THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

associations have no regular means at all of corresponding with the
League of Nations. The simple right of petition, provided for in every
national constitution, has always been refused them. The collaboration
requested from them by the agencies of the League is determined in
a quite arbitrary manner. They have no right to be consulted ... The
international associations are therefore the only persons having no
protection in modern law; for, if they can have neither recourse to the
League of Nations nor the Court of Justice, they are in an inferior
position in respect of every physical human being and every national
association who find a protector in their governments. 31
The invidious position of international associations with respect
to the League on the one hand, and national governments
on the other was dramatically exemplified, Otlet believed, in
the recent conflict of the UIA with the Belgian Government
and in the powerlessness and indifference of the League in
this conflict.
The Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, which Otlet
pointed out yet once again had originated in the activities and
the published proposals of the UIA, had proved no less disappointing
than the League. Once formed, it «had discarded
without discussion the Union's plan». Moreover, it had refused,
Otlet alleged, to envisage the problem of organisation
from a global point of view, according to a vue d'ensemble,
quite apart from not attempting to assure «the international
associations representation at the League of Nations*. As a
result, only one conclusion was possible, the conclusion upon
which, in a sense, the whole of Otlet's report was based: «the
proposition of the Union to create an International Organisation
for Intellectual Work, general in its object, .and federative
in its constitution, remains completely as it was». 32
This report of Otlet's is confusing in its apparently disorderly
movement between description, analysis, prescription,
and theorising of an almost vertiginous generality. Most
striking is its abstractness, the patent impracticability of its
proposals, qualities arising from the very first premise of
Otlet's theory of international organisation, the point upon
which his absolute disagreement with the Committee on Intellectual
Co-operation rested: that it must be done as a whole,
from «la vue d'ensemble». The problem was that the more general,
the less «local» Otlet's thought, the more centered on the
ideal, on «ought» and «should», the more difficult it was for
him to express and anchor it in action through real institutions.
Recognising the simplification, one might say that the
UIA (1910), the Palais Mondial (1920) and then the Mondaneum
(1924), increasing in abstractness, represented an increased
potentiality of failure, an increased defiance of reality
as Otlet became more and more detached through excessive
cerebration and perhaps through disappointment, from the difficulties
and limitations of actual, competitive, international
organisation.
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