1950 – 2000

One of the Centre’s first initiatives was to bring together in Geneva, on 12 December 1950, representatives of nuclear research institutes from six countries and representatives of UNESCO, in application of a proposal made by the Nobel Prize in Physics, Louis de Broglie, at the Lausanne Conference. One of the resolutions adopted at the Lausanne Conference instructed the future Centre to “study the creation of an Institute of Nuclear Science oriented towards applications in everyday life”.

As soon as it was established, the Commission for Scientific Cooperation of the European Centre for Culture, chaired by Raoul Dautry, General Administrator of the French Atomic Energy Commission, set to work. The physicist Pierre Auger played an important role. The task was exemplary of the ideas of subsidiarity and functional integration by “spillover” (practised at the same time by Jean Monnet to create the European Coal and Steel Community): it was a question of noting that the various countries did not individually have the resources to develop this new source of energy following the example of the United States or the USSR. It was therefore imperative to organise and institutionalise cooperation in order to catch up and avoid a brain drain. These challenges are still present today in the field of new information and knowledge technologies.

The meeting of 12 December 1950 organised by the European Centre for Culture made it possible to identify the features of the future CERN’s mission and the criteria that should guide the choice of its future location. It also suggested that UNESCO should take charge of the first stages of implementation, in particular by bringing together the governments concerned. The following year, in 1951, UNESCO submitted a project for a nuclear research laboratory to be built in Geneva. An intergovernmental conference led to the final decision on 15 February 1952 to create the “European Council for Nuclear Research” (CERN), which initially comprised eleven States.

With the composer and conductor Igor Markevitch, the Centre organised a meeting in December 1951 at which representatives of the music festivals of Bayreuth, Aix-en-Provence, Perugia, Vienna, Berlin, Lucerne, Florence, Besançon and Strasbourg were present. They created an Association based in Geneva, in the Centre’s premises, with the aim of disseminating information common to all these festivals and of generating synergies and complementarities in the programming, in order to avoid repetition and duplication. For the first time, the festivals, important tools for promoting European culture (and not without economic spin-offs), spoke with one voice to achieve, wrote the Centre in 1952, a genuine ‘European concert’.

In addition to regular meetings and an information and promotion effort materialised in a common brochure, there were, with the Centre’s help, colloquiums for reflection, such as in 1956 on “The role of festivals in the cultural life of Europe”. Renamed the “European Festivals Association” (which also made it possible to include theatre and dance), the association, which moved to Belgium in the early 2000s (first to Brussels, then to Ghent), now has 90 festivals in 31 European countries and indirectly disseminates information on approximately 300 festivals in Europe.

In the early 1960s, the European Centre of Culture began the process of creating an Institute of European Studies in its premises at the Villa Moynier (Parc Mon-Repos) in Geneva. The negotiations, which involved the University, the cantonal authorities responsible for public education and the Graduate Institute of International Studies, at that time directed by the historian Jacques Freymond, were concluded in 1963, when the new Institute, the first of its kind in Switzerland, began its academic year.

The Institute was interdisciplinary, with three branches forming as many different approaches to Europe and European construction: history and culture (Prof. Denis de Rougemont); political science and European institutions (Prof. Dusan Sidjanski); economics (Prof. Henri Schwamm). Denis de Rougemont was at the time (and would be until his academic retirement in 1977) Director of both the Institute and the European Centre for Culture, which clearly shows the links between the two institutions.

In 1992, the Institute was transferred to the University and became the ‘European Institute of the University of Geneva’ until 2013, when it was replaced – still within the University of Geneva – by an ‘Institute of Global Studies’ within which there is a ‘Denis de Rougemont Pole of European Studies’.

In 1953, the construction of Europe was at a turning point, since it was at that time a question of providing it with a defence community (draft EDC treaty) as well as a political union. The Centre made its contribution by bringing together a group of about twenty personalities, which was to be called the Group of Twenty. Its members included Salvador de Madariaga, Raymond Aron, the French essayist and futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel, the Rector of the College of Bruges Henri Brugmans, the French jurist Georges Vedel, the Belgian jurist and politician Fernand Dehousse, the Belgian sociologist and politician Henri Janne, the German publicist and historian of Nazism Eugen Kogon, and the organiser of the Hague Congress, the Pole Jozef Retinger, etc.The group met regularly for more than a year and periodically published the fruit of its reflections in a brochure edited by the Centre and entitled Le Courrier fédéral, six issues of which appeared between April 1953 and May 1954. The activity came to an end after the French Parliament rejected the EDC Treaty in August 1954.

Shortly afterwards, the Centre led a similar initiative, this time with a group of some twenty economists from seven countries, whose mission was to reflect on ways of integrating the European economies, in particular by creating a large market without borders. Their work was published in Paris (by Plon) in a book entitled “Demain l’Europe sans frontières? Three of the Centre’s Bulletins also bear witness to these activities: “L’Europe s’inscrit dans les faits” (1956), “Promesses du Marché commun” (1957), as well as a “question and answer” presentation of the two Treaties of Rome, EEC and Euratom (1958). In 1976, the Centre set up a think-tank, called the “Cadmos Group”, made up of fourteen people from various academic backgrounds and disciplines, in order to carry out a comprehensive review of European integration and to propose a number of guidelines for the future. The fruit of these reflections, for which Denis de Rougemont was responsible for the final drafting, was published in 1979 in Paris by Stock, under the title “Report on the state of the European Union”. In the same vein, at the beginning of the Maastricht Treaty and with a view to a future enlargement towards Central and Eastern Europe, the Centre organised in April 1994 the first “Denis de Rougemont Meetings” on the theme “Where is Europe today”, the proceedings of which it published the following year.

From the second half of the 1960s onwards, the regions were to occupy a growing place in Denis de Rougemont’s thinking and in the Centre’s activities. It was a question of redefining the approach of the European Federation to incorporate the regional fact, which was very important in particular because it brought Europe closer to the citizen and was the bearer of new forms of civic commitment. Moreover, the cross-border regions that were emerging at the same time – particularly in Basel and Geneva – provided an opportunity for concrete experiences that enabled lessons to be learned about the new relationship that was being established between Europe and the Regions.

Between 1967 and 1975, five of the Centre’s Bulletins were devoted entirely to the theme of the Europe of the Regions, i.e. the Regions directly conceived within the framework of the European Federation, two of these Bulletins being more specifically concerned with cross-border regions (a meeting organised in Strasbourg with the Council of Europe in 1972 and a colloquium with the AIEE in 1975). In 1982, the Centre organised an international colloquium on “Regional Policies in Europe”, which was published in 1985 by L.E.P. in Lausanne under the direction of Dusan Sidjanski and Charles Ricq, who was responsible for regional studies at the Centre.

In 1958, the Centre initiated the creation of a pool of publishers called EDITEUROPA, based on a charter by which these various publishers undertook to publish, in their respective languages, works on Europe which had been identified by the Centre. In 1954, the Centre published a European Bibliography, which was updated and expanded in 1959 under the title Publishing and Europe. It is introduced by these words of Denis de Rougemont: “It is clear that Europe will not be made with books, but will it be made without them? For it was largely through them that it was defeated.

In the field of studies on the construction of Europe, the Centre initiated a pool of law and economics publishers, grouped under the name EUROLIBRI. In 1964, a new European bibliography was published, listing 2,000 titles of works on Europe. 150 of these, considered to be basic works, were the subject of detailed reviews in order to enable booksellers to more easily put together their shop windows during the European Book Weeks initiated by the Centre during the major book fairs (the initiative was launched at the Frankfurt Fair). In 1966, the Centre published a Bilan des activités culturelles au service de l’Europe, listing all the cultural initiatives aimed at Europe between 1949 and 1964.

In 1952, the Centre initiated the creation of a pool of six national news agencies (French, German, Italian, Belgian, Swiss and Luxembourg) to disseminate news and background papers on Europe. In 1956, it created European News, a press service on European issues in three languages, whose dispatches were distributed to more than a thousand subscribing newspapers and periodicals.

A Conference Service was set up in 1957 to provide lists of speakers and to organise several hundred conferences on Europe over the next two decades.

In the 1990s, the Centre launched, in partnership with the publisher Actes Sud, a series of “Que Sais-je?” on European issues, in the form of small books of about 80 pages, assembled in thematic boxes. The collection was called L’Europe en bref. Seven boxes containing a total of 27 small books were published between 1994 and 2002.