Transatlantic Exchanges: Fernand Braudel, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Cold War Origins of the Center for Area Studies in Paris
p. 71-90
Texte intégral
1Fernand Braudel’s famous article “Histoire et Sciences Sociales: La Longue Durée”, which appeared one year after the Sputnik shock in 1958, contains a little-remarked passage on area studies.1 Introduced into Europe after the Second World War, area studies programs constituted one of the key innovations in the social sciences after 1945, insofar as they represented a new institutional and epistemological category of intellectual work in interdisciplinary and international groups, and so restructured the knowledge of a specific region.2 Braudel’s article laid the foundations of the theory of “long duration”. Nevertheless, the text was understood as a pragmatic contribution to the projects of self-examination and self-interrogation triggered within the traditional disciplines by the rise of the social sciences, and it put forward a self-assured proposal for how historians and social scientists might work together.3 Braudel’s call for intellectual cooperation and an interdisciplinary approach refers to the American model of area studies:
« Mais se rapprocher tout d’abord, l’opération est urgente. Aux États-Unis, cette réunion a pris la forme de recherches collectives sur les aires culturelles du monde actuel : les area studies étant, avant tout, l’étude par une équipe de social scientists, de ces monstres politiques du temps présent : Chine, Inde, Russie, Amérique latine, États-Unis. Les connaître, question de vie ! Encore faut-il, lors de cette mise en commun de techniques et de connaissances, que chacun des participants ne reste pas enfoncé dans son travail particulier, aveugle ou sourd, comme la veille, à ce que disent, écrivent, ou pensent les autres !4 »
2Associating Fernand Braudel’s methodological masterpiece with the history of area studies might come as a surprise. It was no accident, however, that his classic text of twentieth-century historical theory should include a brief reference to area studies. Since the mid-1950s, Braudel had been directly involved in setting up one of Europe’s first, highly influential Centers for area studies,5 a project implemented in association with, and partly funded by, the Rockefeller Foundation, and modeled on the content and Organization of area studies in America. In the autumn of 1955, Braudel paid a two-month visit to the US to inspect area studies programs in American universities, and upon his return he drew up project proposals for the Rockefeller Foundation and later the Ford Foundation in close collaboration with his research manager Clemens Heller.6 The idea of the center for area studies in Paris was elaborated during this period of communication between the French actors and the officers of the Rockefeller foundation.7
3The circumstances in which this unfolded – which might be called the Cold War context – calls for explanations informed by the bipolar structure of Cold War thinking. Even if these assumptions were not always explicit, they bear directly on the origins of the Center. In this perspective, associating the French “programmes d’aires culturelles” with American Cold War area studies might compromise the reputation of the center in Paris. In most cases, it is assumed, the pursuit of funding in the U.S. during the 1950s resulted in a more or less direct way with researchers being connected to the military-industrial complex.8 Pushed to the extreme, Braudel and Heller would consequently appear as agents of the Americanization of the French scientific establishment. If journalists in particular assert that Braudel, by pursuing the funding in question, more or less accepted a certain framework of Americanization,9 others, particularly scholars, maintain that Braudel’s personality and reputation functioned as a guarantee of individual and self-sustained French agency10. Both assumptions are linked to hypotheses on the French way of Americanization and the autarky of the institutional and methodological bases of Annales’ Sixth Section.
4Yet the new Cold War historiography might provide arguments to reconsider Braudel’s cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation. As we now know, it was the Cold War spirit of historiography and journalism that imputed the Cold War indexicality to any moment, date or process.11 It made unarguable the role of US hegemony on all argumentative levels. Without a doubt, the area studies programs were introduced at the École Pratique des Hautes Études under the political auspices of the Cold War, a framework that was significant not only with regard to the number of Communist researchers involved,12 but also with regard to the strategic direction of funding policy. The programs may be examined in terms of the respective national institutional landscapes as well as the ideological debates in postwar France and the US. Nevertheless, they were the result of international scientific cooperation.
5As Anders Stephanson, in his explorations of US hegemony, remarks so lucidly, the Cold War may not necessarily amount to everything that happens in the Cold War: that is, the Cold War “is not the backdrop but the stage itself’.13 Following the many deconstructionist historiographical waves in Cold war historiography,14 Cold War indexicality ought really to be understood as the shuffle between foreground and background. In relation to our case study, stating that the Cold War was not a natural condition means that it did not generate a unitary Cold War mode of knowledge production. Reconsidering the concept brought the study of Cold War social sciences to a new position, and bestowed agency upon scholars acting in Cold War structures.
6From this perspective, the assumption that all social science during the Cold War amounts to “Cold War social science” is called into question.15 Long considered as simply “Cold War science”, these practices, though still related to national security concerns, are now understood to have had widely various effects. American social science “was – and was not – a creature of the Cold War”.16 For evaluating the Cold War status, new institutional environments are now regarded as counting at the same level as disciplinary discussions in a broader historical perspective. The fact that historians attribute significant agency to social scientists opens up a new understanding of the cooperation between foundations and scholars. Within this framework, accepting and applying for US money can be considered a communication process, even if it might turn out that it was an asymmetrical one. Instead of stating that this cooperation was determined by the Cold War framework, we will have to show how scholars and foundations were enmeshed in political and disciplinary contexts as well as in institutional environments.
7This essay takes up this new perspective on science in the Cold War and reconsiders the cooperation between Braudel and the Rockefeller Foundation as a model case for the cooperation between philanthropic foundations and European players during the early Cold War. The Cold War origins of the Center for Area Studies in Paris are re-examined on a micro level by proposing a “thick reading” of this communication. It revolves around the following questions. What were the points of convergence and divergence between the Rockefeller philanthropists and their French partners concerning the role and modalities of action of the negotiated topics? What objectives did the American foundations pursue via their engagement in Europe? Moreover, what objectives are to be found on the side of the European partners?17
8The aim of this article is to show that what was at stake was less the direct and hegemonic influence or transfer of money and knowledge than a specific way of conducting research. In the first part, we shall tum our attention to the United States, and look at how area studies functioned as torchbearers for new institutional and cognitive practices after 1945. We shall then return to Paris and explore the exchange between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Sixth Section, in the persons of Braudel and Heller. In this second part we shall be looking at how different scientific practices and concepts found themselves in mutual confrontation in the course of this exchange, and asking which networks thereby played a role. We shall conclude, thirdly, with a brief consideration of the broader significance of the connections between the internationalization and Americanization of science.
“Toward total world knowledge”: The area studies concept in the US
9When it comes to the history of area studies, the object of study is still indeterminate. Since the Enlightenment, the study of the world’s regions from a more or less obvious colonial perspective was part of each colonial project, and contributed to the way in which nations, individually and in concert, shaped the process of globalization.18 The genesis of the European colonial sciences during the nineteenth Century can be considered a fundamental first Step in the development of socio-anthropologically rooted area studies; in this the US already played an important, though rarely mentioned, role.19 Yet if there were comparable area-related knowledge productions under a variety of labels, the years following WWII saw the “invention” of “area studies” under this particular name, and as a new research practice in the form we recognize today. Area studies represented a new institutional category of the production of area-related knowledge arising out of interdisciplinary and international teamwork. In their concentration of different disciplines, all working on and with the same region of the world, area studies were by their very nature cross-disciplinary and demanded a specific organizational form of interdisciplinarity: the Center for Area Studies.20
10The key point about area studies is that they are characterized by a utilitarian interweaving of science and politics. In the US, the principles and teaching of area studies were first institutionalized in dedicated training centers for members of the US military, in response to the prevailing lack of expert knowledge about other regions of the world. Area training programs were set up in December 1942 in a “Joint Statement of the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Navy on Utilization of College Facilities in Specialized Training for the Army and Navy”, in the form of the Foreign Area and Language Curricula of the Army Specialized Training Programs (ASTP-FALC)-courses that were attached to fifty-five institutions-and as Civil Affairs Training Schools (CATS).21 Area studies thereby fostered area expertise-in particular expertise covering distant regions of the world-rooted in knowledge relevant to practical and military issues.
11Ever since the first Centers for Area Studies were founded, the fìeld has been associated with a conglomerate of science-policy-related aims and epistemological considerations. The first report, directed in 1943 by the Committee on World Regions of the Social Science Research Council, determined the necessity of area studies in times of war and peace:
“The present war has focused attention as never before upon the entire world. Interest in foreign regions has been intensified and sharp attention drawn to areas over which we have felt little or no concern. The immediate need for social scientists who know the different regions of the world stands second only to the demand for military and naval officers familiar with the actual and potentials combat zones. Since few overseas areas have hitherto attracted research, we lack the regional knowledge now required; and traditional curricula and methods of instruction have left inert much of such information as we possess [...] No matter what shape international Organization may assume, the United States will enjoy unexampled opportunities and face heavy responsibilities. The ease, speed, and cheapness of communication and transportation will tend to promote economic, political, and cultural relations among nations. Trade shipping, air lines, the press, mining, the production, and distribution of petroleum, banking, government service, industry, and communications will require thousands of Americans who combine thorough professional or technical training with knowledge of the languages, economics, politics, history, geography, peoples, customs, and religions of foreign countries. In order that we may fulfill our postwar role as a member of the United Nations our citizens must know other lands and appreciate their people, cultures and institutions.”22
12Initiated as a project of US hegemony in a period of increasing international communication, area studies grew from being a necessity of war to one of the most recognized new fields within the American university and research landscape. Until the Student protests of the 1960s, area studies was a central component of Cold War science.23 The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) institutionalized the already existing cooperation of the military-science-complex that began in the departments of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).24 During the 1960s, several scandals led to a general debate on possible readjustments in the social science sector.25 However, the Cold War indexicality of area studies has been reassessed through closer analysis of networks, disciplinary contexts, and scholar’s actions.26
13A structuralist view alone would fail to explain the attraction for Contemporary scholars. As a new research practice, area studies was seen as the vehicle for a new mode of knowledge, the torchbearer of a new and international culture of science. This pioneering impetus of area studies functioned as a major catalyst after the Second World War. The proposals drawn up in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s on behalf of the Social Science Research Council were characterized by their enthusiasm for a new way of conducting research, one that provided new knowledge for a globalized world. Many universities participated in these programs during wartime, only to find that area studies had become a reality of research even after 1945. The strategy papers of the Social Science Research Council read almost like conversion narratives: it seems that professors, who had been tasked by the US government with an “area approach” as part of the war effort, subsequently became vociferous supporters of this new form of research.27
14The momentum generated by these early programs was driven by the interest and the support of America’s research bodies. The three research councils-the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council-set up special commissions which, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, went on to found the Ethnogeographic Board.28 This was superseded after the war by the Social Science Research Council’s Exploratory Committee on World Area Research. The management of the war programs’ legacy led to the construction of the postwar programs. The organizational tools included surveys, strategic papers, national Conferences, and other forms of resource pooling.
15At its first meeting, the Exploratory Committee voted to commission a general study of the current status of area studies in the United States, their advocates and opponents, and the possible ways in which they might be inscribed within national Institutes of learning. This survey marked the transition from the teaching of area studies as part of a military subject to the restructuring of the social sciences in peacetime. Between April and September 1946, the chairman of the Exploratory Committee, Robert B. Hall, proceeded to visit twenty-four of the leading American universities, where he evaluated 114 area programs in total. His findings, published in May 1947, were clear: in the USA after 1945, area studies were perceived primarily as a proposal for an interdisciplinary reform of intellectual communication.
16Area studies operated by bringing together researchers with different specializations, a way of working that went against the grain of existing academic tradition, with its distinct disciplines. Since the late eighteenth Century, these disciplines had been created as socio-cognitive structures. Consequently, processes of mental conditioning had also been set in motion. It was against this mental conditioning that area studies-with interdisciplinary work at its programmatic core-now took a stand. As a campaign for the promotion of the social sciences, they were part of a serious-minded reform of intellectual communication within the world of science.
17In his report for the Social Science Research Council, Robert Hall visualized the disciplines and their respective knowledge in terms of vertical pillars. He claimed that the “cooperative attack upon the whole knowledge of an area” could connect those pillars.29 The fragmentation within individual disciplines, coupled with the proliferation of the courses on offer, had caused the organic connection between the various fields of research to disappear from view. By adopting the “total approach to an area”, it was hoped that the gaps separating the knowledge held by each discipline would be bridged, thereby producing a new kind of knowledge. The Student was never to lose sight of the organic relationship between the disciplines. This unity of knowledge was to be communicated, something that was only possible-thus was the conviction in 1946-through working in groups. The most valuable contribution made by area studies was at the same time the most difficult: area integration.
18For as Hall was emphatically told in the universities he visited as part of his postwar survey, it was not enough for area studies programs to offer parallel courses on one area, or for scholars front multiple disciplines to conduct research into a common region. What ultimately mattered was knowledge integration. As Hall observed: “Vast amounts of labour, good will and wholehearted cooperation are required if this end is to be achieved. This runs counter to the individualistic tradition of the scholar. It may well require more time and energy than remains after other duties are fulfilled.”30
19The enthusiasm of the postwar years was in keeping with the positivistic scientific ideal of the period and the rise of the social sciences. In his report on the status of area studies in the US and its implications for research in the social sciences, Hall described area research as having four distinctive objectives, which he stated as follows: “1) toward total world knowledge; 2) toward cooperative research and the integration of knowledge; 3) toward cross-cultural understanding and 4) toward the elimination of handicaps in social science research”.31 It was no accident that all of those objectives can be read as both epistemological orientations and science-policy-related aims.
20Thus, area studies were part of a highly funded, strategically directed internationalization process in American social science, which consisted in both the institutionalization of international cooperation and an approach to foreign areas based on “a deepened recognition of cultural differences, or what is sometimes called cultural relativity”.32 Both dimensions of internationalization were related to national security interests. At the first national Conference on area studies, which was held in New York in 1947, the national interest in “intercultural understanding” was not discussed as problematic for the independence of scientific research. On the contrary, the first Conference funded by the Carnegie Foundation reassembled not only faculty members, but also employees of federal agencies and foundation officers. Government interests, including those of the CIA, were not hidden influences but obvious and fundamental factors in the structuring of area studies from its inception as a project. Nevertheless, these “science managers in charge”33 had to deal with foundation policies that did not necessarily include unquestioned government funding. The role of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was pioneering in the field of area studies in the immediate postwar period, is to be reassessed as a policy of juggling to prevent direct interventions and protect institutional agency.34
21The American approach to area studies exerted an extraordinary influence upon the development of social sciences in the United States. Of equal significance was the American institutions and foundations’ interest in exporting the concept. One of their major aims was the broadening of cultural horizons not only in the US but also in Europe. In a broader perspective, Europe was often included in the agenda-setting as a matter of course. One of the internal papers written in the SSRC in 1954 articulates the objectives of area studies in the following terms: “The European and American cultural provincialism of the social sciences needs to be overcome.”35 This expectation was met by European experience.
Transatlantic exchanges: The area studies concept between france and the US
22Starting in 1955, the Sixth Section in Paris saw the creation of a succession of research centers that were grouped within an Overall Center for Area Studies. First to be constituted was the Centre d’études indiennes (1955), followed by the Centre d’études arctiques (1957), the Centre d’études maghrébines, the Centre d’études et de documentation sur l’URSS et les pays slaves, and the Centre d’études sur la Chine contemporaine (1959), and lastly the Centre de documentation et de recherches sur l’Asie du sud-est et le monde insulindien (1962).36
23This area studies program was put in place with the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, along with additional funding from the French Ministry of Education and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. The start-up funding for the area studies programs dedicated to the Near East, Russia, India and the Islamic world, which were introduced between 1956 and 1960, was largely provided by the Rockefeller Foundation (sixty thousand dollars for the years 1956/57, and another eighty thousand dollars for the years 1958-1960).37 However, as important as the money were the exchanges of ideas between Paris and New York and the adoption of organizational models.
24The transfer of area studies to Paris was a process of negotiation on several levels, in which Fernand Braudel and Clemens Heller represented the French side. Heller worked so closely with Braudel as a creative organizer and manager of research, and was so deeply involved in the negotiations with the Rockefeller Foundation, that it is impossible to speak of Braudel without speaking of Heller. This almost ideal constellation of Braudel and Heller would be a key factor in the exchange with the Rockefeller Foundation. Pierre Bourdieu described Heller as an “incomparable animateur-agitateur scientifique qui le secondait en tout (en le précédant parfois)”.38 Heller was un homme à trois cultures. Born in Vienna in 1917 as the son of Hugo Heller, Sigmund Freud’s publisher, he emigrated in 1938 to the US. In 1947, he co-created the Salzburg Seminar on American civilization, the first Salzburg Seminar to be staged in Salzburg itself and one that adopted its own area approach.39
25In 1949, he left Harvard to settle in Paris. There he rapidly gained the trust of Lucien Febvre at the Sixth Section, and became Braudel’s “research manager” at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Together with Braudel he proceeded to make his mark on the European research landscape, founding the Programme des aires culturelles at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études and later the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Indeed, so closely did the two colleagues work together that, looking back, it is almost impossible to distinguish their individual contributions. “Figurez-vous”, Braudel said of Heller in his response after his Academy speech towards the end of his career, “qu’il travaille à mes côtés, faisant l’essentiel de ma tâche depuis quarante ans. Il le fait avec une sorte d’élan, d’enthousiasme, d’intelligence, d’intelligence supérieure assez rare.”40
26When it came to the Organization and management of research, Heller’s policy was emphatically international and interdisciplinary. As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote in his memoirs, Heller numbered amongst the few who had already recognized, at the start of the fifties, that research had to be conducted within an international framework. “Celui-ci apporta à l’École le cosmopolitisme qui avait manqué jusqu’alors aux bureaucraties universitaires, enserrés par les six faces de l’Hexagone. Pétri de culture anglosaxonne, formé dans les universités américaines, Heller [...] avait compris que le monde extérieur existait.”41 Heller’s unconditional cosmopolitism meant that he brought together researchers “who don’t even know they belong together”. However, Heller was also a master of finance and became the uncrowned king of third-party funding at the Sixth Section. Without a doctoral degree, he took over as head of the Area Studies division from 1956, an appointment that not all of his academically more senior colleagues welcomed. In 1966, Heller became deputy director of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and after Braudel’s death in 1985, its director.
27Heller’s links with the Rockefeller Foundation had been forged immediately after the war with the Organization of the Salzburg Seminar in 1946/47. Heller’s first talks with the Foundation about a possible areas studies program in Paris took place at the end of 1954. Heller was at that time chargé de cours at the EPHE’s Centre de Recherches historiques, and was very enthusiastic about the center’s future under Braudel and about the embrace of areas studies as a focus of research. Accordingly, he presented the delegates from the Rockefeller Foundation with a number of projects they might be willing to finance in the first instance. In fact, they were interested in none of them, judging them to exhibit precisely the historico-philological bias of the French research tradition that the area studies program was intended to help overcome.42 Discussions were particularly heated over Heller’s proposed manual on the Song Dynasty, the ruling dynasty in the Chinese Empire from the tenth to the twelfth Century. As stated in the first section of this essay, US area studies were to focus on Contemporary periods. The French propositions did not met the expectations of American funders.
28The research projects proposed by Heller on that occasion were merely designed as a first step towards strengthening France’s expertise on other world regions. “H.’s [Heller’s] purpose is to extend the awareness of European scholars-particularly historians-to the Islamic and Oriental field. This is essentially a long process of education”, runs the Rockefeller record of the talks.43 Heller’s strategy was pragmatic: he wanted to persuade academics with the appropriate linguistic expertise to direct their attention to social and historical issues, and at the same time to make foreign sources available to researchers who were already interested in them but who lacked the necessary language skills. “H. would like to see historical treatment of e.g. Islamic and Oriental areas undertaken in comprehensible form and with an agreed terminology and definition of problems.”44
29Research traditions that were at odds with each other, in conjunction with political issues and other, smaller obstacles, meant that the negotiations opened by the French side 1954 immediately ground to a halt. The representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation came away with the impression that the French had not really grasped the concept of area studies, particularly its relevance to the present day. After this unpromising start, therefore, the Rockefeller Foundation suggested personal conversations. It was agreed that Braudel should come to the US and familiarize himself with the area studies programs already on offer at academic institutions. The knowledge he would take away, it was felt, would benefit Braudel in his subsequent creation of a similar program in France: “It is believed” – thus state the papers of Rockefeller Foundation – “that if Professor Braudel can obtain a first-hand knowledge of the experience and achievements of such area studies programs as those on Russia at Columbia and Harvard and on the Far East at Berkeley and the University of Washington, he will be able to formulate effective plans for the study of these and other areas in France”.45
30The dialogue between Paris and New York concerned the design of the program, or, in other words, the precise formulation of the project proposal for the area studies programs in organizational terms, and its division into sub-questions, sub-projects, etc. What was being negotiated between Braudel and the Rockefeller Foundation was what we might call the “rationalization of the scientific work process” in project form. Braudel was thus the project’s applicant, while its executives were the directors of the research centers, which functioned on a project basis. As is revealed by the future history of the programs, and by the study of the project as a form of research, this Splitting of the roles of project Initiator and project executive did not necessarily involve a loss of privilege.46
31The initiation of a project could also involve the bringing together of sub-projects, as can be seen in the case of the Center for Area Studies in Paris, at whose origins lay a project on a Song Dynasty manual. The Paris researchers fought hard for the manual to be integrated as a sub-project within the areas studies program, but the Rockefeller Foundation categorically rejected it as being too traditional. It was research in the old style. Under debate here was a further characteristic of project research: a project’s innovative character. What appealed to the academics in Paris about the project as a research form was its structural ability to react to trends and developments, even while remaining dependent upon an organizational source structure, one that was in this case provided by the Sixth Section. This innate flexibility also extended to disciplinary openness and, therefore, to the promotion of teamwork-issues that were being discussed by the Annales a generation before Braudel.
32From America’s point of view, France still lagged far behind in its development of area studies.47 In spite of professorships relating to African and Asian areas at the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, and the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes, the postwar situation was thought to be dramatic. “Extreme specialization, preoccupation with the past and the traditional independence of French professors and institutions prevented the development of studies of the present and recent past”, runs the document setting out the grounds for Braudel’s American trip of 1955. “Until lately there has been no plan for the effective use of existing resources of personnel and materials, no vigorous leadership for group action”.48
33The keywords in these documents are “resource” and “vigorous leadership”. As the discussion on the sub-project of the Song manual indicated, the specific objectives of the Rockefeller Foundation were mainly organizational. The foundation did not send scholars or impose an alien culture on the French scene. However, it did advocate for a specific organizational structure. As our studies of the historical sources have emphatically suggested,49 one of the more significant interventions in, and influences upon, the European research landscape by American foundations might lay within the sphere of management: the pooling of existing resources and the Organization of networks and communication. The Americans exported not knowledge, but forms of action and Organization. Within the framework of a tried-and-tested financing model and traditionally strategic patterns of perception, they did not transfer new ideas but organized the “international exchange” and “global trade” of already existing European research.
34The transfer of area studies from America to France with the financial assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation adhered to the classic sponsorship model. Having at first conducted its primary activities on American territory and confined any engagement in Europe solely to humanitarian relief operations, the Rockefeller Foundation had increasingly developed into an agency of science policy, a global player with an equally global sense of mission, as Ludovic Tournès observed.50 The tuberculosis campaign, mounted in France between 1917 and 1922, was run in close consultation with the State Department and drew upon earlier experiences in Latin America. It established the framework for Rockefeller Foundation projects in Europe and functioned as a model for both the Foundation’s organizational forms and funding strategies and for the patterns of perception that lay behind them. The problem in France, as the Americans quickly realized in 1918, was not inadequate knowledge of tuberculosis, but the absence of a centralized and efficient Organization to orchestrate the TB campaign. The Americans blamed the inefficiency of French measures on what they deemed to be “French individualism”.51
35The findings were the same in 1945. The records of the Rockefeller Foundation indicate that there was recognition on the American side for France’s great academic tradition. It should be emphasized that this awareness provided the rationale for area studies programs. To ensure an “efficient pooling of resources”, however, the Americans needed strong partners in France. Febvre’s Sixth Section had established itself as a credible and powerful protagonist in the French research landscape. It embodied interdisciplinary teamwork52 and was, from an American perspective, the guarantor not just of the new area studies program but also of the transformation of European scholarship. “The Sixth Section”, as the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation confidently asserted in 1955, “will become the vigorous proponent of a style of scholarship new to the French scene, which is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach and group cooperation”.53
36Braudel and Heller also believed that the French scientific landscape needed to be reformed. It is important to emphasize that the inadequacy of France’s organizational and management structures was recognized on the French side as well. Without a doubt, this image of the power of US social sciences was influenced by American hegemony and France’s postwar situation. Within the social sciences, the US had an almost mythical function after 1945.54 Since the impact of foreign academic Systems is known to be one of the key factors of institutional and intellectual reform debates,55 this fact should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, there already existed social sciences traditions and the experience of organizing research in interdisciplinary groups at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études.
37The conclusion must therefore be twofold, as suggested by our reading of the documents in Paris and New York: following his trip to America, Braudel compiled a report on the situation of the social sciences in France, part of which was published in the Annales.56 The report held up the example of area studies in the US. Braudel painted a picture of the social sciences in France which, when set against the American examples, showed them to be in something of a state of national emergency. However, this state of emergency applied exclusively to the practices of Organization and funding. On the other hand, Braudel saw room for improvement with regard to epistemology in the US, where he noted in his famous article on the “longue durée” the absence of a philosophical basis, of a concept of historical evolution and a geographical orientation:
38“Encore faut-il que le rassemblement des sciences sociales soit complet, que l’on ne néglige pas les plus anciennes au bénéfice des plus jeunes, capables de tant promettre, sinon de toujours tenir. Par exemple, la place faite à la géographie dans des tentatives américaines est pratiquement nulle, extrêmement mince celle que l’on concède à l’histoire. Et d’ailleurs, de quelle histoire s’agit-il ?”57
Conclusion
39The essay depicted the Cold War origins of the Center for Area Studies in Paris in terms of a French-American cooperation. Exploring the exchange between Paris and New York confirmed the assumption that the “Marshall Plan of the Mind” was not merely a one-way transfer. However, the direction of this exchange is clearly determined. It is all the more important to assess its significance for the study of research practices in Europe. On a micro level, the essay showed how applying for US funding can be identified as a communication process, even if it was an asymmetrical one, with scholars acting in political and disciplinary contexts as well as in institutional environments. Reconsidering the founding years of the Paris Center, and addressing the agency of scholars, puts further emphasis on the role of networks and the impact of non-state actors in the politics of internationalization. Without a doubt, Braudel was recognized by the Rockefeller Foundation and chosen as a possible investigator because he was one of the leading scholars in postwar France. Conversely, it was Heller who was the main interlocutor responsible for assuring the successful functioning of the project phase. Without his creative management skills, his intimate knowledge of the academic cultures involved, and his proficiency in English, the cooperation with American foundations would hardly have led to the creation of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
40In a broader context, the article suggests that the situation in postwar France might have been more complex than what may be inferred from research papers presenting France as a rather skeptical recipient of American culture and philanthropic scientific funding.58 While there is no dispute over the fact that reform proposals based on American models were sharply criticized (as was Braudel), it has nevertheless become clear that “America” served in these debates as a modernization argument. From the time of France’s liberation to the beginning of the 1960s, America stood at the center of a debate on self-understanding and modernization within French postwar society.59 Elites ready to embrace reform in France oriented themselves towards American models. Consequently, reform proposals like the area studies programs are to be understood as essential elements of the discovery of America and the “American way of life” that dominated intellectual and social life in France during the 1950s and 1960s.
41The article identified the management question as one of the key concerns of this discourse. For, as Luc Boltanski has shown, the import of management from America into the France of the early 1950s was associated with such profound changes as a new industrial ideology and a new concept of the social sphere.60 This ideology included the notion of rationalization, which applies also to the process of scientific inquiry, as seen in the case of the implementation of the area studies program in Paris. If one examines the negotiations between the Rockefeller Foundation and Paris over the semantics of the proposal, the innovative character of a specific sub-project, and of the overall profile, the novelty of project research becomes clear. The area studies program was implemented in a setting of formal planning that aimed to install a specific form of scientific research. Project funding by the philanthropic foundations, which started in the 1920s in Europe, aimed to implement forms of management, planning and organizational techniques. What was at stake was nothing less than the remodeling of the process of research according to a new organizational structure. Therefore, we should conclude that the restructuring of research by project funding was a major stage in America’s advance through postwar Europe.61
Notes de bas de page
1 Fernand Braudel, Histoire et Sciences Sociales: La longue durée, Annales ESC, 13, no 4 (1958), p. 725-753.
2 Immanuel Wallerstein (ed.), Open the Social Sciences. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996. For a critical review, see Michael Burawoy, “Open the social sciences: To whom and for what?,” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 6, no 3 (2007), p. 137-146.
3 For an explanation of the concept as “a product of France in the 1950s”, see Immanuel Wallerstein, Braudel on the Longue Durée: Problems of Conceptual Translation, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32, no2 (2009), p. 155-170.
4 Braudel, La longue durée (note 1), p. 726.
5 Bryce Wood, Area Studies. In: David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 1, New York, Macmillan, 1968, p. 401-407.
6 Anne Kwaschik, Clemens Heller. In: Nicole Colin, Corine Defrance, Joachim Umlauf, Ulrich Pfeil (Hrsg.), Lexikon der deutsch-französischen Kulturbeziehungen nach 1945, Tübingen, Gunter Narr, 2013, p. 278-279.
7 First described by Brigitte Mazon, Aux origines de l’École des hautes Études en sciences sociales: Le rôle du mécénat americain (1920-1960), Paris, Le Cerf, 1988, p. 71 sqq.
8 Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science. The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993.
9 For a conspiracist view, see Frédéric Charpier, La C.I.A. en France. 60 ans d’ingérence dans les affaires françaises, Paris, Le Seuil, 2008, p. 257 sqq.
10 For an example, see the very inspiring article of Rose-Marie Lagrave, Dons et contre-dons: La politique internationale. In: Jacques Revel, Nathan Wachtel (éd.), Une école pour les sciences sociales. De la VIe section à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 1996, p. 421-431: “F. Braudel revient des États-Unis convaincu surtout de ce qu’il ne faut pas faire” (p. 425).
11 Odd Ame Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War. Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London, Routledge, 2000; Ruud van Dijk (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Cold War, 2 vols., New York, Routledge, 2008.
12 Mazon, Aux origines (note 7).
13 Anders Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero”, in Joel Isaac, Duncan Bell (eds.), Uncertain Empire. American History and the Idea of the Cold War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 19-50.
14 Ibid.
15 Mark Solovey, Hamilton Cravens (eds.), Cold War Social Science. Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, New York, Palgrave, 2012.
16 “New Perspectives on Science in the Cold War”, Isis, 101 (2010).
17 Marc Solovey (ed.), Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (Studies in Modem Science, Technology, and the Environment), New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2013; Heike Rausch, John Krige, Tracing the Knowledge-Power Nexus of American Philanthropy. In: ID. (eds.), American Foundations and the Coproduction of World Order in the 20th Century, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012, p. 7-36.
18 Paulin Hontiundji, Situation de l’anthropologue africain, Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie, no 3/4 (1988), p. 99-108.
19 For studies on France, see Anne Kwaschik, L’État et la construction d’une «formation colonial». Circulations intellectuelles, réseaux et constructions institutionnelles en Europe à l’âge des empires. In: Brigitte Krulic (éd.), Savoirs et métiers de l'Etat: enjeux et pratiques en France et dans les Etats germaniques au XIXe siècle, Frankfurt/Main, Peter Lang, 2014, 165-183; Pierre Singaravélou, Professer l’Empire. Les «sciences coloniales» en France sous la IIIe République, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011; Emmanuelle Sibeud, Une science impériale pour l’Afrique? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878-1930, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2002. The U.S. influence on nineteenth Century developments was notably represented by the work and the publications of the Bureau of Ethnography, cf. the primary source based work, Curtís M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists. The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846-1910, Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981, for a more recent account, Stephen O. Murray, American Anthropology and Company. Historical Explorations, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
20 Wood, Area Studies (note 5).
21 Louis E. Keefer, Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II, Jefferson, McFarland & Co., 1988, p. 37 sqq; William Fenton, Area Studies in American Universities (= Commission on Implications of Armed Services Educational Program), 1947. Although area studies took a new tum after 1942, one should not forget that there already existed social science related area projects such as on the Southern regions of the US; see Howard W. Odum, Southern Regions of the United States, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1936. Since the 1930s, several area studies programs functioned as graduate programs in American Studies as well as in Oriental Civilization (Michigan) and Latin American Civilization (California). See on the early activities of the American Council on Learned Societies pioneering in this field, Bulletin of the ACLS 10/11 (1929).
22 Committee on World Regions of the SSRC, World Regions in the Social Sciences. Report of a Committee of the SSRC, New York, Social Science Research Council, 1943, p. 1-2.
23 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies. In: Noam Chomsky et al. (ed.), The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, New York, The New Press, 1997, p. 195-231.
24 Wayne J. Urban, More than Science and Sputnik. The National Defense Education Act of1958, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2010.
25 For the most famous and aborted project about influencing Latin American’s counterrevolutions, see Marc Solovey, Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution. Rethinking the Politics-patronage-social Science Nexus, Social Studies of Science, 31, vol. 2 (2001), p. 171-206. For a contemporary view, see Noam Chomsky, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship, New York/London, The New Press, 2003 [first published in 1967].
26 See the path breaking study, David Engerman, Know Your Enemy. The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
27 Robert B. Hall, Area Studies: With special Reference to their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences, New York, Social Science Research Council (Pamphlet, 3), 1949.
28 Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, chap. 2.
29 Hall, Area Studies (note 27), p. 25.
30 Hall, ibid., p. 35.
31 Hall, ibid., p. 46.
32 Charles Wagley, The Study of World Areas. A Report on the National Conference, Items, 2, vol. 1 (1948), p. 1-6, here: p. 2.
33 Philip Mirowski, A History Best Served Cold. In: Isaac, Bell, Uncertain Empire (note 13), p. 61-74, here: 65.
34 Future studies on U.S. philanthropy should emphasize the different foundations’ policies. As the area studies example shows, the early Rockefeller engagement for the area studies did not follow the same policies as did the more government related politics of the Ford Foundation later. For another Rockefeller example, see Tim B. Müller, The Rockefeller Foundation, the social sciences, and the humanities in the Cold War, Journal of Cold War Studies, 15, vol. 3 (2013), p. 108-135.
35 Charles B. Fahs, Widening our Cultural Horizons, Nov. 12, 1954. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Record Group 3.2., Series 900, Folder 166, Box 31.
36 Années de création de Centres de l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, June 24, 1977. Archives EHESS, Fonds Velay, Article 1.
37 Mazon, AUX origines (note 7), p. 131. The Ministry of Education paid approximately the same amount for the years 1956/57. Further funding came from the CNRS and the Istituto italiano per il medio ed estremo oriente (TUCCI).
38 Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Paris, Éditions Raisons d’agir, 2004, p. 47.
39 Thomas H. Eliot, Lois J. Eliot, The Salzburg Seminar. The First Forty Years, Ipswich, The Ipswich Press, 1987.
40 Fernand Braudel, Réponse. In: Discours de réception de Fernand Braudel à l’Académie française et réponse de M. Maurice Druon, Paris, Arthaud, 1986, p. 106 sq.
41 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier, P.C.-P.S.U. 1945-1963, Paris, Gallimard, 1982, p. 223.
42 See the correspondence between Clemens Heller and Edward D’Arms, Feb./Mar. 1955. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Record Group 1.2., Series 500 R, Folder 95, Box 9.
43 [Statement on Heller], Dec. 9, 1954, Archives EHESS, Fonds C. Heller, Box: Fondations américaines, Folder: Fondation Rockefeller, Dossier on Paris Office.
44 [Statement on Heller], Dec. 9, 1954.
45 Grant in Aid to the Sixth Section of Paris of the EPHE to enable Prof. Fernand Braudel to visit the United States to obtain a direct acquaintance with the Organization of area studies programs and related subjects, June 30, 1955. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Record Group 1.2., Series 500 R, Folder 94, Box 9. Braudel was accompanied by two specialists in Russian studies, Jean Train and Père Henri: Grant in Aid to the Sixth section of the EPHE, Paris, France to enable Professor Jean Train to visit the Unites States in connection with teaching of Russian in area studies programs, July 7, 1955; Grant in Aid to the Sixth Section of the EPHE, Paris, France to enable R. P. Henri Chambre to visit the Unites States in connection with the development of area studies programs and related research, July 7, 1955. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Record Group 1.2., Series 500 R, Folder 94, Box 9.
46 Cristina Besio, Forschungsprojekte. Zum Organisationswandel in der Wissenschaft, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2009.
47 In Great Britain, the Scarbrough Commission argued already in 1947 for a considerable strengthening of area studies. See the Report of the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies, London Foreign Office 1947. The report was among the key materials when U.S. social scientists initiated larger national programs through the SSRC in the 1950’s, Jacob Coleman Hurewitz, The Education of J.C. Hurewitz. In: Thomas Naff (ed.), Paths to the Middle East: Ten Scholars look back, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 57-103, here: 100 sqq.
48 Grant in Aid to enable Prof. Fernand Braudel to visit the United States.
49 See also the case studies, in Rausch, Krige, American Foundations (note 17).
50 Ludovic Tournès, La fondation Rockefeller et la naissance de l'universalisme philanthropique américain, Critique internationale, 35 (2007), p. 173-197. For a representative overview, see Ludovic Tournés, Les fondations philanthropiques américaines en France au xxe siècle, Paris, Garnier, 2011.
51 Quotation from George E. Vincent (1918), in Tournés, ibid., p. 185.
52 For the history of the enquêtes since 1929, see André Burguière, L’école des Annales, une histoire intellectuelle, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2006.
53 Grant in Aid to enable Prof. Fernand Braudel to visit the United States.
54 Michael Pollar, La planification des sciences sociales, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 2, no2/3 (1976): 105-121, here: 110.
55 Christophe Charle, Les références étrangères des universitaires, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 148, no 1 (2003), p. 8-19.
56 Henri Longchambon, Les Sciences sociales en France. Un bilan, un programme, Annales ESC 13 (1958), p. 94-102. This article is an extract tram the two hundred pages report presented by Longchambon to the French government to promote the development of the French social sciences. Written by Braudel, it was signed by Longchambon in his fonction as president of the Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique et du progrès technique, see Diane Dosso, Henri Longchambon (1896-1969), secrétaire d’État de Pierre Mendès France. In: Alain Chatriot, Vincent Duclert (éd.), Le gouvernement de la recherche. Histoire d’un engagement politique, de Pierre Mendès France à Charles de Gaulle (1953-1969), Paris, La Découverte, 2006, p. 62-74; Ghislaine Bidault, Le Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique et du progrès scientifique. In: in Chatriot, Duclert, ibid., p. 75-80.
57 Braudel, La longue durée (note 1), p. 726.
58 Heike Rausch, US-amerikanische, Scientific Philanthropy‘ in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossßritannien zwischen den Weltkriegen, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 22, no 1 (2007), p. 73-98.
59 Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.
60 Luc Boltanski, Les cadres. La formation d’un groupe social Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982.
61 I am greatly indebted to the New York University (Remarque Institute) and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung for the fellowships awarded to conduct the research that is part of a hook on the history of area studies.
Auteur
Junior Professor of Contemporary European History at Freie Universität Berlin (since 2009). Main Areas of Research and Publication : Intellectual and Cultural History of Western Europe ; German-French Relations ; History and Memory ; History of the social sciences. Recent publications : « L’État et la construction d’une “formation coloniale”. Circulations intellectuelles, réseaux et constructions institutionnelles en Europe à l’âge des Empires », in : Brigitte Krulic (éd.), Savoirs et métiers de l'État : enjeux et pratiques en France et dans les États germaniques au XIXe siècle, Francfort/M., Peter Lang, 2014 ; La RDA dans les relations franco-allemandes, Bruxelles, Peter Lang, 2013 (edited together with Ulrich Pfeil). Current research projects include : Der Griff nach dem Weltwissen. Normative Ordnungen, institutioneile und kognitive Praktiken der Area Studies im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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