This book is a history of the European Commission of the Danube, an international organisation established in 1856, consistently transformed in the interwar period and abolished in 1948, when the Soviet Union removed ‘western imperialism’ from Europe’s largest international river. The focus falls on the context, mechanisms and actors that contributed to the creation and growth of the Commission from its foundation to the beginnings of the First World War. Only one chapter deals with post-1918 developments, a choice which is linked to the project from which this book emerged, but also because its character and role changed significantly in interwar Europe.
In recent years, academic interest in the Commission has grown considerably and scholars in various disciplines have focused on different aspects of the organisation’s multifarious activities. Historians such as İlhan Ekinci,1 Luminița Gătejel,2 Constantin Iordachi,3 Agnieszka Kastory4 and Arthur Tuluș5 have written about various political, economic and hydraulic forms of cooperation within and beyond the Commission itself; geographers and geologists6 have analysed the production of knowledge by an early IO, and the environmental results of the Commission’s works in the Danube Delta, today an internationally protected ecosystem; anthropologists7 have scrutinised the legacy of the Commission, an organisation associated in its host town of Sulina with the local community’s golden age; legal experts8 have placed the Commission among similar IOs involved in shaping international fluvial and maritime law, while political scientists9 have studied the Commission as a prototype of organisations tasked to regulate international rivers. Such interest makes this volume timely and hopefully useful for a group of scholars working in the humanities, social studies and political science who are interested in case studies of transnational and global history that, to paraphrase Jürgen Osterhammel,10 transformed the world in the nineteenth century.
The main claim of this book is that the Commission established a ‘security regime’ for Danubian navigation along an engineered river which it also provided with modern shipping rules and reliable enforcing institutions. Through its multi-layered and increasingly complex activities, coordinated by a network of experts in hydraulic works and inland navigation, the Commission contributed towards the creation of a ‘European security culture’ aiming to collectively fight transnational threats on the continent and beyond. When the European Commission of the Danube was established through a decision inscribed in the 1856 Paris Treaty, Europe’s Concert of Powers proclaimed its collective will to remove the sources of insecurity which had plagued Danubian navigation in pre-Crimean War times. The Commission was charged with conducting the works needed to clear the mouths of the Danube ‘from the sands and other impediments which obstruct them’, so as to turn the river into a fully and safely navigable waterway. It was also authorised to fix a toll, aimed at covering the costs of its works, for which a term of two years was assigned.
Three layers of analysis have been relevant in following the organisation’s security-driven programme: a) international relations, with a focus on the international political environment and the IO’s role as an object and later an actor of the Great Powers’ politics; b) historical institutionalism, with the Commission portrayed as an experimental organisation that contributed to the creation of inner mechanisms, bureaucratic expertise and a corporate culture that eventually built trust in IOs as viable entities in the international system; and c) science, technology and environmental issues as part of a ‘river history’, with the Commission viewed in relation to its most extraordinary challenge – engineering one of Europe’s largest rivers.
So rather than being a simple monograph of the Commission, this book aims to illuminate its contribution to removing the sources of uncertainty that had turned navigation along the Maritime Danube into an unsafe and costly venture. The nexus between technology, commercial exchanges and the political sphere allows for a multi-semantic understanding of security11 as both an objective state and the proactive actions taken to enforce that ideal state. With this, the book follows in the footsteps of an increasing number of scholars who, like Eckard Conze, Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan, Matthias Schulz, Glenda Sluga or Brian Vick,12 historicise security.
Touching on the first layer, the Commission’s foundation in 1856 was aimed at removing shipping insecurity along the Maritime Danube. This had been constant in the Russian Danube Delta at a time when the Maritime Danube was a busy channel linking the inland ports of Brăila in Wallachia and Galați in Moldavia to the global markets, an episode in the market integration of an Ottoman periphery. In Russian times it was not just the want of hydraulic works that threatened commercial vessels calling at the Danube, but shipping rules and commercial practices were in a state of sheer anarchy throughout the Danube Delta. The little town of Sulina at the junction of river and sea epitomised what western informants described as Russia’s politics on trade, conducted by corrupt officials colluding with greedy entrepreneurs who ‘were little better than pirates’.
In highly popular pieces, proponents of conspiracy theories depicted the Danube Delta as a state-of-the-art laboratory of Russian intrigue, designed to eventually subdue the entire civilised world. Conspiracy and security work hand in hand, as Beatrice de Graaf and Cornel Zwierlein have recently stressed,13 and in the context of emerging Russophobia in Western Europe, natural and artificial hindrances along the Maritime Danube were regarded as outcomes of Russia’s conspiratorial policies. They eventually grew to form a diplomatic rift between the governments of Austria, France and Great Britain on one side, and Russia on the other. The Sulina Question, as the conflict came to be known, was founded on the belief that maintaining a navigable depth at Sulina was an inexpensive and undemanding technical accomplishment. Russia’s political ill-will was to be blamed for the loss of human life, not to mention the huge price paid by foreign merchants.
This moral indignation of international entrepreneurs against Russia’s hindrances, apparently motivated by its protectionist economic views, was founded on a legal basis: Russia disrespected multilateral agreements, such as the 1815 Vienna Treaty which required it to keep an international river open for the trade and shipping of all nations. Russia responded by blaming the hydrographical features of an unengineered river – tortuous and, at several sites, shallow – oftentimes exacerbated by the violence of a harsh climate.
With increasing quantities of agricultural products needed in industrialising Western Europe, Danubian insecurity affected more than the profits of traders and skippers in inland Danubian ports – it also impacted the replenishment of Europe’s grain storehouses and thus the continent’s food security. So at the outbreak of the Crimean War, the Sulina Question was one of the diplomatic disputes between Russia and several European powers, which were looking for ways – of a political, legal and technical nature – to remove from the Maritime Danube ‘the moral and material obstacles’ which threatened the lives of seafarers and prejudiced the commerce of all nations.
Solving the Sulina Question and removing the sources of shipping insecurity and economic uncertainty along the Maritime Danube were analysed by interested governments before, during and after the Crimean War. One solution was to establish a river commission modelled after the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, the prototypical example for river basin cooperation and a subject of increasing academic interest, as proven by the recent works of, among others, historians Hein A.M. Klemann,14 Joep Schenk,15 Robert Marc Spaulding,16 Isabel Tölle and Guido Thiemeyer.17 When discussed in Vienna in 1855 and Paris in 1856, Danubian navigation emerged as a major dispute between the non-riparian maritime Great Powers, France and Great Britain, and their riparian ally, Austria. This larger Danube Question was fuelled by what the western allies considered Austria’s hydro-hegemonic claims and its monopolistic views on inland shipping.
Larger political and economic interests made the western victors aim at more direct involvement in the Lower Danubian region, which was a fragile inter-imperial borderland vital for the survival of the Ottoman Empire and the continent’s peace. So when France and Great Britain requested a voice in the regulation of the Maritime Danube and agreed to look for ways of improving the political state of the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, they supported their claims through references to larger security concerns and Europe’s balance of power. This interest in Europe’s Concert and international security governance in the nineteenth century is a popular topic for historians and international relations scholars, like Robert Jervis,18 Louise Richardson19 or Matthias Schulz.20
The Commission would come to life amidst such complex diplomatic debates. It was conceived as a techno-political institution, an agency to showcase the Great Powers’ direct involvement in turning the Maritime Danube into a safe and reliable transportation corridor, and a transnational infrastructure that fits into the general framework described by Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser and Erik Van der Vleuten.21 As riparian states along the Lower Danube did not have the hydraulic expertise or financial resources to complete such a task, the Concert’s support was deemed as further proof of its interest in establishing a system of security and predictability for commercial exchanges along the most strategic portion of an international river.
As an offspring of the Great Powers, the Commission survived well beyond the time frame associated with the workings of this security cooperation mechanism. In fact, in dealings tangent to the Eastern Question, the seven signatory powers of the 1856 Paris Treaty continued to act collectively all the way to the First World War. At ambassadorial conferences and larger diplomatic gatherings (recently reviewed by Peter Macalister-Smith and Joachim Schwietzke),22 the Great Powers would gradually extend the lifespan and powers of the Commission, which, after 1878, acted in complete independence of Romania’s territorial authority and in 1883 became a de facto permanent IO. With its consolidation and prolongation in the 1870s–1880s, the Commission was not only a conveyor belt of the Great Powers’ security politics in its fragile environment filled with growing nationalisms, but a collective imperial actor in the international system in its own right.23
The territorial reorganisation of the Maritime Danube region was directly linked to the existence of the Commission. Russia reannexed Southern Bessarabia in 1878,24 but it did not claim the Danube Delta, which was also lost in 1856, as it did not want to be accused of interfering with the organisation and the larger international economic interests in the area. Modern Romania, as the territorial state which bordered the Lower Danube and was granted possession of the Danube Delta, developed complex relations with the Commission, which on the one hand violated its sovereign rights and on the other guaranteed its security against the imperial ambitions of Russia and Austria-Hungary. For Romania, the Commission was equally an arena to have its voice heard on some of the country’s most vital interests and a marker of its own prestige as part of the family of ‘civilised nations’.
The Commission’s survival was enabled by significant innovations in international law, starting with the 1856 Paris Treaty and going all the way to the 1883 London Conference. Growing disputes between imperial powers and small nations brought the region to the attention of the Institute of International Law,25 a body of juridical experts aiming to define the principles that were to govern international rivers and thus prevent further disputes in such strategic regions. This status of the Maritime Danube as an internationalised region, governed as a collective colony by agents of Europe’s Great Powers, made its example relevant at the Berlin Conference which convened in 1884–1885 to transpose Europe’s models of cooperation to Africa’s international rivers. As Yuan (Joanne) Yao has recently shown in her PhD dissertation,26 the Commission was often mentioned as a successful model of international cooperation, which brought commercial rationality and civilisation to the Maritime Danube.
Along the second layer of analysis, the internationalisation and institutionalisation of Danubian navigation through the stipulations of the 1856 Paris Treaty created exceptional juridical instruments that added to previous interpretations of the 1815 Vienna Treaty.27 The Commission was perhaps the Concert’s most innovative creation, fuelled by the belief that once ill-willed Russia was removed from the Danube, establishing a security regime along the Maritime Danube was a relatively simple and inexpensive task.
It took little time for the seven commissioners appointed by Europe’s Great Powers to understand that their governments were too optimistic in their assessments. Hydraulic improvements needed to be conducted along the Danube and at its mouths but reaching a consensus on which branch was more appropriate for correction required preliminary surveys in an extremely complex and almost completely unknown deltaic system. Engineers and hydrographers from around Europe proposed improvement plans, but they all came up with different technical solutions, oftentimes motivated by political concerns. The Commission appointed an engineer-in-chief, Charles Augustus Hartley, but his hydraulic views were far from popular amongst European commissioners and their technical advisors. It became extremely clear that two years were not enough to complete the Commission’s tasks.
By 1857 commissioners had already started turning a provisional commission into a bureaucratic organisation. Commissioners needed, besides a technical department for the Commission’s hydraulic projects, a body of bureaucrats tasked with gathering and organising the knowledge needed for its normative works of drafting shipping regulations. In ways that resemble the conclusions of Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore28 on more recent IOs, commissioners voted for detailed internal regulations to govern their proceedings and employed people to serve as translators, secretaries, archivists and accountants. Organised into departments, they all drew up regulations for a diverse range of problems, from the organisation of the pilotage and lighterage services to rules for throwing ballast and the policing of navigation, all deemed as crucial for the security of Danubian shipping. Aiming to instil a sense of law and order along the river, ‘European’ (i.e. non-Ottoman) commissioners came to believe that this was impossible without implanting in the bordering region a sense of ‘European’ civilisation and morality, directed both towards the local mercantile community and the ‘corrupt’ Ottoman officials, all regarded through orientalising spectacles.
Taking advantage of the region’s unclear status and the anarchy that followed the Ottomans assuming political control in the Danube Delta, the Commission claimed powers that violated Ottoman sovereignty. This exceptional status was eventually inscribed into a ‘Constitution’, the 1865 Public Act which defined the Commission’s attributions and consecrated some of its exceptional features derived from the principles of sovereignty, extraterritoriality and neutrality. The IO would gradually turn into a quasi-state, an experimental transnational organ that enjoyed a privileged position in the international system given the special status of its jurisdiction. As such, it worked, like all modern states, towards imposing legibility and simplification, both part of the Commission’s logics of stability and security over its ‘liquid’ jurisdiction.29
An historical institutionalist approach30 describes in detail the internal structure of the Commission and its most innovative aspects. References to institutional practices and decision-making mechanisms captured the Commission’s distinctive features into a busy constellation of transnational non-state agents. This allows for interesting comparisons with other IOs, as proposed by Bob Reinalda and other political scientists.31
In terms of its actual regulatory results, the Commission established a complex corpus of navigational rules for the Maritime Danube. The Commission was quick to assume some form of legislative power in relation to river navigation, which it gradually extended to executive and juridical attributions. In this, commissioners relied on an increasingly complex international bureaucracy, regarded as one of the ‘institutions’ through which river navigation was to be improved and secured. As shown by Barnett and Finnemore, there is a strong connection between bureaucracy and rulemaking.32 The Commission organised its services within a complex bureaucratic apparatus. The creation of this early international civil service also brought new responsibilities for the Commission in relation to its employees who chose to work ‘for Europe’ in one of the continent’s most unhealthy environments. Human resources were well paid by the Commission, which provided them with numerous additional rights and privileges, such as an innovative pensions scheme.
An important aspect that needs to be mentioned is the Commission’s role in the making of communities of experts (or epistemic communities33 ) in the navigation of international waterways. These networks of professionals, studied in other cases in the influential works of Timothy Mitchell,34 Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler,35 Wolfram Kaiser and Johan W. Schot,36 included a number of fascinating characters from amongst commissioners, engineers and bureaucrats who contributed to establishing a security regime along the Maritime Danube. They did this by collecting relevant data from around Europe and the world, and their expertise was further disseminated to other international undertakings, such as the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine and the Suez Canal Company.
The creation and development of the Commission was a lengthy political and institutional process, but also an intellectual and cultural one.37 The Commission evolved with the creation of corporate symbols and rituals, and it eventually bred a culture that was inherited within the organisation and spread beyond it. Created to deal with threats to the security of Danubian navigation and the economic and political interests associated with free shipping, the Commission would gradually turn into a security community which designed efficient policies and control mechanisms to protect those interests.
The efficiency of the Commission amongst its liberal internationalist supporters of the early twentieth century had a lot to do with its financial independence. This resulted from the poor assessment of the financial means needed for the completion of the works in the Danube Delta. Pressured by the other states to continue funding the organisation, the Sublime Porte agreed in 1860 to allow the Commission to collect navigation taxes on its own account and use these as collateral for a loan that was negotiated with an international bank for completing the Sulina provisional works. This independence turned the Commission into a reliable organisation in relation to its employees, suppliers and clients, but it also directed its attention towards its sources of income. Institutional survival depended on the political stability of the Lower Danubian area, and on the economic situation in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. Statistics became extremely important for budgetary reasons, and the Commission needed to further standardise its procedures and base its calculation of tolls on fairer rules that applied to ships from all around Europe. The Commission was a pioneer in the standardisation of measurement units,38 which it viewed as a moral duty, given the 1856 Paris Treaty’s provision for taxation to be based on an equal footing for all flags. Financial independence came with many other challenges, with survival strategies on the financial market, and with a larger loan guaranteed by six European powers that recognised the unique international status of this experimental institutional construct of Europe’s Concert of Powers.
The most spectacular results of the Commission’s works are visible in relation to the third layer of analysis – that of ‘river histories’. The organisation was invested with a technical mission, which was accomplished under the coordination of an international team of engineers led by Hartley. Just as many scholars have noted with regard to other rivers,39 the Danube was ‘disciplined’, though not by a state but through an experiment in which Europe’s Great Powers invested human capital and know-how to modernise a vital continental transport infrastructure which was encumbered with innumerable natural and artificial sources of insecurity. Hartley based his technical plans on a scientific vision, after starting to understand the Danube, its environment and its climate. Hydrologic knowledge played a vital part in building the jetties at Sulina which eventually ‘tamed’ the Danube and turned it into a predictable and secure waterway. The success of the Sulina piers, a material symbol of European cooperation, turned Hartley into an authority on hydraulic works, and he would later use this expertise to regulate rivers and ports around the world.
The Commission ‘civilised’ not only the river, but also the most central town for its navigation – Sulina. From a ruin of the Crimean War, Sulina was erected anew by the same unruly transnational entrepreneurs who controlled it in Russian times, but it was gradually ‘tamed’ with the support of European warships and the Commission’s bureaucracy. As the Commission’s operational host town, Sulina welcomed the employees’ families, and this new population gradually changed its urban fabric and equipped it with modern schools, churches and a cosmopolitan graveyard. Sulina hosted the Commission’s services, workshops and one of its lighthouses, and because of pressure from commissioners it came to enjoy important fiscal immunities for all its inhabitants. As a collective European ‘colony’ or an international relay station that, to borrow from Valeska Huber,40 acted as a sort of mini-Suez, Sulina saw major investments in its sanitation and modernisation from the Commission, which was the largest employer in town and an important source of economic prosperity for its inhabitants.
The Commission was regarded as a great success of internationalism in an age when territorial states in southeastern Europe were too weak to improve a vital European transportation infrastructure. Rival powers followed explicit rules of behaviour during their conference diplomacy and agreed on multilateral actions designed to contain the hydro-hegemonic claims of the eastern empires, which were themselves members of the IO. Through their cooperation, they increasingly relied on experts, who encouraged forms of cooperation with greater supranational benefit, similar to those described in the volume coordinated by Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski.41 The Commission itself evolved organically to adapt to the changes in its environment. In sustaining an international waterway as a viable alternative for the transportation of Danubian grain to the world markets, it had to compete against railways, ports and state policies. It was also required to update its procedures, be more transparent with its expenses, and convince its clients and the larger public about its efficiency. All in all, as an institutional offspring of Europe’s Concert of Powers it did a good job at a time when IOs were multiplying around the world at a rapid pace.
The Commission’s experimental character remained consistent all the way to the First World War, and six decades after its establishment, not only had it managed to survive its initial temporal and jurisdictional limitations, but came to be hailed by liberal internationalists such as American political scientist Edward Benjamin Krehbiel as a most ‘successful experiment in international administration’.42 Looking ahead to the approaching peace congress, globalist scholars and statesmen proposed populating the world with similar transnational entities that could effectively administer larger collective interests. As a prototype for the category of international administrative agents, the Commission was hopefully heralding a new age in which narrow national partisanships would make room for expert cooperation with greater supranational benefits.
However, as Chapter 10 briefly shows, such hopes were dashed by the interwar structure of the Commission, which looked more towards satisfying the victors’ interests than towards establishing a framework of multilateral techno-diplomacy. Starting with the 1920s, the Commission got caught between resolving the Great Powers’ imbroglios and Romania’s calls for full territorial sovereignty. In 1948, it eventually made way for a revised Danube Commission, modelled on the Soviets’ democratic views of international cooperation.
İlhan Ekinci, Tuna Komisyonu ve Tuna’da Ticaret (1856–1883), PhD dissertation, University of Samsun (Samsun 1998).
Luminița Gătejel, ‘Imperial Cooperation at the Margins of Europe: the European Commission of the Danube, 1856–65,’ European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 24.5 (2017): 781–800; eadem, ‘Building a Better Passage to the Sea: Engineering and River Management at the Mouth of the Danube, 1829–61,’ Technology and Culture 59.4 (2018): 925–953.
Constantin Iordachi, ‘Collective Imperialism: The European Commission of the Danube, 1856–1918/1920,’ paper presented at the Fifth European Congress on World and Global History, Budapest, 31 August–3 September 2017.
Agnieszka Kastory, ‘La Conférence de Sinaia consacrée à la Commission Européenne du Danube (août 1938),’ Revue Roumaine d’Histoire 42.1–4 (2003): 293–304; eadem, ‘La conférence de Belgrade de 1948 et la nouvelle organisation de la navigation danubienne,’ Revue Roumaine d’Histoire 43.1–4 (2004): 289–302.
Arthur Tuluș, Dunărea maritimă între Aranjamentul de la Sinaia și Acordul de la Belgrad (1938–1948) (Galați 2008).
Ștefan Constantinescu, Liviu Giosan and Alfred Vespremeanu-Stroe, ‘A Cartographical Perspective to the Engineering Works at the Sulina Mouth, the Danube Delta,’ Acta Geodaetica et Geophysica Hungarica 45.1 (2010): 71–79; Marius Budileanu, ‘Tipuri de produse cartografice specifice gurii Sulina, din perspectiva Comisiunii Europene a Dunării,’ Geographia Napocensis 7.2 (2013): 59–70; Ștefan Constantinescu, ‘Various Approaches to the Danube Delta. From Maps to Reality,’ in: Iordachi and Kristof Van Assche (eds.), The Bio-Politics of the Danube Delta: Nature, History, Policies (Lanham 2015), 155–181.
See for example van Assche et al., ‘Liquid Boundaries in Marginal Marshes. Reconstructions of Identity in the Romanian Danube Delta,’ Studia Sociologia 53.1 (2008): 115–133; van Assche et al., ‘Forgetting and Remembering in the Margins: Constructing Past and Future in the Romanian Danube Delta,’ Memory Studies 22 (2009): 211–234; van Assche and Petruța Teampău, ‘Layered Encounters: Performing Multiculturalism and the Urban Palimpsest at the “Gateway of Europe,”’ Anthropology of East Europe Review 27.1 (2009): 7–19; van Assche et al., ‘Delineating Locals: Transformations of Knowledge/Power and the Governance of the Danube Delta,’ Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 13.1 (2011): 1–21.
Marc de Decker, Europees Internationaal Rivierenrecht (Antwerp 2015).
Yuan (Joanne) Yao, ‘Standing at the Confluence: Institutional Emergence and the Case of the European Commission of the Danube,’ working paper, ECPR General Conference Glasgow September 2014, online at https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/902daa1a-b2a2-4b78-adb4-36aa663c9c01.pdf (visited on 14 March 2018); eadem, Constructing the Ideal River: the 19th Century Origins of the First International Organizations, PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science (London 2016); eadem, ‘“Conquest from Barbarism”: The Danube Commission, International Order and the Control of Nature as a Standard of Civilization,’ European Journal of International Relations 25.2 (2019): 335–359.
Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton 2015).
Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security. A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder CO 2013).
See some of their most recent contributions in a collective volume: Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan and Brian Vick (eds.), Securing Europe after Napoleon. 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge 2019).
Beatrice de Graaf and Cornel Zwierlein, ‘Historicizing Security – Entering the Conspiracy Dispositive,’ Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung (2013): 46–64.
Hein A.M. Klemann, ‘The Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, 1815–1914. Nineteenth Century European Integration,’ in: Ralf Banken and Ben Wubs (eds.), The Rhine: A Transnational Economic History (Baden-Baden 2017), 31–68.
Joep Schenk, ‘The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine: A First Step towards European Economic Security?,’ in: de Graaf, de Haan and Vick (eds.), Securing Europe, 75–94.
Robert Mark Spaulding, ‘Anarchy, Hegemony, Cooperation: International Control of the Rhine River,’ online at https://www.ccr-zkr.org/files/histoireCCNR/21_anarchy-hegemony-cooperation.pdf (visited on 15 August 2018).
Guido Thiemeyer and Isabel Tölle, ‘Supranationalität im 19. Jahrhundert? Die Beispiele der Zentralkommission für die Rheinschifffahrt und des Octroivertrages 1804–1851,’ Journal of European Integration History 17.2 (2011): 177–196.
Robert Jervis, ‘From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation,’ World Politics 38.1 (1985): 58–79.
Louise Richardson, ‘The Concert of Europe and Security Management in the Nineteenth Century,’ in: Helga Hatendorn, Robert O. Keohane and Celeste A. Wallander (eds.), Imperfect Unions: Security Institutions over Time and Space (Oxford 1999), 48–80.
Matthias Schulz, ‘The Concert of Europe and International Security Governance: How Did It Operate, What Did It Accomplish, What Were Its Shortcomings, What Can We Learn?,’ in: Harald Müller and Carsten Rauch (eds.), Great Power Multilateralism and the Prevention of War. Debating a 21st-Century Concert of Powers (London 2018), 26–45.
Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser and Erik Van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (Basingstoke 2015).
Peter Macalister-Smith and Joachim Schwietzke, Diplomatic Conferences and Congresses. A Bibliographical Compendium of State Practice 1642 to 1919 (Graz 2017).
Iordachi, ‘Collective Imperialism’ cit.
Andrei Cușco, A Contested Borderland. Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (Budapest 2017).
Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge 2001); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (London 2012).
Yao, Constructing the Ideal River cit.
Decker, Europees Internationaal Rivierenrecht cit.
Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations,’ International Organization 53.4 (1999): 699–732; eidem, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca 2004).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London 1998); Charles S. Maier, ‘Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood,’ in: Emily R. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting. 1870–1945 (Cambridge MA and London 2012), 29–282.
Orfeo Fioretos, ‘Historical Institutionalism in International Relations,’ International Organization 65.2 (2011): 367–399.
Bob Reinalda, Routledge History of International Organizations: From 1815 to the Present Day (Abingdon and New York 2009).
Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World cit.
Peter M. Haas, ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,’ International Organization 46.1 (1992): 1–35; Mai’a K. Davis Cross, ‘Rethinking Epistemic Communities Twenty Years Later,’ Review of International Studies 39.1 (2013): 137–160.
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 2002).
Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise. Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke 2014).
Wolfram Kaiser and Johan W. Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels and International Organizations (Basingstoke 2014).
Marc Abélès and Henri-Pierre Jeudy (eds.), Anthropologie du politique (Paris 1997).
Martin H. Geyer, ‘One Language for the World. The Metric System, International Coinage and the Rise of Internationalism, 1850–1900,’ in: Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford 2001), 55–92 and Craig N. Murphy and JoAnne Yates, The International Organization for Standardization (ISO): Global Governance through Voluntary Consensus (London and New York 2009).
See, for example, Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York 1996); Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle and London 2002); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York 2007); Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton and Oxford 2009); Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge MA and London 2011); Peter Coates, A Story of Six Rivers: History, Culture and Ecology (London 2013); Ashley Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (Cambridge MA 2014); Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted, Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers (New York and Oxford 2014).
Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge and New York 2013).
Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (eds.), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters (London and New York 2015).
Edward Benjamin Krehbiel, ‘The European Commission of the Danube: An Experiment in International Administration,’ Political Science Quarterly 33.1 (1918): 38–55.