And the Politics of (Latin American) History at the League of Nations O Corinne A

Chapter eigHt “The Spirit of Harmony” and the Politics of (Latin American) History at the League of Nations O corinne a. perNet, University of Basel uring the hot summer of 1924, the League of Nation’s International DCommittee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC)—ten men and two women of science and culture—met on the shores of Lake Geneva to discuss how increased cooperation in their fields could contribute to the League’s success in keeping the peace. For the Argentine ICIC member Leopoldo Lugones, it was clear that the ICIC should focus its attention on the teaching of history, as the political conscience of the broad public was based on it. Instead of national narratives, there should be histories of civilization, “of communication and of peace,” to foster the conscience of the “genus humanum.” Lugones assured the ICIC that this was not only his personal view and that he spoke “in conformity with the spirit of harmony typical of the Latin American Republics.”1 Lugones was not alone in according history an important role. Even though the League of Nations (LN, or League) was certainly a forward-looking organization, the new world order it hoped to bring about needed its own foundational narratives—histories less focused on conflict between nations, military exploits, or heroic civilian populations and more on interdependence and cooperation. The League’s interest in history was thus rather goal oriented. In the short term, the organization advocated the revision of school textbooks, which should at least be freed of incendiary passages concerning other countries. A number of scholars have examined initiatives such as the Casares resolution of 1926 and generally judged them to be a failure for the lack of tangible 135 136 Corinne A. Pernet results directly attributable to the League’s efforts.2 Recent evaluations are more nuanced, especially when the focus shifts from the great European powers to the Scandinavian or Baltic countries.3 Moving on to Latin American actors adds important strands to the narrative about history at the League. The League has been considered an essentially European organization for too long, which has led to an overemphasis on a European chronol- ogy that paints the 1930s as a period of decline and obscures continuities between the 1930s and the postwar world. But also from the vantage point of the historiography of the Americas, a fresh look at the League of Nations is desirable. For Latin Americans, participation in the League soon became an ambiv- alent undertaking. On the one hand, the League appealed to the idealism that had been evident in Latin American efforts to arbitrate conflict. A certain prestige was associated with membership, in that the League offered a seat at the table with the European powers. Moreover, some hoped that the League would provide a counterweight to the United States in the Western Hemisphere. On the other hand, the League proved unwilling to address the question of the Monroe Doctrine enshrined in the covenant. As a result, a number of countries eschewed active participation in the assembly or with- drew after a few years.4 However, beyond formal participation in the strictly political organs of the League, Latin American intellectuals and diplomats engaged with a variety of League bodies, such as the League of Nations Health Organization or the Intellectual Cooperation Organization. This entrance onto the international stage provided an opportunity to project to the global public an image of Latin America and to develop a regional con- sciousness, fostering regional integration. Latin American delegates to the League assemblies as well as diplomats and intellectuals involved in the various organs of cultural and educational cooperation positioned themselves in the debates about history and history textbooks. They were at the forefront of initiatives to revise nationalist histories and pursued the same aim in the inter-American sphere. They also seized the opportunities the League offered to develop their own historical narratives. On the suggestion of Roberto Levillier, an Argentine historian and diplomat, the League Assembly agreed in 1934 to sponsor a multivolume history of the Americas, to be written under tutelage of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in Paris. This project, however, highlighted thorny questions about how to interpret the history of the Western Hemisphere. Which role should be accorded to the indigenous “The Spirit of Harmony” and Politics of History 137 populations in shaping present Latin America? How best to describe Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule? In the few years until the League’s de facto demise, these questions could not be resolved and the pioneering project did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, the contributions of Latin American intellectuals to these initiatives are too frequently glossed over in accounts that suggest that the League was a vector of worldwide diffusion of European ideas and policies.5 revising histories on Both sides of the AtlAntic League of Nations efforts to reform history writing and textbooks emerged from a broader context. In the wake of World War I, teachers’ unions and professional organizations from several countries in Europe demanded mea- sures to make history books less nationalistic.6 In the Western Hemisphere, the parallel tendencies of US-sponsored Pan-Americanism as well as Latin American arielismo provided a crucial backdrop for Latin American participation in the debates on history writing in Geneva and Paris. Both the advo- cates of asserting the common aspects of the “American” experience as well as those who insisted on cultural differences between “Anglo-Saxons” and “Latins” agreed it was necessary to teach the history of the American hemisphere in a nonnationalistic way.7 The horrid spectacle of World War I only strengthened such arguments. At the 1916 Inter-American Scientific Congress, a number of participants called for better teaching of the history of the Americas.8 Such discussions carried over into the Fifth International Conference of American States, held in 1923 in Santiago, Chile, where several recommendations invoked a common historical past. One advocated safe- guarding historical remains so that an “adequate” American history could be written; another recommended establishing a course on “continental fra- ternity.”9 The scientific congress held in 1924 in Lima proposed that a commission of historians should collectively write a textbook on the history of the Americas, “aligning its tenor with the criterions of American solidarity and the history of humanity.” 10 So when the League of Nations took up the subject of revising and rewriting history in the mid-1920s, it was entering a field that already had a certain tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. Beginning in 1920, the League of Nations Union and the French Association for the League of Nations attempted to steer the organization’s attention toward the issue of teaching history. Within the ICIC, in 1923 US 138 Corinne A. Pernet delegate Robert Millikan submitted a first proposal to revise history textbooks. Elaborating on this as a member of a subcommission, Julien Luchaire recommended that the ICIC produce its own textbook in English and French—but the ICIC did not even discuss the matter.11 During its 1924 session, Argentina’s Leopoldo Lugones presented his plans to reform education as to change “public conscience” through education. History was particu- larly called on in this regard in that the basis of “the political conscience of the modern world, including the conceptions of patriotism and humanitar- ianism, was historical information.” Lugones proposed that the “purely narrative history of each country and individual continents should be transformed into the history of civilization.” Even political economy could be used to show that “all nations were mutually dependent and complemen- tary.” 12 Unfortunately, the ICIC chair postponed the discussion of the proposal to the following year’s session. In 1925, Lugones did not attend the meeting, but his substitute Juan Antonio Buero, a former Uruguayan foreign minister, brought up the proposal again and added that, in several Latin American countries, similar reforms were being discussed. But the ICIC rejected the proposal, consider- ing that it was “not . necessary to translate it into a concrete suggestion, nor would the Committee propose that useless text-books should be pro- duced.” 13 Lugones’s emphasis on history beyond the nation-state as well as the suggestion to deemphasize wars did not sit well with some commission members. The Spaniard Julio Casares, for instance, thought it “premature to attempt the teaching of any subject, and especially of history, from an international point of view.”14 The ICIC did, however, embrace the so-called Casares resolution, which provided a procedure if any country thought that a textbook contained inflammatory or incorrect material and should be revised. Thus, in 1925, the ICIC at the League of Nations rejected the proposal that Lugones had offered “in the spirit of harmony.” In the Western Hemisphere, the notion of a history beyond the nation- state was more present. Although no traces remain of a Pan American Union commission to write a textbook of the Americas, the notion was still in the air when the 1928 Conference of American States at Havana created the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia (IPGH). The IPGH took up its work in Mexico in 1929

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