Los estudios internacionales en América Latina: realizaciones y desafíos

Arnold TOY.'Ie< I THE STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY HJSTORY, POllNDlNG Of THE flRST... later it comes to action, goíng to war for instance, and it will have to get the eleetorate and the people behind it, and if the electorate have been kept in the dark about what the government has been dOing, about the government's poliey, the ehances are that they would rejeet the government's policy. This might have happened in BrHain in August 1914, only of eourse it did not happen. This tension between the need for publie relations, the confidence between the government department and the public, on the one hand, and the need for secrecy and security on the other hand, still continues. And 1 think the British Foreign Office still puts seeurity aboye public relations. After each war the privilege of the victors was to refuse to publish their own official documents relating to the war. But they insisted on publishing German official documents because Germany was a defeated country, and they could demand that the German archives be opened. The result was that, for quite a time, documents dealing with each of the wars from the German point of view -the defeated country's point of view- were accessible to the public, whereas documents relating to the victorious country's point of view were inaccessible, with the result that the story was had through documents representing the German's point of view, which was rather a curious effect of the insistence on security at the price of public relations. Let me come back now to the history of the Institute that was founded in Paris in 1919. at the course of the Peace Conference. It was originally founded as a joint Anglo-United States Institute. But purely for administra– tive réasons beeause it was so difficult to adminístrate it, to manage an institute which contained members on both sides of the Atlantic, it divided itself after a bit into two separate international institutes: The Couneil on Foreign Relations and the Institute of International Affairs in London. There was no disagreement between us, we divided purely for this administrative reason and we have been sister institutes ever since then, and in the most close and amicable relations with each other. And in very friendly relations with similar institutes founded later on in Franee and, after the second World War in Germany, and in a number of othéf countries as well. BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE INSTlTUTES: FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE The people who took the initiative in the American and the British Institute, the temporary officials who took the initiative in founding what turned into these two institutes, laid down two fundamental principies, to whieh both institutes have been faithful ever since -and it is now nearly half a century ago. These two principies may not suít eonditions in other eountries. Every country has its own particular form of tife, its own particular. form of relations between the government and the people, but anyway, it might 23