A Tale of Two World Capitals: The Internationalisms of Pieter Eijkman and Paul Otlet

Abstract

In the years around 1910, two plans for establishing a World Capital were simultaneously promoted from Belgium and the Netherlands. From the sea resort of Scheveningen, the Dutch physician Pieter Eijkman and his assistant Paul Horrix campaigned to build such a city on the outskirts of The Hague. Designed by the rising young architect Karel de Bazel, their "Intellectual World Centre", or "Athens of the Future" as the press also called it, was projected around the Peace Palace, the designated home of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. At the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, government representatives had decided to establish such a court, after which the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie had volunteered to provide it with appropriate accommodation. Eijkman now wanted to surround the Peace Palace with a city of hotels, an international congress hall and, especially, academies of science -all grouped around a Monument for International Brotherhood (Fig. 1). Every academy, moreover, possessed a separate research institute with state-of-the-art facilities where "the most eminent scientists of all civilized nations" would come to work for "say, one week a year" (1) . Thus, his World Capital was meant to stimulate world peace and to advance scientific research at the same time.In the same period, internationalists in Belgium were launching similar initiatives. Brussels was already the seat of more international organizations than any other city in the world, second only to Paris in terms of congresses.

Articulated Flatness: Document Culture and Modernism in the Mundaneum and Beyond

“…Earlier European proposals for projects of global governance, including Josef Hoffmann's 1895 design called "Forum orbis-Insula pracis" and Peter Hendrick Eijkman's and Paul Horrix's World Capital, have been discussed at length in relation to Otlet's work, but Otlet admired Andersen's project for the centrality of "intellectual life" it proposed in the organization of an international society. 51 Though Otlet would later embrace modernist architecture, his predilection for the classicizing monumentality of these early projects continued to inform later proposals. Beneath Otlet's rhetoric of internationalism, his project retained its specificity to Belgium and was seen from the beginning as useful to the kingdom's development as an imperial power.…”

Understanding non-governmental organizations in world politics: The promise and pitfalls of the early ‘science of internationalism’

“…In the years preceding the First World War, alternative typologies of internationalisms were put forward (Van Acker and Somsen, 2012: 1398–1399). At this time, internationalisms were commonly seen to be associated with particular sectors within society, such as socialists, Catholics and businessmen.…”

“…Paul Otlet (1908: 12), on the other hand, drew distinctions closer to contemporary typologies providing contrasting solutions to the problem of war: a pacifist perspective promoting disarmament; a juridical perspective promoting international law; an inter-parliamentarian perspective promoting arbitration; and a socialist perspective promoting the demise of capitalism (Van Acker and Somsen, 2012: 1399).…”

“…As Herren (2000) has argued, the promotion of internationalism in the years preceding the First World War served particularly well the interests of states otherwise marginal in international relations, particularly neutral states such as Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, which hosted many of the principal IGOs and NGOs of the period. The ambitious proposals of authors such as Otlet, La Fontaine and Eijkman therefore need to be considered in the context of the promotion of plans for rival ‘world capitals’ in Brussels and the Hague in this era (Van Acker and Somsen, 2012).…”