Editing Universal Esperanto Association (section)

=== UEA after World War II ===
[[File:1937-01-ei-01.jpg|right|thumb|upright=1|Front page of the IEL organ in 1937, announcing a house in Heronsgate becoming the IEL headquarters]]

The international Esperanto movement survived World War II with its IEL headquarters in [[Heronsgate]], near London. Hans Jakob, from the Genevan UEA, tricked the IEL board into a merger of IEL and the rump Genevan UEA, falsely stating that the wealthy Eduard Stettler had left a huge sum to the UEA.<ref>Sikosek, Marcus: ''Die neutrale Sprache. Eine politische Geschichte des Esperanto-Weltbundes''. Diss. Utrecht 2006. Skonpres, Bydgoszcz 2006, pp. 234, 325.</ref>

[[Ivo Lapenna]], a London law professor originally coming from Croatia, in the 1950s reshaped the association significantly. The office moved from Heronsgate to Rotterdam, the board since then has a ''general secretary'', the ''Esperanto'' editor is a paid position. After 1956, the association in 1980 was again (and since then for the last time) given new statutes.

In the decades after the war, the staff grew. Before the war, it was common to have a director with only one or two assistants. After the war, the UEA at times employed ten or more people (e.g. a congress manager, a book seller, a librarian.)

Lapenna introduced a ''prestige policy'',<ref>Forster, Peter Glover: ''The Esperanto Movement'', Diss. Hull 1977, The Hague et al. 1982 (Hull 1977), pp. 233/234.</ref> for which he was willing to spend considerable funds. This included signature campaigns for Esperanto and efforts to make UNESCO support Esperanto in a moral way, which Lapenna accomplished in 1954 at the UNESCO conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. This made him famous in Esperanto circles as the ''hero of Montevideo''. After having served for more than 30 years on the board of UEA, Lapenna left the association in 1974 and created a rival organization (''Neŭtrala Esperanto-Movado'').

During the [[Cold War]], UEA had to deal with the difficulty of having national organizations and individual members in communist countries. Additionally, the work of Esperanto organizations in Western countries was sometimes influenced by the Cold War: In the early 50s, the American Esperanto leader George Allan Connor denounced dissenting members of his national organization as communists. His national organization and he as an individual were eventually thrown out of UEA. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its allied states between 1989 and 1991 completely changed the international situation.{{Explain|date=February 2021|reason=In what way did it change, and why exactly?}}