This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of a critical turning point in history with long-lasting impacts on the cultural, social and political spheres of human life. Amidst the social and political unrest across the globe, on September 26th sixty-two physicists gathered at CERN to found the European Physical Society. Among these, there were the official representatives of the national physics societies of seventeen countries of both East and West Europe who signed the constitution in spite of the political divides of the Cold War. According to the main proponent of the society, Italian physicist Gilberto Bernadini, the success of the initiative was the realization of a “dream”: the institutional formation of a single European physics community, which was a representation of a culturally unified European “nation.”
This paper analyzes the foundation of the society by addressing the question of which kind of scientific internationalism the main actors were actualizing in the design and, eventually successful, realization of this idea. It will be shown that political motivations, and the notion of scientific internationalism itself, were deeply intertwined with socio-professional interests of a specific community, mostly related to the CERN environment. While the actors stressed the political character of the initiative, a major rationale for the creation of the EPS was in fact the need to solve specific issues concerning the publication venues as well as the future possibilities of cooperation and education of European physicists who still felt disadvantaged with respect to their colleagues working in the US.
