The “Family of Nations” and Its Racial, Cultural and Colonial Discriminations

At first, the issue of educational justice was focused on relations between individuals, but due to the pressure of the decolonisation movements it was extended to relations between peoples: the IBE and its conferences were presented as a “family of nations” whose interdependence presupposed that there was a place for all of them. The chapter shows how the IBE tried to accommodate the new aspirations of peoples and also claimed to offer a platform to all of them, in a world marked by cultural, social and ethnic prejudice. A world where, moreover, the great powers presented themselves as emblems of civilisation and its principles of justice, while at the same time appropriating the planet as a field for their confrontations, endangering populations which had long become invisible and were reduced to silence.