The general terms nationalism and internationalism carry so many meanings that it is necessary to try to specify these before applying the terms to the sciences. Of the two, the terminology surrounding nationalism is the more perplexing; in the words of one author, it is ”a phenomenon so Protean in its manifestations as to defy precise definition.“ In common language, the term is most often taken to mean the waving of flags to solidify sentiments of national allegiance and to mobilize against foreigners. This form of nationalism is most closely associated with the period 1880 to 1914, not only because it was then that many nationalist movements came into being and spread throughout Europe, but also because this was the great time of nationalist doctrine. As both the movement and the doctrine gained currency, they bred the more virulent form of nationalism that came to be known as chauvinism. It is in this flag-waving, rabble-rousing sense that nationalism in the sciences has most often been described - and decried. The term can be given another sense, though, one that does not refer to doctrine or movement, but to nationalism as a phenomenon inherent in certain sociopolitical conditions. As defined by Ernest Gellner, who has propounded this alternative view: “Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” This definition seems to fit best the development of national science enterprises in the late nineteenth century and the types of nationalism among scientists that accompanied them. It will receive more attention presently.

The limited attention given nationalism and internationalism in the history of science makes them the poor relatives of this discipline. The relative neglect of two phenomena that were coincidental with the creation of modern science organization, and also shaped it in so many ways, is not easy to explain. The presupposition that science is and has always been universal – an assumption that will be examined presently - has made inquiries into the influence of nationalism seem irrelevant, even inappropriate. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the most common form of inquiry into the modern science organization that emerged in the late nineteenth century is the national disciplinary history. Also, that despite the universalist ethic with which George Sarton imbued the discipline of history of science, when it was founded early in this century, its practitioners are still billed as historians of French, German, American, or Scandinavian science. However rich in description and detail, their national disciplinary histories are bound to time and place; they are very rarely comparative. On the whole, national science or nationalism in science – and I will show later how the two are related – as an overreaching concept has hardly begun to be explored.

The inquiry into internationalism in science, too, has suffered from the universalist presupposition. The focal point here has been not so much how universalist ideals in science found practical expression in international scientific activities during the latter part of the nineteenth century but the damage done to those ideals during and after World War I.

It is tempting to view scientific development in terms of the inherent elitism of the enterprise, and, as we have seen in Chapter I, studies of scientific elites have constituted a nonnegligible strand of work in the social history of science. This for several reasons: First of all, the idea that scientists constitute a chosen few, who by virtue of superior ability and dedication to the task stand high in society, agrees more or less with the facts. Before World War II, there were indeed few practitioners of science and they were generally accorded high social status, although not always as high as at present. Second, scientists themselves believe that a certain amount of inegalitarianism is necessary to advance the enterprise, and some have not hesitated to express this. “There is no democracy in physics” is the oft-quoted statement of Luis Alvarez, Nobel laureate (Ph 1968). “We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to an opinion as Fermi.” Einstein elevated this communion of superior minds into a principle of universalism in science. “The supranational character of scientific concepts and language,” he wrote, “is due to the fact that they were formed by the greatest brains of all countries and all times.” Third, elitism has been rendered visible, and perpetuated, through the elaborate system honoring scientific achievement that has evolved over time.

In the early 1830s, Alphonse de Candolle, a Geneva naturalist, eager to discover the contribution of different nations to the development of the sciences, invented a new method in the history of science. To gauge the standing of each national scientific group, he counted the foreigners elected to membership in the three major scientific societies - the Paris Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, and the Berlin Academy of Sciences - and calculated the share of the total membership held by each national group. Dividing this share by the size of the country, counted in million inhabitants, gave him a statistical measure of the “scientific value,” as he called it, of one million inhabitants in a given country. Although Candolle's measure was necessarily crude and approximate, it was a methodological innovation and a precursor to present-day scientometrics. The four studies of the Nobel population presented in Part II follow a line of inquiry that goes back to Candolle's comparative method and the concepts on which it was based. Broadly speaking, they relate to the social history of science, a field that until recently was not of major interest to historians of science, who were more concerned with ideas and discourse or the “great men” of science.

Not just with respect to methodology, but conceptually as well, Candolle's Histoire des sciences… was a precursor in the social history of science when it was finally published in 1873 - for three reasons at least.

The Kaiser-Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (known as KWG, which in German stands for Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Wissenschaften) and the Nobel institution had in common the goal of promoting elite science. To accomplish this purpose each had, a few years after its establishment, about the same income and capital including buildings. That what each bought with these monies was altogether dissimilar was a consequence of the very different purposes of the two institutions. For this reason, their interactions, which concerned important aspects of the workings of both, are particularly instructive.

The purpose of the KWG, founded in 1911, was first and foremost to tap private money by recruiting paying members and other donors to the society and only secondarily to use government assistance to build, equip, and operate independent research institutes in different branches of science. These were the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWIs). It was a national purpose in that the stated rationale for the enterprise was that the productivity of professors (the main research force in Germany) had been curtailed by their obligation to teach an ever-growing number of students, who, to make matters worse, made important demands on equipment and assistants. It is not the purpose here to determine how well these claims fit the facts.

The focus here is on Joseph Ben-David's attempt to use the centerperiphery dichotomy to explain the dynamics of scientific development. As we have seen in Chapter I, according to Ben-David's model, the countries that became scientific centers in modern times were those where the organizational structure for research was built on competition. This produced the innovations that raised the level of scientific activity not just in the country that had taken the lead but generally. Smaller countries constituted the periphery because for various reasons, mainly linguistic ones, they could not compete internationally with the organizational units at the center. All they could hope to do would be to copy the organization of scientific work at the center and thereby adopt its work orientations. In both these respects, however, the center would always retain a monopolistic position.

During the first third of the twentieth century, east-central Europe (defined here as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor, the nation-states of Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) was made up of the small and, in the case of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, linguistically marginal, scientific communities that would make the region peripheral according to Ben-David's use of the term. But these countries were also part of Central Europe, which put them in close proximity both geographically and linguistically to Germany, at the time the scientific center of the world. East-central Europe possessed a well-developed, timehonored system of higher education, which in many respects was modeled on that of Germany.

In the history of international science, World War I has been regarded as the ultimate test of universalism, a test that in the opinion of most observers the scientists of the belligerent nations failed. That the war should have brought international scientific activities, including the award of the Nobel prizes, to an almost complete halt is not considered surprising, nor is it surprising that scientists served in the armed forces either in research and development or by fighting and dying in the trenches. What is at issue is the way many prominent scientists, particularly in Germany, sought and found their field of action in propaganda warfare, exhibiting the virulent form of nationalism known as chauvinism.

Acting together with scholars in the humanities and with writers and artists, they signed manifestoes, such as the Appeal of the Ninety-three Intellectuals issued in 1914, setting forth German war aims or repudiating Allied charges of German war crimes. Acting alone, they, as well as their Allied counterparts, wrote articles and pamphlets denigrating the claims of superior scientific achievement made by the other side. Many tried to persuade their correspondents, particularly when these were scientists in neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, that any or all of such actions were justified.

These activities prepared the ground for the postwar politics of international science, which became dominated by the Allied-sponsored International Research Council (IRC) set up in 1919. The policies of ostracism advocated by the IRC reflected a widespread opinion that Germany should be chastized.