Clemens van den Berg at EHS Summer Conference in Cambridge

Clemens van den Berg has been invited to present his research at the 2018 Summer Conference of the British Ecclesiastical History Society at Sussex College, Cambridge. The general theme of the conference is ‘The Church and the Law’, in which Clemens will present his research on the development of ecumenical thought on international law in the late interwar and WW II period. Central figures in his contribution are the Swiss statesman Max Huber and the American lawyer and post-war Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who led the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. Outlining the ecumenical underpinnings of Huber and Dulles’ thought and showing how they translated their abstract rethinking of the international legal system into real political action, provides us with new insights in the transformation of the pre-war to the post-war world order. Special attention shall be given to the way in which Dulles’ Commission prefigured the post-war involvement of the United States in the reconstruction of (Western) Europe.