THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

ergh with some twenty international associations its first
members.
There was in the air a mounting belief in the power of
international associations, a power appearing to be approaching
some kind of zenith in the International Peace Conference which
was to assemble in the Hague in 1907. Gradually Otlet and La
Fontaine's views about international organisation had become
wider and more informed, although La Fontaine, of course, had
had a broad internationalist viewpoint for many years. In the very
year of the foundation of the IIB, the year after he was elected
to the Belgian senate, he had become active in the Interparliamentary
Union. He had participated in all the Universal Peace
Congresses organised by the Permanent Bureau for International
Peace, of which he became President in 1908. In mid 1907
he made a statement in the Belgian senate on the importance
of world organisation. 3 Otlet's activities had hitherto been more
limited, had been circumscribed by the IIB and some relatively
minor ventures associated with it. But both he and La Fontaine
were fascinated observers at the Hague Peace Conference. The
first Conference had been called with much ceremony at the
Hague in 1899. The second was convoked by President Theodore
Roosevelt upon representation from the Interparliamentary
Union at the conclusion of its conference in 1904 in San Francisco,
whither La Fontaine had repaired, being one of the number
to wait on the President. Now, three years later a vast and
splendid assemblage of «career diplomats, ambassadors, generals
and admirals» sat down with some pomp and circumstance
to debate the future peace of the world. 4 Their three monthlong
deliberations were a spectacular failure in Otlet's view.
Met to discuss how the entire Globe might be enveloped in a
well-made mantle of peace, the conference ended by adopting
a threadbare convention for «the minute regularisation of war».
Instead of a permanent International Court of Justice being
created, which was a major aim of the conference, all that was
achieved was an International Prize Court, some modifications
to the Convention the nations had signed after the 1899 conference,
and the recognition that the major and minor powers
were unlikely ever easily to agree on methods for nominating
and electing permanent salaried judges for a more general
international court. 5
Though there was an almost cynical irony in the outcome of
the conference when compared with its original purpose, and
though it rudely dashed the high hopes held for it, Otlet believed
that in had been not without some importance. It seemed to
him that this had been the first time in history that «nations
spoke officially and publically to each other» 6 without the imperatives
of particular situations regulating their exchanges as
had always been the case in the past in the assemblies which
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