The International Research Council and Its Unions, 1919-1931

by Robert Fox

IUPAC was a product of a restructuring of world science that took place immediately after the Great War. In a series of three conferences in London, Paris, and Brussels between October 1918 and July 1919, delegations from twelve allied nations established a new body, the International Research Council (IRC), that was to control international relations in science through subsidiary unions for the various scientific disciplines until a review of the statutes planned for 1931. Four of these unions were established at the Brussels conference, among them IUPAC.

Both the IRC and the unions were profoundly marked by the guiding principle that the defeated Central Powers—Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and what remained of the former Ottoman Empire—should have no place in the new structures. Scientists from those countries would be excluded from congresses, and even the use of the German language was to be forbidden. The exclusionist principle had its roots in early discussions in which the French, represented by the mathematician and secretary of the Académie des Sciences Emile Picard, had an especially powerful voice.

The solidarity that characterized the inter-allied conferences of 1918-19 came under strain from the moment the IRC cautiously opened its doors to countries that had taken no part, on either side, in the war. The Netherlands was one such country that joined the IRC and several of its unions, despite unease about the exclusion of colleagues from Germany and Austria with whom the Dutch had strong traditional links. The case of the Utrecht chemist Ernst Cohen brings out the dilemma of someone who served IUPAC loyally while also working for a relaxation of the IRC’s ban on the former Central Powers, especially in his years as IUPAC president (1925-28) [1].

By 1923, cracks were showing even among those who had supported the decisions made in Brussels four years earlier. William Albert Noyes, a powerful fi gure in the American Chemical Society and a committed internationalist, represented a widely held American opinion that the time had come to admit German chemists to the IRC and IUPAC. The divisions put the IRC under intense pressure. Political pressures too played their part. Once the Locarno agreements of 1925 had opened the way to Franco-German reconciliation and the opening of the League of Nations to all countries, including the former Central Powers, the IRC had no choice but to review its statutes, as it did at a specially summoned general assembly in 1926. While membership of the IRC remained formally a condition for membership of a union, any nation that belonged to the League of Nations was now eligible for admission to the IRC and thereby to the unions.

The question that remained was whether the newly eligible nations would choose to join the IRC. Germany did not. Nevertheless, through the later 1920s German scientists regularly attended congresses, despite the irregularity of their position. In IUPAC, as in other unions, the German presence grew, culminating in 1930, when Germany sent a large delegation to the IUPAC general assembly in Liège (Belgium). There, as had happened at the 1928 congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in Bologna, the German delegation received a standing ovation. Even more pointedly, the assembly elected Fritz Haber, the pioneer of gas warfare, to a four-year term as vice-president, in the expectation that he would probably in due course become president (though, in the event, he died before such a term might have begun) [2].

In July 1930, with its authority terminally undermined, the IRC began the procedures that led, a year later, to its demise and replacement with a new International Council of Scientific Unions, ICSU. The transition was far more than an administrative adjustment. It marked the end of a venture in the centralized organization of scientific research and a decisive move towards a federation of autonomous disciplinary unions, the status that ICSU (now the International Science Council) retains in our own day.

References 1. See Jorrit Smit’s paper infra, p. 9 | 2. Union Internationale de Chimie: Comptes Rendus de la Xe Conférence de la Chimie, Liège, 14-20 sept 1930 (Secrétariat Général, J. Gérard, 1931), 35.

Additional Bibliography 1. R. Fennell: History of IUPAC, 1919-1987 (Blackwell Science Ltd, Oxford, 1994), chp 2, 11-20. | 2. F. Greenaway: Science International. A History of the International Council of Scientific Unions (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), chp 2, 19-32. | 3. O. Lehto: Mathematics without Borders. A History of the International Mathematical Union (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1998), 47-48. | 4. R. Fox: Science without Frontiers. Cosmopolitanism and National Interests in the World of Learning, 1870-1940 (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 2016), 75-81.

Robert Fox <robert.fox@history.ox.ac.uk> is Emeritus Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford.

Cite: Fox, R. (2019). The International Research Council and Its Unions: 1919-1931, Chemistry International, 41(3), 7-8; https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2019-0303