The human and its environment. The Fifth Norwegian conference of the history of science, January 24 – 25, 2013, Bergen Session Internationalism and state loyalty in 20th century Scandinavian science and humanities This session explores the pursuit of internationalism and national interests across time and in different fields of enquiry in Scandinavian sciences and humanities in the years following the two world wars of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it highlights how international organisations became sites where the scholars and scientists strived to achieve a unification of these seemingly paradoxical objectives. In particular, this session explicate the possibilities and the limitations of scientific internationalism in the aftermath of the two world wars, periods which traditionally have been associated with a dismantling of internationalist ideologies. Based on the idea that science produce universally valid knowledge, science has often been depicted as a neutral international sphere where scientists from all nations contribute to the scientific mapping of the world. Since the late nineteenth century, a growth in the number of international scientific organisations was often infused with aspirations of scientific internationalism. In parallel, science also became more important to the nation states, as technological and industrial development became intertwined with the growth of scientific knowledge. Tensions between internationalism and nationalism have also characterized the arts and humanities. The historical disciplines have been important for the development of national identities and national pride, and for legitimizing national interests. International scholarly cooperation has been advocated as a way to counteract national particularism and overcome international antagonism by turning politically charged historical issues into objects of international academic debates, by developing internationally accepted standards for historical and cultural research, and by turning the scholarly attention away from the nation and towards universal aspects of human culture and human history. While many historical and social studies of science have been eager to reveal how national priorities and local circumstance would trump the perceived shallowness of the rhetoric of internationalism, this session will focus on how scientific internationalism as an ideology have been combined with the practice of science under national patronage and in international organisations. As such, this session contributes to our understanding of how the apparently contradictory commitments to international cooperation and nationalistic attitudes often were reconciled and combined, a concern that has attracted considerable attention in the history of science in recent years. Four papers are presented in the session, combining research on the sciences and the arts and humanities. Jon Kyllingstad reviews how Scandinavian humanities scholars acted on the breakdown of scientific internationalism after the First World War, on two international arenas; The International Historical Congresses and the Union Academique International. Vera Schwach studies the The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), and how Norwegian marine scientists tried to reconcile national priorities and internationalist ideologies in the ICES. Poul Duedahl presents work on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and reviews how Scandinavian scientists after World War II were influenced by, and tried to influence, UNESCO’s work. Following this, Gard Paulsen will present a paper on UNESCO’s calls to international cooperation on the computer and computer science in the 1950s and 1960s and the responses among Norwegian scientists and administrators. The overall aim of the papers is to investigate the many ways scientists and scholars have combined apparently conflicting principles, when they made decisions, developed projects and did their research at the crossroads between state loyalty and internationalism. The session discusses the main differences between the aftermath of the World War I and the World War II in terms of how the scholars of the humanities and the natural scientists shared ideologies and practices? Individual papers Internationalist nationalism: How Scandinavian humanities scholars responded to the breakdown of academic internationalism after World War I. Jon Kyllingstad, Norwegian Museum of Technology, Science and Medicine. This paper studies how Scandinavian humanities scholars, in particular the historians, responded to the breakdown of academic internationalism after World War I. After the war, the victorious nations tried to isolate the German-speaking scholarly community. This posed a challenge for the academics in the neutral states, threatening to destroy their multilateral international networks, but it also opened up a window of opportunities. By turning themselves into havens of international scientific cooperation, neutral nations could counteracting the boycott of Germany and enhance international understanding, and at the same time strengthen their own position in the international scholarly world, and help branding the Scandinavian nations as peace-loving, morally and culturally superior and scientifically advanced nations. Academic internationalism was fuelled both by national interests and international idealism, and the Scandinavian actors did not necessarily see any contradiction between these motifs. By comparing Denmark, Sweden and Norway, the paper explores how geopolitical situations and foreign policy, national identities and national historiographic traditions, and varying relations between political and academic elites influenced on the how humanities scholars in the three nations navigated in the treacherous waters of international academic cooperation in the early interwar years, and how they combined national and internationalist ideals and interests. ICES: the fishing resources and the strength of internationalism Vera Schwach, NIFU, Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education Interrelations between explicit national interests and nationalism on one hand, and a scientific and political motivated internationalism in marine science on the other hand, is the focal point of this paper. The case is the Norwegian marine scientist’s involvement in The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), in the aftermath of World War I and after World War II. ICES was established in 1902 as a governmental, regional body aimed at the management and applied scientific investigation of the fishing and marine mammal resources and the natural conditions of the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Its starting point was shared concerns in European countries on the state of the fishing resources, and the obvious fact that the sea and the fishes know no national boundaries. The establishing was also influenced by the turn-of-the-twentieth-century political internationalism, a broad movement aimed at erasing national barriers in order to promote wealth, civilization, knowledge and peace. The paper reviews how Norwegian scientists involved in ICES, with Johan Hjort (1869–1948) as a prominent example, negotiated between nationalism and internationalism in a field where important and mixed economic, political and scientific interests were at stake. It also examines how and why the First World War confirmed and strengthened the internationalism of Hjort and his colleagues, an approach reinforced with the Second World War. The paper contributes first to knowledge about nationalism and internationalism in an applied scientific context, and second to nuance the insight in scientific and political crossing points in the midwar years. Airy dreams or scientific mega-project? Fridtjof Nansen and the Aeroarctic Society 1924-1930 Kari Aga Myklebost, Senior Research Fellow, Department of History and Religious Studies, University of Tromsø, [email protected] In 1924, Fridtjof Nansen was appointed president of the newly established Aeroarctic society (The International Society for the Study of the Arctic by Means of Airship, Internationale studiengesellschaft zur erforschung der Arktis mit dem luftschiff), founded on the initiative of German engineers and natural scientists. Aeroarctic’s primary objective was to conduct a transpolar zeppelin flight from Europe to America, and to conduct a broad geophysical research program during the expedition. There were also detailed plans to establish a circumpolar network of meteorological stations which could serve as platform for increased international cooperation in geophysical research in the Arctic. In Nansen’s biography, the 1920s have been described as a decade when he let go of his scientific ambitions and concentrated on political and humanitarian issues. Nansen’s own Aeroarctic archive gives us a quite different story: During the last six years of his life, Nansen laid down a considerable amount of work in both the logistical and the scientific plans of the Aeroarctic society. Nansen used his international reputation to draw leading natural scientists from the Fenno- Scandinavian countries, the Soviet Union and the USA into the project, and in the late 1920s the society had members in 21 countries. Aeroarctic organized congresses and published the journal Arktis , and as the organization grew a number of scientific sub-commissions were established. The paper discusses Nansen’s scientific and political ambitions and motivations