4.1 Introduction

The right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications was first included (inter alia) in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and later in Article 15(1)(b) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966. The Right to Science thus has a long history in the UN family and in UNESCO in particular. Beneath the ideas about the right to participate in science and to access the body of knowledge produced via science, stands the concept of science itself. The UNESCO General Conference at its thirty-ninth session in 2017, adopted the Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers (which replaced the 1974 Recommendation on the Status of Scientific Researchers) and in doing so it stated, among other things, that:

1. (1) the word “science” signifies the enterprise whereby humankind, acting individually or in small or large groups, makes an organized attempt, by means of the objective study of observed phenomena and its validation through sharing of findings and data and through peer review, to discover and master the chain of causalities, relations, or interactions; brings together in a coordinated form subsystems of knowledge by means of systematic reflection and conceptualization; and thereby furnishes itself with the opportunity of using, to its own advantage, understanding of the processes and phenomena occurring in nature and society;

2. (2) the term “the sciences” signifies a complex of knowledge, fact, and hypothesis, in which the theoretical element is capable of being validated in the short or long term, and to that extent includes the sciences concerned with social facts and phenomena.Footnote ¹

While these definitions may seem commonplace for many present-day readers, they are in fact the result of substantial debates and conceptual negotiations, which have been ongoing throughout the history of UNESCO. This chapter takes a closer look at what the concept of science meant in the early years and how it influenced the initiatives carried out by the Natural Science Section of UNESCO.

The S(cience) in UNESCO was added very late in the process of the organization’s founding. In the original plans for its creation, UNESCO was to be an organization for education and culture only. That it became UNESCO and not UNECO was due to several factors, but especially the persistent pressure exhorted by Joseph Needham (1900–1995), who was to become the first head of the Natural Science Sector in UNESCO, and the first Director-General Julian Huxley. Their visions of science strongly influenced the conceptualization and direction of science in UNESCO.Footnote ² On a structural level, another current undoubtedly played a crucial role in getting the “S” in UNESCO, and that was the unset of the Nuclear Age. If science still retained any enlightenment innocence in the eyes of the global public before the end of the second world war, it was hard pressed by the invention and use of the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The harnessing and destructive use of atomic energy left the broader public with an attitude characterized by both hope and fear.Footnote ³ These sentiments were well captured by the UK Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, at the Conference for the establishment of UNESCO in 1945, as she said:

As I will return to later, this conflicted public opinion towards science after 1945 was seen as a real and important problem by UNESCO’s science section in the early years. In what follows, I focus first on the conceptualization of science in the formative years from 1945–1965 in UNESCO. I trace the different ideas of science as they were articulated within UNESCO to illustrate what the organization itself understood by the concept of science and its relationship to concepts of modernity, progress, and development. This will shed light on the significant role that UNESCO was to continuously play in international science cooperation from that point on. Taking up the legacy from the League of Nations, UNESCO became, and remains, a central place for science and science policy discussions. An exploration of how views on science developed within UNESCO may therefore offer useful background to the historical routes that the development and establishment of the Right to Science took.

4.2 Histories of Science in UNESCO (Historiography)

Throughout the last three decades, the history of the way in which UNESCO conceptualized science has received much needed attention. This is not least due to the persistent and admirable work of Patrick Petijean. Today Petijean stands as one of the central figures within the historiography of UNESCO and science, and was one of the central editors behind the celebratory anthology Sixty Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005.Footnote ⁵ This anthology still stands as one of the central works on science in UNESCO. Bringing in both historians and former UNESCO science employees, the book gives a detailed and vivid account of the historical development of the science section in UNESCO. Despite its celebratory starting point, the anthology is not merely a narrative of triumph. It acknowledges the hardship, the failures, and the frustrations as well as the success and fruitful cooperations that were fostered within the UNESCO science section.

The historical role of UNESCO in international science cooperation has generally been highlighted, not least by Reference Elzinga and Petitjean (ed.)Elzinga (1996), Reference KrigeKrieger (2006) and to some extent Reference FinnemoreFinnemore (1993). While interpretations of the effect of the Cold War divide the historical accounts of UNESCO’s role in the realm of international science cooperation, there is a general consensus that the natural science section did do important work by bringing together and funding different international science communities. The disagreements occur along the more traditional lines of antagonism between the realist and idealist approaches to international politics and the role of international organizations within the Cold war setting.Footnote ⁶ Some argue that UNESCO and its science initiatives willingly or unwillingly became part of the “western” (that is, US-dictated) battle for the hearts and minds of people during the Cold War (Reference KrigeKrieger 2006). Others, like Finnemore, ascribe more autonomy and (moral) power to UNESCO (Reference FinnemoreFinnemore 1993), especially in relation to international norm setting and knowledge accumulation. Since this chapter deals with the conceptualization of science in UNESCO and less with the specific initiatives and their impact, I will not venture further into this discussion here.Footnote ⁷ The literature on UNESCO’s conception of science is rather limited. There seems to be a general agreement that it was strongly influenced, during the period covered here, by what Sluga describes as an “Enlightenment-coddled trust in the universal power of knowledge and education.”Footnote ⁸ And as Elzinga has argued, it functioned “within an overall framework of western bias.”Footnote ⁹ We may however come even closer to understanding the concept by looking more closely at actual usages of the concept within UNESCO.

4.3 Approach

My approach will be that of conceptual history which rests on several important assumptions that should be stated upfront. The first assumption is that our understanding of the present is created in the continual interactions between our past experiences and our expectations of the future. Furthermore, it assumes that this fundamental relationship between past, present, and future manifests itself in the concepts through which we try to make sense of our world. If we are correct in assuming this, then the conceptual architecture of our source material lends itself as prism, giving insight into pasts, presents, and futures past. In other words, the concepts are made up of spaces of experience and horizons of expectation.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, through the analysis of concepts we gain an understanding of how historical agents understood their past, what they found relevant in their present, and how they imagined their future. The concepts function as both indicators of past ideas and as factors affecting contemporary events, pointing towards a horizon of expectation.

In this study, the conceptualization of science has been tracked from 1945 to 1965 in documents produced by and around the Natural Science Section in UNESCO.Footnote ¹¹ In order to analyze and interpret the various concepts of science in these documents special attention has been paid to concurrent concepts and counter-concepts, which is to say concepts that, through their oppositional character, codefine the concept of science (such as the concepts of magic and religion). Through this conceptual mapping, the semantic field of the concept of science in UNESCO 1945–1965 emerges, which in a condensed and simplified form could be presented as in Figure 4.1 below:

Figure 4.1

Semantic field of the concept of science in UNESCO 1945–1965

This initial mapping of the semantic network of the concept of science in UNESCO forms a starting point for the following sections. These will elaborate on the different meanings attached to the concept and the ways in which it has shaped how science was understood within the organization, and how it has been communicated to the wider public through UNESCO’s Natural Science Section.

4.4 Science, Evolution, and World Unity

On the threshold of the nuclear age, public opinion towards science in general, and natural science in particular, was ambivalent. Fear of global destruction and hope of utopian futures were mingled together in unclear discourses of modernity and progress, in which science played a crucial but also ambiguous role. In the view of Julian Huxley (the first Director General of UNESCO) and Joseph Needham (the first head for the Natural Science Section) science, however, had a completely different status. For them, science was an ideologically neutral prerequisite of progress for the benefit of humankind.Footnote ¹² This was manifested not least in Huxley’s idea of “scientific humanism,” which was constituted around a notion of (the) biological, material, and psychological evolution of humankind, leading to world unity:

Huxley’s scientific humanism was in all relevant aspects a scientific evolutionism. As Elzinga has also noted, his conception of science and human evolution was ripe with ideas about progress and cultural stratification. UNESCO should seek to lift up the culturally “backward” countries and races, Huxley argued,Footnote ¹⁴ and this should be done not least through the distribution of science and education. He saw in science the promise for social development and progress of different nations, rather than the fear of the consequences of scientific developments in relation to wars and destruction. On this last subject Huxley was ad idem with Needham. From the onset in 1945, the science section of UNESCO had a strong focus on the distribution of scientific knowledge from the Western to the Third World countries.

The third-world focus in UNESCO’s science efforts in the post-war years was due in large part to the personal commitment of Needham. Needham had a background, like Huxley, in the UK-based “Social Relations of Science Movement” (SRSM). Needham opposed the scientific Eurocentrism that he saw in Western intellectual circles. His focus was on the distribution of advanced scientific knowledge and applied sciences to third world countries. This ambition manifested itself in the establishment of the Field Science Cooperation Offices in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These offices were to become important sites for later efforts to promote science policy implementation in the Third-World member states. Science was the key (along with basic, and particularly science-focused, education) to entering modernity and lifting the living standard of humankind. What was needed was the free flow of ideas (and intellectuals) on a global scale. Within this scientific ethos, the fear and reluctance among the broader public towards science could only be seen as irrational, if not childish. Pierre Auger, the next head of the Natural Science Section after Needham, put it starkly:

Belief in a scientific evolutionism was thus very strong and the ideas of an inevitable (scientific) process seem central to the understanding of science within UNESCO in the early years.

However, both Needham’s idea of a grand international science cooperation and Huxley’s vision of UNESCO as Mannheim’s “free floating intellectuals” were eventually stifled by the onset of the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁶ As the Cold War accelerated, a tight web of secrecy was spun around so-called “sensitive information,” especially the nuclear programs, and the desire for an international “free flow of ideas” was partly subdued under the weight of national security interests. However, these factors – important as they were – did not stop ambitions to organize international science cooperation and to support scientific communities through such international cooperation. That said, the tense political situation may have still influenced how science was conceptualized and communicated by UNESCO. This could be seen in their efforts to highlight the “neutral,” objective nature of science, which was particularly emphasized through a specific way of understanding the scientific method. This brings us to the second theme in the semantic field of the conceptualization of science in UNESCO, that of scientific method and objectivity.

4.5 “One Cannot Trifle with Nature”: Science and Objectivity – Method and Worldview

Objectivity and science emerge as co-occurring concepts in this period, to the extent that we may be allowed to conclude that they were in fact seen as largely defining each other. Comtean positivism was still untouched by deconstruction, social constructivism, or linguistic turns, and objective truth was therefore also a relatively unproblematic and potent idea.Footnote ¹⁷ In the preamble to UNESCO’s constitution, the member states thus verified that:

In their conceptual architecture, tight lines linking the concepts of objectivity, science, and method were drawn. The scientific method was seen as the foundation of objective knowledge and as the driving force in the progress experienced by modern society and in the peace and solidarity of humankind. As in Auguste Comte’s understanding of proper science, the core of the scientific method had the experimental method as its ideal. Science, one of the UNESCO representatives stated: “requires verification by experiment – the experiment is the final arbiter. No quantity of words can be used successfully to camouflage a disproven idea or belief.”Footnote ¹⁹ It was due to the scientific method that scientists had now “tamed the atom” and a strong belief prevailed among the scientific community in and around UNESCO that:

It is thus safe to say that the epistemological grounds beneath the concept of science were strongly influenced by a Comtean-inspired positivism and scientific rationalism. To Needham, Auger, and their staff, the Natural Science Section was taking up a proud heritage, not only from an epistemological point of view, but also from the point of view of international scientific cooperation. Here UNESCO (in its own narrative) came to represent the apex of a development begun by European intellectuals in the seventeenth century, manifested in the astronomers’ conferences in the early-nineteenth century, institutionalized in the League of Nations and now, in the mid-twentieth century, continued in an international “brotherhood” spearheaded by UNESCO. The prerequisite of this brotherhood was freedom, as Bart Bok mentioned, and here science and the newly established Universal Declaration of Human Rights joined forces: “As long as science is free, scientists are almost automatically joined in a world brotherhood and it is fervently hoped that the scientists of the world will realise that in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lies the promise of a guarantee for their cherished freedoms.”Footnote ²¹ Apart from being an evolutionary process, a method, and an international brotherhood, science was also conceived of as a worldview in a broader sense.Footnote ²² The function of science was not limited to the actual inventions or methods produced and used. Its function extended into the realm of what is best captured by the German term bildung, meaning both creation and education. Science teaching was seen as the key to disseminate this scientific attitude to life:

Science was a way of understanding the world and forming opinions and judgments about different matters. Science was also the primary defense against the enemies of progress and development, and it had to be taught from an early stage in order to form the “right” worldview. The time had passed, or so it was argued in UNESCO circles, where young people could get along in life without a proper understanding of science.Footnote ²⁴ In 1954, at the General Conference in Montevideo, resolutions were thus adopted in order to advance science teaching in general and “to stimulate the extension and improvement of science teaching.”Footnote ²⁵ The values believed to be inherent to the scientific worldview went far beyond the classroom. It constituted a prerequisite for life in the modern world and could assist in producing useful citizens and wise parents.Footnote ²⁶ Some even argued that the teaching of science could alter fundamental preferences and: “awaken [the] capacity to observe, describe, and evaluate (discovering, investigating, comparing, classifying) thus fostering a love of truth and intellectual honesty, pleasure in work well done and a liking of order.”Footnote ²⁷ Science was presented as a way of seeing the world, and a way of distinguishing fact and reality from opinions and prejudgments. Superstitions and dogmatic assertions were therefore positioned as the enemy of science and progress. This brings us to the third theme in the semantic field of the concept of science in UNESCO, that of counter concepts – not what science is, but also what it is not.

4.6 Science and “the Enemies of Progress”

UNESCO’s conception of science found its antithesis in concepts such as dogma, tradition, authority, and pseudoscience. Regarding the latter, the pseudosciences, it was clear that the scientific community in and around UNESCO felt a need to distinguish their conception of science, “true science,” from other less methodologically sound practices. Huxley had already taken up the subject of “borderline fields” such as “parapsychology,” “Hindu yogi body control,” and “eugenics” in his Reference Huxley1947 publication.Footnote ²⁸ Huxley argued that while science should remain open to the possibility of radical extensions of our knowledge from these borderline fields, UNESCO should disregard or even oppose that which is unscientific:

What was at stake was the drawing of borders around a broad, “scientific” epistemic community, and this was by no means an easy task. Once again, the scientific method lent itself as a possible demarcation line and became the primary weapon in the fight against pseudo-sciences. In order to oppose these practices effectively, Huxley argued “widespread popular education is required in the facts of science, the significance of the scientific method, and the possibilities of scientific application for increasing human welfare.”Footnote ³⁰ Almost a decade later, Huxley’s views were echoed at the UNESCO conference on the Dissemination of Science in Madrid in 1955. At this point in time, it was particularly the growing popularity of numerology, astrology, hypnotism, and clairvoyance that troubled the scientific community. They lamented the “‘average man’s’ relative or total lack of culture” which made him an easy target for the pseudosciences.Footnote ³¹ It was well known, they argued, that: “the pseudo-science recruits no followers among those who recognize the value of scientific experiment; and it is confidence in scientific experiment that we must inculcate in people today.”Footnote ³² The concern was twofold. Firstly, pseudoscience and similar practices pretended to be somehow “scientific” and attempted to convince followers of the veracity of this claim. Secondly, there were those practices that did not claim to be scientific, yet still proclaimed dogmatic authority over their followers, such as religions. The question of religion was a difficult and contentious one. When Huxley would argue that science “is by its nature opposed to dogmatic orthodoxies and to the claims of authority” then a conflict with religion seemed imminent and inevitable. Auger, the second director of the Section of Natural Science, offered a somewhat more diplomatic position when he, in his writings in 1950, addressed the issue:

Religion was, according to Auger, simply to be relegated to “a different plane,” where the dogmas would not come into conflict with science. Auger (wisely) did not elaborate on whether the religions had willingly removed dogma, or to what “plane” they had been moved. However, he reaffirmed that it was in science that we could all work together with the same language, “since Science is the same in every land” and through this scientific common ground of communication, “a common attitude of mind, inspired by the common goal of the advancement of science, is maintained throughout this society.”Footnote ³⁴

4.7 Concluding Remarks: Actions and Rights

Looking back at the intense efforts made within UNESCO to define and promote a particular definition of science in the early years, one can of course wonder why these efforts seemed to be of such crucial importance. Several things are, however, at stake when defining a key concept like science. As touched upon above, the definition of science helped to demarcate the borders of an epistemic community. These borders were established through highlighting what science was in terms of biological, material, and psychological evolution of humankind, objective knowledge seeking, and a scientific methodological approach. Just as important, these borders were established through highlighting what science was not, as such science was defined in opposition to dogma, tradition, religion, authority and pseudosciences.

Furthermore, the definition manifests a certain understanding of the past: where we came from and, in line with this, where we are going in the future. The definition thus creates specific horizons of action within which some paths of action seem rational and others are deemed illogical and contrary to human progress. The understanding of science in UNESCO, as outlined above, became the conceptual background for the impressive amount of actions carried through by UNESCO and its Natural Science Section. In line with the understanding of science as a prerequisite for development and progress, UNESCO, immediately after the war, set out to rebuild the science infrastructure in war-devastated regions. They sought to facilitate already existing science organizations, and international cooperation, both financially and organizationally, and published a great variety of science material. One such piece was the very popular “Suggestions for Science Teachers in the Devastated Countries” by J. P. Stephenson, which by the early 1960s had been expanded and translated into more than thirty languages. The book contained detailed instructions on how to conduct “good science teaching” despite a lack of proper materials, and instructions on how to build cheap apparatuses from everyday materials.

The strong focus on science teaching in UNESCO becomes more evident when we look at it in light of exactly what science meant to the organization, and how it was conceptualized and distinguished from other practices. In understanding science not only as a set of methods of inquiry, but as a worldview and an attitude to life, the science teaching classroom becomes the ideal place to form the mindset of the new generations from an early age. This was indeed an enculturation process, although it was not conceived as such by the scientist involved in the science teaching planning. The classroom could not only be used to install this scientific gaze in the pupils. It could also be used to correct what many scientists believed was the (misunderstood) image of the scientist in the broader public. As Boulind stated in the UNESCO House:

In this manner, the teaching of science was also an arena well suited to combat what scientists saw as the unrealistic fears (and hopes) of the broader public in the nuclear age. In relation to this, we can also see that the Natural Science Section in UNESCO cooperated cross-departmentally many times, with both the Division of Dissemination of Science, the Department of Mass Communication and the Department of Education.Footnote ³⁶

Another UNESCO science-initiative, the establishment of the Field Science Cooperation Offices in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, likewise takes on a deeper significance when we understand it in light of the fundamental definitions of science in the early years of UNESCO. These offices represented not only a means to distribute scientific knowledge from a Western center to the developing countries, but also an institutionalization of the world brotherhood to which scientists were imagined to belong, and an establishment of a common world language of science that is oriented towards world development.

From the definition of science as a vocation, a worldview, and an ideologically neutral knowledge that benefits all humankind, springs also the claim for rights for scientists. This came in the wake of the massive influx of state control, censorship, and secrecy that especially nuclear scientists were subjected to during World War II, and which only increased during the Cold War.Footnote ³⁷ Huxley took up the subject in 1949 and posted the question in both Nature and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Huxley was lashing out at both the Soviet Union and the Western allies for their attempts to control their respective science communities. The answer to Huxley’s question (or one of them), came from Bart Bok, Chairman of the National (US) Research Council’s Committee on Science in UNESCO. Under the headline “Freedom of science and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” Bok argued that scientists had been given a powerful weapon in their fight for basic rights in the Declaration, and he urged his fellow scientists to seize the opportunity given:

Thus, looking at the conceptualization of science by UNESCO, and the different ideas of science as they were articulated within UNESCO, we see what the organization itself understood by the concept of science and its relations to the concepts of modernity, progress, and development. UNESCO defined its borders concretely with the firm commitment to the “S” in its name, which made it better able to defend those borders when it came to asserting scientific freedom in opposition to state control, censorship, and secrecy that scientists, particularly nuclear scientists, faced during the Cold War. It was that definition and UNESCO’s strong defense of science, that was put into practice when the onset of the Cold War posed its own challenges to the Mertonian norms of science and to the ideas of international science cooperation in general.