Japanese participants at the International Studies Conference and the Institute of Pacific Relations in the twenty years' crisis

Abstract

The proposed project for the research at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) was "a re-assessment of the discourse of the International in the twentieth century." It was to examine how the idea of the "International" was formed. By the "International," I meant the counter-communist notion of the "International," which became the core of what we often term the "liberal international order" of the twentieth century. This research now forms a part of my broader book project. What follows here are my findings on one of the three focuses in this recent research at the RAC, which were also synthesized with documents from the League of Nations Archives and the Unesco Archives, and my thoughts on them. This writing takes place in the unfolding of multiple crises. We are in the middle of the historic global pandemic crisis, which halted an ever-globalizing era of human history. Concurrently, we are experiencing an ongoing crisis of the globe, climate change, and that of parliamentary democracy. We are also in the middle of global BLM movements, while observing increasing power of non-democratic regimes. It is hard not to reflect on what the officers at the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) were going through in the 1930s-1940s, when they watched their era's own crises unfolding, and were faced with "sinking international organizations," with which they "share[d] their objectives and admire[d] their work." What did they think the RF should do? And what could we do? Show more