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New Connections for an Old Continent: Rail, Road and Electricity in the League of Nations Organisation for Communications and Transit

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Materializing Europe

Abstract

During the Second World War, former League of Nations official John E. Wheeler contemplated what international organizations would look like after the war’s end. At that time he was authoring a study for the prestigious London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs on pre-First World War and interwar organizations with a strong focus on infrastructures.1 Wheeler argued that ‘there is no official European body whose field of activity extends to all branches of transport and communications, but the League of Nations Transit Organisation, […], has concerned itself very largely with Europe’.2 The ‘Transit Organisation’ to which Wheeler referred was the Organisation for Communications and Transit (OCT), a body not originally founded with a European scope, but as part of the universal League of Nations (1919).3 Wheeler’s suggestion that the OCT might have been an effective body in dealing with European affairs raises two important and, as we will argue, closely related issues about the League of Nations: its ‘European’ focus and its overall success (or rather failure) as an organization. Both these issues are central to the way in which historical scholarship has framed the League up to now. By taking the OCT’s activities in the field of infrastructure as central rather than peripheral aspects of the League’s method and mission, we look here to revise these narratives. In so doing, we point to the ways in which technology, and in particular technological expertise, formed a central plank in efforts to integrate and unify Europe before the Second World War.

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Notes

  1. Sir Osborne Mance and J.E. Wheeler, International Telecommunications (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1943)

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  2. Sir Osborne Mance, International Road Transport, Postal, Electricity and Miscellaneous Questions (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1946)

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  3. Sir Osborne Mance, Frontiers, Peace Treaties, and International Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1946)

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  4. Sir Osborne Mance and Ralph Wedgwood and Wheeler, International Rail Transport (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1946).

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  5. The notion of experiment is invoked in Robert Cecil, A Great Experiment: An Autobiography by Viscount Cecil (London: Jonathan Cape 1941).

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  8. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray 2001), p. 92.

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  9. ‘Technical’ in League terminology covered the work of its technical committees, including anything from public health and education to maritime buoys or the unification of statistics. In many ways the word was used as an antonym of ’political’: see Pitman B. Potter, ‘Note on the Distinction between Political and Technical Questions’, in Political Science Quarterly 50(2) (1935), pp. 264–71.

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  10. For a recent review of studies on the League of Nations, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations (review essay)’, The American Historical Review 112(4) (2007), pp. 1091–117. She also underlines the lack of a study on the OCT.

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  11. A similar opinion is expressed by F.P. Walters, the author of A History of the League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press 1960, reprinted from 1952 as one volume), p. 180.

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  27. This was reflected in the WEC’s closing resolution, stressing how ‘the Conference has fully carried out its task of setting forth the principles and recommendations best fitted to contribute to an improvement of the economic situation of the world and in particular to that of Europe, thus contributing at the same time to the strengthening of peaceful relations among nations’, LoN, World Economic Conference: Discussion and Declarations on the Report of the Conference of the Council of the League of Nations on June 16th 1927 (Geneva: LoN 1927), p. 14.

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  45. Mance, Frontiers, pp. 0–71. It co-operated closely with the International Union of Railways (UIC, 1922) and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC, 1919) in promoting the unification of transport statistics, and the revision of the Berne Convention on the Transport of Goods by Rail (Convention Internationale Merchandises CIM, 1890). Laurent Tissot, ‘Naissance d’ une Europe Ferroviaire: La Convention Internationale de Berne (1890)’, in Michèle Merger and Dominique Barjot (eds) Les Entreprises et Leurs Réseaux: Hommes, Capitaux, Techniques et Pouvoirs XIXe-XXe Siècles: Mélanges en honneur de Francois Caron (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne 1998), pp. 283–95.

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  48. This can be read by the fact that two publications on the European electricity sector both reprinted the Convention; see Kittler, Der Internationale, p. 21ff, and Joseph Legge, Grundsätzliches und Tatsächliches zu den Elektrizitätswirtschaften in Europa (Gebrüder Lensing 1931), p. 191ff.

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  49. Lagendijk, Electrifying, p.76 ff. A vital link between the industry and politics was Dannie Heineman, a friend of Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Europeanist Paul Hymans, who proposed the study to the CEEU. See letter dated 19 January 1931, Collection Hymans, #11440 I, Diplobel. Heineman chaired the Brussels-based Société Financière de Transport et d’Entreprises Industrielles (SOFINA) and was a close friend and associate of one of the drafters of a general plan for the electrification of Europe, Oskar Oliven. See Oliven, ‘Europas Großkraftlinien. Vorschlag eines europäischen Höchtspannungsnetzes’, Zeitschrift des Vereines Deutscher Ingenieure 74(25) (21 June 1930), pp. 875–9.

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  51. ICC, Proceedings of the Congress, Amsterdam, July 1929, Supplement 2 to World Trade (Paris: ICC) (October 1929), p. 69.

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  52. LoN Document, CCT/CR/024(1), ‘Road Committee, Minutes Fourth Session (25–28 April 1927)’, p. 4; LoN Document, C.234.M.102.1931.VIII, p. 9. For a more elaborate discussion on road signs, see Frank Schipper, ‘Unravelling Hieroglyphs: Urban traffic signs and the League of Nations’, Métropoles 6 (2009), pp. 65–100.

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Authors
  1. Frank Schipper
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  2. Vincent Lagendijk
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  3. Irene Anastasiadou
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, The Netherlands

    Alexander Badenoch (Lecturer in Media and Culture Studies) (Lecturer in Media and Culture Studies)

  2. Maastricht University, The Netherlands

    Andreas Fickers (Associate Professor Comparative Media History) (Associate Professor Comparative Media History)

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© 2010 Frank Schipper, Vincent Lagendijk and Irene Anastasiadou

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Schipper, F., Lagendijk, V., Anastasiadou, I. (2010). New Connections for an Old Continent: Rail, Road and Electricity in the League of Nations Organisation for Communications and Transit. In: Badenoch, A., Fickers, A. (eds) Materializing Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_7

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31313-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29231-4

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

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