Weapons of Mass Distribution: UNESCO and the Impact of Books

Abstract

After World War II, for the first time in mankind’s history, an intergovernmental organization had the ambition to launch a worldwide policy in the literary field. UNESCO’s constitution says that the organization must assure “the conservation and protection of the world’s inheritance of books”, encourage “the international exchange of persons active in the fields of education, science and culture and the exchange of publications” and initiate “methods of international cooperation calculated to give the people of all countries access to the printed and published materials produced by any of them”. UNESCO therefore put in place an ambitious book policy.