entered the Senate as a socialist, following the first elections under an extended franchise in 1894. La Fontaine was passionately pacifist and internationalist in his sympathies. In 1889 he helped to set up the Belgian section of the English-based International Arbitration and Peace Association, which had developed such sections across Europe. Throughout his long career, he was a leading figure at the Universal Peace Congresses and in the Interparliamentary Union. He became president of the International Peace Bureau in 1907 and held this office until his death in 1943. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cyrille Van Overbergh’s background could not have been more different.³ Born in Kortrijk in West Flanders, he attended the Catholic University of Louvain. He too graduated in law but his internship was with François Schollaert, a Louvain-based lawyer who had recently been elected to the Belgian Chamber of Representatives for the Catholic Party. Even before graduation, Van Overbergh had become active in the Flemish urban guild movement led by Schollaert’s brother-in-law, Joris Helleputte.⁴ When Helleputte – deeply religious, anti-liberal and anti-socialist – founded the Belgian Democratic League in 1891 ‘for the church and the people’, the young Van Overbergh was described as having become his right hand.⁵ At Louvain, Van Overbergh had also became deeply involved with the efforts of Désiré Mercier, later cardinal and head of the Catholic Church in Belgium, to create a neo-Thomist Higher Institute of Philosophy.⁶

Van Overbergh’s subsequent professional career was that of a high-ranking bureaucrat in government agencies under the political control of the Catholic Party. When Schollaert was appointed Minister of the Interior and Higher Education in 1895, Van Overbergh became his principal private secretary. He subsequently served in a range of senior administrative posts associated with Schollaert’s ministerial responsibilities, covering areas such as higher education, arts and sciences.

Paul Otlet was the youngest of the three men. He grew up in a milieu of luxury and privilege.⁷ His father, Edouard, was a financier and industrialist who created and lost a large fortune setting up companies to build tram and railways – at least thirty-five of them according to Paul – throughout Europe and many other parts of the world.⁸ Between 1874 and 1900, Edouard Otlet represented the Catholic Party in the Senate. Paul Otlet was educated at an elitist Jesuit school in Brussels, the Collège Saint-Michel, before entering the Catholic University of Louvain. He followed his studies at Louvain with a period of independent study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he cast off his Catholicism, capitulated to agnosticism and embraced positivism and evolutionism.⁹ He subsequently transferred to the Free University of Brussels, where he took a law degree. In 1891, he became an intern of Edmond Picard, for whom La Fontaine had acted as secretary some years earlier. Picard was an Otlet family friend who for many years represented Edouard Otlet’s complicated legal affairs.

In order to understand how these different personalities and orientations shaped the processes that ultimately produced the Central Office and the Union of International Associations, the chapter initially examines the context of Brussels positivism and contemporary attitudes to the social sciences. It then discusses the Belgian Catholic milieu of politics and higher education and its alternative approach to social theorizing. It suggests that the UIA’s founders integrated their different intellectual interests, organizational structures for the international management of information and a commitment to pacifism into the wider vision of a new, knowledge-based world polity. They believed that their Central Office and UIA would give this vision an identity and administrative reality.

Bibliographic Collaborations, the Brussels Positivist Milieu and the Creation of the International Office and Institute of Bibliography

The origins of what was to become the administrative and physical hub of the Central Office of International Associations lie in the expanding and diversifying bibliographical collaboration between Otlet and La Fontaine. This began in Brussels in 1892 in the positivist, anticlerical and short-lived Société des Études Sociales et Politiques (SESP) and continued in the Institut des Sciences Sociales (ISS) in 1894.¹⁰ Working with several colleagues under Edmond Picard’s guidance, Otlet had embarked in 1891 on the publication of a periodical bibliography for law. The work was based on principles that Picard had enunciated, linking bibliography to the positivism that characterized the period’s approach to science.¹¹ Otlet himself had explored these ideas, attempting to understand the impact a bibliography of the kind he had embarked upon might have on the organization and conduct of the social sciences.¹²

In March 1892, he had suggested combining his bibliographical work with La Fontaine’s bibliographical activities for the SESP. Essentially positivist in outlook, the SESP declared itself to be ‘exclusively devoted to scientific research’, with its mission being to ‘observe the facts, to let them speak, to set itself above passions and prejudices’.¹³ Central to its work were its journal, the Revue Sociale et Politique, its library and especially its bibliographical service for which La Fontaine assumed primary responsibility.

The International Office of Sociological Bibliography, which the two men created within the SESP, became increasingly independent of the society as the latter fell on hard times. According to one observer, it was eventually absorbed by the ISS, although the principles underlying the two organizations could not have been more different.¹⁴ Ernest Solvay, a prominent Belgian industrialist and philanthropist, set up the ISS in 1894 essentially to investigate his own sociological and economic theories.¹⁵ La Fontaine and Otlet played a prominent role in the initial organization of the Institute.¹⁶ La Fontaine was given financial responsibility for managing the substantial funds that Solvay provided for it. Otlet undertook unsuccessful negotiations for the SESP’s Revue Sociale et Polique to become a joint publication with the ISS. Their Office of Sociological Bibliography became the Institute’s administrative centre, with La Fontaine in effect acting for its first year as the Institute’s combined secretary-treasurer. The Office undertook to cover all secretarial needs of the ISS and ‘to catalogue such documents, to create such statistics, to carry out such physical research as indicated by the Institute’.¹⁷ In addition, it agreed to put its bibliographical collections and other resources at the disposition of the ISS. For these services, the Institute agreed to pay the Office an annual sum for three years, further funding to be negotiable after that.

Having been asked by Solvay how best to extend and formalize the work of the ISS, Otlet and La Fontaine drafted a series of proposals regarding the bibliographical support which, they argued, the Institute would eventually need for the research of its members and collaborators.¹⁸ The complex of tasks that they now projected for an independent, self-sustaining International Office of Sociological Bibliography went far beyond anything that the ISS might have been expected to support. In fact, Otlet suggested raising capital to support the International Office by incorporating it as a cooperative society in which there would be different levels of investment.¹⁹

Otlet and La Fontaine’s bibliographical experience had begun with the compilation and publication of relatively straightforward periodic bibliographies f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reconstructing the Identities of an International Non-Governmental Intelligence Agency
• Part I The Development of the UIA
• Part II The UIA in a World of International Organizations
• Part III Exploring the UIA’s Publications and Data
• Epilogue: The UIA in the Twenty-first Century
• Index
• Copyright