UNESCO

• 1. Introduction

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  UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was built on a conviction that wars begin in the minds of men, and that education, science, and culture are the tools to prevent them. Founded in 1945, it carries a mandate shaped directly by the wreckage of two world wars and a determination that no generation should endure them again. Today it counts 194 member states and 12 associate members, operates from its headquarters in Paris, and runs 53 regional field offices around the world. But the story of how this organization came to be, what it has managed to accomplish, and where it has stumbled reveals something more complicated than a simple story of international goodwill. How does a body that saved ancient temples from rising floodwaters also find itself at the center of Cold War information battles? How did it come to define what counts as world heritage for all of humanity? And why has the United States withdrawn from it not once, not twice, but three times?

• 2. Before UNESCO

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  The roots of UNESCO stretch back to a League of Nations resolution passed on the 21st of September 1921, which called for a commission to study whether nations could freely share cultural, educational, and scientific achievements. That body, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, came into existence in 1922. Its membership read like a roll call of early twentieth-century intellectual life: Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Robert A. Millikan, and Gonzague de Reynold all sat on it, though it remained a small commission centered largely on Western Europe. A dedicated executing agency, the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, was established in Paris in September 1924 to carry the committee's work forward. A separate body, the International Bureau of Education, had been operating since December 1925 as a non-governmental organization focused on international educational development; it would eventually join UNESCO in 1969. All of this groundwork was derailed by the onset of World War II, which largely interrupted the predecessor organizations just as international cooperation seemed most necessary. The experience of the war, and specifically the way control of information had been used to indoctrinate populations for aggression, would shape the founding document of whatever came next.

• 3. The Founding Moment

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  As the Second World War was still being fought, Allied ministers of education began meeting in London from the 16th of November 1942 onward. The Moscow Declaration of the 30th of October 1943 gave those conversations formal weight, with China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR all declaring the necessity for an international organization. Proposals from the Dumbarton Oaks Conference followed on the 9th of October 1944. The decisive meeting, a United Nations Conference for the establishment of an educational and cultural organization, convened in London from the 1st to the 16th of November 1945, with forty-four governments represented. A central figure in shaping the idea was Rab Butler, the British Minister of Education, who wielded considerable influence over what the organization would become. Forty-one countries signed the Constitution of UNESCO at that conference, and a Preparatory Commission was established to bridge the gap. The Constitution came into force on the 4th of November 1946, when the twentieth ratification was deposited. The first General Conference, held from the 19th of November to the 10th of December 1946, elected Julian Huxley as the first Director-General. Also joining at that session was Blake R. Van Leer, a United States Army colonel, university president, and civil rights advocate.

• 4. Saving What Could Be Lost

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  One of the most dramatic tests of UNESCO's cultural mandate came in 1960, when the organization launched the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia. The reason was the Aswan Dam then under construction in Egypt, whose rising waters threatened to submerge the Great Temple of Abu Simbel permanently. Over the course of a twenty-year effort, 22 monuments and architectural complexes were physically relocated. That campaign set a template for international heritage rescue, and was followed by similar efforts at Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan, Fes in Morocco, Kathmandu in Nepal, Borobudur in Indonesia, and the Acropolis of Athens in Greece. The organizational learning from those campaigns fed directly into the adoption in 1972 of the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. The World Heritage Committee was formally established in 1976, and the first sites were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1978. Subsequent conventions expanded the framework further: the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted by member states in 2003, and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions followed in 2005. When Edinburgh was designated the first UNESCO City of Literature in 2007 and Iowa City took the same title in 2008, those designations belonged to the same broader ambition to map and protect what human civilization has made.

• 5. Press Freedom and Information Power

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  "The free flow of ideas by word and image" was written into UNESCO's Constitution at its founding, a direct response to the wartime manipulation of information. In the years immediately after World War II, the organization concentrated on reconstruction and on identifying where the infrastructure for mass communication was absent. Training and education for journalists began in the 1950s. But by the late 1970s, a dispute had opened up over the concept of a "New World Information and Communication Order", a push by some member states for a more egalitarian global media landscape that critics in the United States and United Kingdom viewed as a threat to press freedom. UNESCO responded by creating the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, which produced the 1980 MacBride report, named after its chair, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Sean MacBride. That same year, UNESCO established the International Programme for the Development of Communication to support media development in developing countries. The argument over whether UNESCO was a platform for free expression or an instrument of censorship was never fully resolved, and it contributed to the United States withdrawing in 1984 and the United Kingdom following in 1985. A breakthrough came in 1993, when UNESCO's General Conference endorsed the Windhoek Declaration on media independence and pluralism. The UN General Assembly then declared the date of the declaration's adoption, the 3rd of May, as World Press Freedom Day. Since 1997, UNESCO has awarded the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize every year on that date.

• 6. Withdrawal and Return

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  The United States first withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, citing what it called the organization's highly politicized nature, hostility toward free-market and free-press institutions, and poor management under Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal. Five years later, in 1989, US Congressman Jim Leach told a congressional subcommittee that the withdrawal had been "nuts" and that the United States had won, not lost, the battles it had engaged in inside the organization. The United States rejoined on the 1st of October 2003. When Palestine was admitted as a member in 2011, existing US law required the country to stop contributing to any UN organization that accepted Palestine as a full member; that contribution had accounted for roughly 22% of UNESCO's budget. Two years of non-payment cost the United States and Israel their voting rights in 2013. Israel withdrew entirely on the 31st of December 2018, citing what its ambassador Danny Danon described as an organization that "continually rewrites history, including by erasing the Jewish connection to Jerusalem." The United States withdrew the same day. In 2023, the United States announced it would rejoin and pay its $600 million in back dues. It was readmitted that July by the General Conference. By July 2025, however, Donald Trump had informed the Director-General that the United States intended to withdraw again, effective at the end of 2026. Nicaragua made the same announcement on the 4th of May 2025. Russia, for its part, was not renewed to the executive committee in 2023 for the first time, after failing to secure sufficient votes.

• 7. Race, Rights, and Scientific Statements

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  Among UNESCO's less-publicized contributions was its sustained campaign against scientific racism. Starting with a declaration by anthropologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, in 1950 and running through the 1978 Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice, the organization systematically used its platform to challenge the pseudo-scientific foundations of racial hierarchy. In 1955, the Republic of South Africa withdrew from UNESCO, saying that some of the organization's publications amounted to interference in the country's racial problems. It rejoined in 1994 under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. UNESCO also issued the Seville Statement on Violence in 1989, which formally rejected the idea that humans are biologically predisposed to organized violence. In education, the trajectory was equally long: a 1947 pilot project in the Marbial Valley in Haiti was followed by a 1949 mission to Afghanistan, a 1948 recommendation that member countries make free primary education compulsory and universal, a global movement launched at the 1990 World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, and a commitment made at the 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, to achieve basic education for all by 2015. The World Declaration on Higher Education was adopted on the 9th of October 1998. An intergovernmental meeting in Paris in December 1951 produced the European Council for Nuclear Research, which later became CERN in 1954, a connection that illustrates how far UNESCO's scientific reach extended beyond its most visible cultural programs.