7 January 2025 —
Mankind is at a turning point in its history. The mass of data acquired is astounding. We need new instruments to simplify it, to condense it, or intelligence will never be able to overcome the difficulties imposed upon it or achieve the progress that it foresees and to which it aspires.
Paul Otlet, Treaties on Documentation, 1934.
2025 marks the centenary of the International Bureau of Education (IBE), created at the behest of the Rousseau Institute in 1925. As part of UNESCO, the IBE has a remarkably long-lasting history as an ambitious international institution. This history is entwined, of course, with the history of international organizations more broadly – as well as with the older, more specific quest for “international information”.
Throughout its 100-year history, the IBE has played a remarkably consistent role in the background of global education standard setting, monitoring, and reform. At the time of its inception, it was part of a wider interwar shift toward “internationalization that becomes conscious of itself”, as Rita Hofstetter and Bernard Schneuwly put it in their recent book on the IBE’s history. From the start, its main aims were to act as a hub for education governance and also to promote progressive goals, such as universal access to education.
First founded as a network of non-governmental associations, in 1929 the IBE acquired status as an intergovernmental organization and was eventually absorbed into the UN family as a UNESCO institute in 1969. Today, education governance stands out for its resilience. Turning to its past trajectories thus promises to generate important insights into possible future pathways of international cooperation.
Probing these pathways is our collective aim at the Oxford Martin Programme on Changing Global Orders, where I work as a postdoctoral research fellow. As a team of historians and international relations scholars, we study a range of different international institutions and their historical responses to turbulence. From economic crises to wars and famines, modern international organizations have been created and sometimes reinvented in response to systemic shocks.
In this context, my own research focuses on the role of expertise in the modern institutional architecture of international affairs. An important dimension of this is the creation, beginning roughly at the turn of the 20th century, of an international information infrastructure—the making of big data, as it were, as the raw material of international governance. Initiatives for intellectual cooperation at the League of Nations faced complex questions: How should information be produced, selected, stored, organized? Where should it be collected, and by whom? How should it be distributed and curated?
Conceived by two Belgian jurists, Paul Otlet (1868-1944), father of modern documentation and indexing techniques, and Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943), Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1910, the Mundaneum is considered as a precursor of network-based knowledge systems and of the Internet itself.
One answer to these questions, which shaped the IBE in its founding years, was an initiative by the Belgian bibliographer and pacifist campaigner Paul Otlet (1868–1944). Together with Henri La Fontaine – today remembered as a distinguished lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate –Otlet worked tirelessly on plans for a world center called the Mundaneum. The Mundaneum was supposed to become a world repository of all available knowledge. It would, Otlet hoped, be a chief means of overcoming ignorance. Ignorance was the cause of war, he thought—so the path to peace had to be paved with information.
Initially, the Mundaneum was housed at the Palais du Cinquantenaire, in Brussels, where Otlet with the help of dozens of bibliographers, mostly women, stored millions of index cards neatly filed and classified in rows upon rows of drawers. This Repertoire Bibliographique Universel, which is still on display at the Mundaneum museum in Mons, Belgium, was essentially an offline Internet of sorts. It was no coincidence that at first, the Mundaneum centered on this repertory: Otlet himself was a pioneer in the development of modern bibliography and documentation science. His Universal Decimal Classification is still in use across the world’s libraries.
Meanwhile, at a 1926 meeting in Geneva, the Swiss banker and political campaigner Guillaume Fatio proposed the establishment of a “permanent centre for international information” as a dedicated branch of the newly created IBE. By February 1927, the Association of the Interests of Geneva – a club of the city’s commercial and industrial elite, founded in 1885 by Gustave Ador, Thomas Cook, and Théodore Turrettini – had taken the lead in setting up and financing such a center. Seizing the opportunity, Otlet and La Fontaine urged the association to consider uniting the information center and Geneva’s fledgling international institutions under a single roof: the Mundaneum.
The association agreed that some form of coordination was indeed needed, noting in particular “the urgent necessity of coordinating” League information services, such as the Rockefeller Library or League of Nations Library. It disagreed that the Mundaneum would be the answer. Instead, by 1927, the Centre Permanent d’Informations Internationales had become an official entity, with a permanent address in Geneva, conceived as a central information hub for non-governmental international organizations. It aimed to monitor international activity and compile it in an annual report, The Annuaire International.
In correspondence with the IBE’s founders in 1928, Otlet repeated his suggestion to absorb the IBE’s information center in a central Mundaneum complex. His petition – which he had also sent to the League of Nations’ intellectual cooperation bodies, who were fellow predecessors of UNESCO – described the project as a “world scientific, documentary, and educational Centre in the service of the international Associations”.
A Geneva-based Mundaneum complex would house the offices of all member international associations: a world museum; a world library, including an international institute of bibliography, information, and documentation; a world university; a world institute for scientific research; and even institutes for nature, sports, and the arts.
Otlet saw this as a project of “incontestable utility” and thought that only the Mundaneum could answer the full range of infrastructural and informational needs of the League of Nations. Despite the IBE’s refusal, along with that of the League’s intellectual cooperation bodies, Otlet did not cease to petition to the League of Nations until well into the 1930s. His utopian plans were ultimately dismissed by the League of Nations, which had more modest ambitions for intellectual cooperation. The League bodies for intellectual cooperation, along with the IBE, set the scene for the creation of UNESCO after the Second World War.
Despite the failure of his grand project, Otlet did leave his mark on the UN’s information ecosystem as we know it today. The central emphasis he placed on systematic information storage, classification, and distribution remains a core part of UNESCO’s mission—even if the UN’s information system today is instead centered on its information centers, with regional offices across 63 countries. The latter are more closely related to the League’s Information Section. Still, both UNESCO and the IBE emerged from this wider interwar quest for international information.
Otlet’s spirit and that of his fellow bibliographers and campaigners generated momentum for the IBE and shaped the documentation center that today houses the IBE’s historical collections. The IBE Documentation Centre, which recently fully digitized its collections, is simultaneously an invaluable resource for any historian of the IBE and an expression of its founding convictions and ambitions: to create and systematize a repository of encyclopedic and documentary knowledge and information.
Otlet’s legacy is worth acknowledging, but so are the profound limitations of this legacy. Two main problems stand out. First, the link between ignorance and war that Otlet postulated led him to wildly overestimate the power of information – a view initially subverted by fascist and Nazi propaganda programs in the decade leading up to the Second World War. Second, Otlet’s proposal for an information infrastructure centered on and primarily curated in Europe and by Europeans corresponded to his own imperialist prejudice, shared by many of his fellow bibliographers and campaigners, for international cooperation.
At its 100th anniversary, then, this historical backdrop serves as a reminder of what roles education governance in a turbulent 21st century should and should not play. Today, the IBE embraces and supports regional and local knowledge production and knowledge ownership, geared toward UNESCO’s emphasis on equal and universal access to education everywhere.
