ABSTRACT
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization represents both the hopes and the limits of human endeavors at creating norms for a peaceful world. At its best, UNESCO is the heroic intellectual and moral force of the idealism encapsulated in its Preamble. This idealism seeks to educate humanity to overcome its worst self through cultural dialogues, scientific collaborations, literacy, and communication. At its worst, UNESCO, like many other UN agencies, is a functional tragedy of our own making, suffering from power politics, lack of resources, ineffectiveness, and managerial ineptitude. UNESCO came into being after a conference of delegates from 37
countries met on 1-16 November 1945, in London, and 20 signed on to the constitution. This conference framed a charter reflecting three years of diplomacy, begun among the Allied Powers, to institute a post-war organization that would reflect enlightenment values in seeking to end human violence through education. As the negotiations proceeded beyond 1942, the emphasis on education was expanded to include science and culture as central tenets of the emerging institution. Speaking to the London Conference, the British PrimeMinister Clement Attlee, asked the important question, “Do not all wars begin in the minds of men?” The US delegate to the conference Archibald Macleish, Librarian of Congress, adapted these words for the Preamble of the UNESCO Constitution (see the Appendix for UNESCO Preamble and Constitution). UNESCO continues to embody a humanism borne of the Enlight-
enment in a twenty-first century intellectual milieu uneasy with grand
narratives, especially when they arise from the minds of the privileged and the few. At its core, UNESCO reflects a scientific humanism “in the sense that the application of science provides most of the material basis for human culture, and also that the practice and the understanding of science needs to be integrated with that of other human activities,” to quote Julian Huxley, its first director-general.1 To its credit, UNESCO has dodged the controversies about its master narratives through its convening power of bringing together the world’s intellectuals of all ideological hues, even if at times one particular ideology may be dominant in its ranks. From Albert Einstein to Wole Soyinka, intellectual luminaries have lent their weight to an organization with an encompassing agenda but a limited mandate in terms of its resources. This chapter describes three central tensions underlying UNESCO’s norm-making capacity. These tensions also inform the main argument of the book, which balances UNESCO’s high philosophy with its more mundane functional aspects through its history.
