Reconciling Science and Foreign Relations in The Hague by Geert Somsen
F
rom 18 to 25 August, IUPAC will convene in The Hague. This is not the first time. One of the earliest IUPAC conferences, in 1928, also took place in the Dutch city. This was a truly historic meeting, because it was there that decisive steps were taken toward the reintegration of German, Austrian, and Hungarian chemists who had been banned from international science since the First World War, as has earlier been described by Jorrit Smit and Danielle Fauque in this magazine. An informal gathering the following year, in The Hague’s beach resort Scheveningen, finalized the process [1]. The rifts of war had been repaired; internationalism revived. Today The Hague and surroundings appear to be a natural place for such a reconciliatory project. As home to more than 200 international organizations, including world courts and war tribunals, The Hague likes to brand itself as “International city of peace and justice.” Indeed, in 1928, before their own reunion, the assembled chemists made sure to first visit the monumental Peace Palace as if to inaugurate their work of making amends [2]. They seemed to have come to the right place. Appearances, however, can deceive. When the IUPAC participants visited, so briefly after the wreckages of World War I, the Peace Palace looked rather like a monument to the failure of international mediation. It had not even come close to preventing the fighting, so gathering there may have bred cynicism as much as hope among the visitors. Besides, the Dutch may be proud of hosting international institutions
Peace Palace in The Hague early 1900s
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Chemistry International
July-September 2023
today, a century ago they were much more ambivalent. In fact, they had never even chosen this role—it had been forced upon them, strangely enough, by the Russian Czar, Nicolas II. It was he who had called for the first great Peace Congress in 1899 and who had picked the small capital (that was officially not even a capital) as a spot acceptable to the other great powers. But the young Dutch Queen Wilhelmina took Nicolas’ choice as an indication of the insignificance of her kingdom, and subsequently refused to open or even attend the meetings. When afterwards the American millionaire-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie offered to make the peace spot permanent by building it a Peace Palace, the Dutch government long tried to decline the offer. It preferred laying low in international affairs and to leave mediation to Switzerland or Belgium [3]. Still, by 1928 the Dutch had grown into the new role, and it certainly suited their IUPAC chairman, Utrechtbased physical chemist Ernst Cohen (a pupil of the first chemistry Nobel laureate, J.H. van ’t Hoff—see also Smit’s article on page 19). Cohen had a strong international orientation, spoke at least six languages, had worked in laboratories around the world, and kept a tight network of befriended chemists on both sides of the war—his own country having remained neutral. Dynamic and diplomatic, he tirelessly pushed for reunification. The same was true for Cohen’s right-hand man at the Congress (and in many other undertakings), his Utrecht colleague Hugo Kruyt. Kruyt led some of the meetings in The Hague, was elected IUPAC President a decade later, and ended up directing the International Council of Scientific Unions and UNESCO after the next world war. Both men strongly believed that science was by nature universal and should hence elevate scientists (and perhaps all people) above international conflict and strife [4]. For them, the sciences—as Gavin de Beer would later put it—were never at war [5]. While this attitude seems benign and idealistic, it is also somewhat problematic. Not only was there the uncomfortable fact that many chemists had actually helped to fight World War I, by developing poison gas and explosives. Cohen and Kruyt also had to accommodate remaining forms of scientific nationalism. In fact, it had been expressions of chauvinism, and especially defamations of enemy colleagues as unworthy scientists, that had created so much bad blood between the former warring chemists—more than their participating in weapons research. And hence Cohen and Kruyt’s task was chiefly to heal that pain and restore trust and wounded pride. For example, when French chemists were finally ready to sit down with their German colleagues again, the latter felt they were merely tolerated.