International Socialist Bureau
국제사회주의사무국
The permanent executive and liaison body of the Second International. Set up in Brussels by decision of the Paris congress of 1900, it brought together representatives of the national parties between congresses. Emile Vandervelde was its chairman and Camille Huysmans its secretary, and Lenin sat on it for the RSDLP from 1905. After its last plenary meeting on 29–30 July 1914 the war left it unable to function; it was hostile to the Zimmerwald movement, and after the war it led via the Berne conference of 1919 to the Labour and Socialist International of 1923.
In depth
From congresses to a permanent body
For years after its founding in 1889 the Second International was only a series of periodic congresses without a permanent organisation, each organised by the host party of the next congress. The Paris congress of 1900 decided to set up a permanent Bureau meeting periodically between congresses and a permanent secretariat in Brussels. Each national party sent two delegates (in practice one to three at a time), and between sessions the Executive Committee of the Belgian Labour Party directed the Bureau. Emile Vandervelde was its chairman and Camille Huysmans its secretary.
The Bureau held 16 plenary meetings in all, from the first in Brussels in December 1901 to the last in Brussels on 29–30 July 1914. Lenin was a member from 1905 as representative of the RSDLP, and from June 1914, on his proposal, Maxim Litvinov represented its Central Committee.
The collapse of 1914 and Zimmerwald
The last meeting at the end of July 1914 did not prevent the war. When German troops occupied most of Belgium, the Executive Committee moved its headquarters to The Hague and added Dutch members, among them Pieter Jelles Troelstra and Henri van Kol. Fearing that an unrepresentative meeting would mean the dissolution of the International, it put off calling a full meeting and confined itself to separate meetings with the parties of the belligerent countries.
Lenin held that in the war the Bureau had become a pliable tool of the social-chauvinists. The Zimmerwald Manifesto of 1915 likewise noted that the socialist parties and the International Socialist Bureau had failed in the obligations arising from the Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Basel resolutions, and Lenin called the International Socialist Commission set up at Zimmerwald "a practically new International Socialist Bureau", founded against the wishes of the old one. The Bureau was hostile to the Zimmerwald movement: Huysmans ridiculed the Zimmerwaldians as unrepresentative "amateurs" and reportedly travelled to Britain and France to dissuade socialists there from attending the Kienthal Conference of 1916.
The Stockholm attempt and after
After the Russian February Revolution of 1917 the Bureau's Dutch members and Huysmans went to Stockholm, where with Scandinavian socialists they formed the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee and tried without success to convene a general socialist conference. In November 1918 Huysmans worked with Allied socialists to convene a conference of the socialist parties of the former belligerents, which became the Berne Conference of 1919. The Second International revived at Berne merged with the Vienna Union (the "Two-and-a-Half International") at Hamburg in 1923 to form the Labour and Socialist International.