CERN, the particle physics lab, grew out of a UNESCO meeting
UNESCO is best known for World Heritage Sites, but its reach is stranger than that. A UNESCO gathering in Paris in December 1951 set in motion the European Council for Nuclear Research, which went on to establish CERN in 1954. The same agency once helped shift an entire Egyptian temple out of the Nile's path.
Its roots lie in the League of Nations. A 1921 resolution led to the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, created in 1922, whose members included Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, though it was a small body centred on Western Europe. The Second World War largely halted that work. While fighting continued, Allied education ministers met in London from 1942, and Britain's education minister Rab Butler did much to shape the idea. In November 1945, forty-four governments convened in London, 41 signed the constitution, and it took effect in November 1946. Julian Huxley became the first Director-General.
UNESCO, headquartered in Paris with 194 member states, works across education, the natural and social sciences, culture and communication. One early project, launched in 1947, piloted basic education in Haiti's Marbial Valley, and in 1948 the agency urged members to make primary schooling free, compulsory and universal. It also took aim at racism, starting with a 1950 statement by scientists including the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. South Africa quit in 1955, objecting to publications on its racial policies, and returned in 1994 under Nelson Mandela.
Heritage became its signature. The campaign to save the monuments of Nubia began in 1960, when the Aswan Dam threatened to flood the Great Temple of Abu Simbel; across 20 years, 22 monuments and complexes were relocated. Similar rescues followed at Borobudur and the Acropolis of Athens. That work produced the World Heritage Convention of 1972, and the first sites joined the list in 1978. Later conventions protected intangible heritage, such as living traditions, in 2003 and cultural diversity in 2005.
The free flow of ideas has been written into its constitution from the start, because wartime propaganda showed how controlling information could prime populations for aggression. The agency trained journalists from the 1950s, and its 1993 endorsement of the Windhoek Declaration on independent media led the UN to name 3 May World Press Freedom Day. In science, a 1968 conference on reconciling environment and development created the Man and the Biosphere Programme.
Source: UNESCO
