EUROPTT

Traditional historical research regards the Second World War as a caesura for the history of European integration. Despite a tendency to view the integration process as part of a long-term continuity beginning in the 19th century, the war period is still characterized as a decisive incision. While there was a strong movement towards the economic and political integration of Europe in the second half of the 1920s, the years between 1939 and 1945 were dominated by conflict. The project intends to challenge this narrative. It is centred around the „Europäischer Post- und Fernmeldeverein“ (European Postal and Telecommunication Union), an international organisation founded in 1942 under German and Italian leadership. It covered a wide range of European States (axis and neutral) and worked smoothly for two years. Apart from that, there are strong institutional and personal continuities from the 1920s to the 1950s. The starting point of this project is that - in spite of the fundamental ideological, political and military conflicts of the Second World War - European Integration processes in the framework of infrastructures were not completely interrupted. On the contrary, World War II seems to have accelerated transnational cooperation in this particular sector. Franco-German relations played a key role in this context because the interplay of collaboration, cooperation and competition became one of the decisive driving forces for the integration in the Europäischer Post- und Fernmeldeverein. In order to explore these complex problems the general project will be split into three parts: The first will be dedicated to the so far unknown institutional history of the Europäischer Post- und Fernmeldeverein, the second will deal with the long term structures of European Integration in this particular field covering the period from the 1920s to the 1930s, whereas a third part will compare postal and telecommunication integration with other infrastructures in the same period (e.g. inland navigation). Doing this, the project will shed new light on Franco-German relations during the war on the one hand and European Integration history on the other. From an institutional perspective, the project will foster the cooperation between leading historical research groups in France and Germany in the fields of transnational cooperation in the post and telecommunications sector, and it will unite research areas like Franco-German historiography, historical infrastructure research and European Integration History. The project design enables a multi perspective analysis of the topic and the reconstruction of plural country-specific perspectives on the complex interdependencies. It will also strengthen institutional cooperation between Germany and France as well as between different transnational research networks. Thus, the project will open up new topics and institutional connections for Franco-German cooperation.