This dissertation traces the international, intellectual, and institutional history of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This organization became the intellectual branch of the United Nations and was able to mobilize intellectual resources from around the world. Historians, educators, economists, and communications theorists used the organization’s conferences, roundtables, and meetings to forge transnational networks. American and European statesmen exploited these networks to encourage postwar peace and promote their own visions of international society. Third World diplomats and intellectuals embraced the organization but campaigned against its Eurocentric priorities. They pushed it to focus on discrediting the set of ideas and assumptions that underpinned the imperial world order. American diplomats and intellectuals championed UNESCO’s anticolonial agenda for decades and assisted such global campaigns as the fight against illiteracy, the preservation of ancient monuments, and the transfer of communications technology. By the 1970s, however, intellectual disagreements about the international economic system sparked a war of ideas and instigated a diplomatic crisis that led to American withdrawal from the organization. The decline of European imperialism and the rise of the Third World led to decades of economic, diplomatic, and military tension. This dissertation concludes that this sea change in world history also led to profound confrontation in the international realm of information and ideas. UNESCO was not the only forum devoted to the international exchange of information and ideas. But its authority as the intellectual arm of the United Nations made it one of the major battlegrounds in the struggle to create a postcolonial world.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49046 |
| Date | 24 June 2024 |
| Creators | Olson, David |
| Contributors | Keylor, William R. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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