In this paper I will consider the format and purposes of the conferences organised by the biggest and most impactful international organisation created during the Second World War: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). UNRRA’s many conferences, ranging from small meetings with scientific advisers to big diplomatic gatherings that debated and ratified UNRRA’s policy, provide plenty of reasons why historians of science should pay more attention to the history of conferences. Conferences in all their variety have a long history as meetings of informed minds with the aims to recalibrate terms, solve problems, achieve professional coherence and define who is a member of the club. UNRRA, as a formally ‘technical’ organisation, adapted the format of scientific conferences to solve intractable political problems, while at the same time drawing on older ideas about political congresses to create and steer technical consensus. One of the purposes of this paper therefore will be to point to the dual traffic of ideas and influences, between the political and scientific realms, shaping the mid-20th century conferences of international organisations such as UNRRA.

In the postwar era scientific conferences became ubiquitous and increasingly very large. As a reaction to this development, the Nobel Foundation in 1965 instituted the self-consciously elitist Nobel Symposia, still a going concern with around 160 meetings organized so far. The areas covered by the Nobel Symposia have mainly been those represented by the Nobel Prizes, including the prize in economic science founded in 1969. But issues of broader intellectual and social significance have sometimes been in focus as well. Using a frontstage-backstage approach this paper will examine the origins of the symposia – how they were conceived from a scientific as well as a political perspective, how support for the project was established nationally and internationally, and how the first symposia were organized and staged. A central question is that of exclusivity, how the symposia were imagined and staged as platforms for elite science and as a breeding ground for future elites. Particular attention will be paid to the 1969 symposium on “The place of values in a world of facts” which constituted the first but not the last example of how the symposia were used to stage more broadly conceived elite summits grappling with issues seen as important from the perspective of global development.

In 1921 and 1922 the Utrecht-based chemist Ernst Cohen organized two informal international conferences. Their aim was to break the boycott of scientists from the former Central Powers that was the official policy of the new international scientific organizations established in the wake of the First World War. Like many scientists from formerly neutral countries, Cohen rejected that policy and tried to reunite his German and Austrian colleagues with their French, Belgian, British, Russian, and American counterparts. The two Utrecht meetings were meant as an “experiment” at such reintegration. In this paper I examine not so much the success of this attempt, but primarily how it was done. By what means did Cohen et al. try to re-establish a broken community? Precisely because this was the only objective of the two meetings, and their subject-matter was relatively unimportant, they offer a window on the mechanisms of community-formation at conferences. What was articulated, for example, at the speeches and toasts? What was the function of the excursions and banquets with courses named after famous chemists? What was the role of spouses in the meetings? And what was the meaning of the various papers, on subjects like “free radicals” and “bonding through light”, for the social aims of the conferences? These rituals have to be situated not only against the background of the war and its rifts, but also in the light of an elite culture of academic scientists faced with their increasingly important, and problematic, industrial connections.