The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914: Component under Cyclic Load and Dimension Design with Required Reliability (Palgrave Studies in Economic History) 3031002954, 9783031002953

Table of contents :
Preface and Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction: European Economic Integration and International Coordination in the First Globalisation Era, 1850–1914
The Transnational Making of the Modern State
The Politics of European Economic Integration
Structure and Aim of the Book
References
2 European Economic Integration before 1914—A Closer Look
International Economy or European Economy?
Measuring Economic Integration
Conclusion
References
3 The European Making of National Public Services—Posts and Telegraphs
State-run Public Services
Negotiating Interdependence
The International Telegraph Union
The Universal Postal Union
The Politics of Technocratic Internationalism
Cross-Subsidies: The Transnational Funding of National Networks
Imperialism and International Cooperation Made Compatible—Administrative Sovereignty
Private Companies
Europe, a Technological Zone Apart
Conclusion
References
4 Inventing Foreign Patents in Globalising Europe
Patents during the Second Industrial Revolution
Knowledge-based Economy
The State as the Guarantor
Patents and International Trade
The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883)
Drivers of National Patent Laws—A Coproduction of National and International Incentives
Patent as a Natural, Individual Right?
Patents in the Globalised World: International Participation and Pressure
Patents and Knowledge Distribution
Conclusion
References
5 Keeping International Order in Good Health: Plant Protection
Fighting Potato Late Blight
Fighting the Great Wine Blight
Protecting Plants: Certificates vs. Quarantine
Conclusion
References
6 Social Policy—From a Prisoner’s Dilemma to a European Cartel
The Three Incentives That Formed National Social Policies
From the Social Question to the Protection of Human Capital
Competition and Trade Dependence
European Labour Migration
Mechanisms of Convergence
Power Relations and Negotiations
Observation, Learning and Symbolic Rivalry
What about International Players?
Conclusion: Social Policy and Globalisation
References
7 Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914 Yaman Kouli Léonard Laborie

Palgrave Studies in Economic History

Series Editor Kent Deng, London School of Economics, London, UK

Palgrave Studies in Economic History is designed to illuminate and enrich our understanding of economies and economic phenomena of the past. The series covers a vast range of topics including financial history, labour history, development economics, commercialisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, modernisation, globalisation, and changes in world economic orders.

Yaman Kouli · Léonard Laborie

The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914

Yaman Kouli Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Düsseldorf, Germany

Léonard Laborie French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), UMR Sirice Paris, France

ISSN 2662-6497 ISSN 2662-6500 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Economic History ISBN 978-3-031-00295-3 ISBN 978-3-031-00296-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book started off as an article. Yaman was a Feodor Lynen fellow (Humboldt Foundation) at the Sirice research unit in Paris and benefitted from the facilities at the German Historical Institute in the French capital. During one of many coffees, we were ingenuously discussing how to formulate an article that clarified the notion of European integration before World War I. We were focussed on specific fields of research, yet we also wanted to see the bigger picture. Quite quickly, though, we had to accept that an article would not suffice to say what we wanted to, so what began as a modest paper escalated into a book. Therefore, we took up Palgrave on its offer to write a book that tackles the question of how European nation-states, European integration and globalisation were linked to one another. What appeared to be easy at first developed into an endeavour that forced us to spend many hours in one room or—because of the COVID19 pandemic—in front of a monitor during countless online meetings. The structure of this book was based on our expertise. Yaman wrote the chapters on economic integration (2), patents (4) and social policy (6). Léonard was responsible for the chapters on international communication (3) and plant protection (5). We are glad that Palgrave accepted our proposal to publish this book and include it in their Studies in Economic History. We are particularly thankful to those who motivated us to meet deadlines. The result is a book that we hope achieves two things: offers stand-alone chapters that v

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

shed some light on specific developments and—these read altogether— develop the bigger picture. Düsseldorf, Germany Paris, France

Yaman Kouli Léonard Laborie

Contents

1

2

3

Introduction: European Economic Integration and International Coordination in the First Globalisation Era, 1850–1914 The Transnational Making of the Modern State The Politics of European Economic Integration Structure and Aim of the Book References

1 3 6 10 16

European Economic Integration before 1914—A Closer Look International Economy or European Economy? Measuring Economic Integration Conclusion References

21 22 23 29 30

The European Making of National Public Services—Posts and Telegraphs State-run Public Services Negotiating Interdependence The International Telegraph Union The Universal Postal Union The Politics of Technocratic Internationalism Cross-Subsidies: The Transnational Funding of National Networks

31 34 37 40 44 50 54

vii

viii

CONTENTS

Imperialism and International Cooperation Made Compatible—Administrative Sovereignty Private Companies Europe, a Technological Zone Apart Conclusion References 4

5

6

56 59 61 66 67 73 80 80 84 85

Inventing Foreign Patents in Globalising Europe Patents during the Second Industrial Revolution Knowledge-based Economy The State as the Guarantor Patents and International Trade The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883) Drivers of National Patent Laws—A Coproduction of National and International Incentives Patent as a Natural, Individual Right? Patents in the Globalised World: International Participation and Pressure Patents and Knowledge Distribution Conclusion References

94 96 99 100

Keeping International Order in Good Health: Plant Protection Fighting Potato Late Blight Fighting the Great Wine Blight Protecting Plants: Certificates vs. Quarantine Conclusion References

105 107 109 115 117 118

Social Policy—From a Prisoner’s Dilemma to a European Cartel The Three Incentives That Formed National Social Policies From the Social Question to the Protection of Human Capital Competition and Trade Dependence European Labour Migration

86 89 89

121 130 130 134 137

CONTENTS

7

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Mechanisms of Convergence Power Relations and Negotiations Observation, Learning and Symbolic Rivalry What about International Players? Conclusion: Social Policy and Globalisation References

138 138 143 148 151 153

Conclusion

159

Index

165

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

3.4 3.5 5.1 5.2

Density of rail tracks and telegraphy (1900) Integration-Index (unweighted, 1880–1913) Market integration (index, unweighted average, 1880–1913) Trade with outer European countries Identity booklet, Universal Postal Union. Issued in France, 1892 For the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Postal Union in 1924, the German Post Office commemorated Heinrich von Stephan (1831–1897) On 25 December 1898, the letter rate between some parts of the British empire was reduced to one penny ‘The postal rate in Europe’. Postcard, before 1906 ‘Synoptic Europe of Posts and Telegraphs’, 1881 Mapping Phytophthora infestans Europe. Phylloxeric map of 1877

13 24 25 26 33

48 63 64 65 108 113

xi

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table Table Table Table

2.2 4.1 4.2 6.1

European integration indexes for 1880, 1896, 1908 and 1913 Subindexes for 1880, 1900 and 1913 Patents per capita Share of foreign patent holders Labour market regulation in Europe until 1913

27 28 76 77 125

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: European Economic Integration and International Coordination in the First Globalisation Era, 1850–1914

Abstract The starting point for this book-project is the assumption that intergovernmental coordination during the last third of the nineteenth century, which was undoubtedly dominated by European states, was a legal instrument for monitoring global trade and market integration. This publication explicitly explores the question of whether there was a common European strategy behind this. It will answer this question by examining the quantitative level of economic integration as well as the policy fields of communication, patents, plant protection and worker protection. Keywords Globalisation · Internationalism · European economic integration

In the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism combined with new means of transportation and communication, engaged European countries in more developed trade than ever before with their neighbours and the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0_1

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rest of the world.1 The second half of this century is thus commonly referred to as the first modern European integration and the first globalisation. While there has been an increasing amount of historical research over the last twenty years on the challenges and opportunities created by this situation for the various actors involved, mainly the main powers of the time—hence the neologisms of anglobalisation and more recently francobalisation,2 we propose in this book to examination of the ways in which Europeans have collectively reacted to them. This European history of globalisation is also a global history of European integration. Without restricting ourselves entirely to this, we focus our approach on the action of public authorities through the study of international governmental coordination in four very different sectors in which the redefinition of the modern state is at stake, in one way or another. The originality of this work is threefold. First, it is an effort to measure European economic integration in relation to the expansion of world trade. Second, it brings together four sectors that were previously treated separately in the historiography of technology, the economy and society: postal and telegraphic communication services, patents, worker protection and plant protection. Not unrelated to one another, as we shall endeavour to show, these sectors illustrate through their diversity the extent of the transformations brought about by European economic integration and globalisation. Finally, this work shows the coproduction of national and international regimes. Contemporary observers and commentators were quick to emphasise the emergence of a new form of world government, and historians have since confirmed that this was the beginning of a new era of globalisation, which was henceforth the subject of collective governance,3 open to the action of public

1 J. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 729. 2 See for the cases of the UK and France, respectively: N. Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003); S. Berger, Notre première mondialisation: Leçons d’un échec oublié, La République des idées (Paris: Seuil, 2003); Q. Deluermoz (ed.), D’ici et d’ailleurs: Histoires globales de la France contemporaine (Paris: La Découverte, 2021). On Germany: S. Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3 Peter N. Stearns calls this new phase ‘political globalization’; P. N. Stearns, Globalization in World History, Themes in World History (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 159.

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authorities, private companies and associations of all kinds.4 Without undermining this dynamic of pooling differences, which takes the form of new international organisations producing commonalities in a certain number of cases, we will highlight the other side of this same coin—the joint maintenance of differences.

The Transnational Making of the Modern State The more time passes, the closer the nineteenth century is. It is clear nowadays that much that is characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century actually originated in the old world more than 100 years ago. The rise of the modern nation-state, the first wave of globalisation and European economic integration are three developments that characterised the second half of the nineteenth century. Essays and monographs dealing with the history of the European continent see the decades from the 1860s until the Great War as a transformative epoch.5 This has led to an underlying dispute as to which century these years actually belong. For a long time, people wrote about the ‘long nineteenth century’, therefore emphasising the fact that it began with the French Revolution in 1789 and ultimately ended with the outbreak of the First World War.6 Consequently, the twentieth century was the short one, as Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal monograph indicated.7 In this narrative, the Great War was the rupture that divided two profoundly different eras. In recent years, however, this perception has shifted, and there are prominent historians who argue that talking about the ‘long twentieth century’ is actually much more appropriate. For instance, Johan Schot and Philip Scranton, the editors of the six-volume series Making Europe. Technology 4 A. Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 9–36. 5 Exemplary: S. N. Broadberry and K. H. O’Rourke (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe. Volume 2: 1870 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 6 The titles of Hobsbawm’s seminal trilogy E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972); E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, History of Civilisation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976); E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914, History of Civilization (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). 7 E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1997).

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and Transformations, 1850–2000, consider that ‘[T]echnology’s role in shaping Europe coalesced around 1850, when a new era began, an era from 1850 to 2000 that we refer to as The Long Twentieth Century’.8 The argument is that the aforementioned developments shaped the entire twentieth century. Therefore, the First World War and its aftermath—or, more precisely, the years from 1914 to 1945—did not entirely destroy what had started before. It just laid dormant and resurfaced in a modified form after the general conditions after the Second World War allowed them to. Publications that cover Europe’s long-term economic history leave no doubt that the economy of the twentieth century actually began in the 1860s. This is true for the advocates of new institutional economics, 9 as well as for the followers of quantitative approaches.10 The idea that the appearance of the internationally integrated nation-state is not fundamentally new but rather deeply rooted in history is commonplace in historical—including economic history—research. The time when the Great War is considered the almost logical consequence of separate, fully independent nation-states engaged in economic competition and geopolitical rivalry is over. Sebastian Conrad puts it as follows: ‘[N]ationalisation and globalisation (…) are not two stages of a consecutive process of development, but rather were dependent on each other’.11 In this book, we focus on international coordination and show that it played a pivotal role at the interface between the consolidation of the modern nation-state and globalisation. Not only did diverse nation-states coordinate to create commonalities,

8 W. Kaiser and J. Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations, Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. x. 9 K. A. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany,

Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); W. Abelshauser, The Dynamics of German Industry: The German Path to the New Economy and the American Challenge, Making Sense of History (London: Berghahn, 2005), vol. 6. 10 Broadberry and O’Rourke (eds.), Economic History II . 11 Conrad, Globalisation, pp. 3–4.

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but coordination also sustained diversity. Indeed, international coordination had the potential to help national regimes prevail.12 One might even go a step further and argue that it was international coordination that made the existence of diverse national rules and regulations possible in the first place. Christopher Bayly rightly emphasises that ‘the form of the national community remained highly contested and ambiguous in almost every case’.13 In other words, the idea that there was a clearly defined nation with similarly clear interests has always been simplistic. On a theoretical level, nationalism is, by design, a very vague concept. Although the nineteenth century is rightfully considered the period during which the nation-state emerged, it is imperative to regard that this fuzziness is an inherent part of the concept. There is consent that—as Eric Hobsbawm puts it—nationalism came from above. ‘Above’ in this context does not mean that the state came before the national feeling. The notion refers to a literate elite that spreads national beliefs among its social class. In this model, such beliefs subsequently ‘trickle down’ and a national society can emerge.14 During the process, national policy serves the justification of its very own existence, and there is no reason per se to assume that national policy does not involve the international realm. Rosenberg goes in a similar direction when she writes that ‘as the very word international suggests, the “national” constituted the building block of the “international” realm, and most internationalists pursued projects that created cooperative forums and regulatory regimes among bounded states – states that were consolidated along a European model’.15 12 This resembles Conrad’s concept of shared history (German: geteilte Geschichten): ‘[T]he increasing circulation of goods, people and ideas did not only create commonalities—it also resulted in delimitations, difference and a need for particularity’, ibid., p. 5. 13 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, The Blackwell History of the World (Malden, Oxford (England), Carlton: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), p. 206. 14 Hobsbawm calls this proto-nationalism; see E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Canto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 46–79. While Hobsbawm puts the national feeling first, there are also historians who put the emergence of a state first. Dieter Langewiesche shows that war initiates the existence of a nation-state in many cases; see D. Langewiesche, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa, Beck’sche Reihe (München: C.H. Beck, 2000), vol. 1399, pp. 25–31. 15 E. S. Rosenberg, ‘Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World’, in E. S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870–1945, A History of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 815–996, at p. 824.

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All this took place within the framework of a global economy, with Europe at the centre. That is why we also present an additional argument in this book: European economic integration was a key middle ground in between nationalisation and globalisation; international coordination was very much European coordination.

The Politics of European Economic Integration To describe this process of worldwide networking and cooperation, historiography uses the multi-faceted concept of internationalism.16 This internationalism involved the general conviction that problems and challenges at the time needed to be solved mostly through international agreements. In this context, it is crucial to understand that the new weight that internationalism gained in historiography does not belittle the role of the nation-state. Three historiographical readings attempt to make sense of what was then and still is today called the internationalist approach—which seeks international points of agreement and pillars of international governance. The first is political. ‘Governmental internationalism’, as Madeleine Herren calls it,17 deployed by politicians, is an attempt to organise peace in the form of the coexistence of modern nation-states.18 It relies on experts and activists of international law, an epistemic community in the making, crossed by fierce debates, whose programme is ‘peace through law’.19 The second one is technical: it is, above all, a question of making 16 M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 6–7. 17 M. Herren, ‘Governmental Internationalism and the Beginning of a New World Order in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 121–44. 18 B. Arcidiacono, Cinq types de paix: Une histoire des plans de pacification perpétuelle (XVII e –XX e siècles) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011); S. Ghervas, Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2021). 19 I. van Hulle and R. Lesaffer, International Law in the Long Nineteenth Century (1776–1914): From the Public Law of Europe to Global International Law? Legal History Library (Borton: Brill, 2019), vol. 28.

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a system of transnational relations functional, a system that has been redesigned by the ‘infrastructural transition’,20 which sees the advent of the railway, the steamship, the telegraph, automobiles and soon electricity or air networks. Before 1914, numerous publicists were convinced that worldwide cooperation was the result of sheer necessity, an approach one might qualify as ‘functionalist’.21 Long idealistic, pacifists became more and more pragmatic, and an ‘organizing’ turn took shape among them during the 1900s.22 The British politician Norman Angell emphasised in his landmark publication, The Great Illusion, that the outbreak of the war had become unthinkable. According to him, not only did international entanglements become too advanced. War also stopped being an instrument to increase national wealth.23 Another example is the American Paul Samuel Reinsch, who wrote a few years before the outbreak of the Great War, that an underlying economic unity of the civilized world has been born. The development of the facilities for communication, bringing with them a great increase in the intercourse and exchange of commodities among nations, first convinced the latter of the need of international arrangements of an administrative nature. The inconveniences and delays caused at the point of transit from one national territory to another by the existence of different administrative methods and harassing regulations were such a serious impediment to the natural currents of trade that they could not long be tolerated. It was thus that a strong demand arose for the regulation of the international telegraph and postal service, of transfer of freight

20 P. Högselius, A. Kaijser and E. van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature, Making Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 21 This might appear anachronistic, as “functionalism”—and intergovernmentalism, its counterpart—is a concept that refers to the second half of the twentieth century. On this issue see P. C. Schmitter, ‘Neo-Functionalism’, in A. Wiener and T. Diez (eds.), European Integration Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 45–74; A. Moravcsik, ‘Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach’, Journal of Common Market Studies 31 (1993), pp. 473–524. 22 A. Rasmussen, ‘Tournant, inflexions, ruptures: le moment internationaliste’, Mil neuf cent 19 (2001), pp. 27–41. 23 N. Angell, , The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (Wilmington: Vernon Art and Science, 2013 [1913]), p. 18.

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on railways, and, in general, of all matters affecting international communication. It is not difficult to see the impulse toward joint action which would arise from relations such as those mentioned.24

In other words, Reinsch was convinced that the world was shifting towards more cooperation. According to historian of international relations Georges-Henri Soutou, global processes were first and foremost a ‘Europeanisation’.25 Like Paul Schroeder, he argues that the almost ‘mechanical’, rule-based European order of the first half of the nineteenth century developed into one that intensified and brought with it more interdependencies and an ‘organic’ order.26 More recently, historians of technology concluded that a ‘hidden integration’27 of Europe had already begun back then. This one predated and survived the more visible integration of the European community after the Second World War. It was hidden in the sense that it was concealed for the majority of the population through the prevalence of the national discourse and that it was overseen by a small elite of administrators and technocrats who referred to political leaders as little as possible. For this reason, it seems permissible to speak of an ‘administrative internationalism’28 or a ‘technocratic internationalism’.29 The third reading is economic. It explains internationalism as adaptation to the challenges and opportunities of an internationalised industrial economy. Economic historians invite us to consider market 24 P. S. Reinsch, Public International Unions, their Work and Organization: A Study in International Administrative Law (Boston, London: Ginn and Company, 1911), p. 13. 25 G.-H. Soutou, L’Europe de 1815 à nos jours, Nouvelle Clio: l’histoire et ses

problèmes, 3rd edn. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2012), p. 131. 26 G.-H. Soutou, ‘Le Concert européen, de Vienne à Locarno’, in J. Bérenger (ed.), L’ordre européen du XVIe au XXe siècle, Mondes contemporains (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), pp. 117–36; P. W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). It is these interdependencies that we want to analyse more closely in this book. 27 T. J. Misa and J. Schot, ‘Introduction: Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe’, History & Technology 21 (2005), pp. 1–19. 28 D. Howland, ‘Telegraph Technology and Administrative Internationalism in the 19th Century’, in M. Mayer, M. Carpes and R. Knoblich (eds.), The Global Politics of Science and Technology—Vol. 1: Concepts from International Relations and Other Disciplines, Global Power Shift, Comparative Analysis and Perspectives (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), pp. 183–99. 29 Kaiser and Schot, Writing the Rules, pp. 21–47.

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forces and capitalists as the true integrators of the century. This is true for both the more liberal, free trade-based liberalism during the middle of the nineteenth century and that in the era after the economic crisis, during the 1870s and 1880s.30 With ideology left aside, and as the high level of market integration showed, there was a clear incentive to stabilising international trade through international agreements of different kinds. In any case, nineteenth-century Europe cannot be understood only in a global context. In his seminal book on the transformation of the world,31 Jürgen Osterhammel stresses the centrality of Europe, which thought itself to be central, and was indeed central. According to him, the call to ‘provincialize Europe’ cannot ignore this unless it becomes ‘dogmatic and ahistorical’.32 Contemporaries made a distinction between Europe and the rest of the world. A ‘conceptual separation of the periphery from the sphere of “true”, European politics’33 sustained a dichotomy between imperialist aggression outside and relatively peaceful relations inside Europe—a regime Osterhammel calls ‘global dualism’.34 For him, though, the ‘European system of states was never preponderant in the sense of acting as a single power, or even a coordinated collective, on the international stage’.35 European imperialism was actually the sum of five European imperialisms —those of the UK, France, Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary. There are, however, authors who do identify a common European strategy to rule the world. One of them is the historian Jörg Fisch. With reference to the mission-consciousness of developed European states, Fisch has shown that the achievement of law led to a situation in which only countries with the same achievements qualified as fellow civilised

30 T. I. Berend, An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe: Diversity and Industrialization (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 31 J. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, America in the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 32 Q. Deluermoz and M. König, ‘Entretien avec Jürgen Osterhammel’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 46 (2013), pp. 137–41. 33 Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, p. 474. 34 Ibid., p. 473. 35 Ibid., pp. 474–5. A different case is ‘political internationalisms’. In this context, Osterhammel emphasises that workers’ and women’s movements are common examples; see J. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Historische Bibliothek der Gerda Henkel Stiftung (München: Beck, 2010), pp. 726–33.

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countries. At the same time, it served as a justification for ‘missionizing’ non-civilised regions.36 Mark Mazower also stresses the consequences of the achievement of law. From this point of view, it becomes evident how internationalism became an instrument for certain states to enforce rules worldwide.37 International law was a tool. The qualification as a developed state governed by the rule of law was at the same time a justification for imposing these rules on others.

Structure and Aim of the Book Evidently, there was no single incentive but several ones for internationalist policies. In the initial concept of the book, we wanted to find an answer to the question of whether European cooperation was an offensive or defensive strategy to deal with transnational challenges. Very quickly, however, we realised that the question was actually not valid. There were simply no European collective actors that had the ability to decide on how to react to transnational challenges and opportunities. Rather, European cooperation was often the result of varied, though interrelated, incentives. This in itself leads to the question of whether European integration is the appropriate term. Our central hypothesis is the following: instead of assuming that it came to a transfer from the national to the international level, we argue that national regimes and international agreements were the results of a coproduction. The transfers of power were not a one-way road but a two-way one. We are convinced that international challenges authorised nation-states to expand their competencies through international coordination. Nolens volens, we therefore assume to have found an answer to the question that Philipp Ther formulates as follows: ‘[W]hat held together

36 J. Fisch, ‘Internationalizing Civilization by Dissolving International Society. The Status of Non-European Territories in Nineteenth-Century International Law’, in M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 235–57. 37 M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

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this little extension of the Asian landmass?’.38 In our perspective, it was exactly that incentives. Consequently, how the rise of modern nationstates, globalisation and international coordination were causally related depended strongly on the problem at hand. This appears banal, yet it also clarifies that there was not one type of internationalism. Rather, the face of international cooperation always looked different depending on the issue. To show this, we decided to look at communication infrastructures, social policy, patents and hygiene, and we concentrate on Germany and France, the two economically most potent countries in continental Europe, in this analysis. Yet before we begin with the case studies, we will examine quantitative economic integration in Europe. Historiography has acknowledged that the level of entanglements between European nation-states was quite advanced before 1914. However, the exact level of economic integration has hitherto been unknown. In the first section, we introduce a comprehensive economic integration index for the period of 1880–1913. Four principles then guided our selection of cases and our geographic tropism. The first is the scope of our own expertise. The second is the importance of the two largest countries in continental Europe in coordinating efforts and the sectors covered in the lives of the societies concerned, as they affect working conditions, information exchange, ownership and commodification of knowledge and the health of people and cultures. The fact that these topics were linked but are usually treated separately in the historiography comes third. The fourth principle is the diversity of actors, issues and trajectories that these cases reveal.

38 M. Espagne, J. Kreienbaum, F. Cooper, C. Conrad and P. Ther, ‘How to Write Modern European History Today? Statements to Jörn Leonhard’s JMEH-Forum’, Journal of Modern European History 14 (2016), pp. 465–91, at p. 490.

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Clearly, one of the most impressive cases of interdependence and entanglements was international transport and communication infrastructure. In the case of postal and telegraph networks, international cooperation was an early path taken. The International Telegraph Union was founded in 1865, and the General Postal Union was founded in 1874. They both emerged out of the demand for functioning transnational pipes for the circulation of information and money together with the aim of developing national networks that became denser than ever. Cooperation indeed allowed transnational flows and helped create a world with faster and deeper connections—something that the following map indicates. At the same time, it also showed that there were large parts of the world that were not covered. The infrastructure was densest in Europe and the eastern part of the US, followed by British India, Mexico, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and parts of South America. Contrary to the idea of a borderless world, which is typically associated with transnational networks, international coordination contributed to building national sovereignty and national integration through communication infrastructure, on the one hand, and imperial domination, on the other, with communication infrastructures and their regulation being a ‘tool of empire’,39 which was key to exercising control over the rest of the world (Fig 1.1).40

39 D. R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 40 In some contexts, as in India, for instance, they also soon turned to be tools to contest the colonists. Therefore there is good reason to call them ‘double-edged sword’. See D. R. Headrick, ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Communications and Imperial Control in British India’, Historical Social Research 35 (2010), pp. 51–65.

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Fig. 1.1 Density of rail tracks and telegraphy (1900)41

The case of patents followed a different logic. Given the second economic revolution, namely, the rise of the knowledge-based economy that took off during the 1870s, it is no surprise that patents played a major role in this increase in trade. For one, the worldwide increase in patents in absolute figures is already impressive.42 Moreover, as we will show later, the share of foreign patent holders increased across many countries. The

41 R. Andree and A. Scobel (eds.), Allgemeiner Handatlas in 126 Haupt-und 139 Nebenkarten nebst vollständigem alphabetischem Namensverzeichnis (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1901), p. 17. Picture taken from URL: http://iegego.eu/de/threads/hintergruende/globalisierung/ulrich-pfister-globalisierung?set_lan guage=, http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/hintergruende/globalisierung/ulrich-pfister-glo balisierung (last access 14.12.2021). 42 P. J. Federico, ‘Historical Patent Statistics’, The Journal of the Patent Office Society 46 (1964), pp. 89–171; A. Carreras and C. Josephson, ‘Aggregate Growth, 1870–1914: Growing at the Production Frontier’, in S. N. Broadberry and K. H. O’Rourke (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe. Volume 2: 1870 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 30–58, at pp. 53–4.

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rise of the knowledge-based economy, which led to trade in specialised products, had an effect on the absolute growth of patents. As a consequence, countries and patent holders had a vivid interest in protecting their patents not only nationally but also internationally. As the available data show, the entanglement of foreign patenting increased profoundly. On the other hand, patent laws were measures whose international regulation beyond the European continent was firmly insisted on by European countries. Therefore, European states, including those on the periphery, often favoured corresponding laws to obtain the necessary basis for tradedriven technology transfer.43 In the case of patents, international pressure heavily affected national legislation.44 The second half of the nineteenth century was an era that was, among others, dominated by an obsession with hygiene.45 It is generally known that the Spanish flu, with up to fifty million victims in 1918 to 1920, cost more lives than the First World War itself.46 However, long before this, most countries were aware of the risk of lethal diseases, which spread because of intensifying interrelations. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century—and in England from 1799—population groups were urged to vaccinate.47 The first of thirty-six multilateral conferences (until 1951) took place in Paris in 1851,48 although most diseases, such as malaria, anthrax, tuberculosis, cholera, the plague and typhoid fever,

43 D. Pretel, Institutionalising Patents in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Palgrave Studies in Economic History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); N. Chachereau, Introduire des brevets pour qui? Seconde révolution industrielle en Suisse et mondialisation de la propriété intellectuelle (1873–1914), PhD thesis (Université de Lausanne, Faculté des lettres) (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 2018). 44 D. A. Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung des deutschen Patentsystems im Kaiserreich: Eine neoinstitutionalistische Analyse (Florence : European University Institute, 2003). 45 D. van Laak, Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft—Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2018), p. 59. 46 N. P. Johnson and J. Mueller, ‘Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 “Spanish” Influenza Pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002), pp. 105–15. 47 M. Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day, Themes in History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 92. 48 G. Ferragu, ‘Les voies sanitaires de la diplomatie française’, in S. Perez and X. Le Person (eds.), Maladies diplomatiques: Souverains et puissants face à la maladie de l’Antiquité à nos jours, Thériaka, remèdes & rationalités (Lyon: Jacques André, 2018), pp. 157–66.

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were only identified in the 1870s, or at least discovered (as in the case of malaria).49 If most of these initiatives started in Europe,50 the rest of the world was successively integrated from the 1880s onwards. Delegates from present-day Lebanon (Levant), Asia and America were present at the 1885 Rome Conference. In 1887, a convention was signed in Rio de Janeiro between the South American states of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil in which Europeans were not involved.51 Historical knowledge of these mechanisms with respect to plant disease is far less advanced. Yet plant protection occasioned the signing of a first international convention (1878) and the creation of an international organisation dedicated to agriculture and phytosanitary issues (1905) earlier than in the field of human disease. This is another example in which a major challenge arising from and affecting trade on a global scale gave birth to international coordination centred on Europe and transforming the modern states from the inside. Social policy might be the most puzzling case. In contrast to infrastructure or hygiene, there was no intuitive logic that made convergence necessary for national social policy to work. As we will clarify in the first chapter on European economic integration, trade grew faster than the gross domestic product (GDP) in most countries, and the growth of trade with extra-European countries was even greater. Therefore, intensifying international competition could have been a powerful incentive to keep labour costs low, and yet the opposite happened. By 1913, Europe became the only region which actively chose to pursue a social policy.52 In the area of occupational health and safety measures—which include not only social insurance and protective measures in the workplace but 49 Quickly, migration was identified as the main driver; see Harrison, Disease, pp. 139–

42. 50 C. Paillette, ‘L’Europe et les organisations sanitaires internationales. Enjeux régionaux et mondialisation, des années 1900 aux années 1920’, Les Cahiers Irice 9 (2012), pp. 47– 60. 51 C. Paillette, ‘Une diplomatie sanitaire de part de d’autre de l’Atlantique, des années 1870 aux années 1890’, in S. Perez and X. Le Person (eds.), Maladies diplomatiques. Souverains et puissants face à la maladie de l’Antiquité à nos jours, Thériaka, remèdes & rationalités (Lyon: Jacques André, 2018), pp. 167–81. 52 M. Huberman, Odd Couple: International Trade and Labor Standards in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); M. Huberman and W. Lewchuk, ‘European Economic Integration and the Labour Compact, 1850–1913’, European Review of Economic History 7 (2003), pp. 3–41.

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also the regulation of women’s and child labour—there was a European understanding that there is, in fact, a common problem since the industrialisation. During the four decades before 1913, the European model distanced itself from—according to Michael Huberman—that of the New World. In his argument, the measures for occupational health and safety proved to be viable and socially acceptable only in Europe.53 We do not attempt to cover all four examples comprehensively in order to draw a plausible conclusion. First, such a monograph would obviously exceed the reasonable size of a book. Second, and more importantly, it is not necessary. We do want to answer how European economic integration and international can be characterised; they were the results of specific economic incentives entangled into a politico diplomatic framework and managed by a cast of experts responding to a variety of pressures and agendas.

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Harrison, M., Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day, Themes in History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Headrick, D. R., ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Communications and Imperial Control in British India’, Historical Social Research 35 (2010), pp. 51–65. Headrick, D. R., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Herren, M., ‘Governmental Internationalism and the Beginning of a New World Order in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 121–44. Hobsbawm, E., The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1997). Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, History of Civilisation, Reprint (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976). Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Empire 1875–1914, History of Civilization (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, Reprint (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Canto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Högselius, P., Kaijser, A. and van der Vleuten, E., Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature, Making Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Howland, D., ‘Telegraph Technology and Administrative Internationalism in the 19th Century’, in M. Mayer, M. Carpes and R. Knoblich (eds.), The Global Politics of Science and Technology—Vol. 1: Concepts from International Relations and Other Disciplines, Global Power Shift, Comparative Analysis and Perspectives (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), pp. 183–99. Huberman, M., Odd Couple: International Trade and Labor Standards in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Huberman, M. and Lewchuk, W., ‘European Economic Integration and the Labour Compact, 1850–1913’, European Review of Economic History 7 (2003), pp. 3–41. Iriye, A., Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Johnson, N. P. and Mueller, J., ‘Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918-1920 “Spanish” Influenza Pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002), pp. 105–15.

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Kaiser, W. and Schot, J., Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations, Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Kouli, Y. and König, J., Measuring European Economic Integration 1880—A New Approach, DICE Discussion Paper No 374, December 2021, https:// www.dice.hhu.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Fakultaeten/Wirtschaftswissenschaftl iche_Fakultaet/DICE/Discussion_Paper/374__Kouli_Ko__nig.pdf Langewiesche, D., Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa, Beck’sche Reihe (München: C.H. Beck, 2000), vol. 1399. Mazower, M., Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2012). Misa, T. J. and Schot, J., ‘Introduction. Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe’, History & Technology 21 (2005), pp. 1–19. Moravcsik, A., ‘Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach’, Journal of Common Market Studies 31 (1993), pp. 473–524. Osterhammel, J., Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Historische Bibliothek der Gerda Henkel Stiftung (München: Beck, 2010). Osterhammel, J., The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, America in the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Paillette, C., ‘L’Europe et les organisation sanitaires internationales. Enjeux régionaux et mondialisation, des années 1900 aux années 1920’, Les Cahiers Irice 9 (2012), pp. 47–60. Paillette, C., ‘Une diplomatie sanitaire de part de d’autre de l’Atlantique, des années 1870 aux années 1890’, in S. Perez and X. Le Person (eds.), Maladies diplomatiques: Souverains et puissants face à la maladie de l’Antiquité à nos jours, Thériaka, remèdes & rationalités (Lyon: Jacques André, 2018), pp. 167–81. Pretel, D., Institutionalising Patents in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Palgrave Studies in Economic History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Rasmussen, A., ‘Tournant, inflexions, ruptures: le moment internationaliste’, Mil neuf cent 19 (2001), pp. 27–41. Reinsch, P. S., Public International Unions, Their Work and Organization: A Study in International Administrative Law (Boston, London: Ginn and Company, 1911). Rosenberg, E. S., ‘Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World’, in E. S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870–1945, A History of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 815– 996.

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Schmitter, P. C., ‘Neo-Functionalism’, in A. Wiener and T. Diez (eds.), European Integration Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 45–74. Schroeder, P. W., The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Soutou, G.-H., ‘Le Concert européen, de Vienne à Locarno’, in J. Bérenger (ed.), L’ordre européen du XVIe au XXe siècle, 15–16 Mars 1996, Mondes contemporains (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), pp. 117– 36. Soutou, G.-H., L’Europe de 1815 à nos jours, Nouvelle Clio: l’histoire et ses problèmes, 3rd edn. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2012). Stearns, P. N., Globalization in World History, Themes in World History (London: Routledge, 2010). Thelen, K. A., How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). van Hulle, I. and Lesaffer, R., International Law in the Long Nineteenth Century (1776–1914): From the Public Law of Europe to Global International Law? Legal History Library (Borton: Brill, 2019), vol. 28. van Laak, D., Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft—Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2018).

CHAPTER 2

European Economic Integration before 1914—A Closer Look

Abstract Historiography has acknowledged that the level of entanglements between European nation-states was quite advanced before 1914. Indeed, historians were able to confirm a high level of cooperation at the legal, social, technical and even political levels. However, the exact level of economic integration has hitherto been unknown. In this section, we quantitatively analyse the level of economic integration in Europe. We use a comprehensive economic integration index for the period of 1880–1913. By exploiting existing and newly available databases, we quantitatively analyse the long-term development of European economic integration for fifteen European countries. The index reveals that economic integration was a characteristic trait of Europe, but outer European countries also became powerful players in Europe. Keywords Globalisation · European trade · European integration · Integration index

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0_2

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International Economy or European Economy? Whether European integration actually existed before 1913 is one of the central questions to which this book seeks to find an answer. If one wants to follow this approach, there is an important methodological consequence: the definition underlying the term ‘European integration’ can no longer interpreted only in the narrower sense as institutional integration within the framework of the European Union. It must also encompass factual integration.1 Economic integration does not necessarily require political intent. Market integration is based on exchange and the effects that come with it. On a general level, there is little doubt that there has been intensive economic exchange between European countries since the 1870s. The European market stopped being divided into several markets and merged into one.2 This did not happen in isolation exchanges rose in parallel between European countries and the rest of the world. For example, Abbenhuis and Morrell focus in their recent book on a key dimension of the intensification of international trade: industrialisation which is both a factor and a result of intensified international exchange. They call the era from 1815 to 1918 the ‘age of industrial globalisation’.3 They argue that industrialisation and globalisation are closely intertwined, with industrialisation and production levels drastically increasing. National markets were not large enough to absorb the entire national production. To a certain degree, this depended on the size of the national market. The US, for instance, depended less on exports than European countries did because of its size. However, even the US needed access to the world market. In principle, this dependence never quite disappeared. Even countries whose exports exceeded their imports

1 There is a body of literature on this subject specifically. For further information, see Y. Kouli and J. König, ‘Measuring European Economic Integration 1880—A New Approach’, DICE Discussion Paper No 374, December 2021, URL: https://www.dice.hhu.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Fakultaeten/Wirtschaftswissenscha ftliche_Fakultaet/DICE/Discussion_Paper/374__Kouli_Ko__nig.pdf 2 D. Chilosi, T. E. Murphy, R. Studer and A. C. Tunçer, ‘Europe’s Many Integrations: Geography and Grain Markets, 1620–1913’, Explorations in Economic History 50 (2013), pp. 46–68. 3 M. Abbenhuis and G. W. Morrell, The First Age of Industrial Globalization: An International History 1815–1918, New Approaches to International History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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were not able to produce everything they needed because of specialisation. Industrialising countries thus formed the core of international trade. ‘In 1850, 82 per cent (at current prices) [of world trade] originated from Europe, the US, and the temperate zones of white settlement; by 1913 that proportion was still almost 81 per cent’.4 Another consequence was that all countries that followed the paths of industrialisation had to accept that they entered a state of constant international competition— whether they wanted to or not. Undoubtedly, this increased significantly during the 1870s5 , once the well-known Cobden Chevalier Treaty (1860) and the consecutive reduction of tariffs produced their full effects.6 This dynamic was not stopped even by the increase in tariffs that took place from the end of the 1870s.7

Measuring Economic Integration All these seem to confirm the assumption that European economic integration was well advanced by 1913. There are, however, some crucial caveats. The very general assessment of generally well-developed integration does not help shed light whether all European countries participated in this process in the same manner. More importantly, it interpret European economic integration as a linear, homogeneous process. Specifically, the constant increase in transport infrastructure from 1870 to 1914 can be interpreted that way.8 In a recent paper, Yaman Kouli and Jörg König constructed and computed an index to measure European

4 S. Pollard, ‘Free Trade, Protectionism, and the World Economy’, in M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London et al.: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 27–53, at p. 30; P. Bairoch, ‘Geographical Structure and Trade Balance of European Foreign Trade from 1800 to 1970’, Journal of Economic History 3 (1978), pp. 557–608, at p. 560. 5 G. Daudin, M. Morys and K. H. O’Rourke, ‘Globalization, 1870–1914’, in S. N. Broadberry and K. H. O’Rourke (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Volume 2: 1870 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 6–29, at p. 7. 6 M. Lampe, ‘Explaining Nineteenth-Century Bilateralism: Economic and Political Determinants of the Cobden-Chevalier Network’, The Economic History Review 64 (2011), pp. 644–68. 7 Daudin, Morys and O’Rourke, Globalization, p. 7. 8 Daudin, Morys and O’Rourke, Globalization, p. 9.

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60 58 56 54 52 50 48 46 44 42 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913

40

Fig. 2.1 Integration-Index (unweighted, 1880–1913)

economic integration from 1880 to 1913. In the index, the authors put together a normalised database for France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, the UK, Denmark, Portugal, Greece, Spain and Finland for the period of 1880– 1913. By focussing on market integration (export quota and share of exports and imports that originate from and go to other European countries), homogeneity (GDP per capita, real wages, wheat-prices, public debt-to-GDP-ratio and long-term interest rates) and symmetry (growth rates of GDP per capita, inflation and government budget balance per GDP), the index targets the development in individual countries.9 The index is constructed in such a way that it allows the changes in European economic integration levels to be seen for every year from 1880 to 1913, both across Europe and at the national level. Theoretically and by design, it is possible to reach a figure from 0 to 100. Therefore, the index is an instrument that includes a number of indicators and merges them into one number so that the integration levels of the countries are comparable over time (Fig. 2.1). The results of this calculation do not confirm the idea of a linear, homogeneous integration process for all countries that started low and reached new heights by the end of the first wave of globalisation.

9 For more information on the methodology, see the discussion paper by Kouli and König, ‘Measuring European Economic Integration’.

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41 40 39 38 37 36 35 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913

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Fig. 2.2 Market integration (index, unweighted average, 1880–1913)

What does the curve depict? Two observations are important for this book. The first is that the index curve shows a decline. The index starts at a relatively high level of about fifty-eight points. In the late 1880s, it drops, reaching its lowest point in 1896. The following rise ends twelve years later (1908), after which it once again declines. Interestingly, the level of integration during the 1880s was not reached again during the entire period. Therefore, the idea that the European economy was characterised by intensifying integration that was harshly interrupted by the Great War does not appear to be a precise assessment. It had already reached a relatively high level by the 1880s (Fig. 2.2). The second observation can be made when one zooms in on market integration—one component of the European economic integration index—during the thirty-three years in question. One approach to obtaining a better understanding of the relationship between Europe and the world is to take a closer look at the trade relations of European countries. Although it is not the only indicator used to obtain an assessment of the relations between countries or regions, it is most certainly a very important one. The level of trade-growth in general is well known. On average, it increased by almost 300 per cent from 1870 to 1913.10 Given Europe’s position in the world, one might expect that this led to a concentration of trade on the continent. However, the figures show that the situation was a bit more complicated. From 1888 to 1898, there was a steady relative decline in the importance of inner European 10 Daudin, Morys and O’Rourke, Globalization, p. 7.

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40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913

0

Unweighted Average (Trade with the USA)

Unweighted Average (Trade with outer-European countries)

Fig. 2.3 Trade with outer European countries

trade. After 1902, market integration levels remained constant, despite some fluctuations. In other words, the share of trade with outer European countries increased both absolutely and relatively compared with that in the 1880s.11 According to the corresponding figure, the significance of the European market rose until 1888 and reached a level that it subsequently never reached again. This is the main reason why the consolidated European economic integration index never reached again its 1880s levels. It is thus not possible to conclude that economic growth and trade made Europe a self-sufficient continent. In fact, the opposite is true. Production growth and increased trade led to more imports from non-European countries. Outer European players obviously fulfiled an integral role in European economies. Therefore, it seems consequential that the increase in trade demanded more intensive international regulations that went beyond Europe. Figure 2.3 sheds more light on this matter. It shows the unweighted average of trade with non-European countries among the countries in question. The figure confirms that trade with outer European states did indeed rise since the 1890s. Quantitavely, the role of the colonies was negligible. The culprit that might have taken their place is surely the US.

11 Calculations based on the RICardo database and the TRADHIST database: ric ardo.medialab.sciences-po.fr/#/; www.cepii.fr/CEPII/En/bdd_modele/presentation.asp? id=32.

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Therefore, we added the figures for US European trade. As one can see, the US played a significant role in Europe, and the notion of a transatlantic economy was certainly justified. On the other hand, the US alone is not responsible for the increase in trade with non-European countries. It did play a role, but it was not the country that did more trade with Europe than the rest of the world did. We take this as a hint that globalisation was not limited to Europe or to Europe and the US, but that other regions entered the scene. At the same time, though—and this is a third insight—absolute figures show that growth in intra-European trade persisted. Therefore, we can deduce that trade with non-European countries grew even more. However, even if the share of intra-European trade exports was declining (market importance), their share of national GDP (market openness) was still on the rise from 1894 onward. In effect, there is no doubt that the importance of the European market was crucial for the economic survival of each of the European economies. Table 2.1 shows the results of the European economic integration index for specific countries. For clarification, we emphasise that we do not assume there is an ideal integration level. The advantage of this Table 2.1 European integration indexes for 1880, 1896, 1908 and 1913 1880 France (FRA) Netherlands (NEL) Germany (GER) Austria-Hungary (AH) Switzerland (SW) Norway (NOR) Sweden (SWE) Italy (ITA) Belgium (BEL) UK (UK) Denmark (DEN) Portugal (POR) Greece (GRE) Spain (SPA) Finland (FIN)

72.32 68.62 64.51 63.41 60.17 59.47 57.61 57.17 56.71 55.01 53.70 50.01 46.20 42.35 37.93

1896 NOR NEL SWE DEN FRA AH GER BEL SPA FIN ITA SW UK POR GRE

65.01 65.00 61.90 61.80 61.80 61.62 51.12 49.34 49.31 42.69 42.41 42.15 40.38 23.98 23.23

1908 NEL FRA SWE GER NOR DEN AH BEL FIN SW UK ITA GRE SPA POR

69.70 68.56 68.50 61.57 61.11 56.78 55.78 55.17 55.12 51.71 51.64 51.07 51.03 49.93 36.23

1913 NEL FRA AH SPA SW NOR BEL GRE DEN FIN ITA SWE GER UK POR

67.43 64.02 54.59 53.40 51.99 51.17 50.18 48.35 48.29 46.12 45.23 45.22 43.28 35.73 28.01

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Table 2.2 Subindexes for 1880, 1900 and 1913

Market integration Homogeneity

Symmetry

Market openness Market importance Real GDP per capita Real wages Prices (Wheat) Public-debt-to GDP-ratio Long-term interest rates Growth rates of GDP per capita Consumer price index Government budget balance per GDP

1880

1900

1913

15.9 68.6 71.6 86.0 76.0 73.3 86.6 22.7 63.1 11.8

17.9 66.3 59.2 67.3 80.0 70.5 91.0 8.4 41.6 7.4

20.0 63.9 49.6 64.9 70.8 86.1 96.6 - 10.4 36.4 22.9

approach is that it enables us to compare different countries and to interpret the evolution of individual indices over time. It is clears that there was a wide variety of integration levels. In 1880, some larger countries showed relatively high levels of integration; France, Germany and Austria Hungary were high up on the list. In the lower half were rather small countries, with the exception of Spain and the UK. The UK was an especially interesting case, as for the integration level of this country was relatively low. Apparently, it was more oriented towards the world market. While the relative integration levels of some countries remained constant (Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Austria–Hungary), some changed significantly over the years (e.g. Germany). Overall, the numbers confirm the general decline. The subindices (Table 2.2) confirm the general trend of the integration index, but they also shed light on some details. Notably, while the importance of the European market declined slightly (from 68.6 to 63.9), market openness increased. In other words, the share of imports and exports within Europe showed a relative decline; more goods went to and came from outer European countries. At the same time, however, the absolute value of trade increased. This confirms our assumption that the growing trade with outer Europe must not be misinterpreted as a declining importance of inner European trade. At the same time, GDP per capita, real wages and price levels did diverge. Only public debt-toGDP ratios and long-term interest rates (ten years) converged. In the case of symmetry, the picture is clearer. While government budget balances per

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GDP showed slightly higher levels over time, consumer price indices and the growth rates of GDP per capita also diverged during the 33 years under investigation.

Conclusion This quantitative approach has its appeal, as it links the period before the First World War and the era of institutional European integration after 1951. However, it is necessary to remain vigilant when making comparisons. The era after the 1950s, particularly the 1980s has a much denser data foundation and it includes additional factors, such as the creation of new common institutions. Moreover, the number of countries has increased, and it is much higher these days than it was before 1914. The comparison also comes with an epistomological risk, as it might lead to a misunderstanding. First, the assumed resemblance between post-1945 and pre-1914 integration implies that there is close structural proximity between these two periods. European integration after 1951 appears to be the benchmark for other eras, and every period of integration has to live up to this standard. Second, their comparison implies a certain consecutiveness. Although authors do not express this explicitly that way, the chronological order which lets modern European integration start in the second half of the nineteenth century effectively expresses just that. We suggest escaping this interpretative trap by differentiating between the integration regimes. The free trade pre-1914 integration regime is different from the Common Market integration regime, which must also be distinguished from the Single Market integration regime. That said, it is most certainly revealing to compare these index figures with those at the beginning of the twenty-first century.12 Already in 1999 and in 2010, integration levels were very different among the countries under investigation. Nevertheless, the indices reveal similarities. France was already very high on the list in 1999 and 2010, as were the Netherlands and Austria. Meanwhile the UK was in the penultimate place (2010). The most striking difference is that from 1999 to 2010, European integration increased, while from 1880 to 1913, it appears to have decreased.

12 For the following see J. König and R. Ohr, ‘Different Efforts in European Economic Integration: Implications of the EU Index’, Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (2013), pp. 1074–90.

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References Abbenhuis, M. and Morrell, G. W., The First Age of Industrial Globalization: An International History 1815–1918, New Approaches to International History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Bairoch, P., ‘Geographical Structure and Trade Balance of European Foreign Trade from 1800 to 1970’, Journal of Economic History 3 (1978), pp. 557– 608. Chilosi, D., Murphy, T. E., Studer, R. and Tunçer, A. C., ‘Europe’s Many Integrations: Geography and Grain Markets, 1620–1913’, Explorations in Economic History 50 (2013), pp. 46–68. Daudin, G., Morys, M. and O’Rourke, K. H., ‘Globalization, 1870–1914’, in S. N. Broadberry and K. H. O’Rourke (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Volume 2: 1870 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 6–29. König, J. and Ohr, R., ‘Different Efforts in European Economic Integration: Implications of the EU Index’, Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (2013), pp. 1074–90. Kouli, Y. and König, J., Measuring European Economic Integration 1880—A New Approach, DICE Discussion Paper No 374, December 2021, https:// www.dice.hhu.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Fakultaeten/Wirtschaftswissenschaftl iche_Fakultaet/DICE/Discussion_Paper/374__Kouli_Ko__nig.pdf Lampe, M., ‘Explaining Nineteenth-Century Bilateralism: Economic and Political Determinants of the Cobden Chevalier Network’, The Economic History Review 64 (2011), pp. 644–68. Pollard, S., ‘Free Trade, Protectionism, and the World Economy’, in M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London et al.: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 27–53.

CHAPTER 3

The European Making of National Public Services—Posts and Telegraphs

Abstract The administrators of public postal and telegraphic networks in Europe and North America inaugurated the era of governed globalisation. The international organisations they set up steered the connection of networks and the intensification of cross-border flows, fuelling and being fuelled by transnational economic, social and cultural relations. Two factors framed these developments: the birth of public communication services that participated in the integration of communities within state territories and, later, within imperial territories and the liberalisation of international exchanges. In this configuration, Europe knew a form of hidden integration and became a technological zone characterised by a singular regulation of communication services. It was indeed the considerably facilitated intra-European exchanges that litteraly funded the expansion of national and imperial networks. Keywords Infrastructures · Communication · National identity

For a nineteenth-century tourist, businessman migrant worker, proving their identity abroad when they wanted to collect money or letters sent by

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0_3

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relatives and correspondents ar the local post office was extremely difficult. Despite the existence of communication networks, accessing them was almost impossible in this case. The international postal passport came in response to this challenge (Fig. 3.1). The pages that make up this booklet reveal three fundamental facets of the communication scene of the time. First, they show the existence of a transnational public—those who, at some point, lived beyond borders1 — with specific needs. Second, they recall the importance of postal services, often overshadowed by the telegraph and, later on, by the telephone, in the historiography of globalisation. Third, they reveal the importance of a new kind of international organisation in which all sorts of crossborder services are designed. In this case, it was within the framework of the Universal Postal Union that some postal administrations decided to introduce the ‘livret d’identité’ in 1885.2 On this occasion, a French reporter described the Union as ‘one of the most beautiful peaceful works of the 19th Century’, and the identity booklet as ‘an excellent precautionary measure’ that should help postmen fight against identity usurpation and help users get their due.3 The initiative came from Italy, which was still a young nation-state in the 1870s and the first to develop this system within its own borders to enable workers from the South to go and work in the North and to make everyone, including employees and employers, integrated into the same national Italian community.4 When participating countries decided to offer this service internationally, they had to create it nationally at the same time. Overall, this example shows that communication services in the nineteenth century were not only integral parts of state-building, on the one hand, and objects of highly institutionalised international cooperation, on the other, but that these two dynamics were also closely connected transnationally. The study of global communication networks in the nineteenth century has developed considerably over the last fifteen years in the 1 M. Herren and I. Löhr (eds.), ‘Lives Beyond Borders: A Social History 1880–1950’, Comparativ 23/6 (2013). 2 L. Laborie, L’Europe mise en réseaux. La France et la coopération internationale dans les postes et les télécommunications (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 120. 3 J. Brescou, ‘Postes… et téléphones’, Le Voltaire, 13/02/1885. 4 M. Giannetto, ‘Dall’unificazione amministrativa alle riforme di età crispina’, in G.

Paoloni (ed.), Le Poste in Italia. 1. Alle origini del servizio publico. 1861–1889 (Roma: Editori Laterza, 2005), p. 59.

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Fig. 3.1 Identity booklet, Universal Postal Union. Issued in France, 1892 (Source Documentation J.-F. Brun)

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double context of the rise of the internet—which raised questions about the origins of the so-called network society, and the concomitant increase in studies on globalisation in the humanities and social sciences. This chapter capitalises on this rich production, also giving postal networks their own deserved place because they, by far, were the number one channel of distant communication of the time.5 Therefore, this chapter focusses on two international organisations that were set up in the last third of the nineteenth century and are now the oldest agencies ofthe United Nations. The Telegraph Union (now the International Telecommunication Union) was founded in Paris in 1865, and the General Postal Union (now the Universal Postal Union) was founded in Bern in 1874. From the outset, both intended to expand geographically (being open to new members) and to last over time (having to adapt to technological developments). Within this framework, state administrations jointly set the rules for the interconnection of communication networks, allowing information to flow across borders at a rate never known before. Contemporaries commonly praised these two organisations as the revolutionary burgeoning of a common administration of the world. To us, they appear conversely as the focal points where the transnational making ofnational public services at the core of the modern state took place. In this dynamic, Europe soon emerged as a technological zone of its own.

State-run Public Services The international conventions that gave rise to the Telegraph and Postal Unions were signed by state representatives, almost all of whom were European. The explanatory memorandum to the 1865 Telegraph Convention emphasised that the signatories wanted to ‘establish a permanent understanding between their States’.6 Why states? It was because at that time, telegraph networks were state-operated public monopolies

5 The author’s previous work forms the backbone, particularly Laborie, L’Europe mise en réseaux; L. Laborie, ‘Globalizing the Telegraph: The ITU and the Governance of the First Globalization of Telecommunications’, in M. Hampf and S. Müller-Pohl (eds.), Global Communication Electric. Business, News and Politics in the World of Telegraphy (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013), pp. 63–91. 6 Documents diplomatiques de la conférence télégraphique internationale de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1865), p. 2.

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by all signatories. In so doing, each state, within the limits of its territory, was no longer only promoting but actively building infrastructure—a new role for many states.7 Neither the UK nor the US were signatories to the 1865 Telegraph Convention precisely because in these countries, telegraph networks were operated by private companies at that time. However, they were signatories to the 1874 Postal Convention because the Post Office was a public monopoly. In his comparative international history of transport, energy and telecommunication networks’ operating regimes, Robert Millward points out the particular trajectory of the latter, which have long been marked by direct and often exclusive state intervention in many countries until the late twentieth century.8 Controlling the rapid flow of information became part of the modern statecraft programme.9 The post office from the seventeenth century onwards, and then electric telegraphy from the 1840s onwards were fully involved in the emergence of the unitary, institutionalised and centralised territorial entities that the modern states were to be. Subject to public monopoly, these networks were the sources of public power, of both fiscal and police value. Fiscally, they generated income for the treasury, whereas policing allowed the authorities to transmit orders and control information. It was for this last reason that some parliamentarians opposed the dismantling of the optical telegraph towers developed by Claude Chappe at the end of the eighteenth century. Solidly protected by a door, they appeared much more robust than the new wired electrical networks, seemingly so easy to cut. At the same time, however, the railway network that had been developing for some years now enabled private individuals to circulate news almost as quickly as public officials, particularly at night when the Chappe towers stopped functioning.10 Only the electric telegraph, which would be installed along the railways as a matter

7 P. Högselius, A. Kaijser and E. Van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition. Economy, War, Nature, Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 33. 8 R. Millward, Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunications and Transport, 1830–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 9 J. Foreman-Peck, ‘L’Etat et le développement du réseau de télécommunications en Europe à ses débuts’, Histoire, Economie et Société 3 (1989), pp. 383–402. 10 A. Etenaud, La télégraphie électrique en France et en Algérie. Depuis son origine jusqu’au 1er janvier 1872 (Montpellier: Imprimerie centrale du Midi, 1872), pp. 66–67.

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of priority, would make it possible to go faster than the train. The advantages were so great that the optical telegraph towers disappeared from the French landscape, although less quickly than from the rest of Europe. A severely punishable offence of sabotage was instituted at the same time to protect the fragile threads weaving the modern state. The telegraph was not only a governing tool at the service of the public authorities but also a potential site of protest against them.11 The state had to ensure that telegraph employees themselves did not communicate sensitive messages outside or with one another for reasons other than those of the service.12 The Russian law was probably the strictest, forcing all employees of the administration and contractors to swear an oath of loyalty to the Empire; telegraphic crimes such as damaging installations, interrupting a line and endangering the state, were punishable by internment in Siberia or even the death penalty.13 In addition to these two fiscal and police reasons, in the nineteenth century, a third reason convinced public authorities to place communication networks under their exclusive control; these no longer had to serve the state only but to integrate the whole population into a social and economic body. They became public services. In the UK, the postal reform led by Rowland Hill in 1840 crowned a process that had begun a few decades earlier by establishing a uniform and moderate national tariff, synonymous with cross-subsidisation between cities and the countryside—relations between densely populated areas, which generated profit, paid for those which were in deficit—and promoting democratised access. In most countries, the telegraph network was publicly owned from the outset but was not necessarily open to the public. This was only done at a later stage once it had been established that this would not endanger state communications. This happened in 1846 in Belgium, 1849 in Prussia, 1850 in Austria and 1851 in France. From then on, the demands for

11 N. Patin and D. Pinsolle (eds.), Déstabiliser l’État en s’attaquant aux flux. Des révoltes antifiscales au sabotage, XVIIe–XXe siècles (Nancy: l’Arbre bleu, 2020), pp. 19–20. 12 J.-M. Villefranche, La télégraphie française. Etude historique, descriptive, anecdotique et philosophique avec figures suivie d’un guide-tarif à l’usage des expéditeurs de télégrammes (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1870), p. 173. 13 M. Siefert, ‘The Russian Empire and the International Telegraph Union’, in G. Balbi, A. Fickers (eds.), History of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Transnational Techno-diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), p. 29.

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cross-subsidisation and popular access constantly brought the telegraph closer to the post office, which followed the English path in 1848 in France after a democratic and social revolution overthrew the monarchy and established the Second Republic. The French Director General of the Post Office called for the merger of both services in 1864, arguing that the telegraph ‘has so far only assisted the rich classes’ and large cities.14 The public’s expectation was to benefit from an ‘electric letter’.15 The so-called postalisation of the telegraph was a widely shared perspective in Europe. One of the essential issues with equal access to infrastructure relied on a moral economy principle—the public network should not distort economic competition between actors. It was in the name of this logic of equal access that private telegraph networks were finally nationalised in 1869 in the UK. The country could then join the International Telegraph Union. While the new opportunity to communicate within the public sphere worried the supporters of the most conservative order, it was generally celebrated as the acquisition of a new freedom. However, this did not come without risks—the risk of being monitored by the authorities, the risk of being misinformed and the risk of being excluded from exchanges. Since then, states and societies had never ceased to be torn by these tensions—the fragility of power, the servitude of freedom, the exclusion through what connects—which made the regulation of communication networks a major issue within every political community. These tensions also played at the international level.

Negotiating Interdependence Until the advent of electric telegraphy, the official correspondence of states crossed borders by postal networks, by special messengers or else by the diplomatic bag.16 In 1851, when the idea of laying a telegraph cable across the English Channel was discussed, British Foreign Secretary Lord Henry Palmerston, clearly expressed the tremendous empowerment 14 Projet de fusion des Postes et des Télégraphes. Rapport du Directeur général des Lignes télégraphiques à S. E. M. le Ministre de l’Intérieur, not dated (1864). 15 E. Arnoux, La lettre électrique. Nouveau service télégraphique. La télégraphie électrique rendue populaire (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1867). 16 A. Tessier (ed.), La Poste, servante et actrice des relations internationales (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2016).

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of the state that this new communication channel would bring. For Palmerston—who understood the value of free access to foreign networks’ capacities—the submarine link would have the following three benefits for the state by allowing ‘the free use of continental Electric Telegraphs’: accelerated governmental communication with British diplomatic apparatus abroad, ‘the rapid conveyance of intelligence of a political and military nature from China and from our Indian and other possessions in the East, as well as from our fleet and harbours in the Mediterranean’, and the provision of fresh news to British newspapers, which was—a rare and valuable asset for the country by then.17 The cross-Channel line went into service in 1852. Three years later, during the Crimean War (1853–1856), the UK and France, together with the Ottoman Empire and then the Kingdom of Sardinia, which allied against Russia, managed to establish a telegraphic connection with their troops on the Black Sea in the spring of 1855. On the Russian side, the line to Sebastopol only arrived later, and too late, to announce the capitulation of the place.18 At the same time, the same allies supported the establishment by a Britishowned company of a line linking them to the southern shore of the Mediterranean via Corsica and Sardinia; however, the venture turned out to be unsuccessful.19 The sea was more difficult to cross than expected. These different experiences show not only the strategic interest of international telegraphy but also its limits. To the east, Austria granted the right to transit through its lines, but it could have been otherwise. Once installed, these links could have been cut or spied on and were repeatedly slowed down. Towards the south, it proved necessary to fall back on other routes via Spain. As a new instrument of power, these transnational infrastructures were not infallible and could also be new sources of fragility. Therefore, interdependence had two faces: additional capacities and new vulnerabilities. According to Daniel Headrick, the British government understood this first, concerned as early as the 1870s–1880s with having the means to 17 National Archives (Kew), FO 97/197: Foreign Office to the Board of Trade,

04/07/1851. 18 Siefert, ‘The Russian Empire and the International Telegraph Union’, p. 20. 19 A. Asseraf, ‘The Immediate Sea: News, Telegraph and Imperialism in the Mediter-

ranean, 1798–1882’, Monde(s) 16 (2019), pp. 47–66. See also A. Giuntini, ‘ITU, Submarine Cables and African Colonies, 1850s’, in G. Balbi (ed.), History of the International Telecommunication Union, pp. 37–53.

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communicate with its colonies without going through third or at least potentially hostile countries.20 Other governments would later learn this to their cost. During its war with the US, Spain saw its communications with its colonies in Cuba and the Philippines disrupted. Although the US government and contractors had been campaigning since the late 1850s to neutralise cables in the event of war, one of the first operations of the US army in April 1898 was to cut the cables linking these islands to their metropolis—even if the cables belonged to non-Spanish companies. Because of a lack of precise maps and tools, the goal was only partially achieved. United States Captain George Squier declared in 1900 that this war, ‘for the first time[,] demonstrated the dominating influence of submarine cable communications in the conduct of a naval war’.21 The dominance of predominantly British-owned cable companies, starting with the Eastern and Associated Telegraph Company, and the ability to defend these cables with a powerful fleet gave the UK an advantage of which all European governments were well aware at the time.22 The Fashoda incident in 1898 reminded the French government of this. It was London that warned Paris of the situation in Sudan, where British and French expeditionary corps, racing for control of the Upper Nile, came face to face. The information balance of power was clear and decisive. Faced with these different opportunities and perils, states gradually developed defensive and offensive strategies which were in place on the eve of the First World War. An example of a defensive strategy was the development of controlled infrastructures—through the payment of public subsidies to support private companies’ activities, the development of radiotelegraph stations, which were alternatives to cables, from the 1900s onwards, and the creation of secret codes.23 Examples of offensive 20 D. Headrick, ‘Le rôle stratégique des câbles sous-marins intercontinentaux, 1854– 1945’, in P. Griset (ed.), Les ingénieurs des télécommunications dans la France contemporaine. Réseaux, innovation et territoires (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Paris: CHEFF, 2013), pp. 59–72. 21 G. O. Squier, ‘The Influence of Submarine Cables upon Military and Naval Strategy’, RNN, RG 8, XCOC, Box 81, 1900–1910. Quoted here: https://www.history. navy.mil/research/publications/documentary-histories/united-states-navy-s/telegraphyand-cable.html. 22 R. Boyce, ‘Submarine Cables as a Factor in Britain’s Ascendancy as a World Power, 1850–1914’, in M. North (ed.), Kommunikationsrevolutionen: Die neuen Medien des 16. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1995), pp. 81–100. 23 In particularly for military communications.

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strategies were plans to cut cables in the event of conflict, development of interception and deciphering capabilities, and spread of deliberately truncated, altered or falsified messages.24 Although they were rivals, the states all the more had to come to terms with these policies because they had, at the same time, patiently cooperated to connect with one another in order to access foreign communication capacities and avoid being excluded from an emerging global network. This cooperation took place in new intergovernmental organisations.

The International Telegraph Union The opening of telegraph services to private users greatly encouraged public authorities to interconnect their lines. Prior to the opening of the network to the public, France had no international telegraph connection. Several of its line were available only a few months later. It was then not uncommon for international lines to be laid before major cities within a country were connected. Connecting national and regional capital cities across borders structured the development of telegraph networks in Europe in the 1850s. The capacities and vulnerabilities conferred on states by the new crossborder means of communication were now to be found at the level of private users. The ability of a country’s nationals to exchange messages at the speed of electricity with men and women living in another territory was experienced as a new liberty and empowerment. The director of the telegraph office established in Varna (now Bulgaria), who was responsible for dealing with exchanges with Paris in the context of the Crimean War, illustrated this in his own way by confessing that he had more than once thought of being paid by some scoundrel speculator to make the stock market fluctuate by announcing false news.25 One individual in a peripheral region was now able to change the course of international financial markets. Putting news into circulation became the business of powerful companies. Contemporaries did not underestimate the capacity of press

24 A. Fickers and P. Griset, Communicating Europe. Technologies, Information, Events (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 85–86. 25 Villefranche, La télégraphie française, p. 160.

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agencies such as Havas, Wolff and Reuters, to form public opinion.26 Governments supported them, as long as they carried information that was not unfavourable, and appeared particularly concerned about the accelerated circulation of news in their colonies.27 However, who could actually access these international services, and who was excluded because of the rates or the distance from the offices? The response of the director of the Varna office, who went on to become the director of the Versailles office, shows that the social critique of networks was not foreign at the time. Steam, thanks to which couriers travelled faster and more regularly by train or ship, and electricity were, as he wrote in 1870, advances hitherto reserved for ‘the rich man (who) can enjoy a larger area of this world’.28 This power itself had its drawbacks, though. Private messages could be censored, eavesdropped on or even manipulated, becoming the sources of a new kind of domination over individuals. All of this makes clear that when state representatives negotiated the way information circulated across borders, it was not only technical questions that they had to deal with, such as the exchange of mail bags and the diameters of wires or cables to be connected. At stake were power and weakness, emancipation and domination, and integration and exclusion of public authorities and of civil societies. Chronologically, the first union to come into being was for telegraph exchanges. The term ‘union’ itself, applied to agreements between states concerning postal and telegraph exchanges, existed before the multilateral agreements were signed. Already in the 1840s, it was used to emphasise the pooling of the means of communication between two states when they signed bilateral agreements for the exchange of mail or telegrams.29 What was at stake in the 1850s and 1860s was the multilateralisation of these unions, which regulated, through general principles and detailed regulations, the way in which borders were crossed, no longer for two given states but for a group of states. There were four incentives for multilateralisation. The first one was internal. It consisted of simplifying the regulatory framework to limit 26 V. Barth, Wa(h)re Fakten: Wissensproduktionen globaler Nachrichtenagenturen, 1835– 1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). 27 A. Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 28 Villefranche, La télégraphie française, p. 254. 29 Laborie, L’Europe mise en réseaux, p. 66.

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the operational and accounting errors of telegraph employees facing ever-increasing traffic. The second incentive was external, consisting of lowering international tariffs by bringing them into line with the reforms carried out at the national level, marked by the introduction of uniform telegraph charges.30 Major users such as banks, stock exchanges and traders, much more than families (who accounted for about twenty per cent of France’s international traffic in the late 1850s, for instance), demanded that these national reforms be extended to international trade. The last two incentives were politico-diplomatic. First, they came from small states with highly internationalised economies, such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, which pushed to find a common framework.31 Second they came from Napoleon III, who sought to position imperial France at the heart of a new European concert by initiating various multilateral conferences of a more or less technical nature. After the Second Italian War of Independence between the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and France on the one hand and Austria on the other in 1859, as well as in the midst of persistent international tensions, it was not obvious to see ‘the delegates of more than twenty former allied or enemy powers, recognised or disowned, gather in one same place in Europe’.32 The transition from bilateral agreements to the Paris Convention was not direct but was prepared by a series of separate multilateral agreements reflecting the European geopolitics of the period. A first multilateral agreement was established in 1850 with Prussia, Austria, Saxony and Bavaria together forming an Austro-German Telegraph Union.33 At the time of its revision in the following year, new members joined the union and a new provision was made. From then on, direct lines could cross borders, equipped with similar equipment, using the Morse system. The

30 K. Aznavour, ‘The Price of Order: Technology, Diplomacy and the Formation of the International Telegraph Union (ITU)’, PhD thesis, (Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2014). 31 On Switzerland’s very active policy: G. Balbi, S. Fari, G. Richeri and S. Calvo,

Network Neutrality: Switzerland’s Role in the Genesis of the Telegraph Union, 1855–1875 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). 32 D’Aubone, ‘La convention télégraphique’, Journal des télégraphes 1 (15/12/1865), pp. 9–10, at p. 9. 33 J. Reindl, Der Deutsch-Österreichische Telegraphenverein und die Entwicklung des deutschen Telegraphenwesens, 1850–1871 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013).

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time-consuming and error-prone transshipment of dispatches at the frontier soon became a thing of the past. The articles of the convention served as models for two other unions. One of these was created in 1852 at the instigation of Belgium, which was linked to both the Austro-German Telegraph Union and to France. Together, they adopted a so-called mixed convention. The other union was formed in 1855 between France and its neighbouring countries, Spain, Sardinia, Switzerland and Belgium, which wished to go a step further in lowering tariffs and to adopt the decimal system. Here again, direct lines replaced the exchange offices as in Irun, a town at the border where the employees of the Spanish and French administrations used to exchange dispatches and recode them in their own language. This whole system came together for the first time in 1858, when the three conventions were revised in series, and merged in 1865 in Paris. The general principles of the convention and the detailed regulations then adopted by twenty states formed a sixty-seven-page, sixty-threearticle package. They reflected a relatively liberal approach to the flow of information because the idea of public monopoly and state sovereignty was deeply embedded in the convention. The point was not to open national public networks to external competition, on the contrary, but to facilitate exchanges among them across borders. This said, the convention was liberal in the sense that it transformed national networks into ‘a kind of common good that the people of the old continent can use’.34 The first principle guaranteed freedom of access to international networks and the secrecy of correspondence for all users in the signatory states. The second principle authorised the use of all languages; therefore, a Dutch telegrapher could be asked to code a message written in Spanish. The third principle, the encryption of correspondence, hitherto reserved for government authorities, was authorised for private individuals. Finally, rates were substantially reduced, making international services more accessible. A uniform international rate for any international dispatch, regardless of the distance and the number of transit countries, was discussed and finally rejected. Instead of this abstract pricing system, delegates agreed on a system based on (geographic and political) distance. The price would indeed vary from one connection to another, according to agreements between the sending, receiving and transiting countries. The service cost

34 A. Darimon, ‘La télégraphie universelle’, La Presse (28/10/1865).

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up to two thirds less than before. The cost of sending a twenty-word dispatch from Naples to Stockholm, for example, dropped from thirty to nine francs, and that from Paris to Moscow dropped from twenty-four francs to 10.5 francs. All of this was done while respecting the sovereignty of each state, or more precisely, all of it provoked the international negotiation of clauses recoding national sovereignty in an age of interdependence. A series of reservation rights counterbalanced the general principles. Under the Paris Convention, each state retained the right to limit the drafting of messages to the languages spoken on its territory or even to just some of them, to postpone the use of encryption (only Austria and Spain would use this provision), to censor a message at any point in the network, to interrupt the service unilaterally, and finally, to process its own dispatches as a priority in the event of traffic congestion.

The Universal Postal Union The same dynamics and philosophy played in the postal sector. However, this long-established service did not lead to the creation of a General Postal Union until about ten years after the telegraph. Although a first conference was held in Paris in 1863 at the instigation of the US,35 the treaty establishing the General Postal Union was signed in Bern in 1874. Two political reasons can explain this delay. The first was the existence of a private post office in the heart of German countries. For centuries, the Thurn and Taxis family had been providing postal services, especially international services, in what was once the area of Habsburg control and influence. Following Prussia’s victory over Austria, the creation of the North German Confederation and the establishment of a federal North German postal administration in 1867 marked the end of this enterprise. The Prussian administrator in charge of foreign correspondence within the new administration, Heinrich von Stephan, then championed a radical international postal reform. His proposal had two sources. The first was the experience of the Austro-German Postal Union (Postverein), formed in 1850 in parallel with the Telegraphic Union, which von Stephan had to deal with at length. Historian Douglas 35 R. John, ‘Projecting Power Overseas: U.S. Postal Policy and International StandardSetting at the 1863 Paris Postal Conference’, Journal of Policy History 27/3 (2015), pp. 416–38.

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Howland explains that if the Germanic area was the breeding ground for a dynamic union between administrations, it was not only because of its fragmentation into multiple states, some of which were keen to organise unity—Prussia, which had set up a customs union, the Zollverein, in 1834, and Austria, which refused to join the Zollverein and instead supported the Postverein because it was anxious to counter Prussia’s influence in the Zollverein—but also because economic liberalism and administrative law represented a privileged way for bourgeois and intellectual society to counterbalance the enduring absence of a liberal political constitution after the Revolutions of 1848.36 The second source was the International Postage Association, founded in 1851 on the fringes of the International Exhibition in London by pacifists, such as the American Elihu Burritt, and free-traders, such as the Englishman Richard Cobden, united in the idea that international correspondence should be facilitated to bring peoples closer together through trade and a feeling of brotherhood.37 The object of the association was ‘to promote a cheap and uniform system of colonial and international postage’. Much more than telegraphy, which was expensive and still far from connecting all parts of the world (the first truly operational transatlantic cable was laid in 1866), the post office was the main channel for the circulation of information on an international scale. However, it remained costly, highly complex for both senders and postmen, and risky, especially when states were not committed to bilateral agreements, as was often the case. The association’s proposal for a general convention received too little support from governments (in the US and Belgium) to be implemented. Inspired by this, the decisions taken at the postal conference organised in 1863, which were agreed to be not binding on anyone, and, above all, von Stephan’s personal investment, put it back on the agenda. In the meantime, however, France fiercely opposed von Stephan’s project. This was the second reason for the delay. More precisely, the French postal administration opposed the project, claiming that ‘in the aftermath of Sadowa, Prussia undertook to play politics with the Post

36 D. Howland, ‘Japan and the Universal Postal Union: An Alternative Internationalism in the 19th Century’, Social Science Japan Journal 17/1 (2014), pp. 23–39. 37 P. A. Shulman, ‘Ben Franklin’s Ghost: World Peace, American Slavery, and the Global Politics of Information before the Universal Postal Union’, Journal of Global History 10/2 (2015), pp. 212–34.

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Office’.38 The proposed reform would lead to significant revenue losses, which France was simply not prepared to accept. Under the bilateral agreements regime, the Posts exchanged mail at the borders as if they were buying and selling goods. In this import–export business, the French Post was a major winner. Its profit counted in millions of francs and, in 1867, represented twenty per cent of the operating profit of the entire French postal service.39 Despite pressure from a ‘postal coalition of Europe’40 and, even in France, pressure from diplomats and liberals, such as Michel Chevalier, the position of the Ministry of Finance and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 postponed the negotiations. In the aftermath of the conflict, the financial state of defeated France, which had to pay heavy reparations, did not encourage the government to reconsider its position. A conference convened in September 1873 was finally adjourned because of France’s failure to participate. It was held a year later in Bern and brought together twenty-one states—mutatis mutandis, the same as the signatories of the 1865 Telegraph Convention, plus the UK, the US and Egypt. France was present, but only as an observer. It abstained from all the votes and, alone among the participants, did not sign the treaty creating the General Postal Union. This strange position did not worry the Times, which considered a definitive refusal of ‘free postal trade (…) hardly likely’,41 because French businesses would suffer too much. In fact, the country decided to join the union a year later, after having obtained certain concessions from all signatories on how to calculate transit charges and revise the tariff clauses of the agreement. Several reasons explained this change of attitude: a better financial situation, a liberal minister of finance, Léon Say, nicknamed ‘the grandson of free trade’—he was the descendant of the famous liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say—and the concern that the French should have the same facilities for international communication as others, especially their economic competitors. Since 1860, the country has signed a series of customs agreements that have opened it up to competition. This turning point in customs policy gave an impetus to the development 38 Edouard Vandal, director general of the post office, to M. Conti, head of the Emperor’s cabinet, 23/05/1868. Centre des Archives du Monde du Travail (Roubaix), 6AQ1. Laborie, L’Europe mise en réseaux, p. 93. 39 Idem, p. 94. 40 Edouard Vandal, Director General of Posts, ‘Note’, 30/04/1868. CAMT 6AQ1. 41 Times (30/12/1874).

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of networks, on the one hand, and to international cooperation, on the other. Indeed, from the government’s point of view, it seemed logical to try to give national economic actors the means to win the competition that was opening up, particularly by densifying the national and international infrastructures at their disposal. Not providing the country with efficient networks and not connecting them to the rest of Europe and the world would be to launch it into a speed race with a ball and chain.42 It was the same logic of economic competition encouraging administrative cooperation that led France to join Germany five years later, when the latter proposed creating an international parcel post service in the framework of the Postal Union; France had no domestic service of this kind (Fig. 3.2).43 Like the International Telegraph Union, the General Postal Union did not liberalise postal markets but still very much responded to liberal pressures and contributed to lowering barriers to international exchanges of correspondence. If states left no room for the private sector, except for shipping companies, which were concessionaries for overseas transport (as cable companies were in the telegraph business), the General Postal Union truly facilitated international postal exchanges insofar as it created together, as stated in Article 1 of the treaty, ‘a single postal territory for the reciprocal exchange of correspondence between their post offices’.44 In practice, the abolition of postal frontiers meant that each state opened its territory to the free transit of foreign correspondence, undertaking to respect its inviolability and aligning itself with common technical standards and metrics for processing it. Therefore, all the means put in place by one state would be available to other states. The idea of a ‘uniform international tax for Europe’, first mooted in 1863 by the delegate of the young Italian state, was implemented in 1874.45 Although the states 42 ‘pendant que l’administration des travaux publics multipliait les moyens de transport, l’administration de l’intérieur multipliait les moyens de transmettre la pensée, jalouses l’une et l’autre d’assurer au commerce et à l’industrie les moyens de jouer un rôle honorable dans la lutte que les traités de commerce ouvrent à leur activité’. De Siorac, ‘La télégraphie française sous l’administration de M. le vicomte de Vougy’, Annales télégraphiques 8 (1865), p. 462. 43 L. Laborie, ‘Global Commerce in Small Boxes: Parcel Post, 1878–1913’, Journal of Global History 10/2 (2015), pp. 235–58. 44 Documents du Congrès postal international réuni à Berne du 15 septembre au 9 octobre 1874 (Berne: Bureau international de l’UPU, 1944), p. 139. 45 Laborie, L’Europe mise en réseaux, pp. 80, 91.

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Fig. 3.2 For the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Postal Union in 1924, the German Post Office commemorated Heinrich von Stephan (1831–1897), without having to cite his name, as the figure was apparently so well known to the public

rejected the idea of all having the same tax for the time being—which would have given full effect to the principle that they formed a single postal territory—they agreed on a single tax for their correspondence with foreign countries, regardless of the destination country and the distance the correspondence had to travel. Just as there was uniformity of internal rates, there would be uniformity of international rates.46 They also set a target for the convergence of these different taxes: twenty-five cents for the postage of the most common postal item (a fifteen-gram letter) to any foreign country. Uniformity remained the goal. Until this was achieved, 46 The only exception was for relations involving a long sea journey, for which the levying of a surcharge was allowed.

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everyone would be obliged not to exceed this target by about twenty per cent. France fixed the rate at thirty cents. This was at the top end of the range, but it represented a sharp drop compared with the previous rate (forty cents for Germany, fifty for Russia, seventy for Norway and eighty for Egypt). On the other hand, this tax was the same as before for Belgium and Switzerland, which were border countries, and was higher in the case of Luxembourg. This example shows that the uniformity of the tax meant that there was no alignment with real costs but that there was international cross-subsidisation between border connections (denser and less costly) and connections further away instead. This set of provisions was therefore a far cry from the situation that previously prevailed, described as follows by the British Post Office: ‘It may be said in general terms that the means of communication were provided by those countries which found it most to their interest to set them up. No prescriptive right of transit existed (…). Rates of postage were fixed according to circumstances, and were apportioned according to circumstances between the country of origin and the country of destination. (…) In negotiating the numerous treaties and conventions framed to regulate all these matters, every country of course made the best bargain it could for itself on each occasion’.47 As in the field of telegraphy, measures counterbalanced this move towards unity in favour of the sovereignty of each member, recoded in an interdependent environment. First, as the financial cornerstone of the new organisation, the tariff range could not be revised without the unanimous agreement of the participants. Therefore, each member had the right to veto. In addition, the remuneration for transit, which some administrations wanted to abolish, was maintained. Those countries that were in between two other corresponding states were obliged to help but not free of charge. From this point of view, the borders continued to be felt.

47 General Post Office, A Brief Account of the formation of the Universal Postal Union, its Gradual Extension to the various Parts of the British Empire and the Reasons which Have Hitherto Deterred the Australasian and South African Colonies from Joining the Union. London, for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1887, p. 203. Royal Mail Archive (London), POST 46/57–57: Universal Postal Union, 1834–1907.

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The Politics of Technocratic Internationalism The telegraph in 1865 and the post office in 1874 ushered in a new era that was liberal in many ways compared with the previous one. It was the public powers—the governments—that implemented this change. For this reason, we can speak of a ‘governmental internationalism’, which led to an international organisation being entrusted with the task of setting rules that were binding on everyone.48 However, who exactly wrote these technical (standards), commercial (tariffs) and operational rules? While formally, the signatories were states, speaking of states in general lacks consistency. One needs to take a closer look at the actors who came together in Paris and Bern and, later on, when the conventions were periodically revised—approximately every three to five years. The international telegraph office and the international postal office, set up in 1868 and 1874, respectively, were institutional innovations with no power. Their directors had limited influence.49 Power was in the hands of those who negotiated and signed the international conventions. In 1865, the signatories were men invested with the power to represent and commit their governments. Almost all of them were diplomats by profession, being ambassadors of their countries in Paris. However, they were not the ones who prepared the texts they signed. After an opening ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the special delegates, as they were called, quickly took over. Each diplomat was accompanied by a telegraph specialist who was generally responsible for this department in his country. These specialists met for three months to prepare the texts together.50

48 M. Herren, ‘Governmental Internationalism and the Beginning of a New World Order in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism. Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London et al.: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 121–144. 49 S. Fari, G. Balbi and G. Richeri, The Formative Years of the Telegraph Union (London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). 50 France was a notable exception, as a diplomat accompanied its director of telegraphy throughout all negotiations.

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Document: Techno-diplomacy. When Italian Foreign Minister Emilio Visconti Venosta celebrated cooperation between diplomats and experts The practice which has been introduced of extending by diplomatic means the application of some of the great discoveries, constitutes, in my opinion, one of the most real advances of our century. At one time, not so long ago, politics was the exclusive concern of cabinets. Now, on the contrary, Governments consider it one of their most serious duties to see to it, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its agents, that commercial relations are developed and that communications between peoples are made easy, numerous and rapid. Thus, in addition to the great political questions which still too often demand the attention of statesmen, negotiations of a more peaceful character, but also more advantageous, are going on important subjects: posts, railways, telegraphs. Renowned scholars, special men or men of great administrative experience, have been called in to assist professional diplomats; and this introduction into diplomacy of men endowed with the most valuable positive knowledge, seems to me to constitute one of the most fruitful innovations in the relations of nations between themselves. Source Opening session of the Rome Telegraph Conference, 1871. Quoted in the Journal télégraphique 26 (25/12/1871), p. 399.

Two texts were finally drafted. The first, the convention, was to be signed by the plenipotentiaries. The second, the international service regulations, which flowed from the first and set out the details of implementation, would not. Symptomatically, the special delegates agreed on the service regulations even before the convention was validated by the diplomats to whom the text was submitted for purely formal reasons. The distinction between the political part of the agreement, which required the signature of a plenipotentiary and ratification to come into force, and the administrative aspect, which did not, lost its substance within a decade. In 1871, the delegates, among whom there were now very few diplomats, planned to move a number of articles from the convention to the regulations at the next meeting. This was done in 1875. Thanks to this sleight of hand, meetings could now be held between special delegates, without diplomats and without the need to request full powers from the chancellery. Decisions no longer had to be submitted to any national ratification body. The Swiss delegate noted the twisting

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of the usual principles of international law, according to which negotiations involving the interests of a state should be conducted by a person in charge of representing it.51 Indeed, the experts , as they called themselves, refrained from formally requesting the power of representation, thus acquiring greater autonomy to organise international relations in their field. We can therefore speak of an ‘administrative internationalism’ or even a ‘technocratic internationalism’, in which experts wrote common international rules in the name of their competencies, free from what they defined as political interferences, which they considered harmful.52 On the Post Office side, the initial situation was different, but the end of the story was the same. As a sign of greater confidence or of lesser sensitivity to the subject, diplomats were absent from the founding meeting. The plenipotentiaries were mostly postal experts. From time to time, governments sent diplomats. This was the case in 1891 in Vienna. The only two diplomats present at the congress, the Count of Lichtervelde for Belgium and the Marquis de Montmarin for France, were surprised that postal officials had plenipotentiary statutes, although not all of them received full powers from their governments. They proposed changing this for the next congresses. However, the postal experts jealously opposed them with a united front. The British postal delegates commented on the event back in London, not without a certain amount of arrogance: ‘This failure of the proposal may almost be described as farcical’.53 Like the telegraphers, the postal officials were clearly the ones

51 ‘In these conferences, the delegates will not only have to deal with questions of service where experience is precious, but also the interests of their countries, as in the discussion over tariffs’. Quoted by S. Fari, ‘Telegraphic Diplomacy from the Origins to the Formative Years of the ITU, 1849–1875’, in G. Balbi (ed.), History of the International Telecommunication Union , pp. 169–190, at p. 184. 52 D. Howland, ‘Telegraph Technology and Administrative Internationalism in the 19th

Century’, in M. Mayer, M. Carpes and R. Knoblich (eds.), The Global Politics of Science and Technology. Concepts from International Relations and Other Disciplines (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2014), pp. 183–199. W. Kaiser and J. Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe. Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations, Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 21–47. Some contemporaries also regretted the absence of jurists or scholars to represent the public interest. D’Aubone, ‘La convention télégraphique’, p. 9. 53 S. A. Blackwood and H. Buxton Forman, ‘Report of the British Delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Universal Postal Union, held at Vienna’, in Universal Postal Union, 1834–1907, 321–334, 326 [1891]. RMA, POST 46 vol. 57.

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who set their own agendas and conducted their own negotiations. They debated among themselves behind the veil of technicality on what were, to a diplomat, mostly technical issues—was a country obliged to accept packages from abroad containing live bees? The debate held up the delegates for several days in Vienna in 1891, but it could also be sometimes very political in the classical sense, such as the distribution of votes and the recognition of the international status of a particular territory or group of territories; the latter question arose for the colonies, with the UK’s delegates pushing for its territories to have their own votes once they became members. While postal agreements remained subject to national ratification, they were not subject to diplomatic control. However, the latter remained vigilant in bilateral relations, as an example from French diplomatic archives reveals. When the seemingly benign negotiation of an arrangement on the exchange of samples by mail between France and the US was concluded on the principle that the administrations of the two countries could denounce it on their own without going through the diplomatic channel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris reacted very strongly. First, it was not consulted on this last-minute amendment; second, the amendment amounted to ‘authorizing the offices to take the place of the governments themselves in certain cases’.54 If the question of samples was secondary, the emancipation of the administrations was not. The clause would constitute ‘an unfortunate precedent’.55 Diplomacy demanded and obtained its withdrawal. In comparison with the bilateral framework, the multilateral postal scene remained out of the diplomats’ reach.

54 M. Outrey, French Legation in the United States, to Mr. Maynard, Postmaster General, 10/03/1881. Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères (AMAE, La Courneuve), 426QO22. 55 ‘Régularisation du protocole de l’arrangement postal signé avec les Etats-Unis relativement aux limites de poids des paquets d’échantillons’, May 1881. AMAE, 426QO22.

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Conferences and congresses were the main social events around which these transnational expert communities coalesced. As they were rather costly for the participating administrations because of the travel expenses and the length of stays, which took officials away for several weeks, the idea of spacing them out as much as possible, for example, every ten years, gained ground. However, this idea was ultimately put off. The official reason was that the congress ‘affords such opportunity for friendly consultation between the representatives of the different countries as to lead to the cultivation of that spirit of conciliation and harmony which is so essential for the maintenance of the Union’.56 The unofficial reason was that in a congress, strategies of influence could play a full role, which allowed for the maintenance of the domination of the minority of large states over the majority of small states, compared to a system in which the decisions would be taken at a distance by vote. Therefore, the supposedly apolitical world of expertise was not so much so. The quest for autonomy from the outside was political itself—carving out space on the international scene was also a way to strengthen national positions within the industrial state apparatus for a new crowd of administrative elites—and the politics of internal negotiations was manifold.

Cross-Subsidies: The Transnational Funding of National Networks The rules adopted within the Telegraph Union and the Postal Union greatly facilitated the transnational movement of correspondence for both operators and users. In particular, tariffs fell significantly. However, they remained remunerative compared to domestic rates. International services subsidised domestic services. This view on international service as a cash provider was most clearly at point in high-transit countries. Crossed by the international telegraphic or postal dispatches of others, they did not wish to provide this service for free or at loss. Instead, these countries developed their networks in the hope of capturing them and profiting from them. The prospect of attracting traffic in transit and earning a comfortable income from it thus

56 S. A. Blackwood and H. Buxton Forman, Report of the British Delegates to the Third Congress of the Universal Postal Union, held at Lisbon, pp. 193–200 [1885], 196. RMA, POST 46 vol. 57.

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explained France’s decision in 1854 to align its terminal telegraph equipment with Morse equipment. ‘This made other nations dependent on French telegraphy, and at the same time increased its revenues,’ confessed an observer.57 This set in motion a virtuous circle, in which improvements in the national network strengthened its position in transnational transit, which in turn provided the means to develop the domestic network. At the end of the 1850s, French telegraph stations corresponded with about 2000 telegraph stations abroad—much more than the country counted within its borders. If international correspondence represented a little bit less than one-third of the domestic correspondence in absolute numbers, it supplied almost as much revenue.58 A highly profitable activity, it was key for subsidising loss-making national traffic. The fare structure adopted at the Paris Conference in 1865 certainly led to a decrease in these revenues. However, the idea of free transit was rejected. Above all, in the years that followed, international rates fell much lower than national rates. The postalisation of telegraphy popularised this means of communication domestically but not beyond. Thus, from 1865 to 1903, a twenty-word domestic dispatch would halve in price in France, while the same dispatch between France and Spain was only reduced by eleven per cent. However, in both cases, the lines became more productive, as new generations of equipment allowed more messages to be carried at the same time on the same conductor. Prices simply did not reflect costs. International telegraphy carried on subsidising domestic telegraphy. In detail, some users managed to have their international correspondence subsidised as well. For instance, from 1875 onwards, newspapers and news agencies benefited from special subscription fares for their use at night of international telegraph lines.59 In the postal sector, in which the logic of standardisation was pushed the furthest, the rates were certainly simplified and lightened in 1874, but the principle remained—international correspondence should generate

57 ‘Revue

historique de la télégraphie française’, Journal des télégraphes (15/09/1866), p. 5.

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58 A. Laugel, ‘La télégraphie électrique en France’, Revue des deux mondes 31 (1861), p. 900. 59 Documents de la conférence télégraphique internationale de Saint-Pétersbourg publiés par le bureau international des administrations télégraphiques (Berne: Rieder et Simmen, 1876). p. 78, pp. 408–10, pp. 476–81.

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more revenue than national correspondence. Knowing that each administration would keep the tax levied on the item sent—and thus cease to buy and sell mail at the borders—the idea was that the international tax should be approximately twice as high as the domestic tax so that when the item was sent, the administration would be remunerated both for the service rendered and for the service it would render when it delivered the reply. The whole thing was remunerative because in any case, there was only half the work to be done compared to domestic correspondence (collection or delivery instead of both). Postal officials were obviously well aware of this. Through the Telegraph Union and the Postal Union, modern states, many of which were recently formed at that time, were thus cooperating in their construction. At the same time, and this was not contradictory, these international organisations also fully supported the globalisation of the economy.

Imperialism and International Cooperation Made Compatible---Administrative Sovereignty Communication networks were catalysts of globalisation; they pulled it and fed into it. On the one hand, they were powerful globalising agents because they ‘directly affect[ed] the very constituents of globalization: global exchanges, movements, transfers, flows’.60 For the first time ever, information could circulate faster than goods through the telegraph, the productivity of international transport rose, and prices could go down and somehow converge. By intensifying exchanges between distant parts of the world, communication networks made countries ever more interdependent. On the other hand, their development responded to demand, and their geography reflected a polarised world shaped by political and, also very much, by market forces.61 The telegraph and postal networks

60 R. Wenzlhuemer, ‘Editorial—Telecommunication and Globalization in the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Social Research 35 (2010), pp. 7–18, at p. 15. See also R. Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth Century World. The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 61 D. Winseck and R. Pike, Communication and Empire. Medias, Markets and Globalisation (1860–1930) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

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concentrated power in the large metropolises, the ‘capitals of capital’,62 while still ignoring vast parts of the world before the First World War and neglecting less populated areas or those less involved in trade, such as many rural areas. In this mechanism, the unions were key platforms in which common technical, operational and commercial rules were designed at a global scale. The initial European framework had almost immediately enlarged in two directions. The first one was horizontal. The process consisted of admitting new administrations around the table of negotiations, broadening the space and users covered by international provisions. The second was vertical and aimed at fluidifying the connection with private companies operating transoceanic routes. Despite several invitations to join, the US remained outside the Telegraph Union for a long time, whereas other countries or territories soon joined the founders. While the latter were sovereign states, those who joined the unions later had varying political statuses. Some were sovereign states, such as Japan, which joined the Postal Union in 1877 and the Telegraph Union in 1879. In fact, for both Japan and the Ottoman Empire, it was more a question of strengthening their sovereignty through these memberships. ‘Unlike their peers in education and journalism, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Keiu, who applauded Japan’s development of civilization, Japanese government officials viewed membership in the UPU as a means of asserting Japanese autonomy (dokuritsu) and recovering Japan’s national rights (kokken)’.63 The Japanese postal administration saw this as a legitimate means under international law to recover its full sovereignty from British and French postal extraterritorial encroachments and to enter an organisation on an equal footing with other states at a time when Japan was struggling to revise the unfair treaties it was forced to sign with Western powers in the 1850s and 1860s. Others were semi-autonomous states, which found a form of international recognition in their membership while remaining under the tutelage of a power, such as Romania after the Crimean War visà-vis the Ottoman Empire, which joined the Telegraph Union and the Postal Union shortly after its foundation. The largest group consisted

62 Y. Cassis, Capitals of Capital. A History of International Financial Centres 1780– 2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 63 Howland, ‘Japan and the Universal Postal Union’, at p. 24.

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of colonies dependent on European metropolises, such as British India, which, curiously enough, represented the UK in 1868. When the UK joined in 1871, it was given two votes. A debate ensued, which led to the development of the Postal Union’s governance in a way that favoured the accession of new members. Should the colonial powers be given as many votes as the number of member colonies? To this question, the countries without colonies responded negatively. Others proposed balancing the power conferred on the colonial powers by allocating additional votes to the largest countries, such as Russia, or those with the longest lines. Smaller states opposed this solution. The Director of the International Bureau Louis Curchod, who was from Switzerland, a small country without a colony, managed to settle the debate when he proposed that each administration should be given its own voice but in conferences of a non-diplomatic nature only.64 This was the main argument of the 1875 reform, which henceforth distinguished between diplomatic conferences responsible for revising the convention and administrative conferences, which could only change the more technical regulations. During administrative conferences, the same signatory government could thus be represented by several administrations, each with a deliberative vote. The participation of as many administrations as possible and the plurality of experiences, which could only be fully expressed through the plurality of voices, were considered good in themselves. Given that this reform was also about the transfer of many articles from the convention to the regulations, the geographically inclusive approach was combined with a politically exclusive approach, reserving power to the experts. The two merged together in a conceptual framework that we might call administrative sovereignty. Therefore, the empires were encouraged to bring their colonies into the Telegraph Union. The same was true of the Postal Union, albeit in different ways. A special conference was held in 1876 to settle the question of whether and how the colonies could join. The answer was positive, and each administration was given one vote. From then on, many colonies joined, particularly from the British Empire, and the union’s own name changed to reflect this expansion—in 1878, the General Postal Union became the Universal Postal Union. ‘By this means there has grown up within the Union a kind of postal federation of a very large part of the 64 Fari, ‘Telegraphic Diplomacy from the Origins to the Formative Years of the ITU’, pp. 177–180.

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British Empire; for, in this important matter of mail communication, the mother country, India, Ceylon, Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements, and the West Indies, may now be said to support by partnership the great lines of packets connecting those portions of the Empire’, reported the British General Post Office ten years or so after the foundation of the Postal Union.65 Before each accession, the metropolis and the colony agreed on sharing the subsidies needed to cushion the rate reduction. However, maritime transit for third parties remained under debate for a long time. The issue was financial: could third-party administrations have access to maritime services at the same rate as imperial administrations? The latter objected and won the argument. The Australian and New Zealand colonies joined the Postal Union in 1891 in exchange for a promise not to challenge this discrimination.66 Then, it was South Africa’s turn in 1897. During the first twenty-five years of the Postal Union’s existence, the area covered by its members tripled. The Telegraph Union parallelly grew from twenty to fifty-two members from 1865 to 1908. If European international law presented itself as the only civilised and civilising law, contemporary specialists in international law, such as Louis Renault and, later, Paul Reinsch, noted that they, themselves, had nothing to do with the genesis of these international organisations and the rules they maintained. More than religion or the nature of the government and the relations between the authorities and the population, the simple fact of having post offices and telegraph wires open to the public opened the doors of the Telegraph Union and the Postal Union. Such was, in this field, the technical criterion of civilisation.

Private Companies Just as private shipping companies subsidised by the postal service linked territories separated by oceans, submarine cable companies served as telegraphic bridges between administrations. When the founding convention 65 General Post Office, A Brief Account of the Formation of the Universal Postal Union, Its Gradual Extension to the Various Parts of the British Empire and the Reasons which Have Hitherto Deterred the Australasian and South African Colonies from Joining the Union. London, for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1887, 201–222. RMA, POST 46 vol. 57. 66 S. A. Blackwood and H. Buxton Forman, ‘Report of the British Delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Universal Postal Union, held at Vienna’, in Universal Postal Union, 1834–1907, pp. 321–334, 326 [1891], 321–322. Idem.

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of the Telegraph Union was signed in Paris in 1865, there were still no long-range transoceanic links. The first functional transatlantic cable was laid a year later in 1866. The inclusion of the private companies laying and operating these cables became a major issue at the next meetings of the Telegraph Union. The companies obtained the right to be represented in an advisory capacity from 1871 onwards. From then on, they were officially able to assert their interests, often in agreement with the countries that granted them the right to operate from their coasts or through their lands. In 1875, it became compulsory for private companies linking two member countries by sea or land to comply with the Telegraph Union’s rules. Without being full members, they acceded to the convention. They undertook to comply with the rules in return for the benefits of the convention, particularly the advantageous rates on the public portion of the route used by their customers’ telegrams. However, it is important to note that, at the same time, the members of the union agreed to adapt some of these rules specifically for the companies. This was the case, in particular, with the minimum number of words in a telegram. By lowering the threshold below twenty words, the administrations gave in to the companies’ demands. The latter sought to reduce the cost of entry for customers and increase traffic. For the administrations, these specific conditions that were favourable to private interests complicated international accounting once again. All in all, this functioned like a public guarantee to private companies, which secured their connection to public networks through which the telegrams they processed would, most of the time, start or end their journeys. The other way round, this considerably expanded the service that the administrations were able to offer to their users and could also somehow decrease the governmental subsidies that many non-financially sustainable private operators connecting to distant colonies received. Public and private operators found a mutual interest and swiftly engaged in diverse anti-competition and marketsharing regulations, which laid the ground for ‘one of the most lucrative and technologically significant international cartels in history’.67

67 P. Cowhey, ‘The International Telecommunications Regime: The Political Roots of Regimes for High Technology’, International Organization 44/2 (1990), pp. 169–199, at p. 169.

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Europe, a Technological Zone Apart Between the construction of modern states around ever-expanding and relatively affordable public services, on the one hand, and the public– private networking of the world, on the other, transnational infrastructures shaped Europe as a technological zone of its own. A technological zoneis an area in which a particular regulation of technology applies. This was particularly visible in the field of telegraphy,68 in which the International Telegraph Union was called for a long time a ‘syndicate of European administrations’.69 When the three multilateral conventions of the 1850s merged in 1865, two new and important members joined: Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The so-called European Russia was traditionally considered part of the European concert. After its defeat in 1856, Russian authorities intended to reform the country in order to once again count among the great powers. Its invitation to Paris was not immediate. It followed that of Austria, which had alerted Switzerland to its desire not to leave it to Prussia to represent the Austro–German Telegraph Union alone. When French diplomacy compromised (France and Austria had been at war just a few years earlier), it invited all members of the Austro–German Telegraph Union, including Russia, which had joined the union in 1854 to circulate war news to Europe.70 The Ottoman Empire was invited to join the European concert when the Treaty of Paris was signed to end the Crimean War. It was this broadly conceived Europe but still close to the Asian parts of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, at their own request, that techno-political cooperation institutionalised, bringing about a dynamic of integration that the director of the Austrian telegraphs, Brunner de Wattenwyl, defined simply and optimistically by its effects: ‘It increases the number of links and makes any rupture harder’.71 68 Kaiser and Schot, Writing the Rules, pp. 44–45. 69 E. Saveney, ‘La télégraphie internationale. Les conférences de Vienne et de Rome,’

Revue des deux mondes 101/3 (01/10/1872), pp. 551–583, at p. 578. 70 Siefert, ‘The Russian Empire and the International Telegraph Union, 1856–1875’, pp. 15–16, 22. 71 Documents de la conférence télégraphique internationale de Vienne, 1868, p. 343. See also M. Wobring, ‘Die Integration der europäische telegraphie in der zweiten hälfte des 19. Jahrunderts’, in C. Henrich-Franke, C. Neutsch and G. Thiemeyer (eds.), Inter– nationalismus und Europaïische Integration im Vergleich (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007), pp. 83–112.

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This integration, on the one hand, and the need to go through private submarine cable companies to link Europe to the rest of the world, on the other, led ten years later to a very explicit distinction between two telegraph regimes: one called European and the other called extraEuropean, with the latter including all exemptions from the initial regime granted to private companies and non-member states. The area covered by both regimes was geographically elastic. Each country had to determine whether ‘the lines that they have outside of Europe and which they have made part of the convention belong to the European or extraEuropean regime’.72 The French administration thus decided to include recently conquered Tunisia and Senegal in the European regime. These overseas territories formed the outpost of a European communication space for the telegraph, as well as for the post office or railways, with its core clearly based in the northwest of the continent. From this perspective, concluded Schot and Kaiser, the formation of core Europe after 1945 cannot be sufficiently explained by referencing three wars in three generations between France and Germany and by enlightened politicians wisely putting an end to that bilateral conflict. Rather, ‘(…) both countries had actually formed the core of the European international machinery and technocratic internationalism from its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century’.73 Telegrams exchanged under the European regime were the most profitable for European administrations, indeed subsidising the development of national networks, on the one hand, and sustaining global linkages, on the other, particularly in the imperial framework. This cross-subsidisation played in the postal sector, too, in which intra-European mails financed preferential rates at the national and imperial levels—the imperial penny postage appeared in 1898 within the British Empire. With rules allowing colonial administrations to take part in the votes in international conferences, European imperial powers secured a strong grip on the governance of this complex system. Interestingly enough, the countries that gathered in the first South American Continental Postal Congress held in Montevideo in 1911 precisely contested a eurocentric approach to the world of communication (Fig. 3.3).74

72 Documents de la conférence télégraphique internationale de St. Petersbourg (Berne: Rieder and Simmen, 1876), at p. 85. 73 Kaiser and Schot, Writing the Rules, p. 301.

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Fig. 3.3 On 25 December 1898, the letter rate between some parts of the British empire was reduced to one penny (Great Britain, Canada, Newfoundland, Cape Colony and Natal). The Canadian Post Office, which promoted this reform, celebrated it by issuing a special stamp. Widely produced (20 million) and used, it represented territories under British rule in red

Both the Telegraph Union and the Postal Union served as platforms for comparison between states. The statistical department was one of the first to be developed within the international offices in Bern. Comparison with neighbours and sometimes rivals was one of the driving forces behind the co-construction of modern states and has long been used by government authorities to carry out and justify reforms.75 Although the practice of comparison mainly empowered experts in their national environments, it was also used strategically by other actors. For instance, French users petitioned for the domestic postal rate scale in their country to be aligned with that of their neighbouring members of the Universal Postal Union through a postcard published by the largely circulated newspaper Le Matin (Fig. 3.4). 74 ‘First South American Continental Postal Congress at Montevideo’, Bulletin of the PanAmerican Union XXXVI (1911), pp. 689–698. 75 M. Kohlrausch and H. Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise. Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 38–39, 310–311.

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Fig. 3.4 ‘The postal rate in Europe’. Postcard, before 1906

What is obvious to us on this postcard, however, was not commented on by contemporaries for whom integration remained hidden; the stamps had the same formats, the same colours and often the same face values, and this was obviously neither the result of chance nor given by nature. Integration was hidden because it deliberately escaped the control of political and diplomatic leaders and the eyes of contemporary users, blinded by the discourse of the nation—stamps, to return to this example, conveyed the language, currency and effigy of each nation, without their common characteristics being apparent at first glance.’ The integration taking place in the European technological area nevertheless generated new visions and practices of transnational communications. News circulated more easily than ever. This circulation was constitutive of a European communication area (Fig. 3.5).76 Lisa Bolz cites an 1870 paroxysmal example of a French newspaper article quoting

76 Fickers and Griset, Communicating Europe, pp. 159–176.

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Fig. 3.5 ‘Synoptic Europe of Posts and Telegraphs’, 1881 (Source Gallica [BNF, Paris])

a Russian newspaper denying a Belgian newspaper that attributed a brochure published in Paris to a Swiss national!77 Locally, of course, the treatment and reception varied greatly, depending on the greater or lesser circulation of press titles and the proper context regarding political, social, economic and cultural issues. However, at least some facts in some circles became synchronised transnational events. This was the case, for instance, with the Franco–Prussian War, followed by the Paris Commune. Quentin Deluermoz shows that

77 ‘St. Petersburg, 23 February. The St. Petersburg Journal denies the news of the Belgian Independence which attributes to Baron Jomini, the pamphlet published in Paris, the Impasse de la politique actuelle’. La Presse (23/02/1870). Quoted in L. Bolz, ‘La dépêche télégraphique comme format d’écriture transculturel au XIXe siècle’, Monde(s) 16/2 (2019), pp. 31–46.

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the French defeats in the summer of 1870 against Prussia were known in a few hours throughout Europe, from London to Bucharest, and as far as the US, whereas it took them sixteen days to reach Brazil, more than thirty for Argentina and up to two months for Japan because of the lack of a submarine telegraph cable.78 This would change dramatically in the next decades with the formidable expansion of the undersea network. Less-connected rural areas that were much closer to the events were likely to be less informed than much more distant urban centres.

Conclusion International cooperation in the field of communication infrastructure could easily be reduced to a matter of mere functional rationalisation. The multilateral management of interconnected communication networks allowed for more efficient management in technical and economic terms. However, such a reduction would obscure the role of interests and values that, in context, shaped the adopted institutions and rules. From this vantage point, international coordination produced international linkages, on the one hand, and the modern (in some cases also imperial) state, which offered new kinds of services to the community, on the other. Europe here served as a middle ground for strengthening both local and global ties. Hannah Catherine Davies concludes from her study of the 1873 financial panic that ‘In times of crisis, both political and financial, it seems, contemporaries displayed an increased awareness of the mediated and media-based nature of events which then became the topic of critical reflection and discussion’.79 Europeanists in the interwar period unsuccessfully challenged Europe’s kind of mediated experience derived from an international postal and telegraph regime which benefited the national and imperial states and kept European integration largely hidden from most of the population.80 The European Postal and Telecommunications Union during the Second World War briefly but effectively turned 78 Q. Deluermoz, ‘La guerre franco-prussienne et la Commune de Paris, 1870–1871, événements médiatiques ‘globaux’ du XIXe siècle’, Monde(s) 16/2 (2019), pp. 159–181. 79 H. C. Davies, ‘Spreading fear, communicating trust: writing letters and telegrams during the Panic of 1873’, History and Technology 32/2 (2016), pp. 159–177, at p. 171. 80 L. Laborie, ‘Enveloping Europe. Plans and Practices in Postal Governance, 1929– 1959’, Contemporary European History 27/2 (2018), pp. 301–325.

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communication networks into vectors of European unification.81 On the initiative of hegemonic Germany and Italy, a radically new European postal and telegraph regime came into force in 1943; transit charges were abolished and a single international tariff was introduced across all the signatory countries of the convention based on the German Reich domestic tariff. Under this regime, borders effectively disappeared for German mails and telegrams. The difference that had hitherto existed between national and international rates and regimes then appeared in a different light, as a factor of differentiation as much as connection. The post-war period marked a return to the previous regime, inherited from the nineteenth century. Supporters of market integration criticised its founding principles—national monopolies and non-competition in international services. Their neo-liberal agenda managed to open a third way of integration from the 1980s onwards through the opening of national monopolies to competition, and the end of cross-subsidies. The expectation was that prices would lower and converge, mainly for international services, to the benefit of all European users, particularly businesses. This proved a success in telecommunications and a failure in the postal field.

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81 C. Henrich-Franke and L. Laborie, ‘European Union for and by Communication Networks: Continuities and Discontinuities during the Second World War’, Comparativ 28/1 (2018), pp. 82–100. V. Aldebert and S. Proschmann, ‘L’Union Européenne des Postes et des Télécommunications (1942–1945). Un ensemble d’asymétries complexes’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 275 (2019), pp. 43–54.

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Siefert, M., ‘The Russian Empire and the International Telegraph Union’, in G. Balbi and A. Fickers (eds.), History of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Transnational Techno-diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 15–36. Squier, G. O., ‘The Influence of Submarine Cables upon Military and Naval Strategy’, RNN, RG 8, XCOC, Box 81, 1900–1910. Quoted here: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/documentary-his tories/united-states-navy-s/telegraphy-and-cable.html. Tessier, A. (ed.), La Poste, servante et actrice des relations internationales (XVIe– XIXe siècle) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2016). Villefranche, J.-M., La télégraphie française. Etude historique, descriptive, anecdotique et philosophique avec figures suivie d’un guide-tarif à l’usage des expéditeurs de télégrammes (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1870). Wenzlhuemer, R., Connecting the Nineteenth Century World. The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Wenzlhuemer, R., ‘Editorial—Telecommunication and Globalization in the Nineteenth Century,’ Historical Social Research 35 (2010), pp. 7–18. Winseck, D. and Pike, R., Communication and Empire. Medias, Markets and Globalisation (1860–1930) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Wobring, M., ‘Die Integration der europäischen Telegraphie in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrunderts’, in C. Henrich-Franke, C. Neutsch and G. Thiemeyer (eds.), Internationalismus und Europaïische Integration im Vergleich (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007), pp. 83–112.

CHAPTER 4

Inventing Foreign Patents in Globalising Europe

Abstract In the nineteenth century, the patent policies of the upcoming modern nation-states had very different traditions. While Great Britain had the oldest law, France certainly had the most influential one. Moreover, some countries, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, did not have a patent law when the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was signed in 1883. In other words, the starting positions for patent coordination were extremely different. In this chapter, we will argue that there is a crucial need to sharply distinguish European patent laws before and during globalisation in order to understand the international patent regime. Although the Paris Convention was a powerful agreement that affected national patent regimes everywhere, we argue that international trade since the 1870s was the most important driver for the internationalisation of national patent laws. Keywords Patents · Internationalism

In the summer of 1911, the invention of Bonjean absorbed the time and effort of several officials in the French administration. The engineer invented a machine that could bore, channel and surface cylindrical turbines. While France, Belgium and the UK granted patents by 1911, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0_4

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the German Imperial Office rejected the application, although the French Foreign Ministry intervened.1 Despite intensive trade and market integration in Europe, and especially between Germany and France, patents and patenting abroad could cause problems on the highest levels. This is why alternative solutions for the patent problem remained prevalent, although the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of 1883 did exist: ‘In 1909, du Bois-Reymond, a patent agent from Berlin, recommended establishing a world patent office to grant a Weltpatent protecting its proprietor in all industrialised countries’.2 The Bonjean episode shows why such a world patent had not lost any of its appeal. Clearly, a world patent appears to be the simplest solution for a comparably easy problem; an inventor with a new idea applies for and receives a patent that is recognised throughout the world. Consequently, it would not be necessary to fight for recognition in different countries or juggle to different national patent regulations. However, until today, a world patent has not existed. The European Unitary Patent has taken several decades of preparation and is supposed to see the light of day during the second half of 2022.3 At first sight, this might appear puzzling. From a general point of view, what patents do does not seem to cause many problems. An innovator develops a new invention, and a patent codifies the inventor’s exclusive rights to their invention. As elaborated earlier, international trade both resulted from and generated industrialisation and high investments in research and development to produce reasonable profit. However, selling products based on innovations was—at least theoretically—risky. First, other firms could try to steal innovations via espionage or simply copy them during exhibitions. Until the 1860s, Prussian firms, for instance, were notorious for copying innovations from their English competitors while not being very innovative themselves.4 During the World Fair’s exhibit in London in 1851, Queen

1 Diplomatic Archives of France (La Courneuve), 429QO/21. 2 P. Griset, The European Patent: A European Success Story for Innovation (Munich:

European Patent Office, 2014), p. 36; A. Scheuchzer, Nouveauté et activité inventive en droit européen des brevets, Comparativa (Genève: Droz, 1981), vol. 20, p. 15. 3 See website of the European Patent Office, URL: https://www.epo.org/app lying/european/unitary/unitary-patent.html; https://www.epo.org/applying/european/ unitary/unitary-patent/start.html (last accessed 22.08.2022). 4 K.-H. Manegold, ‘Der Wiener Patentschutzkongreß von 1873’, Technikgeschichte 38 (1971), pp. 158–65.

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Victoria was obviously unimpressed by the ‘relatively poor display’ from Prussia, which she explained as ‘that foolish Protectionist feeling, which will do no one but themselves harm’.5 The advantages were obvious, as the stealing company avoided the necessary investments so that it could sell the product at a lower price. Evidently, firms with high investment costs were much more interested in patenting because being able to do so helped them guarantee the profit they wanted to make on the basis of the innovation. In Germany, the chemical industry spearheaded the patent movement.6 From the perspective of this book, the history of patenting is a textbook example of a regulation driven by international trade. Although patent laws legally existed in some countries during the first half of the nineteenth century, the number of patents was still low. As Table 4.1 shows, their number increased dramatically after the 1860s. As one can see, virtually every country witnessed a sharp increase in patenting. It is because of this that we recommend clearly distinguishing the patent discussion before and during the first wave of industrial globalisation at the end of the nineteenth century. Before the 1870s, the matter of patents was predominantly ideological. Their number was low, and trade entanglements paled before what had happened during the 1870s. Moreover, from the 1870s onwards, the arguments that structured the debate were very different from those before (Table 4.2). In fact, patents are not self-evident, despite their appeal. The primary argument against patents is economic in nature, insofar as this provision amounts to the creation of an artificial monopoly. However, liberal theory, which was gaining more and more supporters, is strongly averse to monopolies of any kind, even temporary ones, such as patents. Until the 1860s, the idea that what was most important was to strengthen and stabilise free trade garnered international consensus. Protecting global trade took precedence over protecting innovators. For Prussia particularly, this was the primary argument for rejecting calls for national patent laws. Convinced that each country participating in the global market benefited from it, Prussia and other states did not want to endanger economic progress. At the time of the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty on free trade 5 M. Kohlrausch and H. Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers, Making Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), vol. 2, p. 5. 6 A. Fleischer, Patentgesetzgebung und chemisch-pharmazeutische Industrie im deutschen Kaiserreich (1871–1918) (Stuttgart: Deutscher Apotheker-Verlag, 1984), pp. 85–8.

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Table 4.1 Patents per capita (decennial average per million inhabitants)7 Country Austria–Hungary Belgium Denmark Finland France German States/Germany Italy Netherlands Norway Portugal Russia Spain Sweden Switzerland UK US

1791–1800

0.5

0.5

1826–1835

1866–1875

1904–1913

4.0 4.8 0.0 0.1 12.0 2.2

43.8 386.5 59.8 3.9 141.3 20.9 17.5 15.2 24.5

171.7 1194.3 397.7 116.3 363.8 186.5 185.8 1.9 486.2 76.6 9.2 112.2 348.5 971.7 351.9 344.1

15.7 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0

4.4 5.6

7.0 39.0

0.9 5.8 35.0 0.0 82.8 300.0

(1860), protecting inventors from espionage and the theft of ideas was quite present in the minds of contemporaries, but granting an artificial monopoly struck many as too high a price to pay. One popular voice for the abolition of patents was Michel Chevalier, who—being the free trade supporter that he is—blamed patent holders for abusing their monopoly.8 During the 1870s, this liberalist perspective came under significant pressure. Before, monopoly avoidance and the ambition to maintain international trade and exchange were the main reasons why some countries either did not have any patent laws (Germany and Switzerland,

7 A. Carreras and C. Josephson, ‘Aggregate Growth, 1870–1914: Growing at the Production Frontier’, in S. N. Broadberry and K. H. O’Rourke (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe. Volume 2: 1870 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 30–58, at p. 54. It is imperative to emphasise that the absolute number of patents differed for individual patent laws. These rules impacted what could be considered patentable. 8 M. Chevalier (ed.), Exposition Universelle de Londres de 1862. Rapports des membres de la section française du jury international sur l’ensemble de l’exposition (Tome Premier) (Paris: Imprimerie et Librairie Centrales des chemins de fers, 1862), pp. CLXI–CLXVIII.

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Table 4.2 Share of foreign patent holders9 Denmark (%) 1883 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914

Finland (%)

UK (%)

Germany (%)

France (%)

31.1 25.3

98.62 100.00 99.72 99.11 99.12 99.42 100.00 98.73 99.37 99.08 98.82 99.59 99.52 99.17 99.35 99.37 99.22 99.37 99.60 99.19

Italy (%) 63.8

29.5 83.33 70.59 87.50 80.95 78.95 74.47 73.68 89.47 85.71 77.46 88.61 83.33 89.01 75.41 83.06 77.50 82.11 85.11

35.1 53.2

64.9

28.1

24.7

47.2 51.4 52.5 52.8 51.7 49.2 53.9 51.9 52.0 52.8 50.8

61.5

9 Source: Germany: Streb–Baten Database, see H. Degner and J. Streb, ‘Foreign Patenting in Germany, 1877–1932’, in P.-Y. Donzé and S. Nishimura (eds.), Organizing Global Technology Flows: Instructions, Actors, and Processes, Routledge International Studies in Business History (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 17–38; K. Labuske, Essays on High-Value Patenting in Germany in an International Perspective 1880– 1932 (Stuttgart: Universität Stuttgart, 2007), p. 25 (only 10-year patents); France: G. Galvez-Behar, La république des inventeurs. Propriété et organisation de l’innovation en France, 1791–1922, Collection Carnot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), p. 214 (data available online: https://zenodo.org/record/3627575#.Y2I6Z-SZOUk, last accessed 22.08.2022); UK, Denmark, Finland: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/ (01.07.2021); Italy: A. Nuvolari and M. Vasta, ‘The Italian Patent System During the

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and Greece) or abolished them (Netherlands, 1869).10 The two countries with the most influential national patent law traditions are France and Great Britain. France played an especially important role in the internationalisation of patent laws, but it took time. Therefore, the question is where the sudden interest in national patent laws—and, more importantly, their international coordination—came from. In so doing, we ask a slightly different question than most publications do. In historiography, there is a clear tendency to focus on the continuities of European patent regulations. This necessarily includes the different national ideologies and philosophies that shaped national laws. The international treaty of 1883 is then explained via the disappearance of liberalism during the 1870s and the attempts to overcome the different national patent regimes.11 Yet, although this argument appears to be plausible, it does not explain why an international treaty was not formed before 1883. Profoundly different traditions of national patenting existed during the entire nineteenth century, and they were well documented. Theoretically, attempts at reconciling them could have been made earlier. Our argument is that there were two reasons for this change. The obvious one concerns trade entanglements, which paradoxically increased when liberalism lost preeminence as an ideology. This growth in trade was of utmost importance for international patent regulation. However, we also argue that the process through which marketable innovations were developed became much more complex. Coming up with new innovations was not just the task of individual geniuses. It became a matter of meticulous industrial research and cooperation between different players. Moreover, it required time, money and a suitable structure.

Long Nineteenth Century: From Privileges to Property Rights in a Latecomer Industrializing Country’, in G. Gooday and S. Wilf (eds.), Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 147–65. 10 N. Chachereau, Introduire des brevets pour qui? Seconde révolution industrielle en Suisse et mondialisation de la propriété intellectuelle (1873–1914), PhD thesis (Université de Lausanne, Faculté des lettres (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 2018); S. Arapostathis, ‘Industrial “Property”, Law, and the Politics of Invention in Greece, 1900–1940’, in G. Gooday and S. Wilf (eds.), Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 166–83, at p. 175; E. Schiff, Industrialization without National Patents: The Netherlands, 1869–1912; Switzerland, 1850–1907 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 21. 11 We will discuss this further later in this section.

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As the episode between France and Switzerland shows, patent regulations were often international issues. At first sight, this appears to reflect the narrative of regulations in which an international agreement marks the endpoint of inter-state discussions. As many have written, the patent controversy during the first half of the nineteenth century was a transnational debate.12 However, while this is true, it is crucial to emphasise that it was predominantly a discussion among experts. Until the 1860s, patents remained at a quantitatively low level. At the same time, trade was relatively low. The issue that international trade might be affected by patents was still a rather theoretical one. Chevalier has just been mentioned. A slightly different example is the German countries, where the matter of transregional cooperation was an important part of the discussion. The accelerating globalisation in the 1870s affected patent regulation in very different ways. Clearly, the situation changed profoundly, and the issue of international cooperation and trade dominated the discussion.13 However, it went beyond that. One could make a good case in arguing that some countries—Switzerland is a telling example—would not have any national patent laws were it not for international economic integration and trade. Even where national patent laws did exist, the issue of international trade played a crucial role. The constraints and incentives that came with globalisation stand at the beginning of the entire patent movement of the last third of the nineteenth century. This process also shows how the ideology of liberalism lost credibility.14 It is therefore not a coincidence that the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883)—and the discussions that preceded this treaty—stand rather at the start than at the end of the era under investigation. Once this treaty was signed, it became the centre of gravity of national patent

12 G. Galvez-Behar, ‘The 1883 Paris Convention and the Impossible Unification of Industrial Property’, in G. Gooday and S. Wilf (eds.), Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 38–68, at p. 50. 13 M. Seckelmann, Industrialisierung, Internationalisierung und Patentrecht im Deutschen Reich, 1871–1914, Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte. Recht in der Industriellen Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 2006), vol. 2. 14 On the institutional change that paved the way for German patent laws, see D. A. Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung des deutschen Patentsystems im Kaiserreich. Eine neoinstitutionalistische Analyse (Florence: European University Institute, 2003), p. 65.

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regulations.15 After 1883, it was this regulation that affected virtually all national patent laws and put them under pressure. Therefore, this section is structured as follows. First, we will address the rise of the globalised, knowledge-based economy and its effect on patents. In the following section, we will—somewhat non-typically—start with the international agreement of 1883. Our argument is that the patent convention of 1883 became the reference point for national laws. We will look at national debates on patent laws and show how homogenisation and diversity can exist at the same time. The different paths that the countries took were the results of very specific strategies and expectations. Although patent laws appear to cover the same problem in detail, the political motivation behind them could be very different. The chapter will make it more understandable why a single international patent—although rational—has hitherto remained a dream.

Patents during the Second Industrial Revolution Knowledge-based Economy The rise of the knowledge-based economy during the second half of the nineteenth century played a hugely important role in the economic history of Europe—and basically the whole world.16 It is, in fact, difficult to find a field that was not largely affected by the rise of science and the commodification of knowledge. Social life was as much transformed by it 15 On the importance of the 1883 patent convention, see recently G. Galvez-Behar, ‘The 1883 Paris Convention and the Impossible Unification of Industrial Property’, in G. Gooday and S. Wilf (eds.), Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 38–68. 16 There is a huge historiography on this subject. While there is much agreement on the rise of knowledge-based production, periodisation and the correct terms are much more disputed. The ‘second economic revolution’ (North), the ‘second industrial revolution’ (Berend) and ‘industrial globalisation’ (Abbenhuis/Morrell) all refer to the same phenomenon. See T. I. Berend, An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe: Diversity and Industrialization (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); W. Abelshauser, The Dynamics of German Industry: The German Path to the New Economy and the American Challenge, Making Sense of History (London: Berghahn, 2005), vol. 6; M. Abbenhuis and G. W. Morrell, The First Age of Industrial Globalization: An International History 1815–1918, New Approaches to International History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); D. S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd edn. (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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as were weather forecasts. In both cases, one could witness an enormous increase in its scientific foundations during the second half of the nineteenth century.17 Knowledge as an input factor was not entirely new. Paul David even states that knowledge was always crucial for economic development and that there was no knowledge revolution but rather a gradual shift.18 Other authors implicitly state that it was a long-term process. Most historians consider the rise of science as a means to understand, form and manipulate the world. A famous example is Richard Evans’ publication called The Pursuit of Power.19 From 1815 to 1914, ‘states grasped for world power, governments reached out for imperial power, armies built up their military power, revolutionaries plotted to grab power, political parties campaigned to come to power, bankers and industrialists strove for economic power, [and] serfs and sharecroppers were gradually liberated from the arbitrary power exercised over them by landowning aristocrats’. Moreover, ‘labour unions went on strike for more power, wages, and better conditions of work’, (…) ‘engineers, and planners extended humankind’s power over nature; and, in a different sense, scientists and mechanics devised and exploited new sources of power’.20 Science was, therefore, one puzzle piece to conquer the world. In economic history, one of the most influential statements supporting this long-term view originated from Douglass North, who argued that the 1870s was the decisive decade. According to him, it was then that the ‘second economic revolution’ took place.21 In Germany, it gave birth to two new industry types: the electro engineering and chemical industries.22

17 L. Raphael, ‘Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen als methodische und konzeptionelle Herausforderung für eine Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), pp. 165–93; L. Richter, ‘Eine Geschichte des Wetterwissens’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 69 (2019), pp. 10–15. 18 P. A. David and D. Foray, An Introduction to the Economy of the Knowledge Society (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2001). 19 R. J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2016). 20 R. J. Evans, ‘Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Europe’, German Historical

Institute London Bulletin 40 (2018), pp. 7–18, at pp. 16–7. 21 D. C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 172. See also Landes, Prometheus. 22 P. Erker, ‘Die Verwissenschaftlichung der Industrie. Zur Geschichte der Industrieforschung in den europäischen und amerikanischen Elektrokonzernen 1890–1930’, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 35 (1990), pp. 73–94.

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These so-called ‘new industries’23 specialised in the production of goods that were, in fact, based entirely on scientific knowledge: ‘It was a salient characteristic of the ‘new’ industries that their production was primarily led and driven forward by the newest scientific knowledge and discoveries. For the coal-tar dye industry, the chemical laboratory thus served as the indispensable link between research and industrial application’.24 This development was not limited to the new industries; it also affected the traditional ones. Metallurgy, paper, cement and rubber, to name a few, were all branches that were transformed by research and development. Moreover, the ‘second Industrial Revolution’—as Berend25 puts it—profoundly changed not just the economy but the world itself. The construction of the Eiffel Tower or the Titanic stands as testimony to that. While the rise of the knowledge-based economy plays a vital role in the argument of this book, it is not the mere dependency on innovativeness that stands out. Knowledge-based economies did not just depend on ground-breaking innovations. It was an incremental process. While the prices of manufactured goods were increasing, the value of primary goods—commodities—declined during the entire twentieth century.26 During this process, the educational and the vocational system also served as pillars.27 Moreover, science affected the industry in the same 23 W. Abelshauser, Kulturkampf. Der deutsche Weg in die neue Wirtschaft und die amerikanische Herausforderung, Kulturwissenschaftliche Interventionen (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2003), vol. 4, pp. 13–15. 24 W. von Hippel, ‘Becoming a Global Corporation—BASF from 1865 to 1900’, in W. Abelshauser et al. (eds.), BASF: Innovation and Adaptation in a German Corporation Since 1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 5–114, at p. 52. 25 Berend, Nineteenth Century, p. 214. 26 This steady decline in relative primary commodity prices is called the Prebisch–Singer

(PS) hypothesis, named after Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer. The PS hypothesis has been confirmed for 13 commodities: cocoa, coffee, tea, bananas, sugar, rice, wheat, maize, cotton, jute, palm oil, copper and tin; see M. A. Razzaque, P. Osafa-Kwaako and R. Grynberg, ‘Long-Run Trend in the Relative Price: Empirical Estimation for Individual Commodities’, in R. Grynberg and S. Newton (eds.), Commodity Prices and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 35–51, at p. 41. 27 K. A. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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way that the industry affected science. The simultaneous appearance of globalisation and knowledge dependence led to a complex—sometimes even contradictory—situation in which the incentives for countries that participated in international trade changed. One way the incentives changed was the increase in the efforts necessary to develop innovations. The first is obvious: research and development was not cheap. From 1861 to 1913, companies increasingly depended on research and development, and investments within Europe grew by about fifty per cent.28 The development of indigo blue is a striking example. When Baeyer was able to make indigo in the laboratory ‘for the first time in 1880 and entered into contracts with BASF and Hoechst with regard to [the] industrial production of the dye, the quest for the suitable manufacturing process held the company in suspense for 18 long years’.29 In electro engineering, the education of specialised experts began during the second half of the nineteenth century in virtually the entire Europe.30 This example proves what Patrick Verley confirms for the last third of the nineteenth century; until then, the production of technical progress was hardly organised neither by state institutions nor by laboratories run by enterprises.31 Huge expenditures of time, financial capital and effort in a product usually came with higher prices for the developed good, while there was still a clear need to achieve a proper return on investment. Economies of scale could help to avoid increasing prices and to make a reasonable profit. Consequently, having access to the world market was both necessary and provided a high incentive to invest and, in fact, to risk considerable amounts of capital. This is all the more reason to know that one’s product is safe from being exploited unfairly.32 Ironically, the Spanish case confirms this argument in a different way. 28 Measured as share of GDP, Carreras and Josephson, Aggregate Growth, p. 54. 29 Hippel, Becoming a Global Corporation, p. 65. 30 M. Efmertová and A. Grelon (eds.), Des ingénieurs pour un monde nouveau: Histoire des enseignements électrotechniques (Europe, Amériques). XIXe–XXe siècle, History of Energy (Bruxelles et al.: Peter Lang, 2016), vol. 7. 31 P. Verley, La révolution industrielle, Collection folio Histoire Inédit (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 59–60. 32 The ‘Madrid system for the international registration of marks’ worked along the same lines. The convention was signed in 1891 and targeted the use of misrepresentation on the origins of products. See Procès-verbaux de la Conférence de Madrid de 1890 de l’Union pour la Protection de la Propriété industrielle suivis des Actes signés en 1891 et ratifiés en 1892 (Berne: Jent et Reinert, 1892).

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As the Spanish government was not convinced that it was possible to develop its own innovations, it used national patent legislation to enable international knowledge transfers to its favour.33 The State as the Guarantor One basic characteristic rarely expressed explicitly is that the requirements that have to be fulfiled so that a knowledge-based economy can function increased sharply. The rise of the knowledge-based economy can also be considered a phenomenon that changed the expectations of the state. Although this book is not planned as an institutional analysis à la Douglass North, it is reasonable to take a close look at the requirements that must be met for a knowledge-based economy to be successful. Formal institutions—laws—depend on a central power that has the authority to enforce them.34 David Gilgen refers this argument to patent laws,35 yet, in fact, they potentially encompass any state rules. Numerous authors have focussed on the institutional change that came with the new role of knowledge-based economies.36 In a similar direction point the publications that consider laws as the decisive elements to maintain rules and ensure acceptable transaction costs.37 Another group of authors placed the matter of human capital production at the centre of their arguments. They showed the degree to which economically successful countries invested time and effort to ensure that enough human capital was available for the innovativeness of enterprises to persist. This concerns the provision of a functioning school system and a reliable vocational

33 See D. Pretel, Institutionalising Patents in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Palgrave Studies in Economic History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 98. 34 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, p. 138. 35 Ibid., p. 141. 36 Abelshauser, Kulturkampf , vol. 4; on the vocational system, see K. A. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve; W. Abelshauser, D. A. Gilgen and A. Leutzsch (eds.), Kulturen der Weltwirtschaft (Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Sonderheft) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); D. C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, 18th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 37 O. E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting, 10th edn. (New York: Free Press, 1985).

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system structure.38 The history of infrastructure can also be interpreted as an era during which construction, maintenance and regulation became tasks the state was responsible for.39 One way or another, the condition sine qua non of all these approaches is the existence of a state. Be it for maintaining the necessary infrastructure, pushing through rules or promulgating (patent) laws, all examples take for granted that there is a functioning state. The expectations of the state therefore rose. This does not mean that long-held traditions did not form a relationship between the economy and the state.40 National and international patent regulations are examples in which the increasing demands that came with international trade could lead to a situation in which the role of the state became even more fundamental. Patents and International Trade Table 4.1 shows that the number of patents increased immensely during the 50 years before the Great War. During the same period, a considerable part of it came from foreign patenting. The specific compositions of the tables for France, Germany and Spain differ. Be that as it may, they all confirm a clear trend. Until 1914, the absolute number of patents increased in all three countries. Meanwhile, the relative share of European patent holders remained surprisingly stable. Moreover, the speed at which the number of patents grew remained relatively constant. This is notable because Christopher Bayly emphasises that from the 1890s onwards, there was a general speeding up process in the world—a process that included

38 Goldin considers the nineteenth century the period during which education became the central element of economic production; C. Goldin, ‘Human Capital’, in C. Diebolt and M. Haupert (eds.), Handbook of Cliometrics (Berlin: Springer References, 2016), pp. 55–86. 39 Today, the list of what falls under state-maintained infrastructure has become very long: electrical grids, streets, train tracks, radio, administration, refuse collection, internet, water supply and sewage. It is to be expected that none of these will disappear; instead there might still be more to come: D. van Laak, Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft – Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2018). 40 R. Boch, Staat und Wirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte (München: De Gruyter, 2004).

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international trade and the world economy in general.41 Evidently, in the case of patents, this increase was not exponential. Nonetheless, Europe stabilised its position as the central market. At the same time, outer European players had to be included because they became—as one could see—important participants in world trade. This concerns not only the US and Japan but also China and Brazil.42 Therefore, these figures show why there were good reasons to aim for international rules.

The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883) The need to protect innovations is the almost logical consequence of a dilemma brought about by industrialisation. Innovative and unique products were most certainly helpful in trade with other countries. The availability of a world market also made the sale of unique products easier. However, once countries intensified trade with other countries, the matter of espionage and theft became urgent. This was particularly true once the application of science in production, which allowed products to be reverse-engineered, became more easily available.43 Theoretically, once a country was willing to promulgate laws to protect innovative products, there were three different solutions for the problem: a world patent, bilateral agreements or multilateral agreements.44 A world patent would have to be based on internationally harmonised national laws, which was realistic only when national laws were based on mere registration. Yet, even if such a world patent did exist, it would be necessary to find a way to diffuse the details on the patents internationally. Most likely, this would have happened via an international patent office.45 There were indeed attempts to do so, as laying the foundations of a world patent was part of the agenda of the patent conference in Paris in 1878. Evidently, however, it was obvious that the project was too ambitious. The idea of a uniform

41 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, The Blackwell History of the World (Malden, Oxford (England), Carlton: Blackwell, 2004), p. 451. 42 Abbenhuis and Morrell, Industrial Globalization, pp. 105–121. 43 P. Moser, ‘Do Patents Weaken the Localization of Innovations? Evidence from

World’s Fairs’, Journal of Economic History 71 (2011), pp. 363–82, at p. 363. 44 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, pp. 373–75. 45 Ibid., p. 374; Galvez-Behar, République des inventeurs, p. 163.

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international patent regulation was dismissed quickly because of irreconcilable national laws.46 Bilateral treaties were very demanding, as they required every country to conclude agreements with any other country they did trade with. According to Dölemeyer, bilateral treaties usually saw the light of day once a relatively developed country had a patent law and attempted to protect its innovations abroad.47 This could result in a very complex net of agreements. Nevertheless, the Germans attempted to follow this path anyway.48 France also tried to nudge countries in that direction, as the above-mentioned anecdote of 1864 shows. The Paris multilateral convention of 1883 was therefore the result of a learning process as well. In the chapter on social policy, we will describe the process of international convergence as a development that started within the modern nation-states and that was also relatively late because most convergence took place after 1900, and the only international treaty (1906) did not impose much pressure on the signatories. In the case of patents, however, international conferences came much earlier. In historiography, world fairs are often considered the events that started the development towards an international agreement. The World Fair of 1873 was the one that made an international patent solution urgent. The US made it very clear that it would not participate if there were no international patent regulations that protected their exhibits from being copied.49 At the same time, the outbreak of an international economic crisis during the 1870s showed global commerce participants that free trade could cause great damage. The arguments of Friedrich List50 and economists critical of liberalism were more audible and popular, justifying various measures 46 Ibid., p. 163. 47 B. Dölemeyer, ‘Wege der Rechtsvereinheitlichung. Zur Auswirkung internationaler

Verträge auf europäische Patentund Urheberrechtsgesetze des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in C. Bergfeld (ed.), Aspekte europäischer Rechtgeschichte: Festgabe für Helmut Coing zum 70. Geburtstag, Ius commune. Sonderhefte (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982), pp. 65– 85, at p. 66. 48 In 1892 for Switzerland and Italy and in 1891 for Austria–Hungary; see Gilgen,

Entstehung und Wirkung, p. 375. See also the quarrel with Switzerland later in this chapter. 49 Manegold, ‘Wiener Patentschutzkongreß’, p. 159. 50 Friedrich List recommends not forcing companies to compete with others before

they have sufficiently developed and matured. Therefore, List argues that tariffs to protect immature companies are legitimate; see F. List, ‘National System’, in N. Capaldi and

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of protection for national economies, including the creation of a patent system to protect burgeoning industries that were afraid of innovation theft. The central argument against patents—the limitation of economic trade and exchange—lost a great deal of its force. Therefore, the Vienna Congress of 1873 marked the beginning of a decade of intense discussions seeking to harmonise and simplify the processes for the effective international protection of innovators. France did not participate in this conference.51 Five years later, though, it was the French who dominated the scene. During the conference of 1878 in Paris, different national patent systems demanded their tributes. The legal foundations of the right of the inventors, the access to this right and the matter of pre-examination of innovations played a major role during the discussions.52 It was not until 1883 that eleven countries (Belgium, Brazil, Spain, France, Guatemala, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, El Salvador, Serbia and Switzerland) signed an international treaty on this subject. Through the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, member states agreed on the establishment of an international office. Yet, most important were the two core elements of the contract: the equality principle (Article 2) and the priority right (Article 4). The equality principle obliged the participating states not to discriminate between nationals and foreigners who apply for a patent. Therefore, whenever a foreign patent holder applied for a patent that was already under legal protection in another country, that person had up to six months to have the innovation protected in a signatory state. Moreover, should someone else seek the same patent, the foreigner can point to their original patent to fend off other applicants (priority right).53 The convention, therefore, not only allowed national patents to continue serving their purposes in an economy characterised by international trade but also confirmed their persistence. The treaty regulated the coexistence of national patent regulation patterns. Despite all this, the situation was not always clear and stable, and changes necessary at the national level were made, as the next section will

J. G. Lloyd (eds.), The Two Narratives of Political Economy (Hoboken: Wiley, 2011), pp. 243–46. 51 Galvez-Behar, République des inventeurs, p. 157. 52 Ibid., p. 157. 53 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, p. 380.

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show. Some of the first signatories, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, did not (yet) have national laws; others that were more reluctant decided to withdraw later, such as El Salvador, Guatemala (1886) and Ecuador (1894). However, moving in the opposite direction, the UK (1884), the US (1887), Japan (1899), Germany (1903), and Austria (1909) joined and strengthened the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. Twice revised before the First World War (in 1900 in Brussels and in 1911 in Washington), it remains today the fundamental framework for the protection of industrial property at the international scale.

Drivers of National Patent Laws---A Coproduction of National and International Incentives Patent as a Natural, Individual Right? The Treaty of 1883 was based on national patent laws, thus virtually burying any hope of an international patent that overthrows national laws. To understand the persistence of national patents, it is necessary to point out a few issues linked to patents. From an economic point of view, patents are a complicated issue. Patent movement and global trade were far from being natural allies. On the contrary, until the 1860s, supporting global trade was a major argument for resisting any attempt to establish a patent system, as Chevalier’s above-mentioned statement shows. Liberal free trade was considered a major source of economic growth,54 which is why any attempt to restrain free trade was vigorously resisted. Liberal economists were convinced that this was decisive for economic development, which is why, according to them, monopolies— which included patents—had to be challenged.55 Two major arguments were put forward to thwart any attempt to establish a patent system. First, there was the free trade argument that we mentioned before. A patent

54 Berend, Nineteenth Century, pp. 31–44. 55 R. Boch, ‘Das Patentgesetz von 1877. Entstehung und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung’,

in R. Boch (ed.), Patentschutz und Innovation in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Studien zur Technik-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Frankfurt a.M. et al.: P. Lang, 1999), pp. 71–82, at p. 71.

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grants a monopoly, although monopolies are exactly what economists want to avoid. It allows the patent holder to demand any price they see fit without having to fear that someone else offers the same patent or product at a lower price. While this might seem favourable at the micro-economic level, the macro-economic consequences can be harsh. A state-guaranteed monopoly has the potential to affect trade. As a consequence, the political decision in favour of or against a patent is also a decision on what is considered more important: the individual right of the inventor or the entire economy. Therefore, not having a patent law to support the economy put the inventor in a disadvantageous position.56 This decision was also an ideological one, and it had a history. In 1791, during the revolution, French law stipulated that ‘Every discovery or new invention of any genre belongs to the inventor’.57 In Germany, the countrywide debate began much later. In contrast to France, where the citizen was the owner of their own idea, Germany knew no state obligation to protect proprietary ideas. In fact, it was up to the state to decide whom to grant the right or not. This is the ideological reason why acquiring a patent needed more than registration, and also why the state reserved the right to check whether an idea was worth protecting.58 There was also a second reason why patent laws were blamed for doing more harm than good. Economists, as well as other protagonists, were fully aware of the fact that in order to ensure scientific and thus economic development, inventors needed to be able to profit from both the knowledge and the inventions of others. However, liberals were preoccupied with the idea that patents could be used to delay the publication of new

56 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, p. 52; F. Machlup and E. Penrose, ‘The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History 10 (1950), pp. 1– 29, at p. 28. 57 Toute découverte ou nouvelle invention dans tous les genres est la propriété de son auteur. C.-A. Renouard, Traité des brevets d’invention, de perfectionnement et d’importation, 3rd edn. (Paris: Hachette Livre BNF, 2016 [1865]), p. 457. 58 There are several publications that tackle the comprehensive debates on patents during the nineteenth century. For further reading, see Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung for the German case and G. Galvez-Behar, La République des inventeurs. Propriété et organisation de l’innovation en France: (1791–1922), Carnot (Rennes: Presses Université de Rennes, 2008) for the French case. For the case of the Habsburg Monarchy, see B. Dölemeyer, ‘Erfinderprivilegien und frühe Patentgesetze’, in M. Otto and D. Klippel (eds.), Geschichte des deutschen Patentrechts, Geistiges Eigentum und Wettbewerbsrecht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), pp. 13–36, at p. 18.

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innovations and products and thus delay the achievement of progress. In 1863, during the sixth congress of German economists, the liberal economist Prince-Smith came to the conclusion that patents affected public welfare in a negative way.59 Prince-Smith’s opinion was challenged; other colleagues argued in favour of patent law. Nonetheless, the topic remained controversial, and before the 1870s, there was no majority for a German patent law. Although every law had to find the right balance between individual and collective interests, it ultimately favoured one of them.60 While France was the country that almost automatically granted patents, the UK’s approach was different. The British Statute of Monopolies (1624) was a law that did not assume that the state was under obligation to patent innovations. Admittedly, the law also had to fulfil the task of balancing the interests of the inventor, society and the crown.61 This state-centred approach was, among others, the reason why patents were a privilege granted by the state. The inventor had no individual right to patent an idea or invention. French regulations followed an entirely different logic. The law of 1791 was the first to put this conviction into law. There is no reason to ask the state whether it is possible to receive a patent certificate. Theoretically, it would be enough to inform the state. This does not mean that there were no compromises. Although a patent was a loi inaliénable, there was a time restriction on it. The entire law followed the logic of a ‘treaty’ between (French) society and the inventor.62 Only French people had the right to an application. In the case of an alien innovation, only the French importer could acquire a patent.63 While French patent law was inspired by British legislation,

59 G. Heß, Die Vorarbeiten zum deutschen Patentgesetz vom 25. Mai 1877 (Erlangen: University of Frankfurt, 1966), p. 39. 60 A. Heggen, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des Reichspatentgesetzes von 1877’, Gewerblicher Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht (1977), pp. 322–7, at p. 74. 61 Dölemeyer, Erfinderprivilegien, p. 14. 62 G. Galvez-Behar, ‘L’État et les brevets d’invention (1791–1922): une relation embar-

rassée, Concurrence et marchés: droit et institutions du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: Comité d’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2009). 63 K.-H. Manegold, ‘Der Wiener Patentschutzkongreß von 1873’, Technikgeschichte 38 (1971), pp. 158–65, at p. 160.

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French law picked up the mantle of the European patent law role model.64 Ironically, the law of 1791 played only a minor legal role.65 During the following years, these two logics—‘granted patent’ and ‘natural right for a patent’—characterised most European patent laws. Spain copied French law in 1811;66 in Russia and Austria, people had to prove that the new idea actually works. The German law of 1877 followed the British example. The German patent office specifically tested every patent application for its functionality.67 The next challenge was the intensifying international trade and the practical problems that came with it. Previously, we already mentioned that international trade and exchange were the catalysts of national patent laws. Yet, as the French example shows, the matter of international exchange still affected the discussion even before the first wave of globalisation. The French patent law of 1844 was a result of this line of thought, but it also went beyond. The Loi sur les brevets d’invention (5 July 1844) marked a fuller consideration of international relations and a liberalising market. Article 27 stipulated explicitly that ‘Les étrangers pourront obtenir en France des brevets d’invention’ (Foreigners are allowed to obtain patents in France). The next paragraph prohibited discrimination: ‘Les formalités et conditions déterminées par la présente loi seront applicables aux brevets demandés ou délivrés en exécution de l’article précédent’ (The formalities and conditions determined by this law shall be applicable to patents applied for or granted under the preceding article).68 The German case was a bit more complicated. First, Germany consisted of a large number of states until 1871, and a common German patent was,

64 M. Seckelmann, Industrialisierung, Internationalisierung und Patentrecht im Deutschen Reich, 1871–1914, Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte. Recht in der Industriellen Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 2006), vol. 2, p. 79. 65 K. Feldmann, Die Geschichte des französischen Patentrechts und sein Einfluß auf Deutschland, Münsteraner Studien zur Rechtsvergleichung (Münster: LIT, 1998), vol. 30, p. 71; Renouard, Traité des brevets d ‘invention, pp. 133–34. 66 Chachereau, Seconde révolution industrielle en Suisse, p. 60. 67 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, pp. 96–97. 68 Law is available online on the website of the “world intellectual property organization”; URL: https://wipolex-res.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/fr/km/km008fr.pdf (last accessed 02.11.2022).

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in fact, unlikely.69 Additionally, the northern and southern German states had fairly different traditions. Saxony was rather strict, and the right of the inventor had to take a step back, as state development was considered more important. This is also why the inventor had to prove that the invention was new. Even then, it was possible that an application for a patent was declined.70 In southern Germany, on the other hand, the states were—similar to Austria—much more generous.71 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German countries had to invest considerable effort in order to achieve uniform patent rights. This was not only the result of legal details. Rather, fundamental questions had to be answered. While Prussian laws required an examination, Bavaria favoured another regulation. Similar to France, mere registration sufficed.72 It is therefore not surprising that there were several incentives and obstacles to harmonising German laws. The general problem affected the discussion after 1819, when different patent regulations in the German states led to a situation in which trade came hand in hand with legal uncertainty and the risk of innovation theft. Even worse, the liberty to trade across borders became more complicated, if not impossible, as importing products that were patented in that region was abolished to protect the patent holder.73 Meanwhile, France remained true to its roots. The law of 1844 did not profoundly change this concept of possession, yet it was a reaction to the changes in the concept of possession itself. While the law of 1791 interpreted possession as an absolute right that is unchangeable, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a change in that idea towards a concept in which the patent holder possesses the right to monetise the invention. The new law took this into account and created the necessary rules to make the property right transmittable.74 In effect, the new law

69 See, for instance, Seckelmann, Industrialisierung und Patentrecht, vol. 2, pp. 107–26; A. Donges and F. Selgert, ‘Do Legal Differences Matter? A Comparison of German Patent Law Regimes before 1877’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 60 (2019), pp. 57–92. 70 Dölemeyer, Erfinderprivilegien, pp. 30–33. 71 Ibid., pp. 33–34. 72 Heggen, ‘Vorgeschichte’, p. 322. 73 Seckelmann, Industrialisierung und Patentrecht, vol. 2, pp. 107–8. 74 Galvez-Behar, États et brevets, p. 4.

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transformed it into an exclusive right to economically exploit a patent.75 It also granted this right to every person who applied for one before anyone else did, although practical application of the law did not obey this new rule. In particular, two major changes made the French system a role model for other countries. First, patents were to be granted only if they were of economic value. Second, patent applications had to be accompanied by thorough models and drawings that were publicly accessible. That way, while the right to market an innovation was exclusive to the patent owner, knowledge of the technical specifications could still disseminate.76 The last example especially shows that patents had to solve two tasks. First, they had to create an incentive for inventors to develop new innovations in order to facilitate economic progress. Second, they were required to be organised in a way that made innovations freely accessible so that patents could accelerate the creation of new knowledge. Patents in the Globalised World: International Participation and Pressure In the previous paragraphs, we argued that the rise of the knowledgebased economy was a powerful incentive for patent laws. There were, however, exceptions as well. Among European countries, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey and Greece did not have one in 1877.77 The Netherlands abolished its patent law in 1869, and Switzerland finally promulgated one in 1884, even after it signed the international treaty in 1883. The same mechanism also existed before the 1870s. For instance, Portugal promulgated a copyright protection law after the South European country signed a treaty with France in 1851.78 Portuguese law, however, was less focussed on patents and concentrated more on literature and cultural goods. The conflicts and negotiations that Switzerland had can serve as insightful mirrors of the changes that took place in Europe. In the 1860s, before the first wave of globalisation, Switzerland and France negotiated a 75 K. Feldmann, Die Geschichte des französischen Patentrechts und sein Einfluß auf Deutschland, Münsteraner Studien zur Rechtsvergleichung (Münster: LIT, 1998), vol. 30, p. 98. 76 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, pp. 31–32. 77 Chachereau, Second révolution industrielle en Suisse, p. 53. 78 Dölemeyer, Rechtsvereinheitlichung, p. 1987.

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bilateral trade agreement, as the Swiss did with many other countries. The French side attempted to push Switzerland towards measures to provide protection for foreign patents.79 Although the negotiations were intense, this was one of the bargaining chips that the Swiss did not want to give up. Switzerland did not have a patent law, and providing the protection of foreign patents would quickly have led to the matter of a national patent law. Specifically, the matter of patents and models was a tricky one for Switzerland, as the Swiss ambassador in France Johann Conrad Kern explained: ‘Prenons garde de voir tous les possesseurs de brevets d’invention venir chez nous réclamer des mesures qui nuiraient à une foule de nos petites industries’ (Let us beware of all the patent owners coming to us to demand measures that would harm many of our small industries).80 In other words, Switzerland was worried that foreign companies and potential patent holders would threaten immature Swiss competitors. Ultimately, the negotiations ended in a compromise. France agreed to a tariff reduction, and Switzerland agreed to protect models and drawings. Classical patents remained excluded.81 The French government did not exploit its bargaining power to force Switzerland to promulgate a patent law. A couple of years later, Switzerland had another quarrel, this time with Germany. Still after 1883, Germany did not think that it was necessary to take part in the patent union at all, as its bilateral agreements with France, the US, Switzerland and others. seemed to work adequately. However, this conviction changed when Switzerland, a country that signed the Paris Convention, did not abide by these rules. Negotiations between both countries went on during the 1880s. In June 1888, Switzerland finally passed a patent law that excluded all goods that could not be presented via a model.82 The chemical industry could thus virtually not apply for a patent, which especially infuriated the Germans. There were attempts to deal with this problem bilaterally, but the issue could not be resolved successfully. Although the chemical industry had already lobbied in favour

79 The following is based on Nicolas Chachereau’s dissertation, if not indicated otherwise; Chachereau, Second révolution industrielle en Suisse, pp. 71–76. 80 ‘Du traité de commerce avec la France’, Gazette de Lausanne, vol. XIV, 7 January 1863, p. 1. 81 Chachereau, Second révolution industrielle en Suisse, p. 73. 82 Seckelmann, Industrialisierung und Patentrecht, vol. 2, p. 220.

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of the Paris Convention,83 this experience revealed the limited success that came with bilateral negotiations. It was this revelation that pushed the German government in the direction of a multilateral agreement. The number of nation-states participating in the convention grew steadily, and these countries changed their national laws to make their regulations more compatible. In the end, Germany joined the convention in May 1903, twenty years after the first countries signed the treaty. For this, the conference in Brussels (1900) was key, as the priority period of six months was extended to twelve months. This opened the way for German participation in the union.84 Patents and Knowledge Distribution Very often, current historiography indicates that patents are, among other purposes, in place to protect innovations from being stolen. According to this interpretation, governments had an interest in these laws because they had to ensure that nobody else could exploit immaterial capital produced in a certain country. Indeed, the discussion on the necessity of patent laws was accompanied by the matter of knowledge distribution. This was closely linked to the monopoly argument: how can an economy as a whole achieve technological progress if laws prohibit entrepreneurs from exploiting the ideas of others? Interestingly, this revealed yet another contradictory quality of patent laws. At the national level, virtually all countries were interested in knowledge distribution, as it could lead to economic progress that the state could profit from. At the same time, it is virtually impossible to prevent other countries from exploiting newly produced knowledge. As we will show, this is exactly what Spain tried to exploit. Already during the nineteenth century, economic policy indicated an awareness that progress depended on the dissemination of knowledge and the ability to come up with innovations that are based on the achievements of others; this makes nineteenth-century Europe an early example of ‘knowledge sharing for innovation in [a] cross-border context’ that

83 Fleischer, Patentgesetzgebung, p. 175. 84 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, pp. 382, 388.

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depends on knowledge transfer.85 Moreover, this was not restricted to one country. National debates on patents, such as those in Prussia, also focussed on the main question: what is more important, the distribution of knowledge and the progress of knowledge and science, or the economic interests of the inventors? Until the 1860s, Prussia was clearly in favour of the interests of the many. Consequently, economists even fought the Prussian patent regulation—the so-called publikandum was no actual law—of 1815, although patents based on it were of regional importance, very difficult to obtain and expensive for the applicant.86 According to economists, it was rather an ‘anti-patent law’, which led them to entirely dismiss the idea of a working patent system.87 One of the main arguments of economists at the time was that knowledge would be distributed much faster if there was no patent law.88 Yet, while the distribution of knowledge and its contribution to growth and progress were common themes in many countries discussing the invention of patent laws, the actual laws were still very different. The German law of 1877 is an intriguing example, as it went very far to ensure that the invention actually serves its purpose and represents knowledge that is worth being protected; the test that the Imperial Patent Office conducted for every application was a requirement that made the entire procedure more expensive. In comparison to Germany and France, the example of Spain—a country which clearly belonged to the European periphery during the nineteenth century—is very telling. The usual suspects —Germany, the US, the UK, France and Switzerland were countries whose economies have been innovative for a long time. Spain is another case. The Mediterranean country’s priority was not to protect its innovations. Invention activity ‘was not the most relevant issue for a country distinguished by extreme industrial, scientific, and technical underdevelopment during most of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century’.89 Its main interest was to promote foreign technology transfers and imitation, which 85 K.-L. Lepik and K. Merle, ‘Challenges in Knowledge Sharing for Innovation in Cross-Border Context’, International Journal of Knowledge-Based Development 5 (2014), pp. 332–43, at p. 333. 86 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, pp. 7–13. 87 Heggen, ‘Vorgeschichte’, p. 327. 88 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, p. 55. 89 P. Sáiz and D. Pretel, ‘Why Did Multinationals Patent in Spain? Several Historical

Inquiries’, in P.-Y. Donzé and S. Nishimura (eds.), Organizing Global Technology Flows:

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it considered to be the quickest path to innovation. In the end, the Spanish patent system had to provide the necessary tools to fulfil two tasks. First, it had to ensure that foreign investors found a reliable normative framework so that their technologies were safe should the need arise. Second, this protection could be limited ‘if it did not turn into actual innovation and economic growth within national borders’.90 The fact that Spain introduced a patent law to enable innovation transfer is also crucial for another reason. As Gilgen shows, a main argument to fend off attempts to promulgate a patent law was that patents would reduce technology transfers.91 The German economist John Prince-Smith, for instance, argued during an economic conference in 1858 that such a law would grant a monopoly for ‘effortless ideas’.92 At least in Spain, this argument was turned around, and it was patent laws that enabled knowledge exchange. It is safe to assume that the German discussion was rather focussed on the national level, whereas Spain clearly had international exchange in mind. This explains why not only innovation leaders were interested in patent laws. The possibility of participating in world trade and (potentially) profiting from knowledge distribution was directly linked to the matter of having appropriate laws. This is why Spain is a telling example; if the country wanted to participate in international trade and law, ensuring that it adopted the appropriate protection measures was necessary.93 At least according to Pretel, the Spanish case shows there were also many more pragmatic arguments that guided the decision. While France was still a role model for Spanish patent laws, its design was carefully structured to make technology transfer easier. That is why Spain purposely favoured ‘weak legal security, the compulsory working of patents, patents of introduction, utility models and a lack of technical examinations’.94 After 1875, it went a step further because ‘open disclosure of all information contained in patent files (technical memoranda, drawings and Institutions, Actors, and Processes, Routledge International Studies in Business History (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 39–59, at p. 40. 90 Ibid., p. 40. 91 Gilgen, Entstehung und Wirkung, p. 52. 92 Prince-Smith, Über Patente für Erfindungen. in Vierteljahrschrift für Volkswirtschaft

und Culturgeschichte 1863. III, p. 151, quoted in: Heggen, ‘Vorgeschichte’, 324. 93 Sáiz and Pretel, Patent in Spain. 94 D. Pretel, Institutionalising Patents in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Palgrave Studies in

Economic History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 31.

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samples) at the Conservatory of Arts’ was supposed to serve the diffusion of knowledge. The law of 1878 also widened what was to be considered patentable, then including new techniques and practices. Moreover, Spanish law followed the French strategy and required registration only. It was not necessary to prove that the innovation actually worked.

Conclusion International patent coordination and the ensuing impact on national patent laws are incomprehensible without the changes in the 1870s. Until the rise of international trade, the discussions were focussed on the national patent law traditions. With globalisation, the incentives changed fundamentally. Participating in world trade was key to economic success. Research and development became resource incentive. These two issues made the matter of patents much more urgent. In this process, the hitherto dominant liberal ideology was followed by a doctrine acknowledging that laws were not automatically hindrances to trade-based integration. There was intensive economic integration. At the same time, countries took different paths to their patent laws, and the dream of a world patent remained exactly that—a dream. Coordination was, therefore, the next best thing. From this perspective, the Paris Agreement of 1883 seems only fitting. Via the obligation to accept patents from other countries— and to grant them priority—national patent laws could persist, although they did come to homogenisation. This forced participating countries to adapt to the international regime. At the same time, though, international coordination helped maintain national diversity. There was, however, another side to this, as the Spanish example shows. Having a patent law was a necessary condition to attract highquality imports and facilitate knowledge transfer. Imports were effective instruments for attracting innovative products and, therefore, knowledge transfer. Moreover, once international trade increased intensively during the 1870s, it became necessary to better contain the risks involved. Ironically, this opened the way for patent laws in previously reluctant countries, such as Germany and Switzerland. This way, all major countries had patent laws and were therefore qualified to participate in the patent union.

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This is why we argue that the patent regimes were the results of a coproduction at both national and the international levels. This is why the different patent laws continue to persist.95

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95 G. Gooday and S. Wilf, ‘Diversity Versus Harmonization in Patent History’, in G. Gooday and S. Wilf (eds.), Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 3–37.

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CHAPTER 5

Keeping International Order in Good Health: Plant Protection

Abstract As Europe just learned again during the COVID-19 pandemic, diseases spread rapidly and with little regard for national borders. The protagonists and experts of the nineteenth century were fully aware of this, as were the farmers; one conclusion they drew from this was the Bern Treaty of 1878. The signatories committed to documenting every phylloxera outbreak in their countries and to control the flow of contaminants. Therefore, plant protection is another example in which a major challenge arising from and affecting trade on a global scale gave birth to international coordination centred on Europe and transforming the modern states from the inside. Keywords Phytopathology · Agriculture · Plant passport

In the second half of the nineteenth century, famines caused by climatic and sanitary shocks affecting crops disappeared in Europe. Poor harvests were generally compensated for by supplies from distant markets, particularly from the US. Epidemics, on the other hand, continued to have

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0_5

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a major impact on life expectancy. Smallpox, cholera and plague caused thousands of deaths. Diseases followed the circulation of people, plants and animals across borders.1 In the nineteenth century, the combined advent of faster terrestrial and sea transport accelerated their spread, including through postal services. Letters were routinely disinfected to prevent them from carrying pathogens; in the 1870s, it was discovered that ill-intentioned American correpondents introduced live Colorado potato beetles, a terrible pest of potato crops, into mail to Great Britain out of ‘pure malignancy’.2 More vulnerable and faced with intensified risks of contagion, Europeans set up coordinated mechanisms to balance the protection of the population with the continuity of of global trade.3 Historical knowledge of these mechanisms with respect to plant disease is far less advanced than knowledge of human diseases. This chapter draws on the existing literature to present arrangements for controlling the spread of plant diseases in Europe. It shows how potato disease in the mid-nineteenth century crossed borders but was not the subject of coordinated responses. It was phylloxera in vineyards some thirty years later that made international coordination take shape. In 1905, a convention creating the International Institute of Agriculture was signed in Rome. Like the International Institute of Hygiene, whose creation was decided two years later at an international health conference in the same city, it was marked by closer diplomatic supervision than in the fields of communications or patents. A phytosanitary Europe attempted to keep the international order in good health but failed to succeed in bringing the rest of the world on board.

1 M. Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day, Themes in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2 R. Fourche, ‘Internationalisation des traitements arsenicaux: des doryphores américains aux abeilles françaises (1868–1922)’, Histoire & Sociétés Rurales 48/2 (2017), pp. 137– 176, at p.143. 3 M. Harrison, ‘Disease, Diplomacy and International Commerce: The Origins of International Sanitary Regulation in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 1 (2006), pp. 197–217; C. Paillette, ‘L’Europe et les organisations sanitaires internationales. Enjeux régionaux et mondialisation, des années 1900 aux années 1920’, Les Cahiers Irice 9 (2012), pp. 47–60; V. Huber, ‘Pandemics and the Politics of Difference: Rewriting the History of Internationalism Through Nineteenth-Century Cholera’, Journal of Global History 15/3 (2020), pp. 394–407.

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Fighting Potato Late Blight Potato became a major foodstuff in many European societies in the nineteenth century, to the extent that it was seen as one of the key factors of the demographic and industrial revolution.4 The occurrence of a late blight in the second half of the 1840s caused the last great subsistence crisis in Europe, which in some areas turned to be a hecatomb.5 The precise origins of the disease are uncertain. The pathogenic microorganism, identified by Berkeley in 1846 and later named Phytophthora infestans, is believed to have arrived in Europe from the Andes on contaminated tubers. Today, the hypotheses of a Mexican origin or contamination via fertiliser (bat guano) imported from Peru or Chile are abandoned. Contemporary reports crossed with recent genetic studies of specimens archived in herbaria suggest that it first appeared on the east coast of the US in 1843 before being spotted in Europe in 1845— first in Belgium and the Netherlands, and then in the British Isles, France, the Germanic countries, Scandinavia, Northern Italy and Eastern Europe shortly afterwards. From there, it spread to the rest of the world through European missionary and colonial networks; the case of the British Empire is well documented, with the disease being spotted in India in the 1870s, Australia in the 1900s and sub-Saharan Africa thereafter.6 In Europe, the disease spread mainly by wind. Overseas, the carriers were infected tubers travelling by boat to feed soldiers or populations or to be used as seeds (Fig. 5.1). Everywhere, the crop losses were enormous. The consequences were particularly dramatic in Ireland, where, within seven years, almost a million people died of starvation, while another million were forced to

4 M. de Ferrière le Vayer and J.-P. Williot (eds.), La pomme de terre de la Renaissance au XXIe siècle (Tours: PUR/PUFR, 2011). 5 R. Paping, E. Vanhaute and C. Ó Gráda (eds.), When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845–1850 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 6 A. C. Saville and J. B. Ristaino, ‘Global Historic Pandemics Caused by the FAM-1 Genotype of Phytophthora infestans on Six Continents’, Sci Rep 11/12335 (2021). J. B. Ristaino and D. F. Pfister, ‘What a Painfully Interesting Subject’: Charles Darwin’s Studies of Potato Late Blight’, BioScience 66/12 (2016), pp. 1035–1045, at pp. 1041–42. See also L. Tateosian, R. Guenter, Y.-P. Yang and J. Ristaino, ‘Tracking 19th Century Late Blight from Archival Documents Using Text Analytics and Geoparsing’, Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings 17 (2017), pp. 146-155. https://doi.org/10.7275/R5J964K5.

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Fig. 5.1 Mapping Phytophthora infestans (Source https://www.nature.com/art icles/s41598-021-90937-6/figures/1)

emigrate. The infamous Irish Potato Famine was caused by many social, economic and political factors. The consequences were also very serious in Scotland and Belgium. Among botanists and entomologists, the crisis gave rise to a great body of research on the nature, origins and treatment of the disease. Knowledge circulated, both through personal correspondence between scientists and experimenters and through publications. Ansgar Schanbacher gives an example of the complex circuit followed by an article by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, written in November 1845 in Giessen, which was published in Glasgow Constitutional before being taken up by the Allgemeine Zeitung (Munich) and quoted in the Braunschweigisches Magazin.7 Many contemporaries understood that they were suffering from a common evil; as the crisis unfolded, scientists intensified their exchanges. Some called for a common response: ‘Only through joint action can

7 A. Schanbacher, ‘Der europäische Wissenschaftsdiskurs um Phytophthora infestans’, unpublished paper presented at the RICHIE Summer school ‘Européanisation, du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours’, Krzyzowa, ˙ Poland, 08.09.2012. Online: https://www.europe-richie.org/files/858ae85e4e28d71ab0aaae12fe0b4a49/SCH ANBACHER%20Ansgar%20.pdf.

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a common evil be remedied, and just as 14 years ago cholera had to succumb to the measures taken against it, so with God’s help the potato disease will also be eliminated through a sensible procedure’,8 hoped an anonymous. However, states preferred to follow autonomous, uncoordinated policies. Most of them reacted in the same way, lowering tariffs to facilitate the import of substitute food while seeking to limit exports. In the UK, disease weighed on the debate over the Corn Laws, which raised the price of grain through high tariffs. Their abolition in 1846 marked a liberal shift supported by the new industrial elite. In Belgium and France, measures were taken against the export of foodstuffs and favouring their import. In the German states, reactions were disparate, with Prussia itself having a different policy in its western and eastern parts.9 The absence of coordination could prove counterproductive. When everyone blocked exports while facilitating imports, prices could only rise even more. Narrow national policies in a largely integrated transnational market could not effectively relieve people.

Fighting the Great Wine Blight Thirty years after the outbreak of potato late blight in Europe, a new plant disease arrived from the other side of the Atlantic. This time, public authorities engaged in a coordinated international response. ‘Considering the increasing ravages of Phylloxera and recognising the desirability of joint action in Europe to halt if possible, the progress of the plague in the invaded countries, and to attempt to preserve the areas hitherto spared’, seven countries signed the first international convention to protect plants in history on 17 September 1878 in Bern.10 The plant at stake was the vine, cultivated by millions of European farmers for its fresh or dried fruit, and even more so for the fermented juice of its fruit—wine—which fed and delighted millions of drinkers when water was still often dubious.

8 Ibid., citing: Anon., Die Kartoffelkrankheit: Zusammenstellung der über Entstehung, Fortgang und Heilung derselben von Sachverständigen verschiedener Länder abgegebenen Urtheile und Rathschläge (Schwerin: 1845), p. 24. 9 A. Schanbacher, Kartoffelkrankheit und Nahrungskrise in Nordwestdeutschland 1845– 1848 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016). 10 ‘Convention on Measures to Be Taken Against Phylloxera Vastatrix’. See: https://iea. uoregon.edu/treaty/2585 (Ronald B. Mitchell, International Environmental Agreements Database Project (Version 2020.1)).

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Among the signatories—Austria–Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland—France was the most affected by this seemingly harmless aphid, which was killing plants and threatening what then accounted for one sixth of French agricultural income. The first signs were spotted in the country in 1863, the cause was identified in 1868, and a name was given to it—Phylloxera vastatrix, i.e., the destroyer.11 For fifteen years, it had been spreading year after year, forming patches around multiple outbreaks. Winegrowers exhausted themselves by uprooting and replanting in vain. The young plants died in turn. With the exception of a few pockets of resistance on sandy or submerged land, the plague ravaged everything in its path, not in a lightning-fast manner—it usually took three years for the affected plant to die permanently—but inexorably. Among the other signatories, Switzerland had been affected since 1871, with phylloxera having escaped from greenhouses where it parasitised plants introduced from England. In England and continental Europe, American plants were brought in by nurserymen and winegrowers for ornament and study, in order to test their resistance to powdery mildew, a fungus that caused major crop losses in the 1850s. However, they did not know that the American vines carried with them an even worse disease, which their European cousins had never had to face. Entomologists on both sides of the Atlantic, who had strengthened their ties because of Phytophthora infestans , were now able to rather quickly realise that the cause of the new disease identified in Europe was an insect endemic to the east coast of the US. It was then possible to trace the path of the disease fairly precisely by making the link between the places where the disease appeared and the importation of contaminated American plants. In Switzerland, the phylloxera blight remained limited because the vineyards were not continuous. The same was true in Germany since 1874, with infection being spotted around Bonn and then in Alsace. The progression in Austria and Hungary was much more worrying since 1875. In the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal was the first to be affected. After that, it was Spain’s turn, from Catalonia, which was in contact with France, and Andalusia (1877). Italy was inevitably concerned, even if the typical symptoms—yellowing of the leaves, reduced production and then complete decline—were not yet formally recognised (Fig. 5.2).

11 On this and what follows, G. Garrier, Le phylloxéra: Une guerre de trente ans, 1870– 1900 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989).

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Wherever it struck, the phytosanitary crisis did not cause famine, but it certainly caused misery. The income shock would rapidly translate into rising crimes against property12 and would soon have an impact on newborn babies. Undernursed, the children of winegrowers who were conceived during the crisis would indeed be smaller at the age of conscription, at 20, than the rest of their peers.13 Farm workers, craftsmen, shopkeepers and the entire economy of the wine-growing countryside collapsed. Therefore, phylloxera was a powerful accelerator of the rural exodus. In France, entire villages emptied, with their inhabitants leaving for the country’s largest cities, for Algeria or even for California, Brazil and Argentina. In the latter country, French immigrants created wine brands, such as Leon Gambetta y prosperidad, a reference to the French statesman who was born in the Lot to Italian parents, or Torre de Effel.14 Once it was proved that the aphid could circulate on the roots and leaves of infected plants, restrictions prevented immigrants from the common practice of taking vines with them from home. Growing populations in industrialising urban centres in Europe became accustomed to drinking wine in the nineteenth century.15 This represented a huge market which new aperitive drinks and more or less adulterated wines offered as substitutes did not completely quench. Viticulture developed vigorously in regions that were still untouched and sometimes even in those where there were no vineyards until then in order to meet the demand. The need for young vines was very high, as they were planted in droves. The demand for grapes, must and wine for the well-established wine industry in regions such as Bordeaux also grew significantly. The port of Bordeaux, which typically accounted for half of 12 V. Bignon, E. Caroli, R. Galbiati, ‘Stealing to Survive? Crime and Income Shocks in

19th Century France’, Economic Journal 127/599 (2017), pp. 19–49. 13 A. Banerjee, E. Duflo, G. Postel-Vinay and T. Watts, ‘Long-Run Health Impacts of Income Shocks: Wine and Phylloxera in Nineteenth-Century France’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 92/4 (2010), pp. 714–728. 14 P. Lacoste, El vino del inmigrante, Los inmigrantes europeos y la industria vitivinicola argentina:su incidencia en la incorporación, difusión y estandarizacion del uso de topónimos europeos (1852–1980) (Mendoza: Universidad de congreso, Consejo empresario mendocino, 2003), p. 319. 15 J.-P. Poussou, ‘Un autre regard sur les vignobles des Hauts-Pays aquitains à l’époque moderne et au XIXe siècle’, in J.-R. Pitte (ed.), Le bon vin, entre terroir, savoir-faire et savoir-boire. Actualité de la pensée de Roger Dion (Paris, CNRS éditions, 2010), pp. 187– 211.

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the wine exported outside France, was about to become a net importer.16 It was clear at the same time that planting fever and intensified circulations maximised the risk of spreading the disease. Phylloxera was capable of moving on its own, underground and even faster when carried by the winds. However, men very much helped it, first, to cross the Atlantic barrier and, since then, to spread across Europe, carrying it under their hooves, on the dead wood burnt by bakers and, above all, through the exchange of vine plants or other host species. To prevent the disease from spreading further or at least to slow it down until a cure was found while still allowing planting and horticultural exchanges, the zoologist Victor Fatio, with the support of the city of Geneva and of the Swiss government, initiated the convening of an international phylloxera congress in Lausanne in the summer of 1877.17 The congressmen, officially delegated by the states to study the question from the perspectives of scientific theory, viticultural practice and administration, broke up after a dozen days of work; they insisted on the need for an international convention to preserve the estimated 3.5 billion francs of annual revenue that this crop provided in Europe. The convention was signed a year later in September 1878. In this agreement, the signatories committed to legislate in their respective countries in order to map outbreaks, eradicate the insect and monitor the flow of contaminants. Exports of plants from infested areas were strictly prohibited, except for table grapes (without leaves) and market garden produce, which could continue to circulate freely. For other ‘plants, shrubs and miscellaneous products from nurseries, gardens, greenhouses and orangeries’, a customs certificate guaranteeing geographical origin and a pathogen-free status would have to be produced. For vine plants specifically, prior consent from the importing state would be required on top of the sanitary pass. In any case, great care should be taken to ensure that there was no soil around the roots and that packaging avoids contamination in transit. Violators would face heavy penalties; the goods would be burned and the vehicles disinfected on the spot. The text also facilitated a regular and intensive exchange of legal and scientific information. All this implied the 16 P. Roudié, Vignobles et vignerons du Bordelais (1850–1980) (Bordeaux: Féret, 2014 [1988]), pp. 225–227. 17 V. Fatio, État de la question phylloxérique en Europe en 1877: Rapport sur le congrès phylloxérique international réuni à Lausanne du 6 au 18 août 1877 (Genève: Impr. de Ramboz et Schuchardt, 1878).

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setting up of inspection services in the field and a centralised administration. In the name of the joint action, each signatory state undertook to create an administrative service specialising in plant protection, if it did not already exist. The member states of this anti-phylloxera union, limited to European wine-growing countries, decided not to create a central international office. Instead, Switzerland would act as an intermediary. Basically, the whole issue was to find a balance between protecting the safe vines and maintaining trade in the products that came from them, that were necessary for them (plants, stakes and fertilisers) or that were contiguous to them in the field and in transit (other crops). As with the protection of populations from epidemics, a liberal approach prevailed; it was necessary to protect the vines and winegrowers, without cutting off the channels of international trade on which so many activity sectors,

Fig. 5.2 Europe. Phylloxeric map of 1877 (Source Fatio, V., État de la question phylloxérique en Europe en 1877: Rapport sur le congrès phylloxérique international réuni à Lausanne du 6 au 18 août 1877 [Genève: Impr. de Ramboz et Schuchardt, 1878], pp. 146–147. Source Gallica, BNF [Paris])

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companies and jobs were dependent. Luxembourg joined the convention in 1879. Five countries left the convention to sign another one at the end of 1881, which was on the same basis but more tolerant insofar as the phylloxera zones did not cease to expand.18 At the same time, a thousand remedies were tested and sold to distraught winegrowers. Horse urine syrup, nicotine juice, heavy coal oil, naphthalene and lime slurry, parasitic fungi capable of neutralising the insect, turpentine, mixed gasworks residues, arsenic—hundreds of natural, chemical, eccentric and learned remedies, more or less dangerous for the plants and the spreaders, were experimented with and sold. Expensive and dangerous, the injection of carbon sulphide vapours was the least ineffective way of disinfecting soils and prolonging the survival of plants by a few years. In the 1870s, so-called sulphurists opposed Americanists, who advocated replanting with varieties obtained by crossing with American vines (hybrids) or grafting European varieties onto American vines. The latter had developed natural resistance to the insect. While the European vines died, the American vines through which the disease had come were just doing fine. However, they produced wine with a disappointing taste, hence the need to hybridise or graft them. All the supporters of this method, which was increasingly effective despite its cost, lobbied to facilitate the circulation of American plants. In the 1880s, Americanists won out over sulphurists, and replanting with hybrids or grafted plants allowed European vineyards to survive. This was the golden age of nurserymen. However, a large part of the vineyards were never replanted—it is estimated that forty per cent of the vineyards in France disappeared from 1863 to 1890. The conventions remained in force to preserve the few remaining unaffected areas. Unfortunately, this was not without its drawbacks. Apart from the fact that grafting was out of the reach of many ruined smallholders, it resulted in the massive importation of American plants that carried diseases that had previously gone unnoticed, such as mildew and black rot, on top of phylloxera. Without endangering the vineyards, they caused severe losses and required new and expensive treatments.

18 ‘International Convention Respecting Measures to Be Taken against the Phylloxera Vastatrix’. https://iea.uoregon.edu/treaty/2586 (Ronald B. Mitchell, International Environmental Agreements Database Project (Version 2020.1).

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Protecting Plants: Certificates vs. Quarantine In the midst of the phylloxera crisis, when news came that the Colorado potato beetle (Doryphora) was ravaging potato fields in the US, Europeans prepared for their turn to be plagued once again.19 They knew from experience that the chances of the pest arriving and proliferating were high. American entomologists, in touch with their European counterparts on the phylloxera issue, warned of the danger themselves. Scientists and farmers were on the alert. Measures were taken in France as early as 1875 against the import of potatoes or packages from North America. Other countries adopted similar measures. When the first pests and damages were spotted in Sweden in 1875 and in the Netherlands, England and Germany within two years, trade within Europe was blocked. French phylloxera legislation adopted in 1878 in the context of the preparation of the international convention included control of the Colorado beetle. The measures proved effective, as they did not become established in Europe until after the First World War. On the other hand, they posed the problem of cutting off trade channels. As this case reveals, there was no way to deal with agricultural pests. Phylloxera vastatrix gave birth to a convention, not Doryphora. In any case, the globalisation of plant pathologies was now on the minds of all those interested in agriculture. A Californian fruit and wheat farmer, David Lubin, embarked on a crusade to create an international organisation dedicated to agriculture.20 His goal was to fight the crises in the agricultural world in a spirit of solidarity and to give farmers the means to play on equal terms with big traders and other speculators. Epizootics and phytotics were high on the agenda. After almost ten years of lobbying, he managed to find powerful support in the Italian king. The International Institute of Agriculture was founded in Rome in 1905. By 1908, forty states had ratified the convention. This included almost all European countries and many others beyond Europe, such as the US, Japan and British dominions (e.g. Australia). The organisation setting innovated in the sense that, in between the general assembly’s meetings, the management of the institute belonged to a permanent group 19 R. Fourche, ‘Internationalisation des traitements arsenicaux’, p. 142. 20 W. Kaiser and J. Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and Inter-

national Organizations, Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 49–58.

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of national representatives (not an international office), mainly composed of diplomats residing in Rome. The broad socio-economic mandate that the promoters of the International Institute of Agriculture had hoped to give to the new organisation, which was supposed to deal with all aspects of farmers’ welfare, was a failure. Governments restricted the scope of the organisation to the most technical aspects and ensured full control, closing the door to farmers’ associations in the governance of the institute. In sum, the institute became yet another instrument of agricultural sovereignty as much as an instrument of cooperation. Kaiser and Schot conclude about ‘the fragility of experts’ positions within the new international machinery at the start of the twentieth century’21 ; in the discussion on the mandate of this international organisation, they see the opening of a way towards the post-war League of Nations, which would link technical and socio-economic issues in a broader development perspective. However, phytosanitary issues did not disappear from the institute’s horizon. In 1914, the institute promoted the signing of an international phytosanitary convention potentially covering all diseases and pests, not just phylloxera.22 The aim was to limit the number of bans and other quarantine measures, on the one hand, and to simplify the work of inspectors and exporters by standardising certificates, on the other. In a context in which protectionism was vogue but politically difficult to implement, quarantine measures often appeared to be protectionism in disguise. With the support of the French government, the institute convened the first international phytopathological convention in Rome in May 1914, just a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. The delegates were not able to draw up a common list of diseases, as these depended greatly on the crops grown and the environment. However, they did manage to develop a single certificate and an inspection system that was flexible enough to cover all the diseases banned in exporting countries without ruining hopes of making world trade in agricultural commodities more fluid. Though it excluded field crops and vines—covered by the 1878 phylloxera convention—the Rome convention generalised the principles of the latter mainly for horticultural products. As historian Stéphane 21 Ibid., p. 57. 22 S. Castongay, ‘Creating an Agricultural World Order: Regional Plant Protection

Problems and International Phytopathology, 1878–1939’, Agricultural History 84/1 (2010), pp. 46–73.

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Castonguay concludes, it ‘required countries to relinquish part of their sovereignty and to adopt an international certification system whereby plants certified to be disease-free were granted a kind of passport to circulate freely and enter any country’.23 While some countries in Scandinavia or South America already engaged in regional agreements, which they did not want to undermine by signing a global agreement, the US and the UK and its dominions abstained from signing regarding other concerns. They criticised a Eurocentric convention in which contiguous countries with limited bioclimatic diversity challenged systems of quarantine better adapted to more diversified and non-contiguous environments, while excluding industrial crops. In any case, the outbreak of war delayed and jeopardised the ratification process. However, a regionalised phytopathological international regime in the making in 1914 would lean high over discussions during the interwar period.

Conclusion The occurrence of epidemics and the reactions to them reveal to historians the degree of awareness of the affected societies regarding their intertwining, as well as the differences in the positioning of social groups with different visions and approaches in the negotiation of rules seeking to control this intertwining. The circulation of pathogens was not new in the nineteenth century. However, the acceleration and intensification of cross-border exchanges transformed this issue to such an extent that international diplomatic conferences set themselves the objective of regulating these exchanges from a sanitary perspective. The first international convention signed in 1878 did not concern humans but plant health. The provisions concerning partner information and border inspections are very similar to those adopted in 1892 for human diseases. As it only concerned one disease, phylloxera affecting vines, and a group of European wine-producing countries, it formed the basis of an attempt to extend it to all known plant diseases on a global scale in 1914. While this attempt failed, a group of countries on the European continent seemed ready to adopt it. The foundation in 1951 of a European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization at the same

23 Ibid., p. 55.

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time as the signing of a global international plant protection convention marks a form of achievement of a regionalisation process deeply rooted in globalised circulations whereby national and international rules coproduced. Since 1878, the conventions have tried to maintain the international order in good health, knowing that it relied on stable states and communities, on the one hand, and on commercial exchanges among them, on the other.

References Banerjee, A., Duflo, E., Postel-Vinay G., and Watts T., ‘Long-Run Health Impacts of Income Shocks: Wine and Phylloxera in Nineteenth-Century France’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 92/4 (2010), pp. 714–728. Bignon, V., Caroli, E. and Galbiati R., ‘Stealing to Survive? Crime and Income Shocks in 19th Century France’, Economic Journal 127/599 (2017), 19–49. Castongay, S., ‘Creating an Agricultural World Order: Regional Plant Protection Problems and International Phytopathology, 1878–1939’, Agricultural History 84/1 (2010), pp. 46–73. de Ferrière le Vayer, M. and Williot J.-P. (eds.), La pomme de terre de la Renaissance au XXIe siècle (Tours: PUR/PUFR, 2011). Fourche, R., ‘Internationalisation des traitements arsenicaux: des doryphores américains aux abeilles françaises (1868–1922)’, Histoire & Sociétés Rurales 48/2 (2017), pp. 137–176. Garrier, G., Le phylloxéra: Une guerre de trente ans, 1870–1900 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989). Harrison, M., ‘Disease, Diplomacy and International Commerce: The Origins of International Sanitary Regulation in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 1 (2006), pp. 197–217. Harrison, M., Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day, Themes in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Huber, V., ‘Pandemics and the Politics of Difference: Rewriting the History of Internationalism through Nineteenth-Century Cholera’, Journal of Global History 15/3 (2020), pp. 394–407. Kaiser, W. and Schot J., Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations, Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Lacoste, P., El vino del inmigrante, Los inmigrantes europeos y la industria vitivinicola argentina: su incidencia en la incorporación, difusión y

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estandarizacion del uso de topónimos europeos (1852–1980) (Mendoza: Universidad de congreso, Consejo empresario mendocino, 2003). Mitchell, R. B., International Environmental Agreements Database Project (Version 2020.1) https://iea.uoregon.edu/. Paillette, C., ‘L’Europe et les organisations sanitaires internationales: Enjeux régionaux et mondialisation, des années 1900 aux années 1920’, Les Cahiers Irice 9 (2012), pp. 47–60. Paping, R., Vanhaute, E. and Gráda, C. Ó. (eds.), When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845–1850 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). Poussou, J.-P., ‘Un autre regard sur les vignobles des Hauts-Pays aquitains à l’époque moderne et au XIXe siècle’, in J.-R. Pitte (ed.), Le bon vin, entre terroir, savoir-faire et savoir-boire: Actualité de la pensée de Roger Dion (Paris, CNRS éditions, 2010), pp. 187–211. Ristaino, J. B. and Pfister D. F., ‘What a Painfully Interesting Subject’: Charles Darwin’s Studies of Potato Late Blight’, BioScience 66/12 (2016), pp. 1035– 1045. Roudié, P., Vignobles et vignerons du Bordelais (1850–1980) (Bordeaux: Féret, 2014 [1988]). Saville, A. C. and Ristaino J. B., ‘Global Historic Pandemics Caused by the FAM1 Genotype of Phytophthora infestans on Six Continents’, Sci Rep 11/12335 (2021), pp. 1–11. Schanbacher, A., ‘Der europäische Wissenschaftsdiskurs um Phytophthora infestans’, unpublished paper presented at the RICHIE Summer school ‘Européanisation, du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours’, Krzyzowa, ˙ Poland, 08.09.2012. Online: https://www.europe-richie.org/files/858ae85e4e28d71 ab0aaae12fe0b4a49/SCHANBACHER%20Ansgar%20.pdf. Schanbacher, A., Kartoffelkrankheit und Nahrungskrise in Nordwestdeutschland 1845–1848 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016). Tateosian, L., Guenter, R., Yang, Y.-P. and Ristaino, J., ‘Tracking 19th Century Late Blight from Archival Documents Using Text Analytics and Geoparsing’, Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings 17 (2017), pp. 146–155. https://doi.org/10.7275/R5J964K5.

CHAPTER 6

Social Policy—From a Prisoner’s Dilemma to a European Cartel

Abstract European social policy, as we know it today, was born during globalisation after the 1870s. Interestingly, international treaties did not play a decisive role in this process. While there have been influential agreements for every other topic covered in this book, European social policy worked in a different way. It indeed came to a convergence of both worker protection and social insurances. However, this happened predominantly on the basis of mutual observations, competition, information exchange and economic incentives. Social policy is therefore a telling example of European convergence in which multilateral treaties were of relatively little importance. Keywords Social policy · European labour market · Migration · Worker protection · Social insurances

By the end of the nineteenth century, the French Parliament became once again aware that better international infrastructure had surprising but ultimately predictable side effects. On 24 November 1898, the French Chamber of Deputies—one of the two chambers of the parliament during

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0_6

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the Third Republic—discussed a law that addressed the problem of immigration of cheap labour via international transport and its effects on the salaries of French workers. In the exposé des motifs, the authors argue that foreigners ruin the French labour market by accepting lower salaries. These foreigners were also willing to put up with worse food and even worse working conditions. ‘This is why we say, dear colleagues, that the law must oblige the employers to grant the foreign workers the same wages as the French workers’.1 As one can see, the social effects of European economic integration—this time of the labour market—were more than visible. This might be surprising, as the narrative of social Europe is one of the main topoi of the European Union. According to this tale, post-1945 Europe did something that seems economically irrational: although competitiveness and, therefore, price sensitivity are key characteristics of the European economy, it did not come to a race to the bottom of (usually costly) social policy measures. From an economically simplistic point of view, intensive competition as it dominates in the densely populated European continent leads to an atmosphere in which countries try to keep costs low in order not to risk competitiveness. In addition, as Europe has to compete with cheaper countries, such as China and India, there would have been good reason to reduce costs by deconstructing price-intensive laws. Evidently, this was not what happened. As we will show in this chapter, European social policy and labour protection measures preceded institutionalised European integration, as it already existed before 1914.2 The concept of social Europe is clearly inspired by the European Union and the concept of institutionalised integration. In comparison, the steps towards a social Europe before the Great War are unique, as they happened without a multilateral agreement or treaty.

1 Original: ‘C’est pour ces motifs que nous disons, Messieurs, que la loi doit imposer aux employeurs d’accorder aux ouvriers étrangers un salaire égal aux ouvriers français’. Archives Nationales C//5659, Dossier ‘Étrangers’; see also Journal Officiel de la Chambre des Députés, séance du 24 November 1898, p. 2267. 2 According to Lechevalier’s and Wielgohs’ definition, social Europe includes ‘the direct and indirect consequences of European integration on the social protection and employment systems, on the social cohesion of the EU as a whole and, ultimately, on the well-being of European citizens’; A. Lechevalier and J. Wielgohs, ‘Social Europe: The Downward Spiral’, in A. Lechevalier and J. Wielgohs (eds.), Social Europe: A Dead End? What the Eurozone Crisis Is Doing to Europe’s Social Dimension, Studies in European Cooperation (Kopenhagen: Djøf Publishing, 2016), pp. 7–26, at p. 7.

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Theoretically, it did come to one in 1906 in Bern, but its effect was negligible. This chapter will therefore tackle the question of why and how this happened. Did it come to this despite globalisation? Or did globalisation actually accelerate and stabilise European social policy? This question is especially interesting because, as we have shown in Chapter 2, trade with non-European countries increased both in absolute and relative terms. As historians have shown, more than 130 years ago, European nationstates developed what are widely considered the foundations of the welfare states we witness today. These analyses were mostly focussed on specific countries and with good reason. Not only were social policy laws national ones. Social policy was also a strategy to legitimise and, therefore, stabilise the modern nation-state.3 Until the 1990s, the matter of European coordination played only a minor role in historiography, with a few notable exceptions. A very influential one came from Hartmut Kaelble, who argues that the continent was on the way to a European society. With regard to the welfare state, he claims that the foundations of European welfare states had been laid by 1913.4 This has not been undisputed, as Prost contests the idea of European convergence. However, it is important to realise that the convergence they both discuss refers to the second half of the twentieth century.5 During the last two decades, research has intensified when the analysis of pre-1914 European integration impacted publications on social policy.6 3 S. Kott, Sozialstaat und Gesellschaft. Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in Europa, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), vol. 214, pp. 135–37; E. Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa. Von der “sozialen” Frage bis zur Globalisierung, Beck’sche Reihe (München: Beck, 2007), vol. 1761, p. 36. 4 H. Kaelble, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gesellschaft. Eine Sozialgeschichte Westeuropas, 1880–1980, Arbeitsbücher-Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegung (München: C.H. Beck, 1987), pp. 73–74. 5 Antoine Prost admits that there were areas in which European societies came to converge, yet these do not justify the assessment that a general conversion was achieved: ‘La convergence des Etats européens s’accommode ainsi de différences persistantes dans le domaine même où l’industrialisation aurait dû faire le mieux sentir ses effets: celui des usines, des organisations et des relations industrielles. Aussi ne convient-il pas d’en faire l’explication principale de l’unification européenne’. A. Prost, ‘L’industrialisation at-elle unifié les sociétés européennes?’, in F. Guedj and S. Sirot (eds.), Histoire sociale de l’Europe: Industrialisation et société en Europe occidentale (1880–1970), Histoire, cultures et sociétés (Paris: Arslam, 1998), pp. 5–13, at p. 12. 6 N. Souamaa, ‘Les Origines de l’OIT (1890–1950): Élaboration et Premières Expérimentations d’un Modèle d’“Europe Sociale”’ 87 (2015), pp. 63–88; N. Souamaa, La

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Among the publications that target European convergence, Huberman and Lewchuk’s analysis takes on an exceptional role. They show that from 1870 to 1913, it came to an increase in market regulation and social insurances, as well as to a convergence among European countries.7 Somewhat inadvertently, they show that although Germany was among the countries with the densest social policy nets, it was not the most developed one. When it comes to social insurance, the UK was more advanced, and many countries, such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway, played in the same league. Germany was not exceptionally good. Market regulation, mainly meaning worker protection laws, also existed in every country. According to Table 6.1, the spread between the countries became more limited by 1913. In other words, all countries had taken measures to protect their workers, as the French Parliament intended to do in 1898. In general, the index measures market regulation and social insurances for 1870, 1900 and 1913. Both moved at different speeds. During the first three decades, virtually all countries improved on market regulation, with Bulgaria being the only exception. Although there was a visible increase from 1900 to 1913, most steps had already been taken before. In France et l’OIT (1890–1953): vers une ‘Europe sociale’?, Dissertation (Université ParisSorbonne, 2014); E. Eichenhofer, ‘Europäisierung sozialer Sicherung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32 (2006), pp. 517–41; Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa, vol. 1761; S. Kott, ‘Communauté ou solidarité. Des modèles divergents pour les politiques sociales française et allemande à la fin du XIXe siècle?’, in W. Abelshauser et al. (eds.), Comparer les systèmes de protection sociale en Europe (Volume 2. Rencontres de Berlin. France-Allemagne) (Paris: MIRE, 1999), pp. 41–59; T. A. Glootz, Alterssicherung im europäischen Wohlfahrtsstaat. Etappen ihrer Entwicklung im 20. Jahrhundert, Campus Forschung (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2005), vol. 885. An exception is the analyses focussing on two countries, as in Gregarek’s works; see R. Gregarek, Querelles et ‘ententes cordiales’ dans les relations franco-allemandes à la fin du XIX e et au début du XX e siècle. Le cas des assurances sociales (Marseille: Université de Provence, 1991); R. Gregarek, ‘Le face-à-face de la République française et de l’Empire allemand dans les politiques sociales. L’exemple des associations internationales au tournant au XXe siècle’, Revue Germanique internationale 4 (1995), pp. 103–26; R. Gregarek, ‘Le mirage de l’Europe sociale. Associations internationales de politique sociale au tournant du 20e siècle’, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 48 (1995), pp. 103–18. 7 M. Huberman and W. Lewchuk, ‘European Economic Integration and the Labour

Compact, 1850–1913’, European Review of Economic History 7 (2003), pp. 3–41. Market regulation refers to the minimum working age (12), a ten-hour working day (youths), prohibition of night work for children and women and an eleven-hour working day for women and social insurances; see M. Huberman, Odd Couple: International Trade and Labor Standards in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 14.

0.340 0 0 0 0 0.250 0.567 0.190 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.180 0.759 (6) (1)

(4) (2) (5)

(3)

1870

Market regulation index

0.846 0.531 0 0.512 0.381 0.845 0.840 0.519 0.224 0.656 0.595 0.462 0.488 0.244 0.595 0.911 0.854 (11) (14) (5) (5) (10) (16) (6) (7) (13) (12) (15) (7) (1) (2)

(3) (9)

1900 0.846 0.721 0.838 0.619 0.560 0.881 0.876 0.662 0.749 0.733 0.738 0.605 0.720 0.615 0.762 0.911 0.854

(5) (11) (6) (14) (17) (2) (3) (13) (8) (10) (9) (16) (12) (15) (7) (1) (2)

1913 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1870

(9) (9) (6)

(3) (9) (6)

(2) (6) (5) (1)

(3) (9)

1900 0.500 0.125 0 0.625 0.250 0.375 0.750 0 0.500 0.125 0.250 0 0 0 0.125 0.125 0.250

Social insurance index

Labour market regulation in Europe until 1913 (ranking in brackets)

0.750 0.750 0.250 0.750 0.250 0.750 0.750 0.500 0.500 0.750 0.750 0.250 0.125 0.250 0.625 0.375 1 (1)

1913 (2) (2) (13) (2) (13) (2) (2) (10) (10) (2) (2) (13) (17) (13) (9) (12)

M. Huberman and W. Lewchuk, ‘European Economic Integration and the Labour Compact, 1850–1913’, European Review of Economic History 7 (2003), pp. 3–41, at p. 23

Austria Belgium Bulgaria Denmark Finland France Germany Hungary Italy Netherlands Norway Portugal Russia Spain Sweden Switzerland UK

Table 6.1

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the case of social insurances, the situation was slightly different, as most social insurances were created (or improved) after 1900. Only in Finland, Germany and Italy had insurances been developed before and remained on the same levels afterwards. Given these differences, there is good reason to distinguish between the two branches of social policy, although not all authors agree. Hennock, for instance, blames Bismarck for insinuating that these two policies are different.8 In Germany, social democrats were much more interested in workers’ protection than in state-run insurances.9 The Berlin Conference on Workers’ Protection of 1890 confirms the assessment that the main interest is in labour market regulation. During the meeting, the delegates formed three working groups which focussed on three different topics: working in mines, work-free Sundays and the matter of working women and children.10 Similarly important is Huberman’s monograph on the ‘odd couple’ social policy and globalisation.11 In this book, he shows that the development of what he calls a European labour compact was a specific European development that covered virtually the entire continent but no other nonEuropean country. According to him, European countries formed what can be qualified as a social policy cartel, which was—with good reason, as one might argue—the escape from a prisoner’s dilemma. What exactly was the dilemma? In the original example,12 two suspects who have been apprehended by the authorities and have no way to communicate with each other must make a choice to potentially reduce their sentences. The dilemma they have to face is that the final outcome depends not only on

8 E. P. Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914. Social Policies Compared (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 120. We do not want to decide on the question of whether labour laws and social insurances belong to different policies. The fact is that virtually all publications that cover social policy include both in their analyses. 9 W. Ayass, K. E. Born, H. Domeinski, J. Flemming, U. Haerende, A. Hänlein, M. Peterle, P. Rassow, E. Roeder, W. Rudloff, F. Tennstedt and H. Winter (eds.), Quellensammlung zur Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik, II. Abt., 3. Bd., Von der kaiserlichen Sozialbotschaft bis zu den Februarerlassen Wilhelms II. (1881–1890): Arbeiterschutz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), p. XXIV. 10 Ministère des affaires étrangères: Conférence internationale de Berlin: 15–29 Mars 1890 [Paris (1890)], p. 33. 11 Huberman, Odd Couple. 12 S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 28.

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their choices but also on the choice of the other prisoner. If one betrays the other, while the other remains silent, the first will be set free, while the other has to serve ten years in prison—and vice versa. If both confess, both serve five years. The best solution for both—a one-year sentence— only comes true when both remain silent. In other words, only through concerted action can they avoid hardship. With regard to social policy, one could also make a good case for arguing that it was indeed rational to work together. However, plausibility alone is not a sufficient explanation. While the coordinated increase in social protection was reasonable, one might also ask why this did not happen earlier. There is also no reason to assume that governments or parliaments chose rational paths. Finally, this does not explain why non-European countries developed in another direction. Huberman and Lewchuk’s analysis also point to another issue. Obviously, the increase (Table 6.1) took place after the 1870s. However, the idea that this is an issue that has to be taken care of was much older. Publications that have covered social policy since the 1870s often include the first half of the nineteenth century. As Chris Leonards and Nico Randeraad argue, during the nineteenth century, there was a group of international experts who were well informed about social issues. They took part in congresses which could include anything. According to the title of the conferences that took place since 1840, slavery, hygiene, alcoholism, the social sciences and education were all subjects that were discussed thoroughly.13 These discussions, however, remained limited to a small milieu and did not yet affect the lawmaking process. Expert-led social policies did not lead to European convergence, be it intended or unintended. However, there was no common European social concept. There was a common European understanding that this was predominantly a European problem. The enticing conclusion would therefore be that Europe was the cradle of the welfare state quite simply because Europe was the only imagined community that needed one. On the other hand, however, this would not explain why there were hardly any mentionable traces of internationally coordinated social policy before the 1880s. The only other country that was in a similar state as Europe and would have had good reason to discuss the implementation of an active social 13 C. Leonards and N. Randeraad, ‘Transnational Experts in Social Reform, 1840– 1880’, International Review of Social History 55 (2010), pp. 215–39, at p. 238 n.

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policy was the US. European experts were aware of this. During the international conference on labour protection in 1890 (Berlin), the delegates of European countries were convinced that the US developed similarly to its European counterparts. During this conference, French delegate Victor Delahaye gave a presentation on ‘the industrial situation in the US, 1850–1880’.14 He showed that during the thirty-year period, the number of facilities and factories doubled (almost 254,000 in 1880), while production more than quadrupled. The net capital involved in production increased by a factor of six. Based on these figures, Delahaye deduced that American development was almost identical to European development.15 It is therefore an interesting detail that 16 years later, during the conference in Bern (Switzerland), Americans were not even mentioned in the report.16 While it appeared necessary to have a close look at the development in America in 1890, this impression apparently changed. What is special about the discussion is that the idea of a European identity was not prevalent. What was dominant was the wording of civilised states. During both international conferences in Berlin (1890) and Bern (1891), Europe was considered a community, although the participants were aware that the levels of industrialisation were different. In 1907, Paul Reinsch, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, talked of an ‘underlying economic unity of the civilized world’.17 Evidently, the notion of being civilised did not just point to the economy, although it played an important role. A key quality was the rule of law. Mark Mazower goes so far and argues that it was an instrument to govern the world. Only civilised countries were considered partners with whom negotiating was worth it. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 were, in fact, focussed on war between ‘civilised’ countries.18 According to Mazower, ‘if anything, they now allowed the case for brutality to be presented in 14 Ministère des affaires étrangères: Conférence internationale de Berlin: 15–29 Mars 1890 [Paris (1890)], p. 88. 15 Ibid., p. 89. 16 Actes de la conférence diplomatique pour la protection ouvrière réunie à Berne du

17 au 26 September 1906, Berne 1906. 17 P. S. Reinsch, Public International Unions, Their Work and Organization. A Study in International Administrative Law (Boston, London: Ginn and Company, 1911), p. 13. 18 N. Bhuta, ‘The Antinomies of Transformative Occupation’, The European Journal of International Law 16 (2005), pp. 721–40, at p. 729.

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a legalistic guise’.19 Clearly, the construction of a we—be it based on a common cultural, civil or economic identity—served not only as a basis for cooperation but also as an instrument to exclude those who did not belong to the club. This logic of inclusion and exclusion, however, was very vague. As this monograph shows, the idea of a civilised community itself played a crucial role, but it did not predetermine the result. Therefore, the following question is still valid: how did it come to the convergence in European social policy? What role did the outer European world play? There were differences among European social policies when one looks at them in detail. Famously, the Danish sociologist Esping-Andersen identified ‘The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’ in Europe.20 Eichenhofer, as many others, argues that these were born during the decades before 1913.21 However, the general aim of national policies followed a similar logic, and they became key characteristics of the European continent. Evidently, there was no coordinating institution that could have nudged the countries towards more homogeneous national social policy regimes. It is also doubtful that Europe was a collective actor that followed a specific strategy. There was no international treaty that obliged countries to do so. Hitherto, publications usually turn the approach around and focus on actors—national and international ones— to work out and explain pan-European development.22 In this chapter, we take a slightly different perspective. We argue that one crucial reason for this development was negative and positive socio-economic incentives that pushed European countries in a similar direction. A side effect of these dilemma-forming incentives was that national social policies were

19 M. Mazower, Governing the World. The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 78. 20 The most influential publication that identifies three distinct groups of social policy regimes—the conservative, the liberal and the social democratic—in Europe is authored by Esping-Andersen; see G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge (UK): Polity Press, 1990). 21 Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa, vol. 1761, pp. 65–7. 22 See, for instance, M. Herren, Internationale Sozialpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg.

Die Anfänge europäischer Kooperation aus der Sicht Frankreichs, Schriften zur Wirtschaftsund Sozialgeschichte (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), vol. 41; W. Ayass, ‘Bismarck und der Arbeiterschutz. Otto von Bismarcks Ablehnung des gesetzlichen Arbeiterschutzes – eine Analyse der Dimensionen und Hintergründe’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozialund Wirtschaftsgeschichte 89 (2002), pp. 400–26; Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa, vol. 1761; Hennock, Welfare State in England and Germany.

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not independent of what was happening in other countries, although the era was considered the time when nation-states emerged. In this way, we want to explain why they chose the least probable solution of increasing their protection levels simultaneously. By carving out these mechanisms, we can explain not only why Europe appears to have been the cradle of the welfare state but also why only Europe can claim this title.

The Three Incentives That Formed National Social Policies In the previous chapters of this book, we argued that national and international rules were the results of a coproduction driven by transnational incentives. This leads to the following questions what were the incentives that tied European countries together? The argument is that the European track of social policy was not the result of intent but of three powerful incentives: the growing importance of workers’ well-being, increasing competition and trade dependence, and the effects of labour migration. Evidently, it will not always be possible to isolate one incentive with surgical precision. As we will see, some incidents are quoted to support a specific argument, while they can also serve to advance another. We point to these cases specifically, as they also prove a very general point—incentives rarely come alone; they are often backed and stabilised by other incentives, which leads to a situation in which ignoring them becomes even more difficult and, in the end, costly. From the Social Question to the Protection of Human Capital Previously, we raised the question of how, from a purely economic point of view, the mere existence of costly social policy measures might appear puzzling. As interventions in favour of workers usually lead to higher costs for employers and the company, governments would have had good reasons to abstain from them. In Europe, however, this was not an option, as the protection of those in need was well established at the municipal level. That is true for pre-industrial societies, in which poor relief already existed at the local level.23 Moreover, numerous enterprises had already

23 Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa, vol. 1761, pp. 23–4.

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taken steps at the company level.24 There were two reasons why states abstained from that choice of action: the so-called social question and the need to protect human capital. The former leads to the beginning of the discussion of social policy measures. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the transition from a mainly agrarian to an industrialised economy led to an entirely new situation. Pauperism—the immiseration of large parts of society—during the 1830s and 1840s was a side effect of an economy in which the industry became the main driver of growth.25 The transition from the labour market can hardly be underestimated, as it did not only lead to poverty but also brought with it child labour, pauperism and risk management connected with dangers on the job.26 The European revolutions during the middle of the nineteenth century were fuelled by the social unrest that came with these transformations.27 Therefore, the improvement of the fate of the working class became ‘reason of state’; ensuring that the working class had the means necessary to reach a decent and dignified standard of living became essential.28

24 W. von Hippel, ‘Becoming a Global Corporation—BASF from 1865 to 1900’, in W. Abelshauser et al. (eds.), BASF. Innovation and Adaptation in a German Corporation Since 1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 5–114, at pp. 107–12; C. Charle, A Social History of France in the 19th Century (Oxford: Berg, 1994), p. 243. 25 M. Abbenhuis and G. W. Morrell, The First Age of Industrial Globalization: An

International History 1815–1918, New Approaches to International History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 86–9. 26 For instance N. Murard, La protection sociale, Repères, 5th edn. (Paris: La

Découverte, 2011), p. 22. 27 See, for instance, C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, The Blackwell History of the World (Malden, Oxford (England), Carlton: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), pp. 155–61. 28 Kott, Sozialstaat und Gesellschaft, vol. 214, pp. 30–2. On a sidenote, it also shows that the role of liberalism is not easy to assess. In some countries, such as in Germany, for instance, the liberal ideology was never fully accepted, while France—back then, even more than Great Britain—was reluctant to introduce obligatory insurances. There is good reason to interpret social policy measures as part of the strategy to ensure that workers can earn their staff of life. Against this background, labour market regulations are implemented to protect workers from exploitation. Minimum age and normal work days serve exactly this purpose. Therefore, the protection of women and children shields male workers from being substituted by cheaper replacements. Social insurances exist to protect workers from ruinous illnesses, invalidity or the economic effects of work accidents. Therefore, although there was no legal minimum wage, the laws factually defined a minimum standard. In fact, the entire social policy can be interpreted as a tool to protect workers from being exploited entirely. See W. Abelshauser, The Dynamics of German Industry. The German

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The incentive of human capital protection is issential for European industrialisation. In historiography, when authors discuss the different paths of industrialisation, one key characteristic they point to is the issue of whether the process is based on the availability of labour or on the availability of land and resources.29 In general, this differentiation is used with regard to Europe and North America. In this model, Europe is the only continent where land is scarce, but labour is abundant. This key characteristic of European industrialisation also affected European trade. As Huberman writes, the rise of global trade and the development of the international division of labour led to an incentive ‘to act like a cartel and adopt standards’.30 According to him, countries had incentives to work together and to raise labour regulation more or less at the same time, as this was the only way to avoid having to engage in a race to the bottom. Interestingly, while the matter of the social question plays a prominent role in historiography, the issue of human capital protection does not, although both aspects are often closely linked. Publications that cover child protection must necessarily also address the matter of compulsory school attendance, although not everywhere in the same way: ‘[i]n England the enforcement of schooling for factory children had been an afterthought, a means to prevent the shortening of working hours from leading them into mischief. In Prussia, it was the central purpose’.31 This parallel also uncovers an analytical problem. The motivation behind but the policy changed, the measures themselves did not always reveal this. One reason for this may be that they were often discussed as measures to protect the workers themselves, not necessarily their professional prowess.32 However, it is imperative to acknowledge the need to protect Path to the New Economy and the American Challenge, Making Sense of History (London: Berghahn, 2005), vol. 6, p. 110. What still played a role in the debate was the matter of compulsory insurances; see S. Kott, ‘Gemeinschaft oder Solidarität? Unterschiedliche Modelle der französischen und deutschen Sozialpolitik am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), pp. 311–30. 29 G. Clark, ‘The Industrial Revolution: A Cliometric Perspective’, in C. Diebolt and M. Haupert (eds.), Handbook of Cliometrics (Berlin: Springer References, 2016), pp. 197– 235. 30 Huberman, Odd Couple, p. 131. 31 Hennock, Welfare State in England and Germany, p. 78. 32 See, for instance, Fuchs and Eichenhofer, for whom the aspect of human capital

protection stands clearly behind the matter of social peace; F. Fuchs, Institutions, Values and Leadership in the Creation of the Welfare States: A Comparison of Protective Labor

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human capital, as the rise of the knowledge-based economy during the last third of the ‘long nineteenth century’ increased the value of human capital in the production process.33 It makes the timing when social policy measures actually became denser more comprehensible. Despite all this, it is inadequate to draw a direct line between the increase in education levels and the attempts of employers to protect their employees, as the American example shows. From an economic point of view, education was an investment that had to be protected, and worker protection and social insurances could serve this purpose. Yet, the increase in education levels is not a phenomenon that is unique to Europe, as the US profited from the same development. In relative figures (to GDP), the US also invested heavily in human capital. The key difference between Europe and the US was that land was scarce and workers were plentiful in Europe, but the situation was the opposite in the US. The fact that Europe profited from labour abundance while the US did not is essential to explain the exclusively European zeal to protect human capital. In general, there is a good argument to make that the level of human capital increased significantly in virtually all industrialised countries since the second half of the nineteenth century. Public expenditure on education, the number of school years pupils spent at school and literacy rates all went up.34 What distinguished the US was not the rise of human capital itself. One part of the puzzle is the incentive structure for education in the US. As Kathleen Thelen has shown in her monograph, education in the US followed aims different from those in Germany (and probably in Europe). In the US, apprenticeship was much less vigorously enforced, and education was not specified. As Hansen writes, ‘There were no minimum levels of competence required to practice a craft, no regulation of apprenticeship. Nor were there formal associations of craft brothers to present joint appeals to municipal and state officials, to build and sustain collective

Legislation in Britain and France, unpublished dissertation (Cambridge (US), 2001); Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa, vol. 1761, pp. 37–67. 33 C. Diebolt, R. Fouquet and R. Hippe, ‘Cliometrics and the Evolution of Human Capital’, in Y. Kouli, P. Pawlowsky and M. Hertwig (eds.), Wissensökonomie und Digitalisierung. Geschichte und Perspektiven (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2020), pp. 11–32, at p. 27. 34 R. Hippe and R. Fouquet, ‘The Human Capital Transition and the Role of Policy’, in C. Diebolt and M. J. Haupert (eds.), Handbook of Cliometrics, 2nd ed. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2019), pp. 205–51.

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identity and interests, or to enforce production standards, labor practices, price floors and the like. What little collective action American mechanics engaged in was voluntary, ad hoc, and ineffective’.35 One argument for this is the absence of ‘guild structures and traditions’ so that there was no European framework the American system was built on.36 The lack of labour and the availability of lands also played a role in this, as ‘vast land resources pulled New Englanders westward and as a very large number of craftsmen worked simultaneously as independent farmers’.37 Employers also did little to attract apprentices, using them only in times of need and labour shortages. Therefore, the incentives to invest several years of training in one particular profession were much weaker than those in Europe.38 There was no incentive to maintain a stable workforce in a company. Should the need arise, it was always possible to hire or fire workers. Therefore, protecting them was not a priority. In the end, worker protection measures were unique European strategies. Competition and Trade Dependence In the chapter on economic integration levels in Europe (Chapter 2), we showed that European countries were in a state of intense competition, which, in turn, was closely linked to globalisation during that time. Although trade with non-European countries increased faster than inner European trade, the former still played a huge role and grew in absolute terms. It was common knowledge that high trade entanglements were central characteristics of their time. Based on this general impression, competition always played a vital role in debates. Historically, the first discussion aimed at regulating the labour market to protect the workforce took place during the 1830s and 1840s. Back then, the Alsatian silk entrepreneur Daniel Legrand lobbied for child-protection laws in Switzerland, France and the German countries, 35 H. Hansen, ‘Caps and Gowns,’ Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1997), p. 95, quoted in: K. A. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 179. 36 Ibid., p. 178. 37 Ibid., p. 179. 38 Ibid.

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including Prussia.39 The entire discussion was characterised by how it might be possible to implement laws to protect children without risking competitiveness.40 Despite Legrand’s ambition, the discussion was not fruitful, as it did not come to any sort of agreement. This shows, however, that the matter of costs and the economic risks that enterprises might take by protecting their workforces were potentially substantial. The dominant liberal ideology might have also been in the way. Protecting children might still appear necessary during the 1840s, but going beyond it appeared unreasonable.41 A very prominent platform in which the matter of competition was discussed was international conferences. Generally, their number was very high,42 and the two most important ones took place in 1891 and in 1906 (both in Bern). The Berlin Conference on Workers’ Protection (1891) was the first international meeting during which most European countries—Germany, Austria Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and Norway, and Switzerland—discussed this subject. During this conference, virtually every spokesperson emphasised that no single country could improve the situation of the national working class without risking international competitiveness. The German Emperor Wilhelm II, the French republican Jules Simon, the Italian delegate Vittorio Ellena and the Portuguese spokesmen Oliveira-Martins and Madeira-Pinto all explicitly expressed their concerns that any international regulation must be introduced in unison.43 Herbert von Bismarck, son of Otto von Bismarck, wrote the following in a letter to the German ambassador regarding the Berlin conference in February 1890: ‘Given the international concurrence on the world market and the common interests that stem from it, the

39 Glootz, Alterssicherung, vol. 885, p. 618. 40 E. Anderson, ‘Policy Entrepreneurs and the Origins of the Regulatory Welfare State:

Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, American Sociological Review 83 (2018), pp. 173–211. 41 With regard to France, see, for instance, Murard, Protection, p. 19. 42 Mostly, the conferences were privately organised; see B. E. Lowe, The Interna-

tional Protection of Labor: International Labor Organization, History and Law (New York: Macmillan, 1935), p. 18. 43 Ministère des affaires étrangères: Conférence internationale de Berlin: 15–29 Mars 1890 [Paris (1890)].

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institutions for improving the situation of the workers cannot be ensured by only one single country without rendering competition impossible’.44 Despite these general agreements, a treaty was not formed. In fact, it is not easy to plausibly interpret conferences, even at an abstract level. The only international convention that obliged countries to specific improvements was signed in 1906 in Bern. During this conference, an agreement was finally reached. However, this agreement did not bring spectacular results. The abolition of white phosphorus for match production and the abolition of night work for women were, in fact, the most common denominators45 and—more importantly—already in effect in most countries, including the UK, Germany and France.46 Match production was only a miniscule part of Europe’s economy. The discrepancy between the weight that experts attributed to the competition argument—and, therefore, the goal of finding a common agreement—and the actual effects it had is somewhat of a pattern. While entrepreneurs regularly argued that new laws put their competitiveness at risk, advocates of labour protection laws could argue that these fears never came true.47 The fear that new laws might lead to economic problems never disappeared, and virtually all debates that dealt with the matter of national social policy and worker protection had to cover this issue. To summarise, competition was a ubiquitous argument. At the same time, the way the argument worked appeared to be a bit puzzling, mainly because it was predominantly a counterfactual one. It drew its power not from empirical observation but rather from worried concern.

44 Ministère des affaires étrangères: Conférence internationale de Berlin: 15–29 Mars 1890 [Paris (1890)], p.10; French original: ‘Vu la concurrence internationale sur le marché du monde et vu la communauté des intérêts qui en provient, les institutions pour l’amélioration du sort des ouvriers ne sauraient être réalisées par un seul Etat, sans lui rendre la concurrence impossible vis-à-vis des autres’. 45 G. Ambrosius, ‘Institutioneller Wettbewerb im europäischen Integrationsprozess seit dem 19. Jahrhundert’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001), pp. 545–75, at p. 556. 46 Huberman, Odd Couple, pp. 13–4. 47 With regard to Germany see W. Ayaß, W. Rudloff and F. Tennstedt, Sozialstaat

im Werden (Band 1). Gründungsprozesse und Weichenstellungen im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2021), p. 257.

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European Labour Migration In the two previous sections, we focussed on the incentives that predominantly had effects on the national level. The effects of labour migration are the first incentives resulting from inter-state relations. Interestingly, these play a relatively small role in today’s historiography. When publicists examine the rise of European social policy, they tend to look at international attempts, mostly conferences. The common Christian heritage is also highlighted.48 Migration, however, also played a central role. A high level of worker mobility was characteristic of the nineteenth century. Even from today’s perspective, the numbers are impressive. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 500,000 workers a year came to Paris for work, mostly from Italy and Belgium. At the same time, about 100,000 Dutch people a year moved to Prussia. In 1877, out of 250,000 people living in Barcelona, about forty per cent or 100,000 came from abroad. Italy profited from about 600,000 temporarily working immigrants.49 According to the German occupation census of 12 June 1907, there were 440,800 foreigners working in the industry of Germany (agriculture, industry and trade together: 765, 945). Although these last figures also explain why reliable data are not available, it is unclear who among the workers really left after the summer or the harvest and who actually lived in Germany and were just of foreign origin. During the summer, Prussia alone had 733,000 foreign labourers, and 258,800 worked in agriculture.50 The high mobility of workers led to practical problems. Often, when labourers worked abroad, the matter of insurances came up, as laws required that payments be obligatory for all workers to avoid making foreign workers cheaper. It was therefore obvious that assuring compatibility and proximity was necessary. As we will show in the next chapter, these entanglements had several impacts on European social policy.

48 Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa, vol. 1761, p. 20. 49 K. J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur

Gegenwart, Europa bauen (München: Beck, 2002), pp. 85–89. 50 Knoke, however, emphasises that he is positive that even these 760,000 employees do not reflect the entire picture, mainly because the census was conducted in June, which was relatively early; A. Knoke, Ausländische Wanderarbeiter in Deutschland (Leipzig: U. Deichert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1911), p. 14.

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Mechanisms of Convergence In the previous section, we uncovered the incentives that affected national social policies in Europe. In the following sections, we will show the channels through which these incentives formed European social policy. As indicated in the introduction, the chapter has a bias towards Germany and France, the two largest countries in continental Europe. However, we will also include other countries. In this section, we explain which steps led to a convergence in European social policy. We do not argue that the list is complete. We are positive, though, that these examples are revealing, as they show how a form of what we call a European social policy cartel came to be. As mentioned earlier, it is not possible to look at developments and point to the specific incentive that led to a certain incident. This is essential, as the framing of the development of a cartel insinuates that there was a common strategy. It is closer to the truth to argue that convergence found its way differently. With regard to the global diffusion of social policies, Dobbin et al. point to social construction, coercion, competition and learning.51 Yet more than once, it is not possible to isolate one single mechanism. During trade negotiations, for instance, coercion and competition both affect discussions. The same is true when countries include the experiences of other countries to search for examples of best practices and learn from them. This is why we chose another categorisation to clarify through which channels convergence came to be. Power Relations and Negotiations A classic case of coercion and negotiations is the French–Swiss trade war. France promulgated the so-called Méline tariff in 1892. This law is widely considered the end of the free trade doctrine that supported the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty. The law stipulated that low tariffs are only possible if there is a bilateral trade contract between the two countries. France exploited negotiations with potential trading partners to push other countries towards import concessions. In turn, these import concessions could include social policy measures. Trade negotiations with Switzerland are a telling example. During the discussion, Switzerland was

51 F. Dobbin, B. Simmons and G. Garrett, ‘The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition, or Learning?’, Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007), pp. 449–72.

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reluctant to comply and thus initiated a trade war in 1893, which caused more problems for Switzerland than it did for France. Switzerland lost its main buyer for high-end cotton textiles and silks, clocks and specialty cheese.52 In 1891, twenty-five per cent of Swiss exports went to France. Within three years, this figure dropped to less than fifteen per cent. After the quarrel ended, the figure rose back to almost twenty-two per cent (1899).53 By the end of the trade war in 1894, ‘Switzerland agreed to restrictions on night work and an 11-h working day for women’.54 Trade agreements were not the only vehicles that could be exploited in that direction. As indicated earlier, geographical mobility caused practical problems. What would happen to payments to social security if that person worked abroad? Here, too, the solution was found in international treaties.55 The Franco–Italian treaty of 1904 and the German–Italian treaty of 1912 were certainly among the most important. The France– Italy labour accord was signed in Rome on 15 April 1904, and it gave workers access to the national healthcare system. It also assured that workers would receive their pensions, although they were originally paid in neighbouring countries. The Franco–Italian treaty of 1904 is, in this case, very telling, especially Chapters 3–5. Chapter 3 stipulated that the participation of one party at an international conference on worker protection automatically leads to the participation of the other party. Chapter 4 obliged Italy to gurantee the necessary number of factory inspectors in order to ensure that laws for the protection of women and children are respected. Italy, however, did not fully respect this obligation. In February 1910, the French Embassy in Rome sent information on the application of the Italian law of 1902.56 Still in 1914, it had only one inspector per 51,720 workers. These figures made it an outlier; all other countries in Europe, America and Australia had at least one inspector per 12,000 workers. The numbers of inspectors in France (one per 6,610 workers), Switzerland (one per 5,000 workers), Sweden (one per 4,440

52 Huberman, Odd Couple, p. 42. 53 RICardo-Project (05.06.2019). 54 Ibid., p. 42. 55 For the following, see Glootz, Alterssicherung, vol. 885, pp. 65–71. 56 Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affaires 27CPCOM/562b, p. 53 n.

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workers), Norway (one per 4,400 workers) and the Netherlands (one per 4,350 workers) were much higher.57 Chapter 5 allowed both parties to terminate the treaty should any party not live up to the demands. The abolition of night work for women made labour more expensive, which is why France wanted to push Italy in the same direction. The right to terminate the treaty was very influential, as both partners would lose all reciprocal advantages. Italy clearly had the better part of that bargain, as 200,000 Italians working in France profited from the treaty, while there were only a few thousand Frenchmen working in Italy; France was able to ensure that Italy maintained a certain level of social standards.58 The importance of these treaties did not just lie in their actual letters but also in the negotiations that came with them. On occasion, France used the negotiations as leverage. In 1902, for instance, French negotiators were able to push through night work regulations for women and children in Italy, regulations that already existed in France and gave Italy a competitive advantage. Evidently, France used negotiations to improve its own competitiveness. Eight years later, Germany and Italy concluded a similar treaty. It stipulated that Italian workers fell under the jurisdiction of the German pension scheme. Theoretically, Germans could also use this regulation while working in Italy, but this only happened in very few cases. Quantitatively, Italian workers, who were finally provided with access to social security, profited more.59 In all three cases, it is obvious that competition, trade dependence and the matter of labour migration played a crucial role. In the following case, the situation was different. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Luxembourg discussed an insurance law on old age and invalidity, a law that was finally promulgated in May 1911.60 During

57 Huberman, Odd Couple, pp. 16–17. 58 Herren, Internationale Sozialpolitik, vol. 41, pp. 140–43; Glootz, Alterssicherung,

vol. 885, p. 67. 59 Ibid., p. 67. 60 https://query.an.etat.lu/Query/detail.aspx?ID=476173 (25.02.2021).

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the preparation of this law, the Grand Ducal Luxembourgian Cooperative (Großherzogliche Luxemburgische Unfallversicherungsgenossenschaft) contacted the insurance body of the German Reich (Reichsversicherungsanstalt) with very specific questions. The privy council61 wrote in response to an enquiry from his German colleagues in December 1909. The German side had questions about the details of the upcoming law. In his response, the Luxemburgian council asked the Germans to provide calculations of the costs that different age limits (sixty-five, sixty-eight and seventy) would entail.62 There were also follow-up letters in which both sides answered mutual questions. On 2 June 1910, the Germans received a detailed description of how many Luxemburgian nationals are expected to reach retirement age, what would be the monthly payments and more. The German insurance body also wrote an expert opinion on Luxembourgian plans. The Luxembourgian case is telling. It speaks to the routine cooperation between both countries in which Luxembourgianian lawmakers openly discussed unpublished laws with a neighbouring country. Moreover, the correspondence reveals how closely the Grand Duchy copied the law of its eastern neighbour. It is safe to assume that this happened for practical reasons, as Germany was the larger country that looked back on more than two decades of experience. The exchange also revealed that Luxembourg was preoccupied. On average, German workers paid about eight per cent of their salary to old age and invalidity insurance, a share that—as the Luxembourgian civil servant assumed—was too much and therefore unacceptable for the workers in his country. At the same time, a large difference in pension levels in both countries could potentially lead to demands from the workforce. As a consequence, although there was no institutionalised coordination, there was an informal mechanism that gave incentives not to let the gap between them become too large. When countries tried to find national solutions to the immigration issue, they were often unsuccessful. It was common knowledge that the level of inner European migration was high, and having labourers from abroad work in specific areas in relatively large numbers was part of everyday life. This was especially true in France, as limited population

61 Staatsrat. His actual name is unreadable. 62 German Federal Archives BA R/89, 4413.

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growth increased the dependence on labour immigration. As the anecdote at the beginning of this chapter shows, they were also perceived as a nuisance, and they caused parliamentary debates. In that year 1898, the Chamber of Deputies discussed a law that was supposed to ensure that every foreigner who lives and works in France pay the obligatory military tax and that each person pay an additional tax.63 In short, the proposed law aimed at reducing the price advantage that came with the employment of foreign labourers. The law of November 1898 was sent back to the commission. In March 1899, it was once again discussed in the Chamber of Deputies. During the debate, a member of the left group (Gauche Radicale), Louis Dubuisson, pointed out that there are more than 1.15 million foreign nationals living in France according to the census of 1891, of whom 430,000 received a regular salary.64 ‘We think that it is possible to fix it (the tax, Y.K.) at about 60 francs per year and per worker which, when one assumes 300 working days per year, costs only 20 cents per year. The only true risk the law brings with is that foreign governments threaten to retaliate’.65 The general argument in the discussion was that, although countries used tariffs to protect their products from cheaper competitors, France did not yet do this for their workers.66 Mostly among the leftist deputies, there were several propositions on how to protect French workers. One possibility was the same as that done in November 1898, namely, to demand equal pay for equal work. Another was to actively reduce the number of foreigners.67 During the debate in 1898, elected parliamentarians proposed reducing the share of foreign workers to a maximum of ten per cent. In the end, however, it never came to such a law. This law was once again sent back to the working commission, from which it never came back. Although the discussion did not lead

63 Archives Nationales C//5659, Dossier “Étrangers”, Proposition de loi tendant à assujettir les étrangers résidant en France au payement: 1° de la taxe militaire établie par la loi du 15 juillet 1898; 2° d’une taxe supplémentaire. 64 Journal Officiel de la Chambre des Députés, séance du 28 Mars 1899, p. 1191. 65 Original: ‘Nous pensons qu’on peut la fixer à 60 fr. par an et par ouvrier ce qui, en

tablant sur trois cents jours de travail par an, représente 20 centimes par jour seulement. La seule objection sérieuse qui pourrait être faite à cet amendement consisterait à nous menacer de représailles de la part des gouvernements étrangers’; Journal Officiel de la Chambre des Députés, séance du 28 Mars 1899, p. 1191. 66 Journal Officiel de la Chambre des Députés, séance du 28 Mars 1899, p. 1192. 67 Ibid.

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to an actual law, it showed the kinds of problems that were deliberated on at the time. Observation, Learning and Symbolic Rivalry Previously, we argued that labour regulation was a way to protect workers from exploitation. There were, however, conflicting views on this issue. Otto von Bismarck turned this argument around. The German chancellor’s first priority was to ensure that the workers had a sufficient standard of living.68 Yet maximum work days and reduction of night work for women were—according to him—political measures that were factual salary reductions, which is why he fought them, as he fought virtually all political measures that had the potential to dampen their ability to raise money.69 His enmity against worker protection laws explains why the first international conference on workers’ protection took place with German participation but against Bismarck’s will. In Austria–Hungary, things developed differently, as the reform of the Factories Act (‘Gewerbeordnungsnovelle’) of 1885 did place restrictions on work on Sundays, abolish child labour, regulate night work for women and impose a regular work day of eleven hours—but not more, as the threat of competitiveness still prevailed.70 The British law making process was not as much dominated by the matter of competitiveness. Competition, on the other hand, played a vital role. As Hennock has shown in a series of publications, comparison to the German rival was dominant. This was especially true for social insurances. The Liberal (and

68 Ayass, K. E. Born, H. Domeinski, J. Flemming, U. Haerende, A. Hänlein, M. Peterle, P. Rassow, E. Roeder, W. Rudloff, F. Tennstedt and H. Winter (eds.), Quellensammlung zur deutschen Sozialpolitik (1881–1890, Abs. 2, Band 3, Arbeiterschutz), p. XL. 69 Ibid., p. XL. 70 E. Tálos, Staatliche Sozialpolitik in Österreich: Rekonstruktion und Analyse, Österre-

ichische Texte zur Gesellschaftskritik, 2nd edn. (Wien: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1981), vol. 5, pp. 54–8. To clarify, this does not mean that the matter of the social question and the fear of social unrest disappeared, on the contrary; see R. Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik. Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Wien: Ueberreuter, 1995), pp. 298–304.

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later Prime Minister) Lloyd George was hell-bent to prove the superiority of the British approach and to implement a law that worked more effectively than the German one. In other words, British workers would receive higher benefits at lower costs.71 With regard to factory laws, reference to Germany played hardly any role.72 In France, on the other hand, competitiveness played an important role in the discussions. The French socialist Alexandre Millerand ‘was among the first to make use of international labor treaties as instruments for quelling domestic opposition to reform’.73 Earlier in this chapter, we argued that no institution had the power to push through a certain European social policy consensus. However, this does not mean that there was an attempt for an international institution. In 1896, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Russia and Austria united to create an international office. Its mission would have been to gather information and statistics on not only social policy developments but also the industrial and worker developments in every country.74 This plan was unsuccessful, yet it shows that countries were highly interested in a reliable information basis. This fits well with the trend of broadening the knowledge of what other countries pursued at the national level. In Austria, as well as in many other countries, this led to a situation in which the state surveyed average salaries. Officially, these surveys were parts of more intensive attempts to make informed decisions. In fact, this was also a regime to ensure salaries did not drop below a certain level.75 During the nineteenth century, countries were fully aware of the fact that European countries faced similar challenges. More than once, countries looked specifically at others in order to learn from their experiences. 71 E. P. Hennock, ‘Die Ursprünge der staatlichen Sozialversicherung in Großbritannien und das deutsche Beispiel 1880–1914’, in W. Mommsen and W. Mock (eds.), Die Entstehung des Wohlfahrtsstaates in Grossbritannien und Deutschland 1850–1950 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998), pp. 92–114. 72 Fuchs, Protective Labor Legislation; Hennock, Welfare State in England and Germany, pp. 73–80. 73 Fuchs, Protective Labor Legislation, p. 321. 74 Souamaa, ‘Europe sociale?’, p. 11. 75 Tálos, Sozialpolitik in Österreich, vol. 5, pp. 21, 54.

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When it came to industrialisation, England was one of the countries that continental Europe considered to be a laboratory for future developments. One explicit example is the case of Ludwig Jacobi. In 1870, the German Privy Government Executive (Geheimer Regierungsrat) considered the English factory laws from 1847 exemplary and praised their positive effects on productivity and health.76 A look at how countries gathered and processed information also reveals how intensive information exchange worked. There were virtually countless cases in which exchange of information with other countries was a common practice. In July 1879, for example, the French Foreign Ministry wrote a response letter to the German Foreign Ministry. As the letter indicates, the Prince of Hohenlohe had asked for information on certain French measures of social protection. The French side obviously agreed to send them to Germany, and they expected the German side to do the same.77 The letter contains a drawing up of the documents added to the letter. The list is impressive78 : • a list of the current fees for old-age insurance • the laws and directives that currently dictate how the institution works • a copy of the reports on the operations on pension funds for the years 1870 to 1873 (the reports from 1874 to 1877 were promised for a later time once they were finished) • a brochure from 1869 containing the laws, directives, instructions and tariffs of the insurances that cover deaths and accidents, as well as a more current decree from 19 August 1877 • a guide to the organisation of the administrations of the cooperatives • a version of a publication on the legislation and organisation of the societies and cooperatives in Europe • laws, decrees and statutes on cooperative societies 76 Document nr. 22, Ayass W. (ed.), Quellensammlung zur Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik 1867 bis 1914. I. Abteilung: Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Kaiserlichen Sozialbotschaft (1867–1881) (3. Band: Arbeiterschutz) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), pp. 69–71. 77 German Federal Archives BA R 1501/68, Versicherungen im Auslande, pp. 2–3. 78 Ibid., pp. 3–5.

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• a version of the ‘bulletin des sociétés de secours mutuels (societies for cooperative insurance)’ • a copy of the report from 1877 for the French president Aside from the documents, the letter explains that the state is the guarantor of the insurance, and the state also grants a subsidy of five per cent. In the case of accident insurance, the author insinuates that there is still work to be done. At this point, the openness with which the author of the letter reveals the details is remarkable. He announces that after the World Fair of 1878, the Ministry of the Interior formed a working group to discuss and develop steps that will improve the situation of the working class.79 This shows that the German side had a high interest in what was happening in other countries. Kott argues that while France initiated a number of examinations on German social policy measures, the Germans did much less so. However, the findings show that this was not entirely true. Although there were only a few publications, the Germans compensated for this lack of ‘scientific’ research by gathering information on their own.80 Previously, we emphasised that learning from one an other was an integral part of the decision-making process in the ministries. The abovementioned example emphasises that there was no reason to clandestinely gather information on the neighbouring country in order to do so. On the contrary, it was entirely possible to contact one’s counterparts and receive the necessary data. As the documents show, the tone was rather friendly, even less than ten years after the end of the war between Prussia and France. Another way to receive information was to consult relevant publications. Once again, the goal was to learn from others. Maurice Bellom, an author of numerous French publications, writes this explicitly in his publication.81 In one of his analyses, he focusses on the issue of how 79 German Federal Archives BA R 1501/68, Versicherungen im Auslande, p. 6. 80 See, for instance, documents on France, German Federal Archives BA R 1501/68. 81 Maurice Joseph Amédée Bellom (1865–1913) graduated from École Polytechnique and École des Mines de Paris. In 1906, he became professor of industrial economy (École des Mines, Paris). As a member of the Society of Social Economy (Société d’Économie Sociale) in 1890, he was highly interested in European welfare states. In 1891, Bellom

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the risk of social unrest can be avoided. The starting point of his work is their assessment that there are four risks—sickness, accidents, invalidity and old age—that can deprive a man of their livelihood. His introductory description is lurid: ‘Without manifesting itself in such a frightening form as an accident, sickness is neither less cruel in its effects nor less terrible in its consequences. The worker who has been made unemployed by illness is deprived of the means of subsistence which the remuneration for his work provides; in the absence of special and immediate assistance, he cannot have recourse, in due course and to the extent necessary, to the medical and pharmaceutical care which his condition requires.’82 This, as well as insurance protection in general, is what most countries have been trying to find an answer to. The purpose of the book is to work out how other countries answered these questions.83 A few years later, in a note that Bellom prepared in 1897 for the Society of Comparative Legislation (‘Société de Législation Comparée’), he wrote that the question of retirement pension for workers was virulent in most countries. ‘Analysing the current state of the matter of workers’ pensions abroad seems thus particularly instructive for those countries that, like ours, have not yet found an appropriate solution on the subject’.84 Clearly, the French attempts to observe its neighbours did not stop.

worked at the Office du Travail, In 1892, he was sent to the Ministry of Justice (ministère de la Justice), in which he served as attaché of the cabinet. He passed away in 1913; for more information, see www.annales.org/archives/x/bellom.html (31.07.2021). 82 Original: ‘Sans se manifester sous une forme aussi effrayante que l’accident, la maladie n’est ni moins cruelle dans ses effets, ni moins terrible dans ses conséquences. L’ouvrier que la maladie a réduit au chômage est privé des moyens de subsistance que lui assure la rémunération de son travail; faute d’une assistance spéciale et immédiate, il ne peut recourir, en temps opportun et dans la mesure nécessaire, aux soins médicaux et pharmaceutiques que réclame son état’. M. Bellom, Les Lois d’Assurance Ouvrière à l’étranger. I: Assurance contre la maladie (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1892), p. 2. 83 Theoretically, Maurice Bellom does not mention Europe explicitly. Yet, a look at the countries he covers in his book shows where his main interests lie: Norway, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, Denmark, Germany and Austria, with the latter two occupying the most space. 84 M. Bellom, La Question des Retraites Ouvrières dans les Pays Étrangers (Paris: Librarie Cotillon, 1897), p. 5.

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What about International Players? In this chapter on social policy, we focus on international incentives and phenomena, such as migration, competition, trade and common European challenges, as the so-called social question. International actors appear to have played a surprisingly little role. The scepticism of Otto von Bismarck German chancellor who, unlike his son Herbert, did not believe in international agreements—appears to have been well justified. We already mentioned that there was only one conference in 1906 that resulted in an agreement codifying what was already the least common denominator.85 Therefore, the results were not very impressive. One could also go a step further, as the non-binding final statements of the conferences hardly addressed the conditions of not only male workers but also of literally everyone else: work-free Sundays, abolition of labour for children under the age of twelve, restriction of daily work for children up to six hours a day, abolition of night labour for women, stipulation of an eleven-hour workday for women and obligatory four-week-long protection of women in childbed.86 At the same time, the value of the congresses could not just be measured by the number of treaties signed at their end, nor were they just preliminaries. They also served as platforms for mutual discussion and exchange. It did come to several conferences. A very general argument is that their sheer number served as contact zones and kept the discussion alive.87 Since the 1890s, the year the first state-level conference took place, these congresses allowed the participants to gather information on what was going on in other countries. This had concrete effects. For instance, during the conference in Bern in September 1891, Swedish expert Anders Lindstedt used the opportunity and gathered information on the German pension system, information that clearly influenced the

85 For instance. Ambrosius, ‘Institutioneller Wettbewerb’, p. 556. 86 Ayass W. (ed.), Quellensammlung zur Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik 1867

bis 1914, III. Abteilung (1890–1904), 1. Band: Grundfragen der Sozialpolitik (Mainz: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2016), p. 151, document 45; Ayaß, Rudloff and Tennstedt, Sozialstaat im Werden (Band 1), p. 257. 87 Huberman, Odd Couple, pp. 69–70.

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Swedish bill of 1893.88 Finally, one must not forget that international negotiations would have continued had it not been for the outbreak of the war. In September 1913, delegates from thirteen different countries prepared a conference that would have taken place in September 1914 and to which most European countries, excluding Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, confirmed their participation.89 Theoretically, international worker organisations would also have been likely candidates for fighting for the cause of the working class. In 1889, it came to the foundation of the Second International in Paris, and further meetings followed in Brussels (1891), Zurich (1893), London (1896), Paris (1900), Amsterdam (1904) and Stuttgart (1907). However, the Second International never became an institution in which members could stand united and fight for specific social policy measures—in total disregard of their nationality. Its members were national parties with close ties to their national electorates and supporters. Both the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the French Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO) were no exceptions. Kevin Callahan argues that during the years before the Stuttgart meeting in 1907, German and French socialists faced a dilemma. As socialists had always been accused of being anti-national, they often thought that they needed to formulate a concept of ‘socialist nationalism’, which could serve as a clear alternative to the bourgeois one.90 The SPD member and journalist Kurt Eisner spoke of ‘world patriotism’, which he deemed imperative for the creation of a fatherland.91 French socialists tried to take over the revolution of 1789 for their argument, making it less exclusively bourgeois.92 This foundation, however, had virtually no effect on international cooperation. There are several reasons that might help us understand why national labour movements had trouble cooperating internationally. According to Moira Donald, the Second International was never meant to be an initiative whose aim was to establish a truly international movement. 88 Glootz, Alterssicherung, vol. 885, pp. 64–65. 89 Ayaß, Rudloff and Tennstedt, Sozialstaat im Werden (Band 1), p. 259; Herren,

Internationale Sozialpolitik, vol. 41, p. 168. 90 K. Callahan, ‘“Performing Inter-Nationalism” in Stuttgart in 1907: French and German Socialist Nationalism and the Political Culture of an International Socialist Congress’, International Review of Social History 45 (2000), pp. 51–87, at p. 52. 91 Ibid., p. 58. 92 Ibid., p. 62.

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Moreover, despite official propaganda, their own nation and state were always the workers’ priorities. Beyond the cosmopolitan protagonists, there were hardly any members who were actually interested in improving the working and living conditions of foreign workers.93 Ritter also argues that national syndicates often rejected the idea of a state-driven insurance regime, as it would weaken their organisations.94 Even on a more general level, there were other subjects that dominated the scene. The most important of these was the matter of war. Whether French and German socialists would pull the trigger against each other in the case of a war was a matter that played a major role in the discussions. During the Stuttgart meeting in 1907, Gustave Hervé worked towards a resolution that would have required all socialist parties to go on general strike in case a war broke out. The German delegation was reluctant, as they did not want to be forced to stand against their home country, nor did they want to accept that an international institution restricts the choices of the national party.95 One must also not underestimate the different approaches to change or the animosities that stood between the French and the Germans. Hervé blamed the SPD for wanting to ‘conquer the world through the ballot box’, as opposed to the French, who aimed at a more revolutionary approach.96 August Bebel, leader of the SPD, on the other hand, expressed his doubts towards their French colleagues as to whether their level of organisation is sufficient for the challenges to come.97 There was also another hurdle that stood between an international social policy and a concise strategy of international workers. The different professions within the worker associations were not exactly hostile to the idea of cooperation, but there were serious reservations. A very telling

93 M. Donald, ‘Workers of the World Unite? Exploring the Enigma of the Second International’, in M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism. Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Studies of the German Historical Institute London (London et al.: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 177–203, at p. 179. 94 G. A. Ritter, ‘Entstehung und Entwicklung des Sozialstaates in vergleichender Perspektive’, Historische Zeitschrift 243 (1986), pp. 1–90, at p. 36. 95 Callahan, ‘French and German Socialist Nationalism’, p. 72. 96 Ibid., p. 73. 97 Ibid.

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example is the miners.98 In Germany (Ruhr, 1889), Belgium (Wallonie, 1890), France (1889, Pas-de-Calais) and England (1889), they established their own mass syndicates around the same time, with the latter being the only one that was active at the national and not just the regional level. At the same time, they met colleagues from other professions—glaziers and metalworkers—with animosity. By 1914, the coal regions in these four countries were well structured by syndicates. These syndicates kept themselves apart from socialist parties. Their structures followed a similar hierarchy at work as in their social lives, which, in effect, meant that they cared much more for qualified members than for nonqualified ones. Their goal was the establishment of protective measures against the risks of old age, accidents and illness. Yet, they did so in politically very different countries. In the end, the workers focussed their energy on national politics.99

Conclusion: Social Policy and Globalisation By the end of the nineteenth century, European countries had to deal with incentives not to let labour standards and protection measures drop. These incentives were both national (competitiveness, social question) and international (trade dependence, labour migration). From a governmental point of view, they were in a tight spot. When too high labour costs put national competitiveness at risk, the fear was that too low wages might put the workforce in a dire situation. In the end, politicians and state administrators were aware that both too high and too low expenditures for workers had tremendous downsides. Three very different yet powerful incentives significantly reduced the options of nation-states. Theoretically, competition—especially price competition— would have been a powerful incentive to freeze social policy measures at a relatively low level. In the end, this is what happened in several countries, with the US being the most prominent example. American development shows that extensive social policy measures were not a conditio sine qua non for economic growth. 98 For the following, see Y. Le Maner, ‘Une grande thèse d’histoire sociale: Le mouvement ouvrier chez les mineurs d’Europe occidentale (1880–1914), de Joël Michel’, Revue du Nord 72 (1990), pp. 1001–22. 99 N. Delalande, La lutte et l’entraide. L’âge des solidarités ouvrières (Paris: Seuil, 2019), pp. 135–40.

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However, there were also incentives for Europe to promulgate laws that improve and increase social policy. The need to protect and maintain human capital factually forbade European countries from allowing protection levels to fall below a certain level, on the contrary. As the European way of industrialisation was based on land scarcity (and thus resource scarcity) and labour abundance, labour was the main ingredient in European production. The rise of knowledge-based production and the subsequent higher dependence on more educated labour significantly improved labourers’ negotiating positions. Labour migration had another effect. As soon as labourers from abroad started working, legal issues quickly emerged. Formally, these referred to insurances and touched on questions of compatibility. Bilateral negotiations and discussions, although focussed on different topics, gave the administrations and ministries the opportunity to add other topics to the list. Therefore, acting like a European cartel was not only rational; countries also did so without explicit agreement. It was neither internationalism nor Europeanism that provided the necessary incentives, but it was global trade and labour migration. Reducing labour protection measures was not possible because of the fear of social unrest. Increasing them too much might—which was the argument—affect competitiveness. Ironically, it was during globalisation that a social policy began to see the light of day that truly deserved the label European. Relating it to the general issue of this book, we are convinced that it is entirely justified to qualify this European social policy as a regime that was the result of both national and international incentives. So, did European countries specifically choose a European path of social policy to deal with international competition? The answer is both yes and no. The answer is no for the European social policy model or, as Souamaa puts it, ‘Social Europe avant la lettre’, was not the result of specific decisions that were taken at the national level. However, it was the consequence of specific incentives that were unique to the European continent. European countries did not defend against non-European states that had the comparative advantage of being cheaper. They decided not to even try competing with them. At the same time, diverse European laws persisted. As a consequence, it was a limited European convergence. It did not lead to a common European social policy. Neither did it lead to a common European understanding of what social policy should include. This European cartel made the rift between Europe and the rest of the industrialising world even deeper. In the US, dependence on a specialised

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workforce was much lower. The social policy rift that distinguishes Europe from the US was created during the nineteenth century.

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Thelen, K. A., How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract Hitherto, publications that examine international cooperation before World War I often do so while focussing on international treaties or macroeconomic developments. In the previous chapters, we have argued that cooperation at the administrative level was a decisive element in linking political fragmentation and economic integration. While the trajectories of transnational patent coordination, social policy, plant protection and communication were different, they all allowed Europe to maintain its political diversity in entangled economies. Keywords Globalisation · European integration · Internationalism

History has the reputation of increasing uncertainty, and our analysis is no exception. In the introduction, we raised the question of how the numerous transnational developments—mostly economic ones—were linked to one another. We argued that there were incentives that formed the relationship between international coordination and the rise of the modern nation-state, which is why we considered this question essential. As we were able to show, how these incentives finally played out

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0_7

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depended heavily on the issue at hand. Moreover, it relied on the country involved. Spain had another interest in patent regulation that was different from that of France or Germany did. Other countries, such as like the Netherlands, abstained entirely. In the case of infrastructure, for instance, international trade was the main driver, which quickly led to international treaties. Regarding social policy, international agreements hardly played a role. In case of hygiene, European countries (but not all of them) signed a treaty in 1878 in which they promised to map and document every phylloxera outbreak and to control the flow of contaminants. When we reason that international contracts were not the central elements, we do not want to belittle their importance. However, we argue that cooperation at the administrative and governmental levels was more essential. This assessment bridges two contradictory tendencies: international (political) rivalries and transnational economic integration. Apparently, modest administrative cooperation was, in fact, a decisive link between political fragmentation and economic integration. To Emile Saigey, a French telegraph engineer of the 1860s, technical cooperation thus produced something more than just technological interdependence. ‘Let us multiply such agreements’, he states, ‘and the States of Europe would be federated by the simple force of things’. Unfortunately, this did not prevent war. In 1914, the widely integrated infrastructures that were expected to lead to an era of peace—or at least to short wars—became essential for military mobilisation and the economy for the Great War. From time to time, modern-day European politicians are blamed for longing for the nation-state of the nineteenth century. In other words, they are accused of putting the nation-state first without caring for what it means for other countries or for international cooperation. As we have shown, this general argument is based on a misconception about the rise of the modern nation-state itself. The idea that the nation-state was an independent entity with a general reluctance towards international cooperation and only cared for its own power does not hold up to the level of administrative internationalism that characterised the rise of the modern nation-state. It is simply inappropriate to assume that international coordination came somehow after the modern nation-state. In fact, it came to a coproduction of international rules and treaties, on the one hand, and of national adaptations and laws on the other. Both were inseparable. One incentive for international coordination was the prospect of maintaining national regimes. Therefore, somewhat paradoxically, international coordination served to maintain diversity. This happened even when truly

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unifying options, such as a world patent, appeared to be a viable options. This does not mean that they did not have homogenising effects in the long run. Yet, they were not the main drivers, and the continuing absence of a common European social policy or a European unitary patent proves our point. Our main argument is that, if there was a European rescue of the nation-state after 1945, according to British economic historian Alan S. Milward, there was already a European making of the nation-state before 1914. One aim of this book was to show that multiple incentives served as the transmission belts between the consolidation of the modern nationstate, European economic integration and international coordination. As we showed, how this played out depended heavily on the problem at hand. In social policy, it did not come to an international agreement that forced the hands of the participating states. However, the convergence of social standards still led to what can be qualified as a social Europe avant la lettre. In the case of patents, the situation was different. The Paris Convention of 1883 was not the (preliminary) climax of long-term development, on the contrary. The treaty was rather a starting point. Before and after this convention, national laws were immensely affected by international influences, such as global trade and the need to be able to participate in it. During the whole era under investigation, Europe was evidently not a monolithic actor. European countries reacted to the problems at hand, but they still did somehow individually. When historians, such as Philipp Ther, ask—as we wrote in the introduction—what held Europe together, our answer is economic incentives. This might be a disappointment, as this does not seem to fit the meaningful European story that today’s politicians often point at. For instance, the European Commission likes to maintain that the reason why there is a highly developed social policy regime today compared to most other industrialised countries is due to a deliberate decision. This way—the story goes—Europe tamed the negative sides of capitalism while still benefitting from the advantages of a highly developed economy. In this book, on the other hand, we argue that the reason why European social policy avant la lettre took shape was due to specific incentives that nudged European countries in a certain direction. Our assessment that national and international regimes were the results of a coproduction does not exclude the fact that additional requirements had to be met. When the era of free trade ended and led to an economic crisis, the idea that states must avoid laws that affecting international

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trade became much more difficult to uphold. This led to a situation in which national laws and regulations became justifiable. Ironically, these national laws had to be internationally coordinated, as international trade continued to grow in absolute terms. Often, when a book covers the issue of European integration, making the link to the present day seems like a natural thing to do. That might be particularly true for our investigation, as there is always the risk of over-interpreting the similarities and economic integration that Europe before 1913 and Europe of the second half of the twentieth century seem to share. Yet, that is not what we wanted to show. This starts with the objects of investigation. Evidently, social policy plays an important role in the European Union. The same cannot be said with regard to the three other topics covered in this book. Patents do not fall under the European Union’s jurisdiction. This might be particularly surprising because the idea of a world patent is as old as international patent agreements themselves. A European unitary patent would clearly have been a significant step in that direction. Similarly, the European Union had virtually no authority when it comes to the topic of hygiene, although this is likely to change given the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been keeping the world in suspense since early 2020. The coordination of infrastructure is a complicated matter. Admittedly, the European community has become an active player in this field since the 1980s. Given the findings of this book, we also strongly recommend that we be much more careful in applying the notion of supranationality in the nineteenth century. Publications clearly consider supranationality to be the key to better understanding European integration better after 1951. The logic of this notion, however, implies that the existence of the nationstate preceded the transfer of power to a supranational entity. Aligning this logic to the era before 1913 is tricky, as modern nation-states had not yet been fully developed when international challenges emerged. Rather, these challenges hit countries whose administrations were still in the process of consolidation. In the case of International communication, international challenges—and also treaties—preceded the creation of some states. The serial order of the transfer of sovereignty from a consolidated modern nation-state, which that characterised institutional European integration after 1957, is therefore not applicable to the last third of the nineteenth century. Despite all the differences, there are lessons for the Europe in which we live today. There is an argument to be made that the entire debate

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on whether the European Union is necessary, or without an alternative, is misleading. It was economic incentives that led to European integration, and it is unlikely that these incentives will disappear once a country leaves the European Union or once this organisation is dissolved. The question of whether we need such an entity is therefore not a matter of yes or no. Instead, the issue is the kind of coordination that the continent needs to allow modern nation-states to function. The high level of entanglement and economic dependency involved would most certainly make every non-cooperation extremely costly—both at the end of the nineteenth century and today.

Index

A administrative sovereignty, 56, 58 Algeria, 111 Alsace, 110 Amsterdam, 149 Andalusia, 110 Andes, 107 Angell, Norman, 7 Argentina, 15, 66, 111 Austria, 29, 36, 38, 42, 44, 45, 61, 89, 92, 93, 110, 124, 144, 147 Austria–Hungary, 9, 24, 27, 28, 76, 87, 110, 135, 143 Austro–German Postal Union (Postverein), 44, 45

B Baeyer, Adolf, 83 Barcelona, 137 BASF, 82, 83, 131 Bavaria, 42, 93 Bebel, August, 150

Belgium, 24, 27, 28, 36, 42, 43, 45, 49, 52, 73, 76, 88, 107–109, 124, 135, 137, 144, 151 Bellom, Maurice, 146, 147 Berkeley, 107 Berlin, 74, 126, 128, 133, 135 Bern, 34, 63, 123, 128, 136, 148 Bismarck, Herbert von, 135 Bismarck, Otto von, 135, 143, 148 Bonjean, 73 Bonn, 110 Bordeaux, 111 borders, 32, 34, 37, 40–43, 46, 49, 55, 56, 67, 93, 96, 98, 106, 117 Brazil, 15, 66, 88, 111 British General Post Office, 59 British India, 12, 58 Brussels, 89, 96, 149 Bulgaria, 40, 124, 149 Burritt, Elihu, 45 C California, 111

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Kouli and L. Laborie, The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00296-0

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INDEX

Catalonia, 110 Ceylon, 59 Chevalier, Michael, 46, 76, 79, 89 child labour, 16, 131, 143 China, 38, 86, 122 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty, 75, 138 Cobden, Richard, 45 communication infrastructures, 11, 12, 66 Corn Laws, 109 Corsica, 38 Crimean War, 38, 40, 57, 61 cross-subsidies, 67 Cuba, 39 Curchod, Louis, 58 D Delahaye, Victor, 128 Denmark, 24, 27, 76, 77, 124, 135, 144, 147 disease, 14, 106–110, 112, 114, 116, 117 Dubuisson, Louis, 142 E Eastern and Associated Telegraph Company, 39 Ecuador, 89 Egypt, 46, 49 Eisner, Kurt, 149 Ellena, Vittorio, 135 El Salvador, 88, 89 England, 14, 110, 115, 131, 132, 144, 145, 151 espionage, 74, 76, 86 European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization, 117 European economic integration, 2, 3, 6, 16, 23, 24, 122, 161 European Postal and Telecommunications Union, 66

experts, 6, 51, 52, 54, 58, 63, 79, 83, 116, 127, 128, 136, 141, 148 F farmers, 109, 115, 116, 134 Fashoda, 39 Fatio, Victor, 112 Finland, 24, 27, 76, 77, 126 First World War/World War I, 3, 4, 14, 29, 39, 57, 89, 115, 116 France, 9, 11, 24, 27–29, 36–38, 40, 42, 43, 45–47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 61, 62, 73, 74, 76–79, 85, 87, 88, 90–95, 97, 98, 107, 109–112, 114, 115, 124, 131, 134–136, 138–142, 144, 146, 151, 160 Franco–Italian treaty (1904), 139 Franco–Prussian war, 46, 65 free trade, 9, 46, 75, 76, 87, 89, 138, 161 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 57 G GDP, 15, 24, 27–29, 83, 133 Geneva, 112 German Imperial Office, 74 German–Italian treaty (1912), 139 Germany, 2, 9, 11, 24, 27, 28, 47, 49, 62, 67, 74–77, 81, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95–97, 99, 110, 115, 124, 126, 131, 133, 135–138, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147, 151, 160 Giessen (Gießen), 108 globalisation, 2–4, 6, 11, 24, 27, 32, 34, 75, 79, 83, 92, 94, 99, 115, 123, 126, 134, 152 global trade, 75, 89, 106, 132, 161 Great War. See First World War/World War I

INDEX

Greece, 24, 27, 78, 94, 149 Guatemala, 88, 89 H Hague Convention, 128 Havas, 41 Hervé, Gustave, 150 Hoechst, 83 Hong Kong, 59 human capital, 84, 131–133, 152 Hungary, 110, 147 I imperialism, 9, 56 incentive, 9–11, 15, 16, 41, 42, 79, 83, 93, 94, 99, 129, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, 141, 148, 151, 152, 159–161, 163 India, 12, 59, 107, 122 industrialisation, 16, 74, 86, 128, 132, 145, 152 innovations, 51, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82–84, 86–88, 91, 93, 94, 96–99 insurance, 15, 124, 126, 131–133, 137, 141, 143, 145–147, 150, 152 International Institute of Agriculture, 106, 115 International Institute of Hygiene, 106 internationalism, 6, 8, 10, 11, 50, 52, 160 International patent office, 86 International phytopathological convention (1914), 116 International Postage Association, 45 International Telegraph (Telecommunication) Union (ITU), 12, 37, 40, 47, 61 Ireland, 107 Irun, 43

167

Italy, 24, 27, 32, 67, 76, 77, 88, 107, 110, 126, 135, 137, 139, 140, 144

J Jacobi, Ludwig, 145 Japan, 12, 57, 66, 86, 89, 115

K Keiu, Nakamura, 57 Kern, Johann Conrad, 95 knowledge-based economy, 13, 14, 80, 82, 84, 94, 133

L labour migration. See migration labour protection, 122, 152 Lausanne, 112 Lebanon, 15 Legrand, Daniel, 134, 135 liberalism, 9, 45, 78, 79, 87, 131 Lichtervelde, Count of, 52 Liebig, Justus von, 108 Lindstedt, Anders, 148 List, Friedrich, 87 London, 39, 45, 52, 66, 74, 149, 150 Lubin, David, 115 Luxembourg, 49, 114, 135, 140, 141

M market integration, 9, 22, 24, 25, 28, 67, 74 Martins, Oliveira, 135 Méline tariff , 138 Mexico, 12 migration, 15, 137, 141, 148 Millerand, Alexandre, 144 monopoly, 34, 35, 43, 67, 75, 76, 89, 90, 98

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Montevideo, 62 Montmarin, Marquis de, 52 multilateralisation, 41 Munich, 108

N Napoleon III, 42 nation-state, 3–6, 10, 11, 25, 32, 87, 96, 123, 151, 159–163 Netherlands, 24, 27–29, 42, 76, 78, 88, 89, 94, 107, 115, 124, 135, 140, 144, 147, 160 New Zeeland, 12 night labour, 148 night work. See night labour Norway, 24, 27, 49, 76, 124, 135, 140, 144, 147

O Ottoman Empire, 38, 57, 61

P Palmerston, Henry Palmerston, 37 Paris, 14, 34, 39, 40, 42–44, 50, 53, 55, 60, 61, 65, 86–88, 95, 96, 99, 137, 146, 149 Paris Convention For The Protection of Industrial Property (1883), 74, 79, 86, 88, 89 patents, 2, 11, 13, 14, 73–76, 79, 80, 84–99, 106, 161, 162 pauperism, 131 Peru, 107 Philippines, 39 phylloxera, 109–117 Phytophthora infestans , 107, 110 Pinto, Madeira, 135 Portugal, 24, 27, 76, 88, 94, 110, 135 postal networks, 34, 37, 56

potato, 106, 107, 109, 115 Prince-Smith, John, 91, 98 protectionism, 116 public services, 31, 34, 36, 61 publikandum, 97

Q quarantine, 116, 117

R railway, 7, 8, 35, 51, 62 real wages. See wages regimes (coproduction of national and international), 2, 67, 161 Reinsch, Paul, 7, 8, 59, 128 Renault, Louis, 59 research and development, 74, 82, 83, 99 Reuters, 41 Rio de Janeiro, 15 Romania, 57, 149 Rome, 15, 106, 115, 116, 139 Rowland Hill, 36 Rural areas, 57, 66 Russia, 9, 38, 49, 58, 61, 76, 92, 144, 147

S Sadowa, 45 Sardinia, 38, 42, 43 Saxony, 42, 93 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 46 Say, Léon, 46 Scandinavia, 107, 117 science, 34, 80–83, 86, 97, 127 Scotland, 108 Second International, 149 Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO), 149 Serbia, 88

INDEX

Social Democratic Party (SPD), 149, 150 social Europe, 122, 152, 161 social question, 131, 132, 143, 148, 151 South Africa, 12, 59 South America, 12, 117 sovereignty, 12, 43, 44, 49, 57, 116, 117, 162 Spain, 24, 27, 28, 38, 39, 43, 44, 76, 85, 88, 92, 96–98, 110, 144, 160 Squier, George O., 39 Statute of Monopolies (1624), 91 steamship, 7 Stephan, Heinrich von, 44, 45 Straits Settlements, 59 Stuttgart, 149, 150 Sudan, 39 Sweden, 24, 27, 76, 115, 135, 139, 144, 147 Switzerland, 24, 27, 42, 43, 49, 61, 76, 79, 87–89, 94, 95, 97, 99, 110, 113, 128, 134, 135, 138, 139, 147

T technocratic internationalism, 8, 50, 52, 62 technocrats/technocracy, 8 technological zone, 34, 61 technology, 2, 8, 14, 61, 97, 98 telegraphy/telegraph networks, 12, 34–38, 40, 45, 49, 50, 55, 61 Thurn und Taxis, 44 trade, 1, 2, 7, 9, 14, 15, 25–28, 42, 45, 46, 57, 74–76, 79, 83, 85–88, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99, 113, 115, 116, 123, 132, 134, 137–140, 148, 151, 160, 162

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transit, 7, 38, 43, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 59, 67, 112, 113 Turkey, 94 U United Kingdom (UK), 2, 9, 24, 27–29, 35–39, 46, 53, 58, 73, 76, 77, 89, 91, 97, 109, 117, 124, 136 United Nations, 34 United States (USA), 12, 26, 27, 35, 39, 44–46, 53, 57, 66, 76, 86, 87, 89, 95, 97, 105, 107, 110, 115, 117, 128, 133, 151, 152 Universal Postal Union (and General Postal Union), 12, 32, 34, 44, 46, 47, 52, 58, 59, 63 Uruguay, 15 V Varna, 40, 41 Venosta, Emilio Visconti, 51 Versailles, 41 Victoria, Queen, 75 Vienna, 52, 53, 88 vine/vineyard, 109–114, 116, 117 W wages, 81, 122, 151 Washington, 89 Wattenwyl, Brunner de, 61 Weltpatent . See world patent West Indies, 59 Wolff, 41 world fair, 74, 87, 146 world patent, 74, 86, 162 Z Zurich, 149