was a firm believer in international cooperation to promote both the spread of knowledge and peace between nations. A self-identified liberal, universalist and pacifist, his endeavor to catalog and classify is an expression of the commitment to the Eurocentric project to structure knowledge according to universal categories and taxonomies, of which the Universal Decimal Classification is an example. The Union of International Associations, which he had founded in 1907 with Henri La Fontaine, later participated to the development of both the League of Nations and the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which was later merged into UNESCO. At several occasions, Otlet published racist statements dressed up as scientific facts, starting at the beginning of his career with L'Afrique Aux Noirs (1888) where he argued that white people or 'westernized' blacks were to be tasked with 'civilising' Africa. Similarly, in Monde (1935), near the end of his life, he claimed the biological superiority of white people. His interest in advancing 'The African Issue' was fuelled by a firm conviction of the superiority of European culture and intelligence which fitted the Enlightenment project that he was dedicated to. Otlet’s organisational support to the 1921 Pan-African Congress at the Palais Mondial (later: Mundaneum) therefore needs to be considered in connection with the racist statements that he published both before and after the event. In 1933, Otlet proposed building in Belgium near Antwerp a "gigantic neutral World City" to employ a massive number of workers, in order to alleviate the unemployment generated by the Great Depression. Fade into obscurity Otlet died in 1944, not long before the end of World War II, having seen his major project, the Mundaneum, shuttered, and having lost all his funding sources. According to Otlet scholar W. Boyd Rayward: "The First World War marked the end of the intellectual as well as sociopolitical era in which Otlet had functioned hitherto with remarkable success. After the war, he and his schemes were never taken seriously except with the circle of his disciples. He quickly lost the support of the Belgian government. In the late 1920s he faced the defection of his followers in the International Institute of Documentation, as the International Institute of Bibliography " And: "Perhaps at one level, Otlet, is best regarded as a fin de siècle figure whose work enjoyed a considerable measure of acceptance and support at home and abroad before World War I. But after