Abstract
The complex landscape of the scientific institutions operating at the international level in the post-World War II period is outlined here. Around the mid-1950s, when the community-building activities connected to general relativity first began, a reconfiguration of these institutions for the promotion and organization of international cooperation in science was under way. The motivations for, and constraints of, this transformation were defined by the world order that was being constructed after the end of World War II and by the evolution of the Cold War. For those willing to create a new structure for promoting general relativity in the international arena, these existing institutions provided both a model to follow and a larger established structure with which to interact. It is argued that one of the major structural changes in institutions such as the International Unions was that they began promoting specific areas of research at this point, while before World War II their role was limited to define international standards. Besides these structural changes in scientific institutions, the second major element was the changing political context related to the post-Stalinist reforms in the Soviet Union and the related détente in international relations that led to an increasing participation of Soviet scientists in international scientific institutions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
When IMU was re-established in 1952, for example, the matter was discussed and it was decided that membership was to be limited to countries (Lehto 1998, p. 98).
- 2.
The major exception to this unwritten rule was in biology, when new unions in specialized fields of biology were founded and admitted: the International Union of Immunological Societies in 1976 and the International Union of Microbiological Societies in 1982 (see Greenaway 1996, pp. 128-131).
- 3.
The six research sub-fields were: macromolecules, radioactivity, electrochemistry, chemical thermodynamics, molecular spectroscopy, and kinetics of chemical reactions (Fennell 1994, p. 119).
- 4.
- 5.
According to Russian historian of science Konstantin Ivanov, in the post-World War II period the USSR was a member of only two international scientific institutions before 1953 (Ivanov 2002, p. 321), one of which was certainly the IAU, of which it had been a member since 1935 (Hollings 2016, p. 31).
- 6.
One way to look at this agglomeration of scientific, personal, and political reasons, at least in the adopted rhetoric, is Aant Elzinga’s distinction between “autoletic scientific nationalism” and “heteroletic scientific nationalism” (Elzinga 1996, p. 38).
- 7.
On the notion of state-sponsored internationalism, see Wang (1999).
References
Anon. 1992. UIPPA-IUPAP 1922–1992. Album souvenir realized in Quebec by the Secretariat of IUPAP. http://iupap.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/history.pdf. Accessed 7 Mar 2016.
Armstrong, John A. 1954. The Soviet attitude toward UNESCO. International Organization 8: 217–233.
Crawford, Elisabeth. 1990. The universe of international science, 1880–1939. In Solomon’s house revisited: The organization and institutionalization of science, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, 251–269. Canton, MA: Science History Publications.
Crawford, Elisabeth, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin. 1993. The nationalization and denationalization of the sciences: An introductory essay. In Denationalizing Science, ed. Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin, 1–42. Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-1221-7_1.
Elzinga, Aant. 1996. Modes of internationalism. In Internationalism and science, ed. Aant Elzinga, and Catharina Landstrom, 3–20. London: Taylor Graham.
Fennell, Roger. 1994. History of IUPAC, 1919–1987. Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd.
Forman, Paul. 1973. Scientific internationalism and the Weimar physicists: The ideology and its manipulation in Germany after World War I. Isis 64: 151–180.
Fox, Robert. 2016. Science without frontiers: Cosmopolitanism and national interests in the world of learning, 1870–1940. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press.
Gerovitch, Slava. 2002. From Newspeak to cyberspeak: A history of soviet cybernetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Graham, Loren R. 1972. Science and philosophy in the Soviet Union. New York: Knopf.
Graham, Loren R. 1993. Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A short history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenaway, Frank. 1996. Science international: A history of the International Council of Scientific Unions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, Karl. 2003. Europe and Russia. In The Oxford companion to the history of modern science, ed. John Heilbron, 279–282. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hollings, Christopher D. 2016. Scientific communication across the Iron Curtain. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-25346-6.
Holloway, David. 1994. Stalin and the bomb: The Soviet Union and atomic energy, 1939–1956. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Howard, John N. 2203. The early meeting of the International Commission of Optics. Optics and Photonics news. June 2003: 16–17.
Ivanov, Konstantin. 2002. Science after Stalin: Forging a new image of Soviet science. Science in Context 15: 317–338.
Josephson, Paul R. 1991. Physics and politics in revolutionary Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kaiser, David. 2002. Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists after World War II. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33: 131–159. doi:10.1525/hsps.2002.33.1.131.
Kojevnikov, Aleksei B. 2004. Stalin’s great science: The times and adventures of Soviet physicists. London: Imperial College Press.
Lehto, Olli. 1998. Mathematics without borders: A history of the International Mathematical Union. New York: Springer.
Mastny, Vojtech. 2010. Soviet foreign policy, 1953–1962. In The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 1, Origins, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler, and Odd A. Westad, 312–333. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pollock, Ethan. 2006. Stalin and the Soviet science wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rabkin, Yakov M. 1988. Science between the superpowers. New York: Priority Press.
Schroeder-Gudehus, Brigitte. 1978. Les scientifiques et la paix: La communauté scientifique internationale au cours des années 20. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal.
Schroeder-Gudehus, Brigitte. 1990. Nationalism and internationalism. In Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge, 909–19. Routledge.
Sewell, James Patrick. 1975. UNESCO and world politics: Engaging in international relations. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Vizgin, V.P., and G.E. Gorelik. 1987. The reception of the theory of relativity in Russia and the USSR. In The comparative reception of relativity, ed. Thomas F. Glick, 354–363. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Wang, Zuoyue. 1999. U.S.-China scientific exchange: A case study of state-sponsored scientific internationalism during the Cold War and beyond. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30: 249–277. doi:10.2307/27757826.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lalli, R. (2017). (Re-)Establishing International Cooperation After World War II. In: Building the General Relativity and Gravitation Community During the Cold War . SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54654-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54654-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54653-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54654-4
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)