History
Eight leading personalities of the IPU have received Nobel Peace Prizes:
- 1901: Frédéric Passy (France)
- 1902: Charles Albert Gobat (Switzerland)
- 1903: Randal Cremer (United Kingdom)
- 1908: Fredrik Bajer (Denmark)
- 1909: Auguste Marie François Beernaert (Belgium)
- 1913: Henri La Fontaine (Belgium)
- 1921: Christian Lange (Norway)
- 1927: Ferdinand Buisson (France)
The organisation's initial objective was the arbitration of conflicts. The IPU played an important part in setting up the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Over time, its mission has evolved towards the promotion of democracy and inter-parliamentary dialogue. The IPU has worked for establishment of institutions at the inter-governmental level, including the United Nations, an organization with which it cooperates and with which it has permanent observer status.
Numerous bodies have expressed interest in the possibility of transforming the IPU into a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, among them the Committee for a Democratic UN, the German Bundestag and the Socialist International. The Liberal International also considers this as an option.
The headquarters of the union have been moved several times since its inception. Locations:
- 1892–1911: Bern (Switzerland)
- 1911–1914: Brussels (Belgium)
- 1914–1920: Oslo (Norway)
- 1921 – permanent in Geneva (Switzerland)
Read more about this topic: Inter-Parliamentary Union
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)