The (Real)politiks of Culture: U.S. Cultural Diplomacy in Unesco, 1946-1954*

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco), 1 which was founded in 1946, has long had a reputation as one of the more contentious, politically divided, and ineffective organs of the United Nations.It is familiar to many scholars as an illustration of the failure of multilateralism and the controversies of Third World nonalignment in the 1970s.However, Unesco had been hampered by political controversy from its earliest years as tensions emerged over the deepening pragmatism of America's Cold War cultural diplomacy.This article explores the politicization of culture during Unesco's first nine years, focusing on U.S. efforts to generate an anti-Communist consensus within Unesco and exploring the effect of U.S. policies on its Western geopolitical allies.Despite the cosmopolitan hopes of its founders-educators and policymakers who envisaged Unesco as cultivating global humanism beyond the narrow concerns of politics-within a few years the regular conferences and diplomatic channels of Unesco had been overshadowed by political pragmatism and the pursuit of cultural prestige.The most conspicuous source of the politicization of culture within Unesco in this period was the United States, which had the financial capacity and institutional dominance to shape the organization's agenda and principles.The United States also had an obvious interest in shaping global cultural relations as the Cold War conflict emerged, and U.S. diplomatic strategy in Unesco reflects key shifts in how its cultural interests were framed according to its broader ideological objectives.In Unesco's infancy, U.S. policymakers were shaped by the "cultural internationalism" of the early postwar years, sentiments which fitted easily into the humanistic basis upon which Unesco was founded.However, within two years the U.S. delegation had become preoccupied with the "scourge" of Cold War neutralism among Unesco members, and increasingly sought to apply to Unesco the instrumental approach *I wish to thank Sally Kuisel from the US