The Culture of International Society: How Europe’s Cultural Treaties Forged a Global Concept of Culture, 1919-1968
This project will examine the historical emergence of a global concept of culture in the twentieth century by analyzing a rich and largely untapped source: cultural treaties between states. That culture can be used to legitimate power is well established. This is also the case in international relations, where contrasting ideas about "culture"--cosmopolitan versus nationalist visions, for example--have been used to justify systems of domination over states and peoples. An anti-racist consensus on the equal value of the world's cultures is a premise of today's post-colonial world order. But where did that concept of culture come from and how did it win out over rival visions, above all the notion of "Civilization" associated with European imperialism? How are such global concepts formed and disseminated? Cultural treaties--legally binding agreements on what forms of culture shall be exchanged between two or more nation-states--offer a good source for a historical investigation of these questions. They illustrate how states agree on what culture is, what culture can and should do, and to what degree states should promote or regulate it. Through a comparative, multi-method study of the cultural treaties of several Western European states from 1919 to 1968, my project explores the emergence of a global concept of culture, based on the hypothesis that this concept, in contrast to earlier ideas of civilization, played a key role in the consolidation of the modern international order.
Final report
PROJECT PURPOSE
The overall purpose of this project was to use cultural treaties – bilateral agreements among states that promote and regulate cooperation and exchange in the fields of life we call cultural or intellectual – as a historical source with which to explore the international history of the culture concept in the twentieth century. Working in collaboration with systems developers at Umeå University’s digital humanities laboratory Humlab, the project’s multimethod approach made use of methods associated with the digital humanities, as well as transnational archival research, to examine bilateral cultural agreements from 1919 to 1980. The project’s central questions can be divided into two groups. First, what is the story of the cultural treaty, as a specific tool of international relations, in the twentieth century? For example, in which political or ideological constellations do we find (the most) use of cultural agreements? Second, what is the “culture” addressed in these treaties? That is, what do the signatories seem to mean by “culture” in these documents, and what can that tell us about the changing roles that concept played in the twentieth-century international system?
The project sought to answer these questions through two approaches. First, I used transnational historical research, rooted in traditional methods of humanistic scholarship, to trace the origins of this new kind of diplomatic agreement, and to explore the process by which a certain class of treaties came to be classified as “cultural.” This research involved the collection and analysis of archival materials in Paris and Rome, as well as extensive use of the documentation of international organizations like the League of Nations’ Institute for International Intellectual Cooperation and UNESCO.
Second, the project deployed methods associated with the digital humanities, including descriptive statistical analysis of patterns of cultural treaty-making as well as digital text analysis of treaty texts. For this work, I approached these treaties through two data sets. Basic information, or “metadata” (countries, date, topic, etc.) for cultural agreements were available through the electronic World Treaty Index, portions of which my colleagues at Humlab and I refined, edited and published in this improved form. To access the content of these agreements we assembled a large sample of treaty texts from countries across the world, which we curated into two fully machine-readable corpora. Using digital tools created for this project by systems developers at Humlab, I applied various forms of quantitative analysis to analyze, visualize, and explore these datasets.
THE PROJECT’S MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS
1. Treaties are an age-old tool of diplomacy, so it seems unsurprising that cultural diplomacy should involve cultural treaties. Yet, through my empirical research, I discovered that the modern bilateral cultural treaty was a diplomatic innovation of the 1930s. This finding helps to correct the anachronistic way the category of “cultural agreements” has been applied, including by international bodies like UNESCO. I found, moreover, that the modern bilateral cultural treaty was pioneered in particular by fascist Italy, through agreements Mussolini signed with Austria and Hungary in 1935. Bilateral cultural diplomacy is associated with the promotion of peace and international understanding, so it is a striking finding to discover that Italy’s fascist dictatorship played a leading role in the development of this new cultural diplomatic instrument. It is similarly noteworthy that cultural treaties very similar to the kind developed by Mussolini’s regime were used by countries around the world beginning in the 1950s.
2. Through quantitative work with the metadata on all cultural treaties available in the electronic World Treaty Index (eWTI), I identified global patterns of usage of bilateral cultural agreements—patterns that shed light on the international history of the relationship between the state and culture in the twentieth century. I found, for example, that there was a major increase in the use of cultural treaties, in absolute and relative terms, beginning in the mid-1950s; that this was a global event, in that states on all six continents contributed to the spread of the practice; but also that a relatively small number of countries accounted for a notable proportion of all cultural treaty-making: the bilateral general cultural agreements signed by ten states (France, USSR, East Germany, Poland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Brazil) represent some fifty-four percent of the total number signed between 1935 and 1980. I found, finally, that the United States and Great Britain, although they were the world’s most active treaty-makers, signed very few cultural agreements. One important implication of these findings was that the strongest predictor of whether or not a state would sign many bilateral cultural agreements was the degree to which elites in that country considered culture to be an appropriate realm for state intervention. This—the attitude toward the role of the state in cultural life—was the main factor that linked the quite diverse group of states that signed the most cultural agreements, a group that included fascist Italy but also the Soviet Union, France, and Brazil.
3. Methodologically, this project demonstrated the value of digital approaches for diplomatic-intellectual history, at the same time that it highlighted the challenges and limits of these approaches. One exciting development was that our quantitative, computer-assisted research on the eWTI led me to an important departure from my original plan. The initial project design envisioned a set of case studies, focusing on cultural agreements signed by a handful of European states. But, inspired by digital humanists’ scepticism about the reliance on case studies in humanistic research, we decided to use the eWTI to identify and analyse all relevant agreements signed by any country during the period in question. This approach allowed me to pose open-ended questions about trends in treaty-making from a global perspective, using quantitative methods to determine which countries (European or not) stand out as having played a particularly significant role in the use of cultural treaties.
Our work with the treaty texts was likewise broadened by the possibilities offered by digital methods. Rather than studying a small set of documents, we assembled two sets of treaty texts from around the world: one composed of cultural agreements from any country (1935-1972) in English translation, and a second set composed of France’s cultural agreements with all countries in French (1919-1972). We curated these into “corpora” that are fully machine readable, so as to facilitate digital text analysis. These corpora offer an exciting point of access for our research, as well as for others, and constitute one of the project’s major contributions. At the same time, this approach revealed disadvantages as well. Preparing the corpora was highly time consuming, and the corpora turned out to be relatively small, which meant that some common tools of digital text analysis were not appropriate.
NEW RESEARCH ISSUES
The project gave rise to numerous new empirical and methodological research questions. To begin with, our empirical findings, documenting which states signed bilateral cultural agreements most frequently, raise historical questions about why these states acted as they did. What was it, for example, that led both France and the Soviet Union to invest so heavily into this diplomatic practice? What conclusions can we draw from the similarities between those states’ cultural agreements and those forged by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany? How did states of the “third world” use cultural agreements with the “first” and “second” worlds to advance their international agenda in the 1960s and 70s, and what accounts for the fact that relatively few agreements were signed among states in the global south? Finally, the use of cultural treaties seems to have declined sharply in the 1990s: what accounts for this decline? The project also raises several theoretical and methodological questions. What are the best ways to do digital text analysis on small, specific corpora like the ones we assembled? That all these countries called the same set of phenomena “cultural” (in English translation) does not of course mean that they all understood the culture concept in the same way. What methods allow us to address the issue of the cultural and political significance of conceptual translation in the field of international relations?
RESEARCH COMMUNICATION
Project research was presented at several Swedish and international conferences, including in Helsinki, Berlin, and New York. I organized two international workshops, one related to theoretical and methodological issues (“Intellectual History and the Digital Humanities,” co-organized with the Canadian historian Mark J. Hill in 2020) and another on the project’s historical focus (“Cultures of Twentieth-Century Cultural Diplomacy” in 2022). Project publications included articles in leading international journals, as well as a special issue of the journal Contemporary European History, co-edited with the German historian Elisabeth Piller, devoted to one of the project’s central topics. My collaborations with Hill and Piller were among several international connections activated by this project, including also a research stay in Paris in cooperation with the CNRS Centre Alexandre Koyré. The project’s scholarly articles are freely available on the internet as open access publications. Public outreach took the form of blog articles and a project webpage with links to our publications and datasets, as well as a project page on the programming platform GitHub.
The overall purpose of this project was to use cultural treaties – bilateral agreements among states that promote and regulate cooperation and exchange in the fields of life we call cultural or intellectual – as a historical source with which to explore the international history of the culture concept in the twentieth century. Working in collaboration with systems developers at Umeå University’s digital humanities laboratory Humlab, the project’s multimethod approach made use of methods associated with the digital humanities, as well as transnational archival research, to examine bilateral cultural agreements from 1919 to 1980. The project’s central questions can be divided into two groups. First, what is the story of the cultural treaty, as a specific tool of international relations, in the twentieth century? For example, in which political or ideological constellations do we find (the most) use of cultural agreements? Second, what is the “culture” addressed in these treaties? That is, what do the signatories seem to mean by “culture” in these documents, and what can that tell us about the changing roles that concept played in the twentieth-century international system?
The project sought to answer these questions through two approaches. First, I used transnational historical research, rooted in traditional methods of humanistic scholarship, to trace the origins of this new kind of diplomatic agreement, and to explore the process by which a certain class of treaties came to be classified as “cultural.” This research involved the collection and analysis of archival materials in Paris and Rome, as well as extensive use of the documentation of international organizations like the League of Nations’ Institute for International Intellectual Cooperation and UNESCO.
Second, the project deployed methods associated with the digital humanities, including descriptive statistical analysis of patterns of cultural treaty-making as well as digital text analysis of treaty texts. For this work, I approached these treaties through two data sets. Basic information, or “metadata” (countries, date, topic, etc.) for cultural agreements were available through the electronic World Treaty Index, portions of which my colleagues at Humlab and I refined, edited and published in this improved form. To access the content of these agreements we assembled a large sample of treaty texts from countries across the world, which we curated into two fully machine-readable corpora. Using digital tools created for this project by systems developers at Humlab, I applied various forms of quantitative analysis to analyze, visualize, and explore these datasets.
THE PROJECT’S MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS
1. Treaties are an age-old tool of diplomacy, so it seems unsurprising that cultural diplomacy should involve cultural treaties. Yet, through my empirical research, I discovered that the modern bilateral cultural treaty was a diplomatic innovation of the 1930s. This finding helps to correct the anachronistic way the category of “cultural agreements” has been applied, including by international bodies like UNESCO. I found, moreover, that the modern bilateral cultural treaty was pioneered in particular by fascist Italy, through agreements Mussolini signed with Austria and Hungary in 1935. Bilateral cultural diplomacy is associated with the promotion of peace and international understanding, so it is a striking finding to discover that Italy’s fascist dictatorship played a leading role in the development of this new cultural diplomatic instrument. It is similarly noteworthy that cultural treaties very similar to the kind developed by Mussolini’s regime were used by countries around the world beginning in the 1950s.
2. Through quantitative work with the metadata on all cultural treaties available in the electronic World Treaty Index (eWTI), I identified global patterns of usage of bilateral cultural agreements—patterns that shed light on the international history of the relationship between the state and culture in the twentieth century. I found, for example, that there was a major increase in the use of cultural treaties, in absolute and relative terms, beginning in the mid-1950s; that this was a global event, in that states on all six continents contributed to the spread of the practice; but also that a relatively small number of countries accounted for a notable proportion of all cultural treaty-making: the bilateral general cultural agreements signed by ten states (France, USSR, East Germany, Poland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Brazil) represent some fifty-four percent of the total number signed between 1935 and 1980. I found, finally, that the United States and Great Britain, although they were the world’s most active treaty-makers, signed very few cultural agreements. One important implication of these findings was that the strongest predictor of whether or not a state would sign many bilateral cultural agreements was the degree to which elites in that country considered culture to be an appropriate realm for state intervention. This—the attitude toward the role of the state in cultural life—was the main factor that linked the quite diverse group of states that signed the most cultural agreements, a group that included fascist Italy but also the Soviet Union, France, and Brazil.
3. Methodologically, this project demonstrated the value of digital approaches for diplomatic-intellectual history, at the same time that it highlighted the challenges and limits of these approaches. One exciting development was that our quantitative, computer-assisted research on the eWTI led me to an important departure from my original plan. The initial project design envisioned a set of case studies, focusing on cultural agreements signed by a handful of European states. But, inspired by digital humanists’ scepticism about the reliance on case studies in humanistic research, we decided to use the eWTI to identify and analyse all relevant agreements signed by any country during the period in question. This approach allowed me to pose open-ended questions about trends in treaty-making from a global perspective, using quantitative methods to determine which countries (European or not) stand out as having played a particularly significant role in the use of cultural treaties.
Our work with the treaty texts was likewise broadened by the possibilities offered by digital methods. Rather than studying a small set of documents, we assembled two sets of treaty texts from around the world: one composed of cultural agreements from any country (1935-1972) in English translation, and a second set composed of France’s cultural agreements with all countries in French (1919-1972). We curated these into “corpora” that are fully machine readable, so as to facilitate digital text analysis. These corpora offer an exciting point of access for our research, as well as for others, and constitute one of the project’s major contributions. At the same time, this approach revealed disadvantages as well. Preparing the corpora was highly time consuming, and the corpora turned out to be relatively small, which meant that some common tools of digital text analysis were not appropriate.
NEW RESEARCH ISSUES
The project gave rise to numerous new empirical and methodological research questions. To begin with, our empirical findings, documenting which states signed bilateral cultural agreements most frequently, raise historical questions about why these states acted as they did. What was it, for example, that led both France and the Soviet Union to invest so heavily into this diplomatic practice? What conclusions can we draw from the similarities between those states’ cultural agreements and those forged by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany? How did states of the “third world” use cultural agreements with the “first” and “second” worlds to advance their international agenda in the 1960s and 70s, and what accounts for the fact that relatively few agreements were signed among states in the global south? Finally, the use of cultural treaties seems to have declined sharply in the 1990s: what accounts for this decline? The project also raises several theoretical and methodological questions. What are the best ways to do digital text analysis on small, specific corpora like the ones we assembled? That all these countries called the same set of phenomena “cultural” (in English translation) does not of course mean that they all understood the culture concept in the same way. What methods allow us to address the issue of the cultural and political significance of conceptual translation in the field of international relations?
RESEARCH COMMUNICATION
Project research was presented at several Swedish and international conferences, including in Helsinki, Berlin, and New York. I organized two international workshops, one related to theoretical and methodological issues (“Intellectual History and the Digital Humanities,” co-organized with the Canadian historian Mark J. Hill in 2020) and another on the project’s historical focus (“Cultures of Twentieth-Century Cultural Diplomacy” in 2022). Project publications included articles in leading international journals, as well as a special issue of the journal Contemporary European History, co-edited with the German historian Elisabeth Piller, devoted to one of the project’s central topics. My collaborations with Hill and Piller were among several international connections activated by this project, including also a research stay in Paris in cooperation with the CNRS Centre Alexandre Koyré. The project’s scholarly articles are freely available on the internet as open access publications. Public outreach took the form of blog articles and a project webpage with links to our publications and datasets, as well as a project page on the programming platform GitHub.