ABSTRACT
In July 1925, the General Assembly of the International Research Council (IRC) had to vote on a motion to end Germany’s exclusion from its membership. The movers’ credentials and the authority of their argument seemed unassailable: the representatives of the Dutch, Swedish, and Danish Academies of Sciences were confident, indeed, that their countries’ wartime neutrality and well-established hospitality to international undertakings would dissipate doubts about their impartiality, and Dutch physicist H.A. Lorentz, their spokesman, did not fail to invoke the universality of science in forcefully urging the need to repeal, six years after the end of hostilities, all restrictions to international cooperation. 1
