Nadine Akhund (IRICE, Paris), A Transnational Network in Central and Southeastern Europe .

A Transnational Network in Central and Southeastern Europe: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1913-1934.

Founded in 1910, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) had three objectives: to promote international understanding, to study the effects of war on civilians, and to support international law. Organized in three divisions, the CEIP played a substantial role at the dawn of the new kind of international affairs emerging after 1918 in re-defining international affairs, institutionalizing the concept of peace trough law elaborated by and through the pre-war Peace Movement at the turn of the 20th century.

Drawing entirely from the Carnegie archives the paper studies the link between the “Carnegie men” and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires struggling with the last chapter of the Eastern Question and the rise of nationalism. In 1912, the CEIP, an operating trans-Atlantic network opened a European bureau in Paris. His president, Paul d’Estournelles de Constant (1852-1924), a French diplomat who started his career in the Balkans was a personal friend of Nicolas Butler (1862-1947), president of Columbia University until 1945 and later president of the CEIP. As a non-governmental organization, the CEIP demonstrated how a group of influence could participate in the ruling of international state affairs.

The paper presents the CEIP’s activities undertaken in Central and Southeastern Europe before and after World War I, showing a strong diversity but organized around two main themes, education of international public opinion and regional integration. The Endowment intervened directly by sending three times representatives to the Balkan Peninsula; and international commission in 1913 (the Balkan Report, 1914), a French delegate to Albania in 1921 (the Albanian Report), and an observer to the Balkans conferences early 1930s.

Following World War I, the CEIP supported regional cooperation through economic prosperity as a way to stabilize the region. Further, the Endowment promoted international conciliation and launched an ambitious reconstruction program in Europe after 1918 (reconstruction of universities and public libraries, US institutes in Vienna, Berlin and Prague, funds for refugees in Russia, Syria and Armenia) to support the setting up of a new international order. The “Carnegie men”, and especially Nicholas Butler, had a sense that a turning point in international affairs was approaching. He advocated a strong theory, “the International Mind” and emphasized the concept of an international organization whose competence should be placed above the one of the states on both sides of the Atlantic.