 Welcome back for the second day of our colloquium and without further due, I will pass the floor to the chair of this session. Christian, it's your turn now. Thank you very much. And also a warm welcome from my side. We will now start with session five. Yesterday we have discussed a lot about the global, the transnational and the national level, also about imperial connections and even sessionist states. Now we will move on to a different perspective and look at the regional level. We will have four speakers. Three of them are already present here and Mr. Hadri will join us online. I'm very happy to introduce now the first speaker, Gabriel Gaudro. He is a PhD candidate both in France and Germany, working on a thesis on the idea of central Europe in the life and work of the Hungarian economist. And he will now introduce us to the work and history of the Central European First Union as all speakers who have 15 minutes and I will watch over the time. Monsieur le directeur général adjoint. Deputy director general ladies and gentlemen colleagues and participants. First of all, I'd like to thank the organizers for having invited me to this historians colloquium of the Universal Postal Union. I am very honored to be here with you to share my presentation on Central European Postal Union, which is part of my research work on Central Europe in the 1920s and 30s looking at the economic unification of the area after the collapse of Austria hungry. I'm delighted to be here in part because my father has been a long time. And my Christian name Gabriel in the Christian culture refers to Archangel Gabriel, who is considered the patron saint of postal workers and at least and I imagine the Universal Postal Union, so to go to the main core of the subject. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the economic policies which were protectionist and national nationalists for the successors. We can see Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany then we saw a process of postal separation which will look at later. So the protectionist and nationalist policies of the successors including customs barriers created problems for exchanges in Central Europe. In order to have free exchange, politicians, economists decided to meet in Vienna in September 1925 at the Central European Economic Congress. It was the first where they discussed the modalities for bringing together the Central European economies. So they committed to work on creating a large economic space in Central Europe. So, following the first Congress they decided to meet once more in 1926 in order to discuss issues of transport and communications because the organisers felt and considered that it was easier to work closely together in those areas than in other economic aspects partly because of technical reasons but because there are already institutions in existence which cover economic cooperation before the First World War. So for postal issues, the Postal Administration of Austria, you can see the General Director Conrad Holheisen who brings his expertise to the preparatory committee for the Congress and his Director General and team support and assist the Congress for Central European economy. The other national administrations don't participate in the event. The consultative and technical committee for communication and transit of the League of Nations sends a delegate but the Universal Postal Union is not represented at that Congress. During the Congress, the former Minister Gerthein opposes the European having a setting up a European Postal Union in the resolution set up by Elmer Huntels, the economist who is the centre of my thesis. They speak in favour of the creation of a Central European Postal Union within the Universal Postal Union. So the first question is why? First of all, we have Gil Gottheim who wants to restore the pre-war postal relations before the First World War. So the German and Austro-Hungarian agreement which follows on from the Austro-German agreement has a unified postal space in Central Europe. So I can show you here on the map what that represents. Before the First World War there was a unified postal space between the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War and also because of the process of postal separation, there were new postal administrations in Poland in Czechoslovakia and also the rebuilding of the Austrian and Hungarian postal management. So that led to a serious deterioration of postal services in the region. So in 1921 the successor signed an agreement and then there was a postal convention between Germany and Austria which will facilitate and improve a little the situation. But it is nevertheless not a very satisfactory situation in comparison to the pre-war status. So for Gil Gottheim it's not just about acting in the looking at the past and rebuilding what existed but to think of the future. So he thinks it's necessary to improve postal relations throughout Europe in order to be able to compete with the major economic spaces such as the United States of America and the British Empire. So whilst the postal relations deteriorated in Europe there were new regulations, different tariffs and a significant increase in tariffs. So the United States and the British Empire set up a single tariff for the whole economic territories. I need to have some help here with moving the slides. Could we move further forward? One more please. So as I was saying whilst the postal relations had deteriorated in Central Europe in the USA and the British Empire they had set up single tariffs in their territories and they'd set up an agreement to improve their postal relations and to set up a sort of Anglo-Saxon postal union. And the USA also participated in the Pan-American postal union which is a restricted union within the UPU with most Central South American states and Spain. So looking at the good relationships that exist within these two economic spaces. So Geo Gotem thinks that they must and invites the European states to set up their own postal relations to compete. He also regrets that the universal postal union was not able to impose a universal stamp or tariff. So the Central European and the European Postal Service was an area which could be used for internationalising it but through regional movements. So how was this done? In order to set up the Central European postal union they needed to set up a single postal territory through two measures the implementation of common regulations and the removal of transit costs. And they also needed to introduce a Central European postage stamp so there are two concepts. So one is to have a single colour coded tariff and all participating states could put their own national emblem on the uniform stamp and issue them in their own national currency. So for Geo Gotem he felt that it was not necessary to introduce a single tariff for Central Europe. He felt that because of the major tariff differences the costs are very high in Germany and also because of currency fluctuations that would make a single tariff very complex. But it would be simple to reinstall the pre-war system so the internal tariff would be used for external relations so for foreign posting as it happened before. So at the 6th Central European Economic Congress in February to March 1930 the German Minister for Posts Georg Shetzen proposes this measure to his counterparts from the European, the Central European states and he suggests that they use this to set up relations with the German postal services and that they also apply their internal domestic rates to post going to Germany. He's not concerned about the potential loss of earnings because he can see an increase of postal exchange with Germany so that will make up for any losses. But the German Minister for Posts doesn't manage immediately to convince the other national Central European administrations to participate in his project. For the European postal union projects which were set out under the brillant plan in France I suggest you could read Leonhard Laborier's work on this history and I'm very pleased to be able to hear the two other contributions on our subject. Thank you very much for having listened. Yeah, thank you so much Gabriele also for time discipline. So I'm happy now to introduce you to the second speaker in this session Sabrina Broschmann. She has done her PhD on the European postal and telecommunications union and also already published her book, creating the new Europe through postal services setting standards during World War Two. For those who are interested, it has come out with a German publisher Nomos and is also available open access. Welcome Sabrina and we are looking forward to your talk on the European postal and telecommunications union. Thank you very much for the introduction and the invitation and the organization it's been a nice day yesterday and I hope we can continue to do the same granted the title of my presentation is kind of pointed. But there is a story behind it. When I went to the archives of the Swiss PTT, I was asked exactly that question. And so I thought upon my return to Ben I will try to finally answer it. My hypothesis today is that the EPTU was not there to replace the UPU. By the way, EPTU is what I will in the following use as the abbreviation of European postal and telecommunications union because it's quite a long name. But the EPTU was a restricted union within the UPU that Nazi Germany would have surely used to try and obtain influence and power, surely also with revisionist aims towards France. The EPTU was in essence an imperial project exporting German standards to European area, thereby laying the groundworks for the never defined but often mentioned new order of Europe that fascism was supposed to install after the war. In order to approach the question, I will first give you a short overview of what the EPTU was before turning to the UPU and EPTU relations. In 1940, there were two different initiatives that attempted to create institutions that would help compensate for the problems in international communications caused by the Second World War. There was the initiative by German and Italian engineers to create a working group for telecommunications and within the Reichspostministerium there was a department created to establish a European postal union. In the end telecommunications were integrated into the EPTU in the form of two specialized companies. I have divided the existence of the EPTU into three phases which I will now use to very quickly summarize the EPTU's history. Within the initiation phase the EPTU was prepared by bilateral agreements with the majority of later member administrations. This is not a new strategy for regionalization. We've seen it with the German-Austrian postal union and so on. These bilateral agreements are of high importance because the same standards that were within these agreements were later discussed upon the European Postal Congress. This bilateral agreement was signed with Italy in October 1941. This was important because the EPTU was later presented as an access project, even though one can discuss the balance between the German and Italian powers but this is not the question today. The decision phase begins with the European Postal Congress held in Vienna in October 1942. During it the administration agreed upon the founding of the first European postal union as well as on standardizing the tariffs between countries on the inner German system for civilian letters and postcards. This is a system that Gabriel has mentioned before just to point out the continuities. The second main result of the congress was the abolition of the transit charge between the countries which I don't have to explain here is a long discussed issue. It was part of the memorandum by von Stefan and was thus a major goal of the Reichspost and was also presented as a major success of the Reichspost. The working phase starts with the entry into force of the agreements from the Congress in Vienna in April 1943, but essentially after that as you can imagine this phase was quite unsuccessful. In June 1943 there was a committee session for postal service. It had few results and they weren't enacted because you needed a congress to enact the results of committees, but the two planned congresses in 1943 and 1944 had to be cancer due to the war developments. With the defeat of Germany, it was out of the question that the union would be continued and the standards were abolished at different times by different administrations. In the following the last administration to do so was probably the Hungarian one in March 1946. In the graphic and I apologize this is not entirely correct, but this was the closest to the actual situation I could find. You will find the member administrations in a darker green color. In a lighter green, these are the administrations from countries that were invited to the congress, but then disinvited shortly before the congress. And in a darker blue where the observer countries, these are Spain, Turkey and Switzerland, so these countries came to the European Postal Congress in October 1942, but didn't actually become members of the union. And in a lighter blue, you will find Sweden and Portugal, the administrations of those countries were invited but did not participate in the end. While the EPTU was founded during the war, it was certainly not meant to be a war organization, but it was the idea was that it would work to its full capacity after the war. And this intention is clearly, clearly, yeah, receivable in the sources. There were so many more plans for more standards within the Reispost Ministerium that would only be able to actually be implemented after war. But since fortunately the war didn't end with a German victory, they were never enacted. For postal services, it has to be said that the Reispost was clearly the leading actor within the EPTU, also with regards to the Axis partner Italy. Different administrations had different leeway in their actions, most prominently is probably the refusal of Belgium to join the union. Last but not least, the EPTU shows that the war time was not necessarily a caesura in European postal cooperation, but rather it represents a connection between the interwar and the after war time. It's strongly built upon the previous ideas and experience and structures, though of course it has to be mentioned under very different circumstances and different political aims, and allow me one sentence to the discussion we had yesterday upon unpolitical standards and technicalities. This is one time when not only the framework is very political, but also the standards that are said are quite political, and in part these are the same experts in the interwar war and after war time. In the following, I will touch upon different aspects of EPTU and UPU relations, starting with some contextualizations. It starts with the 1939 Congress in Buenos Aires, where Überschor points out in his history of the German Reispost from 1939 to 1945, that politics played a strong part in it because in the final document Czechoslovakia was still mentioned, which was unacceptable for the German side, so Hitler in the end decided not to sign. In the final document yet the Reispost found a way to surround it by applying the convention only to non-hostile countries because it wasn't quite happy with the decision by Hitler. Secondly, international organizations, though maybe counterintuitive from the fascist propaganda on nationalism and the League of Nations and so on, were an important part of the international strategies of these countries. They used and created international organizations as platforms, instruments of power and the diffusion of their own programs. As Madeleine Herron has so rightly formulated it, there were different strategies close, undercut, transform and create, and this is why I think that the EPTU was meant to be an instrument to obtain power within the UPU and then maybe influence the decisions towards German thinking. And thirdly, I know we have talked a lot about Heinrich von Stefan, but I cannot not mention him today because for the Reispost this was the one idol. He was omnipresent in their thinking and writing. Almost every member of the leading staff within the European Postal Union that came from Germany had either written a book or an article about him. And it comes through, through the sources, that in a way they saw themselves as continuing this legacy of Heinrich von Stefan with the European Postal Union, so sort of making the Reispost minister Wilhelm Ohne-Sorge the von Stefan of his time in a sense. And this is actually also one of the arguments why I don't think the EPTU was supposed to replace the Universal Postal Union as really omnipresence and admiration of Heinrich von Stefan. Within the export community, the EPTU was only ever presented as a restricted union, which it institutionally also was. Article 5 and article 9 of the Universal Postal Convention allows for these unions and they are also certainly not the first one. So there's the Nordic Postal Union, there's the South American Postal Union and with its enlargements and so on. And as Gabriel has pointed out and I would point out to the works of Leonel Labouré as well, the Nazis also weren't the first to think about a European Postal Union and they weren't the last either as Valentina should surely present us. Within the Reispost the need for the union was explained with the contemporary non-functioning of the EPTU due to the war and the fact that a general union such as the EPTU could not properly respond to European specificities. To Hitler by the way on a side note the union was explained as an instrument to exploit occupied countries, though it was not specified how exactly that was going to happen. In German articles it was explained sort of with the same reasoning as within the Reispost. There is a strong focus on the EPTU currently not working and the necessity for European Postal Union. I've brought your citation of the Reispost minister and the Völkischer Beobachter, which reads in English, now that the string between the old and the new world is torn, this is proper Nazi rhetoric with respect to the interwar time. And the universal postal convention, not convention, not union, is only a fragment when we underline the practice a matter of habit. What has been a necessity for a long time could become reality. The perspective on the question has been up until now very German. I would now like to turn shortly to other countries. This is where I could actually find a discussion on the future of the EPTU in a post war Europe. And it's not that my colleague and I haven't tried. We went to 16 archives in 11 countries, but either the discussion around this topic wasn't documented or it simply wasn't discussed. For the Swiss, I think this might be interesting. There's actually no hints at the question or any fear that this might replace the universal postal union. And there's one instance where the Swiss PTT deems a proposal that was made by the German administration as too political. It concerns newspapers. They were actually scared that once enacted, the standard would lead to them being flooded by German newspaper and propaganda. Otherwise, all the proposals were approved by the Swiss administration. And the observer to the Congress for Switzerland, Ernest Bonjour, concluded that in the end, Switzerland would not be able to stay out of the EPTU if the union continued to exist due to its benefits for the consumers. This was seen entirely different by the Spanish postal administration. They didn't sign a bilateral agreement because they found it too political and they didn't want to join the EPTU because they thought it would endanger the universal postal union. It is not explained in the sources how it would endanger the universal postal union. And it has to be said that Spain, with its own restricted union in a sense and also with the special relationship between the Franco regime and Nazi Germany, and his focus on the Hispani Dat, sorry for the pronunciation, might also have a different context for analyzing the EPTU in this way. To conclude, obviously, because the EPTU existed for such a short time, there is no actual real relationship between the EPTU and the UPU. There's an article published in the Lyon Postel by one of the leading actors within the German Reichspost to create the universal postal union. And of course, once the agreement entered into force, this information about the agreement was spread around through the UPU's channels, but otherwise there's no documentation of any kinds of further context. The question around the EPTU's future role within the UPU were not dominant or not documented at the time, so it doesn't seem like to have been an intensive discussion. And then from the German side, it has to be repeatedly said that it was constantly underlined that this was just a regional union. And from the statutes of the EPTU, it also really was, it was open to European and neighbouring countries. And with that, I thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. We have now the third presentation by Valentina Vada Basso. We stay within Europe, but we move on in time. Valentina is a researcher and specialist for European political history. She has dealt also with parliamentary history, but also technological aspects of European integration and teaches contemporary history in Paris and Algerie. And we will now hear her presentation on the origins of the European postal union. Thank you very much to the organisers for inviting me. I am going to talk about the European Postal Union and it's very beginning. So I am going to cover the circumstances in which this project came to light. And that difficulty evolving from 1495, there were a series of interruptions. Well, it started with as a diplomatic project and then other protagonists, unions, industrial organisations and other participated in it. It started off as a diplomatic project with state actors and non-state actors. So in my research, I thought to demonstrate that this European postal union was born way before the European coal and steel community. But when the machine was relaunched, this project became a tool of the ECSC for further integration with the union. So that was in Europe. So that's what I researched and I found archives in Paris, some in Florence. And then I found information about the evolution of the EPTU and the UPU through the archives I found here. So the first part of my research was about the birth of this European postal union. And then in Rome, I carried out research about the history of post in Europe from the beginnings up until 1956. Now we've got to the literature on the European postal union. There wasn't much data. It was Mr. Laboury, maybe that had worked on it, but there wasn't much literature. And so first concerning the way in which the project was started. Well, it was separate from the ECSC. There was a postal union between France and Italy after the war and that convention was open to other countries. However, the project unfortunately got bogged down in the failed customs negotiations between France and Europe. And then it was born again in the Council of Urans. But from 1949 to 1955, there were a series of false starts. So in 1951, the parliamentary assembly blocked a project to launch it at the European level because some monarchies, some countries wanted the image of the sovereign, the king or the president of the republic on the European stamps. And then in 1953, it was the Council of Ministers that blocked this project of a European postal union. And what's striking is that the 18 countries of Europe were against this project, including countries of the ECSC, France, Italy, among others, because they considered the project too technical. So what were the difficulties these countries faced according to the archives? Well, the competition from the UPU, most likely. So there was no need to create a union at a regional level. And there was another important issue, which countries should be part of this European postal union? The 18 countries of the Council of Europe or should it be a much more restricted union? And so the third reason, and this bring me back to Sabrina's study, it was a weight of the past that was still in the minds of decision makers. There was a fear that the past experience would be repeated, for instance, Hitler's thought of creating a postal union. And so there was fear that one country would dominate others. The war was over, but it was still in people's minds. So from 49 to 155, the project was rejected. But in 1955, the French Minister for Posts introduced a memorandum, which was rather revolutionary. Why? Well, because he proposed to organize a European conference of postal experts in Europe. And the memorandum was very important. Why? Because it proposes the organization of a conference and also voiced the idea of modernizing posts throughout Europe, with in the back of its mind the idea of further integration in Europe. So the modernization of the post would be twofold administrative and technical. And the memorandum was first introduced in July 49 to the Council of Europe, which approved it. A couple of days later, on the 20th of July, it was submitted to the Intergovernmental Committee meeting in Messine. And that was a very important moment because it's as of then that this project of a European postal union was linked to the European Coal and Steel Community, the ECST. So the conference in Messine designated a subcommittee, and that subcommittee started drafting the first organogram of the European Postal Union. And the subcommission, which was a working commission to create this European Postal Union, was composed of the six ministers for post of the ECST. And that is why I believe that this project of a European Postal Union is very closely intertwined with the European Coal and Steel Community. And in January 1956, a meeting took place in Paris, a very important meeting, and the six ministers for post and telecommunications of the ECST, on that occasion, linked this EPTU project to the ECST. And then in March 1956, there was a conference in Paris. Nothing was decided on that occasion. All the decisions were postponed to the conference in Rome in October, November 1956. I believe that the Rome conference was the founding moment of this European Postal Union. Why? Because many decisions that were submitted to Paris in January 1956 or in March to the conference in Paris in March were then submitted to Rome. So what was decided? And why do I think that that conference was really the founding moment? Well, it's been that a single tarification for air mail was adopted and also rates for the member countries of the ECST and of the Postal Union were to apply the same rates. And it was very difficult to find a solution. The Dutch were the ones that found a solution. What did they propose? Well, some countries had many reservations, were against it. Because the majority of Postal administrations at the time run a deficit. And so they didn't have enough income and were the delays were therefore financial. The Dutch managed to come to to find a solution. How? Well, up until then, the rate of the UPU had applied. But as of then, there was a tariff that started to apply among the six members of the ECST. And that rate, the adoption of that rate was the founding moment of this European Postal Union. And then standardization required the standardization of rates, but also of letters on a technical level. So this issue of standardizing letters was a huge diplomatic issue. Why? Because the first that were concerned were the paper industry of the different members in Paris. There were many engineers, very technical businesses that were closely or that were very much concerned by this. So this automation of letters and standardization of the letters was alarming to some member states. And so initially, the Italians and the English wanted different parameters to apply. But in Rome, it was decided all letters should have the same format. However, the issue was postponed to different conferences in Brussels in 68 countries finally agreed on the letters dimensions. The French managed to impose the color red for all mailboxes. And then another issue that is of interest is that it was also important at the time to ensure a swift delivery. And so to do away with many of the checks to accelerate the mail flow. So the technical issues were also of a technical, the technical issues were also political in nature because the states wanted to ensure they made this European integration more visible. They wanted the ECSC to become more visible. What was lacking was visibility. And that's why they wanted to create a European stamp. What they had in mind was greater visibility. And then there were other political interests as well. The European coal and steel community was based on coal and steel initially, but had remained a rather distant project in the mind of many citizens and only concerned coal and steel. But the idea was to bring European citizens closer through common rates and standards. So this European integration was a cross border into regional project. But it was too early to call it a super national project. There was a lot of resistance among states. It was quite clear within the postal administrations matters was still dealt with domestically. Then in 1956, an exhibition was organized by the ECSC in Rome, inaugurated by the president of Rome at the time and paying tribute to the organizers. So they had already been Schumann's great speech, but they went beyond the ECSC. So what the exhibition aimed to do was to show the common roots of all European countries. And through technique and progress, they aimed to demonstrate this. So they aimed to show that progress would be possible through sharing knowledge. It was an exhibition on 6,000 square meters on the mechanization of posts in Europe. So it was a huge exhibition close to the airfield in Rome, and it was in two parts. One part of the exhibition was on the present and one part on the past. So they were Roman systems and the role of all the different protagonists before mailmen. And they even went all the way back to the second century before Christ. They show all the itineraries from Rome to Spain. Unfortunately, there aren't any pictures left of the exhibition. However, there was quite a lot of media coverage and the Italians and English both claim to have invented the stamp. The English in 1840 created a system and the Italians, another one dating back to the Savoy times. And the discussions on the matter is still ongoing. The English emphasize the role of Queen Victoria, then the Italians are also still discussing how they created the first stamps. The objective was also to reduce waiting times. The English created one of the first electronic machines and another machine was then invented able to sort through 3,000 letters very quickly. So in conclusion, there isn't much literature about the creation of this European Postal Union. My objective was really just to give you a few ideas of this European Postal Union, which was a tool of the ECST. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We are now moving on to the last presentation. We will leave Europe. And we are very happy that we will introduce us to the work of the Arab Postal Union. Mr. Hadri is currently a professor of international relations at Tunis University and a member of the International Scientific Committee at UNESCO in Paris. And he is also a long trajectory of practical work with international organizations. So I hope you can hear us. I hope technology is working fine and we look forward to the online presentation. Professor Hadri, please unmute yourself. Professor Hadri, please unmute yourself. We don't hear you. Mr. Hadri. Hello. Hear us. Can you hear me? Okay. Can you hear me? See you. I don't know. Normally the video should be working. I'm just looking into it. Can you see me now? We can't see you, but we do hear you. Well, I'm not too sure why you can't see me. And then you can start with your presentation. Okay. Yeah, the presentation is visible now. So we are looking forward to. Thank you very much. And I'm delighted to join this a high level event. And I will be talking about a regional organization, an Arab regional organization entitled the Arab Postal Union. I will attempt to give you an overview. Some information about is the work when it was founded and it's an economic role. So this Arab Postal Union was modeled on all other specialized organizations, including in Europe. Yesterday we had a presentation of different post organizations in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. And I listened with much interest this morning, the presentations on the European postal unions and organizations. So first I will try to give you a brief oversight of the Arab Postal Union. It statutes its objectives as a specialized Arab organization. And then I will attempt to give you an overview of the close relations between the Arab Postal Union and the UPU. And we'll cover the main projects of digitization that are currently on the agenda. And then I will give you a case study based on the Tunisian experience of postal matters. Tunisia is a country with a huge amount of experience and great levels of performance in a postal matter. First a couple of some information about this Arab Postal Union, which was founded in Syria in Damas in 52 on the basis of a recommendation and a constitutive resolution. And I wanted to recall in passing that the Arab League was founded in 45 a couple of months after the UN was created. The objective was to create a pan-Arab organization with a view to ensuring relations, international relations between the Arab countries of the time. It then became the Postal Commission and moved to Cairo. So this statute provides that the objectives are to organize postal services within the Arab world to improve the postal services throughout that region. So at the time, those countries were dominated by some Western countries such as France, Italy, the United Kingdom. And so there wasn't such an organization at the Arab level for communications to make a telephone call. You had to go through London, Paris, Rome. So the objective was to organize the services and provision of services in the Arab countries. And so they were modeled on the various post-organizations throughout the world. So here you see the map of the countries covered, 22 member countries from the West and Coast, Mauritania to the Middle East. That's Saudi Arabia and others that were part and members of the Arab League. So among the events that have a symbolic meaning is that a decision was made to commemorate every year the day of the Arab Post, the Arab Post Day on the 3rd of August each year. And a commemorative stamp is issued on that occasion each year. So here you see the image of the stamp that was issued by the United Arab Emirates. So each country has its own symbols on the stamp. And I just wanted to point out to one of the great developments in the Postal and Telecommunications area. This is the creation of an Arab sat, a regional telecommunication system that was created in 76 by 22 countries to ensure better satellite telecommunications and telecommunications between the Arab states. So here you see on the map the countries covered by Arab sat. So it covers an area from the north of Africa to part of the Middle East. And this was a great step forward in enabling Arab states to communicate through telecommunications and post. And so this was the main step forward in transforming the postal space in the region. So by way of comparison on this graph you see the number of posts in the world by region in 2020. And you see the greatest, largest in the world is the Asia Pacific region with close to 300,000 post offices. Then secondly Europe and the IS and then Middle East. In 2020, in the Arab world, there were 118,000 employees and 20,500 some post offices. And then in that position you see Africa, which is slightly below that level in terms of postal services. And just over 7,900 postal centers, they had the fewest post office. So it's quite far behind other industrialized countries. So globally, the historic relations between the UPU and the UPA, they really date back a long way. At least two countries, Egypt and Tunisia joined the UPU in 1874. Immediately after the founding of the Universal Postal Union in Ben and in 1934, Egypt hosted the Universal Postal Union's Congress for the first time on the African continent. And in 1957, the Arab Postal Union participated in the UPU Congress in Ottawa in 1957. So we have the statute of the Arab Postal Union, which foresees the application and cooperation with the UPU in Bern. And it's ensuring that there are communications between the peoples of the Arab world. So some cooperation projects and some assistance projects that have been covered by the UPU for a number of countries in the Arab region. So on the 1st of August, 2008, there was an agreement between the Arab countries for the money transfers, electronic money transfers with the assistance on the technical side from the UPU. And that covered the five countries, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. And so that was agreed and signed at the 24th Congress of the UPU in Geneva. Another very successful and efficient project was that of the launching of the UPU training centre in Tunis in 2016 and the UPU finance the creation of the UPU training centre for the Arab region in Tunis. And in particular, it provided a large number of technicians and engineers to work with the Union for training. And that assisted 22 postal administrations in our region. Now, here's some information on the history and the cooperation process between the UPU and the Arab Postal Union. And I think it would be useful to talk about an experience that the Tunisian Post, which is considered the number one. So they carried out a case study. First of all, some information on the history of the Tunisian Post. It's the oldest and has the most experience within the Arab world. In 1847 is when they set up the first components of a postal and telegraphic service with the opening of a first post office in Tunis. So that's quite early in the history of postal services. So it's considered a pioneer in 1861 on the 19th of April. Tunisia, I did to the telegraphic convention, which was concluded in Brussels and Berlin 1858. And it also Tunisia joined the UPU at the same time as France in 1878. And then we had the opening of postal services in cooperation with France. And then they joined the French mainland services. But generally Tunisia continued the process. And in 1918, in May 1918, there was an opening of postal account services. And then we had the rapid EMS post set up in 1982, 1982 in Tunisia. They were one of the first to do so in our region. Here you can see a letter from Tunis sent to Marseille on the 6th of July, 1867. So you can see that the second half of the 19th century was one where Tunisia had postal relations not only with France, but other European countries, Italy, Spain, Austria and so forth. And so we can consider that it was certainly very novel for the region. Now to come back, we can really talk about the performance of the Tunisian Post, which is classified as the best African and Arab postal service. It's the Universal Postal Union, which in April 2018 gave Tunisia awarded Tunisia the first place in Africa and the Arab world. And that's the third consecutive year that they won the award. And the Tunisian Post is listed in 44th place out of 168 postal establishments throughout the world. And that is based on the Postal Development Integrated Index, the two IPD. So that means that Tunisia has built information experience throughout the region. And then in second place we have countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, who also have good performance in the Arab region. And the 5th and 6th of October 2016 Tunisia was elected a member of the Administration Council of the UPU for 2017 to 2020 at the 26th Universal Postal Congress in Istanbul. And I can also add that Tunisia is considered by African countries as a model country in the area of postal services. And in 2010 the Tunisian Post exported its know-how to 20 African countries who signed bilateral partnership agreements and technical support to many people from all over Africa come to be trained in Tunis and benefit from the experience of Tunisia. That's why we have a partnership agreement signed with some 20 countries such as Côte d'Ivoire, Congo, Mauritius, Uganda, Liberia. And we have another 14 African countries, particular from Western Africa, who have previously signed agreements. We also have a great deal of experience in Tunisia in e-commerce. And we are considered Tunisian Post is considered a leader. And so in January 2017, the Tunisian Post joined the UPU major project and set the first stones of e-commerce in Africa, e-com Africa. And so this will help African countries to coordinate to their work and their relations in the area of e-commerce and in particular of the rapid post services. So we can say confidently that this major project will make Tunisia the door to Africa for e-commerce. And it will be a sort of electronic exchange point for goods and for telephone and telecommunications transmission. So that is some information on both the history of the Arab Postal Union and its cooperation with the UPU. And I think if the aim of this colloquium is to create a single postal territory, we should consider this as one of the factors in progress that we're seeing that comes from the Tunisian Post. And they've also worked on the development of economic relations throughout the world. And we should recall that at the 27th UPU Congress in August 2021, the African continent committed to ensure coordination between countries in Africa. And I would like to say the next Congress of the UPU will be taking place in the United Arab Emirates. The 28th Congress will be taking place in 2025. And I think the Emirates have undertaken to organize a major Congress, which will be another step forward in the area of the relations between the Arab Postal Union and the UPU. So that is a conclusion. I think I've finished in good time. Thank you for listening. And I remain available if you have any questions. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Radri. We have now 15 minutes for contributions from your side, so please. I have a question for Mr. Gabriel Godfra. Could you please tell us a little more about the Potra's agreements that you mentioned in your presentation? And that was the first conference between the successor countries and they set up the postal tariffs that were reduced within the economic space mainly for economic reasons between Italy and the various successor states, which was in force until the eve of the Second World War. Thank you. No further questions for the moment. Can you hear me? Yes. You sort of answered the question already. I don't know all the details of the Potra Rose Agreement of 1921, but it's the first conference after the war that looked at the settling of all economic issues, many economic issues of the successor states. And they had serious political problems. And until that agreement, there weren't many agreements for any type of postal exchange, no tariffs, no contracts that regulated that. So we got to a point where the tariffs were lowered and there was an increase in postal exchanges. We had a period where there was difficulty, there were still thoughts that there might be a restoration of the Habsburg monarchy and countries such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. So it was Italy that took on the lead, which considered itself also a successor state of the Austro-Hungarian Empire because they recovered some territory from the former empire. And so Italy played a significant role. And this brought Poland and Italy into this postal space that was brought about by this convention. It goes beyond the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it doesn't bring in Germany. Germany continued with the traditional sort of German-Austro-Hungarian postal agreement. So we have lots of minor agreements, but the main agreement is the Potter Rose agreement, which is going to remain in the 1920s and 30s. Yes, I have a question for Sabrina Prozman. I'd like to know how her work clarifies the political role of an expert within the framework of the UPU and maybe beyond that. Thank you for this question. I'm going to answer in English. It's easier. Well, I think because the union was created at such a very different political time than usually regional union were approached. The experts have a different role. For instance, you can see that very clearly in the documents of the Danish Postal Administration where the entire attitude towards the European Postal and Telecommunications Union was derived from the political idea of appeasement policy of Denmark towards Germany. So the postal delegates had sort of the job to translate this policy of appeasement into how they were acting within the European Postal and Telecommunications Union. And you can see that by the fact that actually the Danish delegates proposed to go even further with the transit charge abolition looking at sea post, which is of course during the war completely impossible. But also the fact that the Danish Postal Administration hosts the only postal comedy session during the time of this union. So I think the fact and from from that special example, going further on, I think the fact that you are within a union where the stands of one country are supposed to be just expanded towards all the other countries. And the experts having to deal with that sort of standardization shows that they're not just simply in a technical spectrum where they have to navigate what is best for their countries but they have to, in many cases, think about the fact that their country is being occupied and brutally occupied while they are negotiating with the German Reichspost about these new standards. Thank you. Are there any further questions or comments in the room? I have a question on how linked to Miss Vada Basso's presentation. Yes, I very much agree that the exposure to postal mechanization in the 1950s was a turning point and a change of organizations of postal services within Europe. Because it was an exhibition that was really surprising at that time. So it was just a little comment related to that exhibition. Yes, it was important because the issue was giving visibility to this European integration project. And on the project that had already been started with the coal steel mission, but it was a double path. The common route, if we think back to the past and the future, this community, the Europeans needed to have the convenience of a European postal community where we look at the region where one operator can deal with 3000 letters in the United Kingdom, the English who had electronic reading. So I think it was an important conference. It gave visibility to the European project. The discussions remain national because the countries were looking at their own country but an universal stamp for 80 countries was approved. So there was still a national aspect to it all. So from that point of view it's very interesting to read the catalogs of that exhibition. I suggest that it's very important not only for the photographs which are really interesting. I haven't found any pictures of the exhibition in the National Archives in Paris. I found photographs or the photographs are in the catalogue. You should be able to find a catalogue in the libraries. Thank you. Sebastian Riches for the Postal History Committee. I have a question for Mr Adri. I'm very interested to hear about how old the Tunisian Postal Service is and is there a new postal museum in Tunisia? Something which would show and make available this very interesting history and it would also be interesting to think about Nicolas Croix's work, his work on the Algerian Post which was supported by the Postal History Committee. Professor Adri, did you get the question? Can you hear me now? Very good. Thank you for that question. Unfortunately we don't have a museum as such. We have a large building, we call it the Postal Hotel or building where we can find some of the documentation on the history of the Tunisian Post but unfortunately there's not yet a museum as such. I think that it's an idea that should come about because I think we can say this with all modesty. The experience of the Tunisian Post is a pioneer in the area within Africa at least and we have major relationships building with African countries and also with countries in the Arab sphere. We don't have one yet but I haven't found any thesis on the Tunisian Post because it's a pity. I am unfortunately not a postal historian. I am a historian on international relations and in particular specialising in the Arab world and Tunisia and I was struck by the fact that there are no organised archives. So I think we have to look here and there all the time for bits and pieces of documentation but we don't yet have a museum for the Tunisian Post. Maybe that would be an idea to try and launch that one dear but I'll keep your idea. We need to work further on the idea. Thank you. If there are no further questions, thanks to all of our speakers for introducing us to the regional dynamics of postal cooperation. We have now a slightly extended coffee break until 1045. And there are two of us today moderating this session. Myself, my name is Christian Sund. I'm a professor at the Oskelde University in Denmark and I have the pleasure of having my colleague and good friend, economist at the UPU Jose Anson. We have split a little bit our role so I will say welcome to the first speaker today and then Jose will come and introduce the second speaker. This session has the title the UPU material world on stamps, envelopes and electronic mail. So we are going to have for the pleasure of the young participants from the International French School of moving all the way from the good old physical stamps and envelopes that you young people maybe are not so familiar with anymore to the electronic communication where you are of course much more advanced users than many of the rest of us. We have three speakers lined up today and it's a pleasure for me to introduce our first speaker, Daniel Piazza. And Daniel Piazza is with the Smithsonian Institution the National Postal Museum in Washington DC and he will be joining us online. So I expect everything will be lined up. I had the pleasure myself to visit this museum. Many years ago in 2008 and it is truly worth visiting this museum if you ever have the possibility of doing so. And Daniel will talk about the unintended role of the UPU in the creation of postal museums around the world. So with no further ado, I would like to pass the word to our first speaker. All right. Thank you very much. Let me just share my screen here. All right. Good morning everyone. My greetings and very warm thanks to the organizers of this conference for the opportunity to address you today. We're nearing the end of a very successful conference and so I promise to keep it light and we can also look at some very pretty stamps together which is always fun. My presentation is titled UPU specimen stamps and the world's postal museums and accidental history. And this history is accidental in several respects. First of all the research project was suggested to me accidentally by my attempts to locate UPU specimen stamps in the collection of the National Postal Museum in Washington DC where I've been a curator for more than 15 years. So I just sort of stumbled on this as a research project to begin with. But it's also an accidental history in the sense that these stamps were never really intended to be in museum collections at all, as we shall see in a few moments. So this is very much a work in progress and I'll flesh out the main themes of my research so far. But I would very much like to hear from you and have input in the Q&A session and also to take correction from you on such points as may be necessary. And I'll also share my contact information with you on the last slide at the end of the talk. I alluded to earlier today's talk concerns one aspect of the work of the UPU's International Bureau, which from the beginning has been an information sharing body connecting member nations. As it was founded in 1874 its purpose was to collect and share official statistics and regulatory documents received from member nations and also to assist host countries that were chosen to organize the periodic UPU congresses. And then at the 1878 Postal Union Congress in Paris the International Bureau had added to its responsibilities the job of circulating copies of member countries postage stamps among member nations. And these exchanges were and still are ostensibly meant to ensure that mail bearing legitimate postage stamps would be handled according to UPU regulations and also to facilitate the identification of forgeries in the global mail stream. To be very honest I can find little evidence that any postal administration at least in the period that I've studied which is down through about the night early 1950s that any postal administration that received these reference collections really use them as they were intended. Some British colonies and Latin American countries. I've seen a lot of evidence to suggest that they simply periodically destroyed these collections. Particularly in other smaller and remote places stamps from these UPU distributions seem to have leaked out of the official archives and into the collector market. And we can find collectors writing and talking about an examples of these stamps being in private ownership as early as the 1930s. So clearly they were coming they were there were some mechanisms for them coming on to the marketplace. And then the number of these stamps appearing in the in collector hands really began increasing in the 1950s. I suspect so I have not yet proved that this is as a result of a number of the post World War two independence movements movements and number of countries pass out of existence and and there's a there's a ready and willing collector market to receive their official archives of of of specimen stamps when they when when these countries go out of existence or absorbed by newly created countries. And then starting in the late 1970s many thousands of bureau distributed specimen stamps begin being sold at public auction or by private treaty and many of them. Remaining collector hands to this day still pasted to the original ledger pages that indicate their provenance from an official archive. So all of those of course were not intended uses for these for these stamp distributions. A handful of postal operators though chose to give their UPU reference collections to museums. The Federal Post Office in London began donating them to the British Museum in 1914 and that collection still exists today and now resides at the at the British Library and similar transfers form the basis of many of what are today the world's most renowned postal and philatelic museums including the Musee de la Poste in Paris, the Archive for philatelie in Bonn, the Postal Museum in London, the Post Museum in Stockholm, and the Postal Museums in Madrid, Singapore, Portugal, Serbia, Russia, many other countries I've been able to trace still have these intact UPU reference collections. You know you I'm sure you prepare beautiful slides but unfortunately we're stuck here on the first slide. You're not stuck. I haven't moved the slide yet. Oh, okay. My apologies. Some measure I think of the importance of these collections can be had by reference to the time period in which they were transferred to these museums. The late 19th and early 20th century were the high watermark of nationalism, which had its origins in the Napoleonic era. And as a result, many of the postal collections and museums created in this period were intensely focused on domestic postal history. And the acquisition of these UPU collections brought a new transnational perspective to these museums. This is a photograph of the philatelic collections at the Smithsonian Institution sometime in the 1920s as they were displayed in the pull-out frames. You can see the pages of stamps mounted on pull-out frames and undoubtedly very many of those stamps that visitors were looking at in the at the Smithsonian in the 1920s were the UPU specimen stamps. So exhibitions, public exhibition of these stamps, organized by postal museums as well, helped to raise public awareness of the world as a single postal territory that was based on cooperation. Outside of a handful of buildings and monuments, as was discussed at some length yesterday, the Universal Postal Union had and continues to have in many countries a fairly low public profile. And so we can think of these UPU specimen collections that now reside in postal museums and capitals all around the world as paper monuments, as quiet reminders of the existence of the International Bureau and its work for well over 100 years. I think also the effect was that as museums began collecting worldwide stamps through these transfers, it helped to legitimize philately as a field of study. This was a status that was already enjoyed by numismatics at the turn of the 20th century but was not yet enjoyed by philately. So what are we talking about? Here are some examples. The double head issue of Rhodesia from 1910. These are the high values in the set of stamps showing the King and Queen, but if you can see this word specimen printed vertically down the middle of each stamp. This is what we mean when we talk about distributions of UPU specimen stamps. High values from the reins of Edward the 7th rather than George the 5th. You can see the face values of these stamps, $500 straight settlements, 500 rupees, 1000 rupees. It should be stated that most of these very high value stamps were not issued for postal purposes rather they were for collecting taxes. These are very expensive stamps in collector markets even today and for many museums the only copies that they have of these very scarce stamps in their collection today are likely to be the UPU specimens that were distributed. Not all countries printed the word specimen on their stamps. Here are some examples. All of the stamps that I'm showing you in these slides now are from the National Postal Museum's collection. But Australia rather than over printing specimen or using that type of a mark to identify their stamps simply neatly canceled them with a date stamp of Melbourne. And here's an example of a display page of the type that you saw in the photo of visitors looking at the pullout frames again from the museum's collection entirely composed of UPU specimen stamps. It was not just Britain and its colonies that over printed or identified its UPU specimen stamps. Here's an example from Mexico, the special stamp that was issued for the Amelia Earhart's Goodwill flight to Mexico City in 1935. And the small word muestra here on the left indicating that this is one of the stamps distributed in the UPU distributions. And we still use these stamps in our exhibitions today. This is the current exhibition in the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery at the National Postal Museum. And here are the specimen stamps on the wall. And you can see them perhaps here on the screen of this digital interactive and displayed next to Earhart's flight suit. The first air mail issue of China 1921 the UPU specimen over prints are still on display in the museum's galleries today. Some countries there's evidence in the collections that when UPU distribution started in in the 1870s, some countries actually went back and reprinted their earlier stamps. This is a stamp of New South Wales issued in 1861, but it's mentioned in the UPU distribution circulars and over printed here with the specimen overprint indicating that New South Wales, at least, went back and reprinted their older stamps in order to make sure that all the member nations had a complete set. The colony of Netherlands Antilles Curacao during World War One when supplies of stamps ran low they resorted to bisecting their stamps for use on mail cutting the collector term for cutting stamps in half to use them on mail and amazingly they were also distributed through the International Bureau through the UPU in this condition and they remain in the Smithsonian's archives today. As you see them here on the screen strip of three stamps each one very neatly cut in half. In some cases, a nation included a stamp in its UPU distributions that it then either never issued or changed the design or color of the stamp when it was finally issued to the public. And so in some cases color varieties and any otherwise unissued stamps exist in these archives that are not known at all outside of institutional collections. It's the case with the first issue of the Finland Republic shown here in unissued values and colors that were never released to the public but they were in the UPU collection. St Helena 1903 distributed via the UPU in all red as you see here at the upper left but when it was finally issued to the public it was a by color issue. Same thing with the straight settlements distributed printed in red via the UPU but when it actually went on sale at post offices, it was printed in ultramarine. The six pence issue for the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. Commemorating the anniversary of that event was withdrawn at the last moment largely because of political and racial tensions in Jamaica at the time and replaced with a totally different stamp. As you see here at the lower right so the only surviving examples of the unissued stamp in are the UPU over prints. This is an example of the circulars that accompanied the distribution of these stamps and I chose this one because it traces the chain if you will. Here's the upper left hand corner the corner card or the header of the International Bureau and the Universal Postal Union with the protocol number of this bulletin. Here's the stamp indicating the date 19 January 1912 the stamp indicating that it was received by the post office department in February of 1912. And then these magenta markings accession the black number five five zero zero zero zero nine and these the registrar stamp here are indications then of transfer to the Smithsonian Institution. So you can see the chain of custody. So that's just a quick look at the UPU specimen stamps and how they came to form the basis of a number of the world's postal museums. And my contact information I'd very much like to hear from anyone who knows of official archives other than the ones that I've seen and reported on here. And I encourage hearing from you after the conclusion of the conference, but also during the questions and answer period. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much Daniel for that and I would like to call Jose to introduce the next speaker. Merci beaucoup Christian. Moving now to the history of envelope from the history of stamps and the history of envelope so Sebastian Riches is going to is a specialist of French post history but now he's going to talk to us about the history of the envelope. So the floor is yours, Sebastian. Thank you, Jose. For your very enthusiastic welcome. Welcome. So colleagues, the economic crisis of 2008 followed by the confinement of 2020 have accelerated the trend towards the increasing scarcity of mail, which began with the democratization of the internet for business mail had become a financial burden that had to be reduced and for all others and obsolete means of exchanging information as mail disappeared so does another consubstantial almost anonymous object they meet the envelope which had celebrated its by century, a short while ago. As we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century it seemed appropriate to explore a part of the history of this paper use stencil or tool, the new packaging for the written word through the prison of the UP which is celebrating its 150th anniversary. So my presentation will be three fold first I will try to draw up an anatomical genealogy of the envelope. And I would like to raise the issue of postal materiality in the discussion in this UN cynical that welcomes us today which began for example in standards for postal parcels established in the early 1880s with the so called international stamp. The point is the major chronological milestones of the program, which will enable me to outline this diplomacy of the object and the method use and then the standardization of the envelope within the more global mail standardization program so first brief anatomical genealogy. It should be noted that while the work is done on the history of the packaging of packaging in France the place of the envelope in the historiography is tiny the Anglo Saxon science identifies its origins in England the country that has led the way in a number of postal advances in history. The idea of a special postal envelope is attributed to an Englishman a bookseller and a stationary merchant living in Brighton by the name of Brewer in the early 1820s at the time it was a paper bag in the shape of a lozenge. So, with the corners curved into triangular flaps converging towards a common center to seal the envelope but the flaps were closed with a wax seal. The first third of the 20th century saw a host of patents relating to the envelope registered in several countries in the Western world they concerned the closing and opening of envelopes protection of the letter and practicality of use. Leading to the so called a rational envelope model in 1929 the UPS journal union postal called for its distribution throughout the world this was a rectangular it was in a rectangular format paper bag already existing in the form of a paper sachet which no longer required the letter to be stuffed inside but simply to be sit folding in half through a slit on the narrower side then closed by moistening and pressing the edge no seams on the reverse to prompt the sender to stick the stamp there to seal it. And this is important because it simplifies checks. So, while this rational envelope is a tool for improving productivity in office administration since it facilitates dispatch and mechanization it is not quite the answer to the major challenge facing the post offices in major countries. Because after 1945 they saw a period of transition in the 1960s between the former dominant period of manual mail sorting at a rate of 1500 to 2000 letters per hour for the better post masters. And the hope for future period of mechanically sorting 20,000 items an hour. And this method was still trying to find its first guiding principles at the crossroads of the two models the presence of envelopes of different sizes leads to an excess of operations that are detrimental to the streaming streamlining of mail processing the flow of which was growing by 6 to 12% a year in the west. So the whole square envelopes complicates stacking facing and cancelling operations. In addition, the sorting machines that were being developed were designed to handle items that fell within certain size limits so the items that were too small or too large were already rejected. And above all in a standardized post or format project this would not mean that the creation of a new special format but would require overall cooperation for certain formats or groups of formats whose width and length for individual items could not exceed certain limits. Now, we have clear a picture of the envelope and the tensions that engenders that took at the chronology and the methodology used to standardize it. The Ottawa Congress in 1957 that Masi Bahu Masu described as the Congress of Technology at the service of the post set up the Consultative Commission on Postal Studies, the CCEP, the forerunner of today's Postal Operations Council, and its board management. Together, these two interlocking bodies launched the project by making an informal assessment of the recommendations of the International Organization for Standardization, ISA, to which I will return. The report was discussed at three meetings in 1958 and 1959, which informed that the ISA was already working on the formats of administrative papers of businesses or state administrations and that the link with efficient postal envelopes would be desirable. And by setting up a technical working group called the AON, called the Standardization Letter Envelope Format, made up of the FRG, and the first meeting was in Eastburn in 1960 and resulted in two decisions, a framework for thinking about envelope limits based on two ideas, a width of between 90 and 120 millimeters and a length of between 150 and 230 millimeters. The length of the envelopes should never be less than the width multiplied by the square root of two. And also, secondly, the second decision was expressed, namely the wish for collaboration with ISA, recommending the establishment of a contact committee. So the first of its kind for the UPU, this technical collaboration was the revolution to bring to fruition a complex subject involving measurements, operations and crosscutting economic issues. On the union side, the four posts of the economic powers are initially in charge of this rapprochement. French connections in this body facilitated rapid implementation. Paris hosted the first meeting of the contact committee in 1960. It was chaired by Marcel Foucon, Director General of the Post Office, who welcomed Henri Saint Léger, Secretary General of the ISA. The ISA had already set up in Paris a standardization group called the TC6 paper, standardization group dedicated to office paper. At the time, ISA, based in Geneva, was a young and small organization created in 1946 with 44 member countries. That consisted of many of rich countries that were already technologically advanced. In awe, the contact committee met three times between 1961 and 62, as did the ISA technical subcommittee TC6C6 paper, in which UPU members now participated in parallel. It drafted the principles for the 1964 Vienna Congress, the key moment in the development of the program. First of all, the debates at Congress reflected the new porosity established between the UPU and ISA in a technical meetings, where each party contributed its own point of view and methods for the UPU, a practical and endogenous method, which feeds the debate with the results of questionnaires and two member posts for the ISA theoretical and exogenous, which wants to link the subject of the wider issue of paper in the growing administrative and tertiary sector. And then among the first striking trends, there are the first the abandonment of the idea of a single standardized postal format, which had initially been hoped for, and at the end of square formats and then the initiative to up for recommended preferred formats to member posts. However, this rapprochement between the UPU, the elephant and the mouse was not without its problems. The main one rose between 1962 and 1963 when ISO expressed regret that the new minimum format recommended by the UPU was not the one it recommended. And above all, in Vienna, Finland tabled an amendment in 1964 at the start of Congress, its argument was consideration for the paper ecosystem, which would take a dim view of the obligation to modify its paper making machines and France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland all supported the Scandinavian approach. Germany and the UK were opposed. The United States remained on the sidelines, even though it initially advocated less restrictive sizes, although the Finnish amendment was initially rejected. In the C6 that was finally preceded by proposal 1394 approved in a modified and not immediately binding form. So it was finally at the Tokyo Congress in 1969 that the new common standards for envelopes was made official. So the deadline was set for the 1st of October 1973, extending the transitional period instead of the original date of 1st of October 1972, before the obligations were imposed on all members which were reviewed one last time in 74 at the Lausanne Congress. However, there were exceptions for business cards and other mignonette as they were called greeting cards in exceptionally small format. And then this Tokyo Congress was opened by its chairman Katzumi Soyama, marked the irrevocable technological inflection or postal issues with a universal dimension. And that quote, the post office cannot stand aside from progress despite flourishing the flourishing of telephone and telegraph radio and television. It is and will remain the most practical means of communication, the one most within everyone's reach they must therefore be developed at an accelerated pace and on a large scale with you to generate In Tokyo, with regards to postal technologies, six meeting before the Congress that was held in Geneva in 72. And on that occasion, other matters were dealt with in working groups, leading to massive mechanization and automation. So for instance, with regards to the position of the address of the, of the, the sender, the sorting of letters, standardization of typewriter characters, damage and the positioning of window envelopes, etc. So the discussions were held with countries that were all involved in the mechanization of post sorting. And then in Tokyo, there were two new interlocutors with a direct interest in mail standardization that made themselves known, the International Chamber of Commerce and the second one, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe created in 1947 as a forum for pan-European cooperation, which was particularly interested in seeing how the mail standardization program fit into East-West development relations. So in conclusion, and I'm sorry I will go over the last minutes that I'm, that I still have. So yesterday's panel was very interesting, but my, I've used mainly printed archives found here at the UPU from the technical committee of the contact committee, and on several occasions I contacted ISO that emphasized that it didn't have any archives or documents on this huge program to standardize the mail, which I find very suspect. I must admit. And then we also need to identify a general scope as it relates to the fields of history through the prism. Of the study of these globalizing objects. It seems that the standardization of envelopes in the mail object during the 1960s and 1970s, 70s had the same impact as the harmonization of the standardization gauge of rails in Europe. It was introduced in 1922 under the ages of the International Union of Railways. It was intended to ensure the continuity of transcontinental convoys. This meant that the vehicle for trade, be it a written package or other, could be received everywhere by domestic network so that it could continue as transit as quickly as possible. I'd also like, I can also see three particular short term implications linked to the mail ecosystem. The first is the confirmation for a postal object other than the parcel of the stamp that the conduct of this global mail standardization program. It had underpinned the institution's capacity for consensus overcoming initial disagreements through a good natured multilateralism that does not co-hers, but suggests and guides within the framework of long timeframes in order to achieve convergence. This second identifies the work on envelopes as the cornerstone of the mail standardization program. It was in this way during the 1970s that the main developed countries that the postal industrial era came to fruition. For instance, in France, the best, the first automatic mail sorting center opened in 73. This brings us back to the origins of the UPU and its first founding project standardization of the envelope and the standardization of mail constitute a sort of completion of the three international transit of mail to which the member states were formerly subject. And which is now made even easier by the convergence of mail formats and the formulae. Finally, this also reflects a new era for the UPU, which is convinced of the need for an external collaboration with other technical and supranational organizations that had not been considered postal operators. The ISO UPU relationship with regard to the format of envelope was to prove conducive to a continuation along the same lines, followed by an extension to other postal and peri-posal subjects such as the definition of the standard for the alphabetical and numerical codes of country names in which the UPU was to participate. Thank you for your attention. Thank you so much, Sebastien. And also for keeping time. We move now from the big where we started, which was with the stamps of the late 1800s, early 1900s. We, we moved through the innovations and standardizations of the envelope in the middle of the 20th century. And we now move to the 1980s and a time when it became clear that a digital substitution was underway. This was the decade for the our younger audience up here. That was the decade when the personal computer came about started entering the workplace first and also slowly private homes. It was the decade when the first mobile phones came on to the market. It was still rare. Very few people had them, but you had one. They were quite big as well. We have to say, yeah, we call them mobile, but it was more like a big box. And it was also the time when I think it became clear there was a telefax who can remember the telefax. This was quite something. So it became clear that there were new ways of communicating. And the big question was, of course, how would this affect the postal industry, the postal sector. And so it's a pleasure to welcome our third speaker, Dr. Christian Franke from the University of Segen in Germany. He is joining us online. And he will talk about the early response of UPU members to electronic messaging systems. So Christian, are you with us? Yes, I am. Can you see and hear me? We can see and hear you. Perfect. So I start with sharing my screen. So where is it? Where is it? Wait a minute. I don't see my presentation. It worked perfectly at the test. Okay, so you see my presentation? Okay, can you see? So we see your slides, yes. Okay, perfect. Okay, so let me take the opportunity to thank the organizers for having invited me to this very interesting conference, which I think I'm one of the last ones to speak. And it was a pleasure to join, even though it was only online. And I apologize for only having been able to take part in this conference online, but we had a family emergency. And so I had to stay at home. And currently I'm in parallel presenting and taking care of my children. So if you hear a children's voice in the next 50 minutes, just ignore it. Okay, so my topic is nothing can replace the post electronic mail at the UPU in the 1980s. Nothing can replace the post the UPU demonstrated with that motto at the Universal Postal Congress in Hamburg in 1984, that it positively approached the future, even in the 110th year of its existence. Its members did not expect electronic mail services to compete seriously with traditional letter mail in the foreseeable future. My presentation today takes a closer look at the UPU's attitude towards electronic mail. So around from the 1970s to the 1990s. Questions are why, when and how did UPU and their member administration respond to electronic mail? How do the UPU's reaction to electronic mail fit into the long lines of trans-border postal services? It's important right from the beginning to underline that the UPU's Consultative Committee for Postal Services, or in short CCPS, was originally not responsible to standardize electronic modes of communication. This was done within the Consultative Committee for Telegraph and Telepro CCITT, which was part of the International Telecommunication Union ITU. Electronic mail services at that time were a very different character. They actually had a long history, as the Telegraph or the Telex already transmitted written messages electrically since the 19th century. But characteristic for these older systems were low transmission capacity and a low demand. In the 1970s and 1980s, these conditions changed fundamentally. For postal administrations, electronic mail was a service where written messages were transmitted electronically, as you can see in the slide, and then printed out, enveloped and delivered physically. Because of that combination of electronic and physical components, they were also called hybrid systems. 1977 must be seen as a milestone in the development of electronic mail systems as the CCITT started to issue recommendations for the transmission of typewritten texts via digital tech networks. The postal administrations recognized that the digitization of telecommunication, the increased use of data networks, and computer communication would sooner or later raise the question of electronic mail. They asked themselves how to react to these new modes of information transformation. The German Bundespost, for example, carefully analyzed the market situation and concluded in 1977, and here I quote, In the Federal Republic, no concrete demand for electronic mail is perceptible. Just a few years later, a few postal administrations set up national pilot projects for hybrid mail systems like the Swedish post-fac system or the German telebrief. These pilot projects in the early 1980s, however, confirmed the administration's reservation. In 1982, for example, the German telebrief delivered 29,976 mails or 70,000 pages altogether in the domestic service, compared with 36 million letters that were delivered in Germany every day. So in the mid-1970s, postal administrations in Europe mostly had such an effective distribution system that delivery was in 24 hours was almost guaranteed. It was only international electronic mail services over very long distances that promised significant time savings compared to letter post, and generated a demand which allowed a cost-covering service. In 1980, Intel Post became the first such service between the USA, Canada, Great Britain and the Netherlands to deliver high-quality reproductions of documents, pen and ink drawings or diagrams up to a full size, facing the actual economic importance of electronic mail services. The members of the UPU, by majority, reframed from an in-depth study of electronic mail systems. They preferred to discuss intra-system improvements like the automatization of letter sorting systems instead. The World Postal Congress in 1979 nevertheless instructed the CCPS, and here I quote, to draw attention to the need for postal services to follow closely the development of different forms of electronic mail. At its next meeting, the CCPS decided to carry out Study 503 on electronic mail and other advanced message systems. This German led Study 503 started its work by drawing up and distributing a questionnaire to the administrations to find out which types of electronic mail services were operated or planned by the national administrations. Aspects such as definitions, legal basis, transmission technology, posting, delivery, service organization, billing systems and charges were queried. A first summarizing report was then issued in autumn 1981. Three years later, at the World Postal Congress in Hamburg in 1984, the German Bundespost then recommended the introduction of the International Electronic Letter Service, although the legal status of this new service was still completely unclear. Besides some initial discussion and recommendations, electronic mail services were at best a marginal issue at the World Postal Congress. Instead, postal actors had learned from the long development since the 19th century that the different innovations in telecommunication, like the telegraph, the telephone, or the telex, never seriously challenged letter mail. The ITU's Standardization Committee, the CCITT however, had already taken a first step in the direction of the UPU's International Bureau. UPU responded with exploring the institutional basis for cooperation. This took more than two years until the first preliminary meeting between UPU and ITU took place in November 1981. Both organizations agreed on much closer cooperation, although this had to be clarified in lengthy institutional coordination processes. Five years after the UPU had begun to discuss cooperation with ITU, a first official meeting took place in September 1984. Besides some loose or informal contacts, hardly any intense cooperation between both organizations had taken place before. Already a year before the UPU initiated the study 503, a working group of postal administrations, the so-called Paris Group, had been formed outside UPU. Its members met annually at electronic mail conferences to discuss developments. A technical committee and a committee for marketing and operations were set up to annually issue reports and recommendations for further action. A major problem was privacy of correspondence in hybrid mail systems, enveloping in the post offices as per protection of data privacy and quality of transmission. The Paris Group's members, which mostly already operated some kind of electronic mail service, carried out an important task, even though their work was largely ignored by UPU. The group in-depth studied electronic mail services at a time when the UPU just began to compile its questionnaires. The Paris Group was the actual source for the revision of the CCITT recommendation F170. It drafted the first guidelines for the selection of facsimile equipment for direct communication via public telephone networks. And it brought about concrete agreements for international services. For example, a common vocabulary, common basis of calculation, and a corporate identity of the inter-post system. The Paris Group, however, had little direct influence and standardization of technical components of electronic mail services. The only way it was allowed to contact CCITT's bodies was through national telecommunication administrations. So, although the Paris Group was much more advanced in the 1980s than the UPU in terms of expertise, it was nevertheless bound by institutional constraints while the UPU and the ITU already negotiated the cooperation. The years 1984 to 1986 can be regarded as a kind of critical juncture because technologies had developed rapidly while the majority of postal administrations and the UPU still reacted hesitantly. Between 1980 and 1984, technical advances in areas like closed data networks, in companies, data transmission via fax or personal computers were numerous. One important aspect was the standardization of the integrated services digital network ISDN, which promised digital data transmission between terminal equipment in companies and private holds by making use of the public telephone network. Here, for the first time, a structural change in the markets for mail transmission was looming, particularly in the IT sector. It was expected that through the use of electronic office machines like computer, an ever-increasing amount of mail would already be digital in its origin, and so the question of direct digital transmission would inevitably arise. Technical research played an increasingly important role at that time, within the CCITT it was regretted that the postal administrations on several occasions did not have a co-ordinated UPU attitude. A step in that direction was taken in May 1986, when the CCITT CCPS contact committee took up its work, again with a delay of nearly two years. CCPS now even set up a permanent study group to monitor the work carried out jointly by CCITT and to merge the positions of the postal administrations into reports to be submitted to the CCITT on behalf of UPU. This group made the UPU the central institution on the postal site and devaluated the Paris group. Nevertheless, it had to rely on the work carried out in the Paris group to fulfill its tasks. In spring 1987, UPU was only able to make a contribution to the ongoing standardization processes within CCITT because it forwarded studies that were prepared by the Paris group's technical committee. These dealt with details on the design of service elements like modes of delivery, physical forwarding, undeliverable mail, addressing and the interworking between electronic components and physical delivery. These proposals were adopted as components of various drafts for new CCITT recommendations. Nevertheless, the postal administrations were in a position to give input for CCITT standards only in some marginal, non-technical aspects. The Swedish administration therefore voted for continued corporations and the Paris group and argued that the UPU in the 1980s was not organized in such a way that it could effectively counter new competitors of technical innovations. And here I quote, the UPU has far too long a work cycle, usually five to seven years from the creation of an idea to its realization. For this reason, the development of new services is already taking place outside the World Organization. The German Minister for Postal Services, Christian Schwarzschilling, shared this opinion and warned the UPU that, I quote, the post should not become the monopolist for snow mail. The study group 503 continued its work unimpressed by such criticism and consideration. According to its traditional procedures, the SGT 503 instead prepared a colloquium for all its members in October 1988 to discuss future strategies and developments without liability. Again, the group compiled an extensive survey of the range of electronic mail services offered by its members. The majority of UPU members saw no particular urgency because according to the pure figures, postal electronic mails did not yet have any remarkable influence on communication markets. UPU members could in the long run imagine that one day it might be possible to reach anyone worldwide via fast communication channels. However, they expected that it would take at least 15 to 20 years until electronic mail services would be able to gain significant market shares. The spread of networked computers into private households and the widespread availability of systems like the email was unimaginable for postal administrations at that time. Although the World Postal Congress in 1989 passed without further action by the UPU, however, at that period the basic standards for digital networks and electronic mail services which had a fundamental impact on postal services in the long run were largely agreed without any recognisable involvement of the UPU. Up to the World Postal Congress in Seoul in 1994. Similar discussions were held on the operation of electronic mail services and model agreements for bilateral contracts were negotiated. This time, however, the breakthrough of the email could no longer be denied. And here I quote, a significant development of electronic mail services took place where 70% of letter post items are computer generated. For the first time, the UPU now clearly stated that, and I quote, electronic mail services are strategically important to the post. Just 10 years after the very self-confident, nothing can replace the post at the World Postal Congress in Hamburg. Even the delegation from Pakistan underlined that we have to meet this challenge by innovation and by technical expedience. Let us come to an end and draw a conclusion. A number of partially interdependent reasons made the UPU and its members react reservedly towards electronic mail systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The combination of a missing financial incentive was the historically grown expectation that innovations within telecommunications, like the telegraph, the telephone or telex, never seriously impacted postal services was crucial. UPU and its members could hardly imagine that electronic mail services would be able to become a competitor for letter mail. As long as electronic mail services were negligible in quantitative terms, the UPU and its members were only involved in the implementation of such services to a limited extent. When then the development of ISDN and new electronic messaging options emerged at the UPU, the UPU had to react unexpectedly quickly to the ITU's offer of cooperation in the second half of the 1980s. It was forced to fall back on the Paris Group study work, although it had ignored the Paris Group for a long time. The study Group 503 devaluated the Paris Group through its ability to participate in the ITCC ITT, however, it was in the following unable to intervene similarly successful in the standardization of electronic mail. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the UPU could not have foreseen this change in the 1980s. Neither were expliers experts in computers and digital networks, nor did the long-term experience with the new forms of electronic communication suggest the kind of change in communication routines that gradually occurred with the spread of email and internet. Many thanks for your attention. Thank you very much. And thank you to all our three speakers also for keeping time so beautifully, which leaves us more than ample time for questions and comments from the room, including the gallery. If you wish to ask a question or give a comment, please raise your hands and we have a first speaker down here. Don't forget to turn on your microphone and speak into that. Yes, hi Richard John, Columbia University in New York City, United States. I have a comment and then a question. The comment is now we've come to the present. And we're looking back on the history of the envelope and we're looking back on the history of materiality of the mail. The letter is not going to be as important in the future as it was in the past, especially the distant past. And it may be that that heightens our understanding or our awareness of its enormous significance as an artifact for among other things the crafting of historical narratives, biography, administrative history. Postal monopoly is very important to the conception of the UPU yet in the most competitive markets today, at least from a US perspective, parcel delivery. There's a lot of deals being cut between the post office and the delivery carriers, but it's a competitive market whereas the UPU was organized around national monopolies. And that raises the question for what is the rationale for a national postal network government owned or operated in the 21st century, where so much communication is going via platforms that. Well, they're not coordinated by the UPU as we heard from the last presentation, and it's not even clear about the extent to which they are government owned and operated. So, can the current moment has light on the distinctiveness and the enormous significance of the posted letter as an artifact raise questions about monopoly. And just finally, as a parochial US observation. The postal service was enormously important in the 2020 US presidential election. Because we're in the midst of a pandemic and awful lot of ballots were mailing which became controversial, which was in keeping with the mandate of the institution in the 18th century but not suggested. I mean, not it was not something that would have been anticipated. So can we talk about the contemporary significance of the post, given the challenge of electronics, perhaps, how does the current environment should light on the enormous significance of say posted letter, even those wonderful, wonderful specimen stamps. Do you have a favorite person to respond or I'd like, I'd like Frankie and Sebastian, and then I'd really like to hear Daniel Piazza on the significance of a postage stamps I wasn't able to attend the philatelic session, but those specimens were just so startling three speakers. Okay, excellent. And in reverse order you are so Christian Frank, would you like to have an attempt at answering online. Okay, you still understand me. Yeah, okay. A complex question which, which lights this, that's the password on the present or the present on the past. I think one important point is that that letter mail is a kind of fallback option in situations like like pandemics or in situations where where electronic communications are what will there are currently we will know if in the international arena we see that that electronic communication is in a in a very competitive situations we have we have the brick states we have China we have Russia, which all do their own Internet their own communication channels. So, I think having the having the letter mail in the background is is is a backup with regard to what is what is facing us in the in the near future. Okay, great. Sebastian, would you like to say a few words. This is a very vast subject but looking at it from a French perspective. The public principles of the post were built on the third in the third Republic to build a notion of citizenship. You can add to this the concept of a market for parcel post post was a vehicle for that and then there were financial there are financial services. I think that this is a moving history throughout the 20th century and evolving history, the post office in France had to rethink its public usefulness for citizens and citizenship, which has now become dematerialized while convincing that it has strengthened major, it's major competitive services. I very much like Mr Frank's talk on electronic mail. The French post office has invented a public service electronic mail in 1982. And realized that individuals had no use for it but that businesses would quickly appreciate this means of delivering publicity and management documents on management matters. So, I learned that the UPU was very reserved with respect to the usefulness of electronic mail. Let me ask Pascal Grise. Did the French post office, which was part of the posts and telecommunications at the time. Did that help the French post postal service to wake up more earlier. Has the French postal service realized that mail volumes were going to decline since the 80s. It was no surprise from what I've been able to see in the French archives. Thank you very much and perhaps Daniel would you like to. Are you still with us Daniel. I am. Yes. Excellent. Do you have anything to add. Yes. Hello Richard. Good to see you. I mean it's an interesting, it's an interesting question. You know we regard stamps as artifacts and ask the question then in an age in which their ubiquitousness is sort of passing away or diminishing. And how do we find new significance and distinctiveness about them. I think in in academics. I mentioned one of the roles of the UPU specimen stamps was kind of legitimizing the field of philately as something that was collected and exhibited by national museums. I think in the what we've seen over the last 30 or 40 years as academics finding a lot of new meaning and significance in old and new postage stamps by looking at the iconography and the semiotics of these stamps in a in a in a critical way. I think for postal operators that is the people who actually design and issue these stamps in most cases. They will carry a lot of potential for political and public service type messaging that you know a number of countries have used it's very disconcerting seeing myself on a giant screen. But you know, they've I think they still continue to issue stamps and will continue to issue stamps because it has that potential. So in the for a lot of places, especially emerging nations developing nations. I think they still provide a function a role both for the producer and the user in terms of construction and imagination of national identity symbolisms and and and those sorts of things. So the they because stamps continued to be issued in huge numbers if the use if the use is not primarily postal and we take as it as a granted that there's a collector market. Yes, what beyond that. I think those three things are are are sort of new relevancies or discoveries that people are making by through appraisals, you know, academic appraisal of stamps. Thank you very much and Jose, you have something to add just answer. I think it's on. I don't know. Yes, just a word about the monopoly and the UPU. There are many countries in the world, especially EU countries that liberalized their male markets long ago. That has not reduced the relevance of the UPU as an organization. Postal services are collaborating even more. The end of monopolies may even have increased the need for cooperation between postal services. I don't think there's a strict. And if there's a strict correlation between monopolies and needs the need to cooperate, it's just the framework that changes the type of collaboration that evolves and which today is an invitation. And today there's an invitation for wider players to come into the circle. Something myself actually I'm standing here reflecting on on this question and I think it's a very interesting question. What I take from it is how the present illuminates the past in a sense and how, you know, what reflections can we have one reflection that has come out of all of these sessions in this conference has been the problem of actually sourcing data sourcing historical data. We had some examples in in our, our presentations here in this session specimens that were destroyed the international standards organization that can no longer locate any meeting minutes or whatever documentation artifacts to actually illuminate our understanding of you know what what happened in these discussions. And interestingly, these were, these were discussions taking place in the up in ISO and other organizations that were fairly open organizations organizations based really around diplomacy based around open discussions of things like standards and how do we operate and so on. It seems to me that this point if we already have a problem, you know, approaching our sort of not too distant history with these organizations and identifying artifacts. What will the future look like. What's it going to look like in 2030 50 years when historians want to understand decisions around communication that take place today. And one of the big problems that I see is that I would say there's been some discussion about the monopoly or the role of government in communication. I think it would be wrong to assume that government governments don't play any role in communication today. Yes, some of the actors maybe private actors Google and so on meta and all of these big organizations that we know of but behind the scenes we also are perfectly aware that government agencies are actually doing a lot. However, these are hidden government agencies. And, and I would worry that in the future, future historians are going to have a very tough time knowing exactly, you know, who was talking to who what organizations were involved in which ways. And, and, and, yeah, Richard you want to do quick follow ups. There's a good literature now on early modern economic development East India company, the company state. We're challenging the idea of the public private government versus corporation. It's not clear to me that Google or Facebook are private. They're doing the things some of the things that governments have been doing so that I think we need to get beyond that binary, because I think that's going to confuse us and that's going to open up possibility for example, why not go back to turn in taxes. Why do we start with the national monopoly post offices which has been an implicit assumption in our discussion. And second history is not the past. And so much of history at least in the parts of the world I'm familiar with in the early modern period on is organized around posted letters. It is just such an enormously basic fact about archives, biography comes out of posted letter diplomatic history comes out of posted letter. It's such a fundamental existential reality. And we're now in a world in which the posted letter as we understood it is no longer as central as it was even in the 1980s. And I just think this may be a way to to think about say the Republic of letters and the up you how enormously important that was when religious confessions made it impossible for say young people or even Descartes or other scientists to communicate across boundaries. They could do it through mail, communicated different ways. I just think this raises questions, because of the wonderful final presentations on how different the world is today which I think we all recognize about what was it that's so essential about not only letter mail but the posted letter as an artifact. That's really what I'm trying to get the attention on. Yeah, and that's a great. Thank you. Are there any other comments or questions. We do have. Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much to introduce myself. I'm the chair of the consultative committee, the new consultative committee and not the old consultative committee that was several times on the screen. So I'm representing the wider postal sector players. One question to the gentleman from the Smithsonian. We heard all about these beautiful stamps stamps duties and so on but parallel to some of those specific specific sense. The very technology driven development spearheaded by the US. That was the invention of franking meters. So the first targeted destruction of stamps. And so that was the first introduction and of course parallel to that development in the US in Europe. It was a company with exactly the same idea. They were not linked to each other. It was Frank retired to Stalin. And that had a tremendous effect, not only on stamp production but on the whole technology. First step into what we have seen in emerging technologies. How was that organized. There were of course then national standards to start with and that evolved to global standards, I guess. And in the end, the franking meters disappeared. And there was something new coming like electronic postmarks. Again, the US had a leading role there. To my understanding the United States Postal Service was the first postal service ever to allow remote printing of postage marks. I would be very interested if Daniel could could look into that or if he has some ideas about that. Thank you. Daniel. Yeah, just, I mean, a few sort of random thoughts and responses. I think some of the earliest examples of meters and meter impressions that we have in the Smithsonian collection anyway are from Norway and Sweden. Maybe at about the same time or possibly even a little bit earlier than the United States. So one of these things that sort of sprang up in multiple places at about the same time. To your question about how they were standardized and organized. Yes, it was in the beginning. It was very hyper local. I mean, if you had, if you, I mean, you had to apply for permission to have one of these meter machines. Once you had permission to have one of these meter machines, you actually had to bring it into the post office to have the postage value added to pay $100 $500 and that would actually have to be added on to the machine. Mechanically at the post office, you periodically had to bring the machine in for inspection. And this is all in the United States, which is the context course that I'm the most familiar with. And the ability to add value and postage to the meter machines remotely probably doesn't come around until the 1990s in the United States anyway. Yeah, I imagine that the trajectory is the same in most other countries, even if the dates are are slightly different. But, but for the first 50 or 60 years, I mean they were those meters were under the jurisdiction, not just of the post office department, but the local post office and you actually had to physically bring the meter into the post office at regular intervals. Thank you for that interesting reminder of both of you of some of the other technologies that have actually played a role here. Excellent. I think I would suggest that we stop this session here and that's before we we welcome. Muriel Leroux and Leonard Labori, our chief scientists of this of this entire conference who will give a little conclusion to the event. Before that, I would suggest we give a round of applause to our speakers. Thank you very much. We are not going to come to the conclusion of this symposium. The children from the neighboring school have been very quiet, very attentive. Some of the things were probably difficult for you to understand, but I saw some of you taking notes. So I don't know whether the teachers have all seen an examination after this morning's presentations but congratulations to the children for having been so attentive. Some of our topics are that somewhat austere and complex technically speaking. I don't know whether the teachers would like to stay. You could leave the room if you wish. If you wish to. So we're not going to come to the scientific conclusion. So we have two speakers and two friends and colleagues from CNRS. We will provide these scientific conclusions who are going to summarize what was done over the last couple of days. Tell us what conclusions they have drawn. And then we will have a few words by Marianne Oswald, Deputy Director General of the UPU International Bureau. President of the Council of Administration and also President of the Post of Côte d'Ivoire. Thank you very much for being here this morning with us. So I'm going to give the floor now to our two colleagues, Muriel and Léonard. And then Mr Oswald will say a few words of conclusion. Before giving them the floor, I would like to say that all of the participants are invited to join the photo session outside this room after the closing speeches in front of the glass windows. We'll have group photo over there. And the photos of the historians are colloquium will be available on our website. We've also recorded everything that was said. The acts are going to be published shortly. We will contact of course all of the speakers to get their green light. So I'll give you the floor now for your concluding remarks, Muriel and Léonard. So we have some ladies and gentlemen, dear friends to the end of this historians colloquium, achieving a single personal territory of global promise past and present. Whether you're a practitioner or an academic, well you know that such colloquia and conferences consist of two parts. There is the part in the room, what is said in plenary, and then there is the part outside of the room during the coffee breaks. And we are going to share the work. I'm going to draw some conclusions regarding what was said in this room. And then Muriel will tell us what happened outside of this room during the coffee breaks behind the scenes. Well, what could I say as a conclusion? I would say that for my part, I would say that there are six points that stand out. Milestones, questions. The first point might make you smile. It's somewhat anecdotal. It's the tram accident yesterday morning that meant that we were deprived of a coffee break. And this accident reminds me of another accident that took place in 1874. The data that has been mentioned so many times over the last couple of days. Well, a train accident at the time prevented the French delegation from arriving and burn. Two French postdelegates were injured and had to return to France, which means that it was necessary to modify the French delegation at the very last moment. So much for that anecdote. And this brings to mind two ideas. First of all, what is the Universal Postal Union? It is the grouping of meeting of men and women who come together to talk about a certain number of issues in much the same way as we've come from the various parts of the world to speak to each other in this type of event. Some accidents may occur technical and other. So when we try and have an overview of the history of an organization such as UPU, it is necessary to take into account those material conditions, technical conditions, often IT conditions. And I have in mind the work done by our colleagues, simultaneous interpreters. So this has an impact on the way the exchanges take place. We haven't really talked about this technical aspect of cooperation, which is part and parcel of the topic. The other idea that comes to mind is that there is a very strong link between the post and transport. Postal services are used of various transportation means, railroads, planes, boats. And these trains, boats and planes may not have evolved, taken off so quickly in the case of the planes, if it had not been by the post. The sectoral poster provided tremendous backing to these various forms of transportation that made it possible to transport mail by air, by sea, by rail. So the postal sector there played a very important role in terms of backing these various industries and enabling them to take off. That was my first point. The second point now. Why have we come together over the last couple of days? Well, we're celebrating 150 years of the formulation of a pledge or of a promise. So 150 years, there is no doubt the 9th of October, 1874, that is not under discussion. Which is not always the case in other international organizations. Last year, WMO celebrated its 150th anniversary too. But we should remember that it was necessary to have a resolution in 1967 to set the official date of birth of that organization. There are various dates that were bandied about. And as regards the very beginning, 1873, 1879, nobody was really sure. And so there was some discontinuity from the historical standpoint, including the change of status of WMA, which initially was non-governmental, the World Meteorological Organization, before becoming inter-governmental in 1950. Everything is much clearer with the UPU. There is only one date, 1874. And since that date, the organization has kept its status of inter-governmental organization. The date might have been different. The first congress was organized in 1873, France and Russia had said that they wouldn't participate in this organization. It was necessary to postpone the dates for a year. But since October 1874, the signatory countries and the members of the International Bureau have given life to this inter-governmental international organization, which has succeeded in adapting to a changing world. As regards the second part of my sentence, one single postal territory, a promise, a pledge. But this is why we have come together. This is why the post-operators came together in 1874. As regards the title of this historian, Coloquium, this is what we said, achieving a single postal territory, a global promise past and present. The French ambassador yesterday spoke about a dream necessary to keep this dream alive of a borderless communication. We can see a certain ideology in this promise of having one single postal territory and having a mail that can circulate freely across borders. This was called infrastructural globalism by a US historian. And here we're talking about an ideology where infrastructure, communication and transport in particular have to integrate the world. That the world has to be integrated, has to be united through these networks. So 1874 is certainly a revolution moving from an old postal regime to a new postal regime. I will not mention the names of each of the speakers over the last couple of days for a lack of time. But we saw very clearly that the classical narrative is moving from a chaotic former postal regime, an exchange of mail to a new rational regime, much better organized and stabilized. I would like to be somewhat disruptive this afternoon regarding this narrative and questioned the underlying ideology behind this pledge or this promise, whatever you may wish to call it. The main idea that I would like to introduce here is that there was certainly not one solution to achieve postal progress. In 1874, one solution was chosen, one way, one cause to follow, but others could have been easily chosen at the time. And was the situation that chaotic before 1874? I do believe that other work would be necessary to analyze what happened at the time. There was a first democratization of correspondence in the 18th century. This democratization could not have occurred if there had been such a chaotic situation. If it was not possible to have correspondence, mail correspondence over the borders. It was recalled that communities of researchers, of politicians, of religious leaders relied on the postal sector. Before 1874, so we need to revisit this idea that prior to 1874 it was chaos. There were transnational operators, thrown in Texas. Was that chaos? There were bilateral treaties that were signed between national postal services. And the world after 1874, was that the only possible world? Is there only one form of rationalization? Probably not. This reminds me of another change that has always been presented as obvious and the only possible solution, and that was the creation of national markets. Before the French Revolution, and after the French Revolution, there was a major change, which was the creation of the country as a market without any internal borders with no toll gates. We now know that the establishment of this national market was the result of vision, a representation of the world in which Homo economicus, the economic agent, had to be able to maximize his utility without constraint. This vision of the world and one of the papers show this clearly in speaking about the importance of colonial experience. This abstraction, which is the uniform national tariff and the other abstraction, that is the idea of a global postal network based on uniform rules, is the fruit of a representation of the world, which is the open playground for an economic player who has been freed, released from a number of obstacles. But behind these obstacles, these weights and measures variables, they may be these national postal systems, which are greatly variable, there were powers and interests at stake and at play. And things were very much influenced by this. I've got a few final points. The aim that we set ourselves was to gain a better understanding of the organization. I think we have achieved that to a certain extent through this symposium. We could continue thinking about the history of the UPU in pairs of things which I prefer to see as loops. We have the cooperation and competition hub or pair, the technical political binom or pair, the multilateral bilateral pair, the symbolic and material pair, the postal world and the rest of the world. We could think about the history of the organization with respect to these terms that are like two opposite poles. But I would prefer to see it, as I said, as a loop because these two terms are never predefined and they influence each other mutually. The cooperation and competition, for example, I know the time is short, but in actual fact, in the postal union, the very terms of cooperation and competition change their meaning, bilateral and multilateral, change meaning according to what's happening in the union. Our other aim was that we wanted to hostelize globalization, and I think we definitely achieved our aim there. We've seen how the opening of a post office, which seems to be quite trivial, resulted in the forced opening of a territory to world trade. Zanzibar, China, Brazil might be included in this group, Japan as well. So globalization, that is the intensification of trade, which was not always something that the parties involved wished for. Well, the post played an important role in that. We've also seen that the postal union has been a place of subversion of this informal imperialism, and we've discussed this at great length with variable results. Japan, the Ottoman Empire, China had great hopes when they joined the UPU and were disappointed for a number of years because their sovereignty was not necessarily recognized. We also wanted to transnationalize the history of national posts and stop talking about the history of the post as if it was bound inside the national boundaries. We understand that every morning, every evening these posts were important in households with their symbolism. They were associated with the idea of citizenship in many countries. But we must realize that they were built up through exchanges themselves, and this is the aim of transnationalizing national posts. The nation was built through exchanges, and the posts were one of the transnational vectors of this. It was a co-production. My final point is actually an appeal. I think this is going to feed in quite well to what Mural is going to say, that the UPU should continue to be a place where professional historians and historians working within postal operators, for postal operators, or in museums, we hope that the union can continue to be a place where this community can meet regularly. We realize now that we've organized this symposium that there are historians working for postal operators who have a historic, some of them have a historical mission, and who would like to further develop their knowledge for their employers. We know that there are museums working on this, and historians who can work on these subjects in and for museums. And independent historians and these three groups are working in parallel on this history, and we hope that the regular meetings of these groups can take place within the union. Thank you. Meryal, let me give you the floor. Ladies and gentlemen, attendees of the Congress, Director General, ladies and gentlemen, members of the Universal Postal Union, members of Post, Jean-Pierre Jean-Paul-Françoisville, Elisabeth Maçonné. On behalf of the historians and participants gathered here, I would like to extend a warm word of thanks for having hosted us here in Bern in these August halls, which as we now know, are celebrating their 150th anniversary. On behalf of the historians, I would like to thank the technical team of the UPU for their expertise. We tend to forget the people who are behind sitting behind the windows or in booths, but who have been very instrumental in ensuring the smooth running of this symposium. And I include the interpreters in this, the interpreters who have made it possible for we academics to work in exceptionally good conditions. I have to say that it's very rare that we are able to speak our native tongue in symposia. And Leonard and myself would like to be able to work with you again so that we can have such good conditions for our meetings. I would like to pay a special tribute to a number of persons amongst whom I must first mention, Sebastian Riches, who is sort of the reference point for our, the linchpin of our French delegation. We owe him a lot in the organization of the symposium, but also his enthusiasm and passion that have infected all of us, have been infectious to all of us. Sebastian sees everything as a potential field of research. As you heard him say this morning, he's passionate about envelopes, but he is also very good in other technical subjects. I can't thank everyone, but I would like to say a word about the scientific committee. Some of whom are still present in the room Eric Godelier and Pascal Grisé, among others, were constant companions who made it possible for Leonard Labori, the linchpin of the symposium to defend a thesis on European communications relations, a thesis that was vigorously supported by the Committee for the History of the Posts. And let me now mention a specific characteristic of the French post. First, we have a number of officials who feel it's important above and beyond museums and people in, to have people in other fields, transport and the universities to be work, to be collaborating. As Philippe Valced with the National Scientific Research Council, the CNRS, without this broad cooperation, this symposium would not have taken place. And when André Derigrand in 1995 expressed a wish to see the Committee for the History of the Posts to be reborn, no one sitting at the table would have put any money on us being able to organize the symposium here in Bern on the 150th anniversary of the Universal Postal Union. So why has the post and the UPU to a certain extent remained so rarely visible in the work of historians until the mid 1990s? Well, the history of the post is all everything and nothing. It's a history of communications of exchanges of territories. It can be a history of territories, communications and exchange. You can see it either way. We understand that when we talk about connections and when these connections are based on something which is so important as technology, the men and women who are behind these exchanges, various fields and types of approaches must be brought to bear. With constant support from a French company, a collection was established some years ago. It's the collection of work that is published by a Swiss publisher because the Peter Lang publishing house is located here in Switzerland. So when you want, as was our aim at the outset, to take a European approach before you have a transnational and global approach, it's important to start this way. Since 1995 work that has been carried out on the history of the post or posts, do we want to say the post as a singular, as a generic term, or should we start at grassroots level and use posts? I will leave that up to you and I will leave you to think about this question. Whatever the case may be, the Committee for the History of the Post has striven, strived with our Italian colleagues. And at this stage, I would like to remiss, thank Mr. Giuntini, who is a long standing friend of the Committee and also André Tissot, who's professor at the University of Neuchâtel and is an old traveling companion in our international approach to history of the art of the post. Bring us to think together today about the Universal Postal Union. Does it represent the post, its idea, its ideal, as Sebastian said, or does it represent posts with a national postal service in each country? It was very important for us that this symposium take place because in the mid 1990s, when we suggested to our students, our doctoral students, that they might delve into research about the post or the posts and the Universal Postal Union, I can tell you that Pascal Grise said, one of our students said, that's not fun, it's not sexy. Why would we want to work on a musty subject like the post? But it's because the post office is such a fixture in our landscape in our daily lives that we had to argue with young historians that it was important to take an interest in the organization. It's such a firm fixture in our societies that we tend to overlook it. We tend to think it's banal and unworthy of academic work. Of course, we were not the first ones to work on it. But I think the real question is an epistemological one. Why is the post or the posts, a transnational entity, the Union, the Universal Postal Union, has, why have so few academics been interested in it? Well, because it's difficult. It's difficult for many reasons. The first of which is, and we mentioned this yesterday, we even had a full panel on it, is to do with the archives, which are where the documents which we need to write up our work are found. Archives are not centralized. The UPU has its own archives. But for the Postal Union, they're also the delegates, the National Archives. How can we write the global history of a Universal Postal Union, which is in its very essence transnational, when in order to synthesize this knowledge, you need to, as Sabrina said, I think it was Sabrina, you have to visit 11 National Archives and 16 repositories. And that's a minimum. So this approach to history requires an approach that starts with the major organization. But it's also a work that is a long quest for everything that has to do with thinking about conservation correspondence. If you want to understand how the UPU works, you need to have access to all of the correspondence and forms of correspondence between the delegates and not just the nice postcard photos like the ones we received yesterday. So the history is difficult to tackle because it also means that you need to be multilingual if you're working on a transnational institution, you need to speak 234 or perhaps 100 languages. And so this history is a collective effort to establishing this history is a collective effort. I'm not saying that individual efforts are not needed and not important. As Leonin said, we have to tackle it from the top and from the bottom and it must be the mirror image of the organization. Only historians as a group can find answers to the questions that have been raised during these two days. So it is necessary to look at this from above to be able to understand the organization as a whole and as some colleagues indicated, including African colleagues, it is necessary to study very carefully the role played by the various actors. We are able to collect the testimonies of the people who would be prepared to hand over those testimonies. This requires also upstream their reflection by the UPU to be able to compile these testimonies and make them available publicly. So there is social usefulness in the work of historians who take an interest in the Universal Postal Union. And why do I say this? It is that if we make it known to the public at large and to historians, researchers, what is the modus operandi of this organization? What we want is for them to think about the relationship between an organization and the technical aspects that have been discussed. We need also to reflect on the relationship between the organization, technologies and economic systems and systems of exchange. And we're all convinced of the fact that we're talking about tools for exchange, tools for communication. How? Why? When? What were the impacts at different times of the organization's history? Why were such and such decisions taken at a given time that had an impact on the evolution of societies to which we belong? So sources are very important testimonies as well. All of this has to be preciously maintained and preserved. We also need to keep in mind that the many players who are active in the way this organization operates and who are also active in their various respective national companies and that provide support to this organization. I'm not thinking so much of the elite that has been mentioned several times. I'm thinking of women who play a very important role in the very functioning of the postal sector. Amongst the employees of the French postal sector we find a majority of women and they outweigh by far their male colleagues. And it would be interesting to know what the situation is in other post offices of other countries and also at UPU. What role do they play in the past when they took part in the postal congresses that were mentioned? And in the history of science, which is one of my passions, what about the invisible people, all of the technical staff that make it possible for such an organization to function? And I think in particular of the translators and interpreters as well as the people who draft texts to try and arrive at a common language. Who wrote what and when? How is it possible to draw up a treaty within the UPU with the translation problems? We're talking about the transposition of European law, international or domestic laws. And it would be interesting to know what the situation was within UPU. How were the decisions taken by UPU translated at the national level in the various member countries? What were the relationships between the various actors? I think you will have understood that we have a responsibility as historians to ask a number of questions. And we need to awaken our students to the importance of these matters. There are arduous questions that have to be examined, legal questions in particular that are often austere. Of course, we have these major treaties, but then there is the issue of transposition and adaptation in national laws. We heard presentations on the Arab world, on China, Japan, Brazil. And we realized listening to those presentations so that it was not obvious to have one single post office or to draw up the history of one single post office. The vision is much more complex than that. It is a wonderful puzzle with many pieces that have to be brought together. And for this reason, it is necessary to examine these various aspects that make up the history of UPU. Of course, after these two days, we need to ask the question of what exactly is UPU. We were told that it was a transnational or intergovernmental technical agency that was 150 years old, an agency part of the UN family, and as such did not involve itself in politics. Well, I disagree somewhat with that assumption or assertion. We're talking about a technical agency of the UN. For this reason, it's not surprising that UPU played a very important role in diplomatic discussions and in political realms. We are talking about the proper functioning of a democracy. How can you ensure a good transmission of information? How can you ensure the reciprocity of exchanges, be they political or private? And here I'm talking about correspondence or public with the press if we disagree with the very meaning of the reciprocity of exchanges. This is a major theme, a major pillar of a political theory as we see it in Europe as of the middle of the 19th century. So, where we're talking about a free trade or the free movement of goods and persons, I think it is useful to recall that the Universal Postal Union was at Benchmark a reference which has always been extremely useful for the international community. The respect for proper correspondence is incumbent upon states who have a certain responsibilities in this regard. There's the transport of letters and packages, parcels. This is something that is very important. We're talking about the transmission of goods and today the transmission of data following what was said in one of the presentations of this morning. We know as we meet in the neutral state which is Switzerland a democracy that it was not always obvious to be able to guarantee this reciprocity, this reliability, this efficiency and this respect for correspondence and the private sphere. So, what I'm really trying to say is that the history of the Universal Postal Union, which we have been looking into over the last couple of years, and I think that there are many more years of research that are necessary to examine all of this, is that this matter is political and it should remain the subject of academic research. And it is very different from other issues that we face, be they diplomatic, economic or social. Thank you for your attention. Dear children, but I realize they left. Distinguished speakers and participants, it is an honor for me and a privilege actually personally also to host you here in UPU. As we wrap up our rich discussion, I would like to thank you all, the speakers and contributors for their engagement and enthusiasm in putting a spotlight on the UPU Universal Postal Union in the academic world for the first time since the organization's foundation. Our speakers, a mix of historians, academics and philatelists have told us why and how the UPU, which was founded by 22 nations, grew to connect 192 member countries. Thank you all for dedicated efforts to study our organization's literature, share insights, foster exchange and contribute to building knowledge about our past in order to nurture our present and shape our future. We have also seen how the postal industry has not only adapted to change, but has also played a significant role in shaping the landscape over the course of a century and a half. In closing, I hope that acquiring academic understanding of the postal industry's history will guide us with a refreshed global promise to enable communication and empower peoples across nations. Allow me to express my sincere appreciation to our partners, friends LaPost, group and historical committee for the post, as well as the Cirice Laboratory for bringing laboratory for bringing together this truly exceptional event. I am also pleased to announce that the proceeding of this conference will be published in the form of a paper book, which I am convinced will be a landmark publication. My final words of thanks go to our UPU team for all their efforts in organizing this memorable occasion. You all know postal services have always contributed to better communication. And this is essential. Only communication can bring peace what we need today. Very much. I thank you all. I wish you all a safe travels on your journeys. Thank you very much.