Abstract
Modern transportation technologies have conflicting political potentials: regarded as tools of nation-building,1 they are also depicted as engines of transnational integration, weakening national control over borders and identities.2 How these opposing potentials play out depends on national geographies, regulatory structures, and political, technological and economic criteria. Post-1918 Europe presents a unique case for study in this regard. Nowhere else do so many states exist within such a small area; the nationalist and integrationist aspects of transport development have therefore often conflicted. Europe is also significant because the integration process that emerged after the Second World War begs the question of what role transport played in this shift. If transportation is an engine of integration, then evidence supporting this view should be visible within the European context.
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Notes
The nation-building aspect of transport technology has been explored notably in relation to railways and aviation. See, for example, Eugen Weber, Peasants intofrenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford University Press 1976)
Pierre Berton, The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871–1881 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1970)
Rudolph Daniels, Trains Across the Continent (Indiana University Press 2000)
Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2002)
Guillaume de Syon, Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900–1939 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins 2002)
Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture ofModernity in Britain and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005).
See, for example, Debra Johnson and Colin Turner, Trans-European Networks: The Political Economy of Integrating Europe’s Infrastructure (Macmillan 1997), which asserts transportation systems to be a crucial tool of European integration. The theme of transportation technology as an engine of integration is also a pervasive theme in the burgeoning literature on globalization.
See, for example, Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (eds), The Global History Reader (New York and London: Routledge 2005)
David Held et al., Global Transformation: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999)
Jeffrey A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: W.W. Norton 2006)
Frank J. Lechner and John Boli (eds), The Globalization Reader, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2004).
On the concept of hidden integration, see Thomas J. Misa and Johan Schot, ‘Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe’, History and Technology 21(1) (2005), pp. 1–19.
Geza Szurovy, The Art of the Airways (St Paul, Minnesota: Zenith Press 2002), p. 28.
The term comes from E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), p. 122.
On theories of imperialism see Wolfgang J. Mommsen. Theories of Imperialism, trans. P. S. Falla (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977)
Harrison M. Wright (ed.) The ‘New Imperialism’: Analysis of Late Nineteenth-Century Expansion, 2nd edn (Lexington, Massachussets: D.C. Heath 1976)
Robin W. Winks (ed), British Imperialism: Gold, God, Glory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1963).
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987; rpt. New York: Vintage Books 1989), p. 196.
E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875 and 1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1987), p. 160; see also Nations and Nationalism since 1780, pp. 121–2, 141–3.
Hobson explained that the ‘debasement of this genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and unassimilable peoples, … marks the passage from nationalism to a spurious colonialism on the one hand, Imperialism on the other’, J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1938; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1967), p. 6. Interestingly, although Hobson is usually credited solely with an economic theory of imperialism, he discussed the interaction between imperialism and nationalism in the book’s opening chapter, the latter appropriately entitled ’Nationalism and Imperialism’ (pp. 3–13). For other scholars who have explored this connection, see Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism and Wright, The ‘New Imperialism.’
An insightful case study that traces the interaction between nationalism and imperialism in late nineteenth-century Italy is Giuseppe Finaldi, ‘Culture and Imperialism in a “Backward” Nation? The Prima Guerra d’Africa (1885–96) in Italian Primary Schools’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8(3) (2003), pp. 374–90.
Quoted from J.S. Corum ‘The Myth of Air Control: Reassessing the History’, Aerospace Power Journal 14(4) (2000), pp. 61–77.
Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005), p. 233. Rieger’s study offers a brilliant comparative analysis of aviation nationalism in Britain and Germany.
The story of the restrictions on German airspace and aviation is unfortunately not discussed in Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 (New York: Random House 2001). It can be traced through articles in the Times (London).
Some information is also provided in S.W. Buxton, ‘Freedom of Transit in the Air: The Present Position and How It Has Been Reached’, Economica 16 (March 1926), pp. 49–57.
H. Burchall, ‘The Politics of International Air Routes’, International Affairs 14(1) (1936), p. 91. See also the discussion in Buxton, ‘Freedom of Transit’.
Erwin Seago and Victor E. Furman, ‘Internal Consequences of International Air Regulations’, University of Chicago Law Review 12(4) (June 1945), p. 334. Although these Chicago lawyers were discussing the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, they explained that the later convention ‘continued’ the regime of absolute airspace sovereignty, and did not change the existing system codified in the Paris Convention.
Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1992) examines the link between aviation and nationalism in Germany in some depth.
Another important work that addresses this topic is Robert Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press 2005).
Discussion on the paper of H. Burchall, ‘The Politics of International Air Routes’, International Affairs 14(1) (1935), pp. 106.
The symbiosis between civil and military aviation and aviation’s tie to militant nationalism in Britain are explored in two books by David Edgerton: England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan 1991); and Warfare State: Britain 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006).
Ministère de l’Air, L’Aéronautique militaire, maritime, coloniale et marchande (Paris: M. & J. de Brunoff, 1931), pp. 164–5. Istanbul was still frequently called Constantinople during the interwar period.
The early history of CIDNA is recounted in Alexandre Herlea, ‘The First Transcontinental airline: Franco-Roumaine, 1920–1925’ in William F. Trimble (ed.) From Airships to Airbus: The History of Civil and Commercial Aviation, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press 1995), pp. 53–64. CIDNA was one of six private French airline companies that merged under government auspices in 1933 toform Air France.
The theme of aviation as a tool of empire and colonial management was extensively developed in this period. See Robert McCormack, ‘Airlines and Empires: Great Britain and the “Scramble for Africa,” 1919–1939’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 10(1) (1976), pp. 87–105.
See also H. Burchall, ‘Air Services in Africa’, Journal of the Royal African Society 32(126) (January 1933), pp. 55–73
P.R.C. Groves, ‘The Influence of Aviation on International Relations’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6(3) (May 1927), pp. 133–52
P.R.C. Groves, ‘The Influence of Aviation on International Affairs’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 8(4) (July 1929), pp. 289–317. Burchall was a managing director of Imperial Airways. Groves, retired from the RAF in 1922 (rank: Brigadier General), was editor of Air (1927–9). He was also Associate Fellow Royal Aeronautical Society and Honorary Secretary General of the Air League of the British Empire.
R.E.G. Davies, A History of the World’s Airlines (London: Oxford University Press 1964), pp. 59–60. This remains the best general history of European airlines for this period.
Frederick H. Sykes, ‘Imperial Air Routes’, The Geographical Journal 55(4) (April 1920), p. 262.
Lucien Marchis (ed.), Vingt cinq ans d’aéronautique française, Vol. 2 (Paris: Chambre syndicale des industries aéronautiques 1934), p. 1,085.
Christer Johsson, ‘Sphere of Flying: The Politics of International Aviation’, International Organization 35(2) (Spring 1981), p. 279.
Thomas J. Misa and Johan Schot, ‘Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe’, History and Technology 21(1) (2005), pp. 1–19.
Ralph S. Cohen, IATA: The First Three Decades (Montréal: IATA 1949).
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, trans. Lewis Galantière (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock 1939), pp. 97–9. A review of St-Exupéry’s life story shows that he lived his vision — a transnational, global life that brought him a wife from South America, and work and travel all over the world.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Oeuvres complèts, Vol. I (Paris: Gallimard 1994), pp. lxxxvii, 113–15.
Heinhard Steiger, ‘From the International Law of Christianity to the International Law of the World Citizen — Reflections on the Formation of the Epochs of the History of International Law’, Journal of the History of International Law 3 (2001), pp. 180–93.
See also Jo-Anne Pemberton, ‘New Worlds for Old: the League of Nations in the Age of Electricity’, Review of International Studies 28 (2002), pp. 311–36.
Henry Serrano Villard and Willis M. Allen, Jr., Looping the Loop: Posters of Flight (San Diego: Kales Press 2000); Geza Szurovy, The Art of the Airways.
W. Wronsky, ‘Commercial Aviation in Germany: Past and Future’, trans. by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics from Der Luftweg 50–1 (February 1921), pp. 6–9, p. 4 of translation.
Baron de Foucaucourt, ‘L’Aviation touristique’, La Belle France, numéro hors série — special, ‘Ailes françaises,’ (8 Novembre 1936), n.p.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930; New York: W.W. Norton, 1932, 1960), pp. 38–9.
See John Urry, Consuming Places (London and New York: Routledge 1995).
Melvin Maddocks, The Great Liners, Vol. 4 of The Seafarers (Alexandria: Time-Life Books 1978)
Jean Des Cars and Jean-Paul Caracalla, The Orient Express: A Century of Railway Adventures, trans. George Behrend (London: Bloomsbury Books 1988); Szurovy, The Art of the Airways; Villard and Allen, Looping the Loop: Posters of Flight.
See, for example, Eric Neumayer, ‘The Impact of Political Violence on Tourism Dynamic Cross-National Estimation’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 48(2) (2004), pp. 259–81
M.A. Clements and A. Georgiou, ‘The Impact of Political Instability on a Fragile Tourism Product’, Tourism Management 19(3) (1998), pp. 283–8.
Gordon H. Pirie ‘Cinema and British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919–1939’, Historical Journal of Film 23(2) (2003), p. 123.
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London and New York: Verso 1983), pp. 53–6.
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, An Idea Conquers the World (London: Hutchinson 1953), p. 134. Coudenhove-Kalergi apparently did not like to travel by plane during the interwar period. He mainly discusses travel by train, ship and automobile. However, he was sensitive to the ways in which aviation was reshaping Europe. For example, he wrote in 1939 that Britain was ‘obliged to stick to Europe because history forces her to do so as the result of a new technical development’. This was the airplane, and, according to Coudenhove-Kalergi, ‘by the invention of the aeroplane, England ceased to be an island from the strategic point of view.’ He also believed that aviation and long-distance communication required a worldwide system of standard time, and he thought about how such a system should be designed. See his article ‘Europe To-Morrow’, International Affairs 18(5) (1939), p. 623; and An Idea Conquers the World, pp. 235–6.
See the revealing analysis of Robert Wohl in The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press 2005), pp. 49–107.
P.R.C. Groves, ‘The Influence of Aviation on International Relations’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6(3) (May 1927), p. 138.
Hans-Joachim Braun, ‘The Airport as Symbol: Air Transport and Politics at Berlin-Tempelhof, 1923–1948’ in William M. Leary (ed.) From Airships to Airbus: The History of Civil and Commercial Aviation, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press 1995), pp. 45, 50.
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Kranakis, E. (2010). European Civil Aviation in an Era of Hegemonic Nationalism: Infrastructure, Air Mobility, and European Identity Formation, 1919–1933. In: Badenoch, A., Fickers, A. (eds) Materializing Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_18
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