 I'm introducing briefly myself, my name is Andrei Giuntini and I'm Italian. We had two very extremely interesting case studies today in our short session. The first relating to the history of the mail in China and the second referring to the equally important question, the African case of Zanzibar in practice. We will continue the analysis of the crucial question posed in the title of this session that you have in the slide. What role as we have also heard in previous interventions, in previous speeches, did the postal system and specifically the role of UPU play in the development of the colonial relationship emphasizing the geoeconomic and political aspects exactly as our colleagues did. I'm introducing two prominent scholars, Lane Harris and Furman University in South Carolina, USA and Camilla Avrias, University and Pantheon Sobon France. Good afternoon. I hope I can keep you awake after that wonderful lunch. I would like to start by thanking the director general and the organizers of the historic colloquium. I greatly appreciate being invited. So my presentation today is about China's entrance into international society and one of the prominent ways in which China first entered international society in the early 20th century was by joining the UPU in 1914. So a little later than some of our earlier cases, but there'll be a lot of similarities in the topics to the last panel. Primarily because it deals with China's relationship with so-called foreign post offices or what Chinese calls alien post offices. So as this particular panel addresses the question of informal empires and it is certainly an important one in 19th century China. And so just a very brief context. After the first opium war in 1839 to 42, China signed what became later known in the early 20th century as the first of the unequal treaties. These were perceived by Chinese to be infringements on its sovereignty. But as British, French, German, Italian, Japanese and other countries, imperialist powers began building up the structures of informal empire in China. It looks similar to the cases that we saw, for example, under the Ottomans, the capitulations, unequal treaties in Japan, settlements and concessions, extraterritoriality, pedagogical regime of international law. And so China would respond to that later in the 19th century and into the early 20th century. Primarily by perceiving that their entrance into international society required them to first and foremost present themselves as civilized, but of course as we all know, no standard was ever forthcoming to the nature of that particular civilization. So today I'd like to talk about some of the actual circumstances, some of the things that actually occurred as China entered that society and started to claim its sovereign rights over postal affairs, in that particular case. So the Chinese post office or was first known as the imperial post office was authorized by the Guangxu Emperor in 1896. But there was a very brief period in which Sir Robert Hart, a British civil servant who was employed by the Qing government. So he's a Qing government employee, was authorized to establish first a small postal service between customs houses in the largest cities of China. And in 1878, the Universal Postal Union extended an invitation for Hart and his five post offices to join the union, but he demurred saying that China could not accept those international obligations. When the Imperial Post Office was first founded in 1896, it was expressly as a semi-colonial institution. The highest level bureaucrats are all Europeans from a variety of different countries. But after Hart's retirement in 1908, all of the foreign staff who oversaw the Chinese post office at the highest levels would be French. So Théophile Pierre and Henri Picard d'Estalon are the two most prominent figures here. But the vast majority, 98% of all postal staff are Chinese in this period. Somewhat unusually in postal history, the Qing government decided not to grant a postal monopoly to Hart's Imperial Post Office and to start instead, Hart had to compete against six other existing postal services in China. The one we're particularly interested in today is the one at the bottom, the so-called foreign post offices. But if you have questions later about all these other ones, I'm happy to answer those. These foreign post offices or the Chinese euphemistically referred to them as alien post offices were, as we heard in the previous panel, also established in the Ottoman Empire, also in Japan after the signing of a series of unequal treaties. And I'll just put them all up here. These are the dates in which those various countries established post offices in China. Maybe the most interesting case for the last presentation about Japan is that Japan itself, even though it had European post offices in it, established a foreign post office in China in 1875. The vast majority of the time these post offices followed the establishment of steamship routes between Europe and China, or in this case, Japan and China. Also a point that was previously made. All of the foreign post offices in China are not an independent administration, but they are part of the home administration postal services in Europe. So if you send a letter from Shanghai to London, you pay British postal rates, domestic postal rates. It's not international postal rates. So that'll become a major issue later on in China's discussions. So here are just a few examples. This is how you can tell these postal services are all part of their home administrations. They don't have their own unique stamps. They simply over print depending on the country. The location in China at which that stamp was used. And everyone, we all just like looking at stamps. And then these are various foreign post offices in China, the one on the upper left-hand corner you can easily see says US mail on it. But that's a horse taking the mail from the center of Shanghai down to the port to drop it off. So I think I don't need to go over the universal postal union itself, the problems that it was trying to address in international postal relations. Nor particularly its significant accomplishments that those have been discussed. It will be discussed today and tomorrow. What I would like to say is just at the bottom here, this question about who is a member of the universal postal union is an interesting question. And from the very beginning of the union, it was decided not to incorporate states, but instead to incorporate countries. And that was in 1876 and 1878 interpreted very broadly to include colonies, small groups of colonies. And in the case of the foreign post offices in China, they were added to the union as belonging to the union in 1878. So all the British post office in China have a separate kind of belonging to category under the universal postal union starting from 78, but semi colonies, colonies, all kinds of different sovereign situations were allowed to enter the universal postal union if they requested. So when Robert Hart founded the imperial post office in 1896, he immediately decided not to join the universal postal union, recognizing that he could not possibly undertake the international obligations requirement to deliver mail that is sent to him anywhere in China. China as you could all realize is quite large. He couldn't possibly cover the entire country. And so instead he just began preparations for the union by applying things like union rates to certain international males. Instead, his strategy was to try to compete with these foreign post offices and undermine their financial viability. He would try to set up a series of domestic postal reforms, domestic postal regulations that would limit how those foreign post offices could operate within China. And then most importantly, and that's what the fun little, he likes to write limericks, the fun little limiker is about, he decided to sign exclusive mail carriage contracts with all of the modern transportation, excuse me, industries. So steamships in 1896, 97 railroads in 1903, to prohibit steamships or railroads within China from carrying the males of these foreign post offices. They could still carry males from ports to Europe, but they weren't supposed to carry them inside China in that case. In 1901, Hart sort of retired himself from everyday operations over the, or everyday control, excuse me, over the Postal Administration and Theophile Pire became what was called Postal Secretary at the time. He became Postal Secretary just after the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, 95, and after the scramble for concessions that took place, something like the Scramble for Africa, but between 1895 and 1900, and then the Boxer Uprising. And immediately after the Boxer Uprising, all of the imperialist powers feeling that the Qing Empire was about to collapse, began quickly expanding, particularly Japan, their post offices inside China. This produced to Pire a concern about a rate war that all these foreign post offices were charging domestic rates, and this was undermining the financial stability of the imperial post office in this case. So he began, we heard some discussion about bilateral postal treaties. Since China was not a member state, it could still sign by the Union, it could still sign bilateral postal treaties, and began to do so with the imperialist powers who maintained the foreign post office in China, so France, Germany, Japan. And in those treaties, it says that those foreign administrations are supposed to abide by UPU regulations. In other words, charge foreign rates for international males. They don't end up doing that, but they're supposed to. Instead, Pire also decided to rapidly expand his own postal network trying to undermine the viability of those foreign post offices. So he opened up 8,300 of so-called agencies. These are little postal agencies like mom and pop stores, little shops that could collect mail for the imperial post office to compete with the foreign powers, and also continue to prepare for joining the Union. So China did not enter the universal postal union until quite late. It had planned to enter and officially enters in September of 1914, and it had planned to attend the first Congress at that time, but it was delayed because of the outbreak of World War I. And so the first Chinese delegations are going to arrive at the Madrid Congress in 1920. But before doing so, the director general of posts, Leo Fucheng, decides to file a protest with the universal postal union, believing that the union can force the imperialist powers to abolish their post offices. He was wrong, of course, as we all know, but presented for the first time China's case that this was an issue about sovereignty. So I tried to raise the issue of sovereignty with the universal postal union and was, no surprise, we'll see in a moment, told that it was a political issue that could not be addressed by the union. Nevertheless, because China declared war against Germany in 1917, they were able to close the German post offices, the Austro-Hungarian post offices, and then the Bolsheviks and the Beijing government excuse me, abolished their unequal treaties in 1920, and so their post offices were closed at that time. So after this preparation, China decided to try to make the case to abolish the foreign post offices at the Versailles Peace Conference, but Clemenceau refused to address such small issues that didn't pertain to the post-war peace. And so the Chinese then had to prepare for the Madrid Congress. So Henri Picard Destalon, who was then co-director general of post, the kind of foreign administrator of the post office, began a series of informal negotiations at Madrid trying to take the temperature of the remaining imperialist powers. He spoke with the British, the Americans, and the French who all agreed verbally to withdraw their post offices when China was prepared to make its case, but was told that the Union Congress was not the place to make the case. And so instead he got them to agree to a series of informal stipulations that all the post office, this sounds exactly the same, all the foreign post offices must close simultaneously. Henri Picard Destalon should keep his job overseeing the post office to maintain its efficiency Siberian roots for British mail should be reopened, censorship should be overseen, and then if the Chinese post office proves inadequate that the imperialist powers could re-establish their post offices. In general, the Chinese delegation was simply repeatedly told that this was a political issue that the universal postal union could not directly address. But important here, once China joined, that's where they first started speaking about questions of sovereignty over postal administration. So China made its actual case at the Washington Conference. Most of us know that as a conference about naval limitations. There was a second portion of the Congress conference, excuse me, that dealt exclusively with security issues in the Pacific and the Far East, as it was known at the time. That's the portion to which China presented its case on the abolition of the foreign post offices. Before the conference began, they issued another demand to the various imperialist powers to formally withdraw their post offices. The Chinese government finally granted the post office a monopoly so they could use that in their claims at the conference. And then when the conference actually took place, China's head of the delegation made the case about the abolition of the foreign post offices, saying that now China has a legal postal monopoly, has a very efficient service, the probity of its employees is excellent. The foreign post offices not only deprived China of important postal revenues, but they also materially interfere with China's sovereignty. So eventually, after a series of subcommittee meetings at the conference, all of the imperialist powers agreed to abolish their post offices by January of 1923, except Japan, and Japan requests a special postal conference in Beijing to deal with some technical issues between the two countries. So that conference is held in the late fall of 1922. And at the conference, they deal primarily, the two sides deal primarily with technical, for technical agreements, kind of bilateral arrangement. Yep, between China and Japan. And then the conflict, the conflict is over Japanese post offices and what's known as the South Manchurian Railway Zone. This was a zone that originally controlled by imperialist Russia, which then passed up the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 to Japan. So at the end of the negotiations, Japan would close about half of its post offices in China, but all of its post offices in the railway zone would continue to exist until Japan invaded the Northeast in 1931. So what we have here is the abolition of the post offices. China's first, it perceives diplomatic victory, regains an aspect or uses the rhetoric of sovereignty to regain control over its post offices and have it internationally recognized. So the question is then, how does a country or a semi-colony like the Ottoman Empire, Japan, China, how do they enter international society, not by civilization, maybe by technical, intergovernmental organization, but it's really on a case-by-case basis depending on what we're talking about in that case. So eventually, those unequal treaties are abolished in 1943 but I argue in the longer paper that this is a really requisite experience this arguing about the post offices for Chinese diplomats and international lawyers as they prepared. So thank you, I'll stop there. Thank you. Thanks a lot to Lane Harris. I think that his intervention is was fitting perfectly with the word that we have in two brackets in our title, informal imperialism. I leave the word to Camilla Villas. Allow me to start by thanking the organizers of this colloquium, the Universal Union Committee, as there is laboratory of the CNRS for the invitation to participate and to introduce our research. So we will address here the links between the UP and the imperial and diplomatic rivalries of three great powers based on the post office between the United Kingdom, Germany and France around a city in Zanzibar. So between 1875 and 1870, 1856 and 1870, there were three post offices, one that depended on the Indian post offices in 1875 but in 1895 became autonomous and only only was under the British authorities until 1799, a second opened by France and a third opened by Germany in 1890 in that city of Zanzibar, an eponymous city called Munchbar on the western side facing the coast of continental Zambia with several tens of thousands of inhabitants or more according to contemporary counts. It's the main port city of the whole African west coast it's the main commercial platform of the whole region until the 18th of the end of the 18th century in the beginning of 19th which explains this presence in the 20th century there were treaties on trade and with the United States in 1933, the United Kingdom then France in 44 and the Germany in 59 so it was a state that was created by a division of Zanzibar and the Sultanate of Oman in the dynastic crisis called by the death of Said Said Sultan recognized by a French or British treaty signed in 1862 the Treaty of Paris so as of 1870 the British had a strong presence in Zanzibar they had a strong influence over the Sultan in that period the Sultan called Bargain Ibsaid they had a policy to try to connect the island through Patbos and a post office in 75 and then a telegraphic line in the Aden Le Cap access the British was surprised by the initiatives of the German explorers Karl-Peters Clemens and Gustav Den Hart when they established two German protectors on the territories along the Zanzibar Zanzibar's border and they had one on the hinterland of the Emoire coast facing the island of Zanzibar and the Sultanate of Witu not far from the port city of Lammu so the British responded by establishing a protectorate in Mombassa and they obtained the protectorate over the Sultanate itself following the Heligot Zanzibar treaty signed in 1890 between Germany and the United Kingdom as for the French their influence was not so they were a British territory they ended up a British territory that was limited to two islands that you see in the rectangle on the screen and Germany was left with two protectors German colony on the left in grey and the British in red above and then the French influence was reduced but not absent the consulate as well as the training house were established on the line to Zanzibar and on the axis so this French influence was strongest in two close regions to the Sultanate the Comoros and Madagascar when three post offices were inaugurated the Sultanate and the capitals were already at the heart of these European conflicts so we need to see the post offices in the wider context of the expansion of post offices throughout the world and the use the wider use of post cards then the post offices became a real central rivalries between the French the British the Germans and then Zanzibar following the colonial interest in the area and these rivalries was were in the interest of the users since behind the rivalry between states there was a financial rivalry that makes quality of service something very important especially on the Zanzibar and French side so this was a the why that period of sharing when these countries shared Africa was a challenge for the Postal Union a challenge that was settled between the nation's consent with but in which the Postal Union was a tool of pressure between the states British, French and private interests as well so when the burn treaty was signed on the 1st of July 875 they weren't post offices yet in Zanzibar so it was not until a British post office was opened in 78 that the Postal Agency became a post office that was the under the remit of a Bombay post office that served the commercial interest of the British present in Zanzibar and it assured a Postal Service for consular agents and the two Pagbo post companies that had a liaison between Adele and the Cape so they also contributed to putting an end to the slavery practices and on the 1st of October 76 one post office was withdrawn another was set up on a date we don't know between 76 and the Postal Congress of Paris two years later so article 6 of the range of the stipulates of Zanzibar the Zanzibar office should be part of it is no longer there so all the post offices of Adele Maduro Persian were under the remit of that British post so it was only later that a first post office of Zanzibar became part of the UPU the French one and it was that was the first time at which the tariff supplied so it's the first time that a West East African office was part of the Union because the Germans already in 88 had offices that they incorporated in 89 so the British also joined in with theirs in 90 and then the Reich post a few years later opened an office in Zanzibar whereas they were already under British protector so there are two reasons for this they didn't want to go through the French or the British for postal communications and because Zanzibar was also the seat of the German office to a post that that wasn't yet however established on the continent until later so in blue you see the French office the red one is the British one and then there's the embassies neighborhood in grey and then the German one below and here on the picture on the left hand side you see the French office in Zanzibar at the back at the British office at the top on the right and the German office and its staff right below so the German office was closed the first of July 1891 they had already decided to close it in 1890 as emphasized by the British consulate to his French counterpart they he stated that he believed that there were many there was a great presence on the continent but they wanted to settle on the coast you know what was still a village at the time so there was a bilateral framework that applied mainly to the post office and the same applied to the French the French agreed to close their post offices as long as the British would compensate them especially in Madagascar after the end of the customs dispute that ended in 1996 so there were three rounds of negotiations in 93 one in between 1893 and 1899 and finally was the French English convention of 1904 that closed the office the French office in that year during the negotiations what was important was the profitability of the French office it was very expensive for the French in the negotiations with the British it's where the negotiations for the UPU were very useful it was in this war and service so dispute so the UPU had much to offer Zanzibar the decisions were taken by the ministry in charge of post office affairs in France and the ministry of foreign affairs in France didn't base itself on the British model so they always postponed the decisions for the French so in 1893 on packages and therefore the year after the British had to review their system because it was higher the prices were higher than terrorists were higher than the French system the French feared that the British might interfere in their trade because they had to control over the customs so the negotiations didn't lead to an agreement until March 1900 and the French managed for the customs checks to be carried out outside the office so there would be no interference in their affairs there was also a tariff war going on the union was supposed to settle the matters but they still had a managed to set up a smaller union the British postal union so a reform was initiated by John Ashilton who was also a journalist in 1894 he had already recommended a special tariff for internal communications within the empire in order to promote British interests and their positions 20 million letters and postcards were already circulating within the union and the British empire at that time the French colonies so to conclude the postal offices were part of the rivalries between the English the Germans and the French and in Madagascar in Kenya there was a German post office and there was a full control of the communications which suspected that the French were covering subversive information from Zanzibar but once the British protectorate that was set up in 1890 they decided that they had to have bilateral negotiations the postal union played a role they're not in a multilateral role but as using rates and tariff tools to be able to help with this postal globalization the conclusions are definitive because we haven't been able to use all the sources in particular there are German and some British sources that we haven't been able to consult yet thank you thanks to Camille who said clearly a critical note in terms of European rivalry in Africa so we are opening to the floor for a couple of quick questions possibly each one our colleagues microphone can you hear me yes so I'm really interested in both your presentation because this is my main domain of research now I wonder for the parallelism it's really the same the aggressive growth over a number of post offices the rate towards very strong rate towards also the competition between the different countries in the same place and it's strange but it's always the same story with the Ottoman Empire mandatory to study this matter of foreign post offices in colonies or semi colonies or anyway these territories from a global point of view because the answers the matters are always the questions are always the same so maybe it's not a question is a consideration maybe it's important to study this matter from a global point of view not only regarding the Ottoman Empire or China or Japan or Morocco and so on but all the ideas of European powers I don't remember in the slide the number of Austrian post offices and French post offices in China was small because Germany has a low number of post offices in the Ottoman Empire and a large number in China for France and Austria is opposite a large number in the Ottoman Empire and a low number in China but if it says imperial dimensions no of course so we have to study about it Hello Is it working? Can you hear it? Exactly I don't have a lot of response because you've made excellent points that I agree with In the midst of working on the paper I think it's obvious we need a lot more historical work on the universal postal unit itself and Camille made a wonderful statement that the universal postal unit was a tool of pressure as these different countries imperialist power competed with each other on a global stage and early this morning we heard much about the origins of postal services and capitalism and that's certainly something we need to pay a lot more attention to the Chinese are in the history of postal services quite late in developing one obviously they're modeling it on European postal services I showed a long list of other kinds of what I quote postal services that existed in China none of which are similar at all to western postal systems but when China wanted to engage with the rest of the world on an international basis facilitate trade they were obligated by the existing networks established by the European powers to create that kind of postal system Having heard the previous presentation we can see the repetition of the subject of the European powers in the area in the context of Zanzibar there's too little time between the creation of the postal services the postal union and in the European archives I've been able to consult we can find some answers to this imperialism before 1875 there isn't really a source available on the western posts or other posts it was really confidential or trusted careers that did the work yes I really have the impression that it's session 2 that shows us through this juxtaposition of cases what there is in common between cases and there's a true definition so I wonder if Lane or Bruno or one of our colleagues from Turkey or from Japan have any indicators of exchanges between those countries that were dominated to put forward their point of view within the UPU was there any coordination what we'd call situations in countries that were incomparable situations or were they sort of kept in their silo I know some relation between Ottoman Empire and the Persia I know some I know some I have some knowledge on Persia but the Ottoman Empire and Persia were always enemies but there were some links but it was very interesting question to hear but I'm not aware of any other cases excellent question thank you Vienna the first thing that comes to mind is that all of these semi-colonies colonies raised this question at the universal postal union and so they're returning the question back to Europe if this is your game we're playing the game but now you change the rules of course they change the rules all the time so whether this is a mass for power politics or constantly shifting the standard that's being required of non-western places certainly something that most Chinese historians would accept but to look at your question from a longer perspective I would say that China today stands as one of the pillars of Westphalia and state sovereignty in the world still fully embraces that particular notion and China and Japan's role in the world economy and their presentation of issues at a variety of international organizations suggests that they've not only learned the game well but are besting many other countries today not in the period I'm talking about but from that longer perspective they've certainly learned their way in Zanzibar there wasn't really enough time to talk about building up throughout the 19th century and the communication with other on postal services are not really known to us thank you everyone we're right on time and I'm now going to give the floor to my colleague Muriel Le Roux I think we can start our session so I'm very happy to see that quite a few participants are staying here to look at the crucial question which defines, characterizes and obsesses all historians that's the matter of archives because compared to other sociology related subjects we need sources and so those who say these sources mean written sources whilst oral recollections can be useful and can be one of the methods used by historians what we're going to be talking about this afternoon is postal archives and in particular archives either that are managed by a foundation which can seem strange when we're looking at the history of posts which are normally national and state structures so they have an historic archive heritage which could be national but we're also going to look at the archives of the universal postal union through a biography of the directors now before we start so that we can agree on what we're going to be covering I'd like to mention one thing so I'm a historian and I can be quite touchy about the definition for historians and archive is not a printed document the reports that are maintained here in this August organization and which this organization always loved are printed materials but what historians like are correspondence the things at the back of the file the thing that we don't necessarily see in the official documents but which indicate the life of the organization so these communications are going to give us some information on what can be used to write the history of these international organizations and I hope that the discussion that will follow the presentations we will hear from our panelists this afternoon I'd like to thank them all once more for being here with us but this will give us some more clarity on the reproduction of a number of stereotypes or cliches that we see in publication and which can often be the result of a lack of previous consideration by the authors of what they're holding in front of them so first of all I'd like to introduce Anna Badseli who is a member of the foundation Archives Portal Europe and also we've got Mr. Luke Davis so you have some 15 minutes to present hello yes so I'm going to do half the presentation and then I'll pass over to my colleague so Archives Portal Europe is doesn't seem to be working yeah that's Archives Portal Europe is a online aggregator of a range of collections from within Europe but also from outside Europe relating to European history so it comes from 36 countries it's got more than 24 languages five alphabets it's a real range of geographical breadth but also a range of different types of institutions including national archives smaller university archives some private collections so there's a real sort of geographical spread but also a range of perspectives which is really useful particularly this kind of thing with this universality at its core so it's really useful for research and as part of this we want it to be a tool that's really sort of collaborative and by researchers for researchers so there are tools where you can make a suggestion you can add external sources such as journal articles or relevant literature you can suggest translations and you can also contact an institution and you can let them know what you think about their collection or ask any questions and you can also assign it to topics which will become apparent why that's useful later so this is what the search tool looks like so this is how you might search for the universal post or the union so here we can make use of things like world cards operators and boolean operators so the asterisk after the l in postal means that that can be followed by anything which makes it very useful for different languages adjectival agreement and there's also the question mark in universal which means it can include either universal or the French universal and then as well as that you can put an or and then it will also include other languages you can also include other alphabets in there as well you can also limit your results to only digital items and that's the range of results you might expect to get from a range of countries and the sorts of results that might be on offer there are some problems with the search problems more obstacles to get around so one of the things about Archives Portal Europe is it doesn't search within items because most items haven't been digitized they haven't been machine readable yet which means that you can sometimes get things that have keywords mentioned in their description but they're not particularly relevant to the resource itself so here for example if you search in universal postal union you will get this collection from the UK National Archives which is a collection so to get around this you do have to kind of approach searching in quite a different way to how you might search on Google and use other keywords so for example communications colonial that is much more likely to get you as we've heard in other sessions today as more likely to get you content that is more relevant to what the UPU has in its history and indeed if you search for that you do get some collections particularly from the British Colonial Office about the universal postal union about the stamps from the 75th Anniversary and also from some congresses in the past another example of what you might find and this is probably the very best the portal can do is it can give you the digitised copy, the second best is things like this where it hasn't been digitised yet freely available but there are catalogs and if you search for this you will get this, this is the period collection again very relevant from a previous session and that is on our search and you can view the catalog from Queen's Belfast with some translations and summaries of the items and as well as this there are also plenty of visual resources we put visual content side by side alongside written history because so much of the UPU's history is visual pictures and videos so we put that right alongside the written stuff and on that I'm going to hand over Thank you very much so okay then the second part of this presentation will focus mainly on how Archives Portal Europe can be of great use for researchers working on aspects related to staffs and flatly as my colleague has said the portal has some limitations but if you apply it also has some advantages the great advantage is that enables researchers to access results from home to save time and money in regards to organising their research so we will briefly present three examples related to flatly at staffs the first one is about the National Staff Exhibition in Lucerne that took place here in Switzerland this is a very interesting case study as staff exhibitions usually serve as a great opportunity for cultural exchange events and in these exhibitions countries have the opportunity to showcase their history art achievements through the design the topics they have selected for their postal staffs also this exhibition is very much important as it took place shortly after the Second World War so it was of historical significance it was organised in the spirit of reconciliation cooperation the second example the second case study that was found through the portal is a good example of how staffs can be used for doing advocacy for policy this collection is from the international institute for social history from the Netherlands it is about raising concerns for human rights violations in the Soviet Union and the impact of the regime in political opponents it was also about triggering the public discussion about against the political repression in the Soviet Union despite the fact we know from history that these types of activities, these types of initiatives didn't have a major impact in the country it is a nice example to see how staffs can be used for raising awareness for doing advocacy the third and final example is linked to Universal Postal Union today's philatelic exhibition that you can see outside this venue this is from the UK Glasgow School of Art Collections these staffs were designed by Paul Hawcourt a painter, printmaker, illustrator and educator he was born in 1917 and he studied art at the Magistrates School of Art his work is held by many galleries both in the UK and abroad these staffs were printed by Harrison and Sons Limited which was a major worldwide engraver, printer of postal staffs at banknotes this company produced most of the British staffs at the 60 year period from the 1930s till the 1990s included the first UK staff using the photograph method in 1934 all in all Archives Portal Europe facilitate can be great and valuable to facilitate our research in the archives also the portal has some limitations we will be happy to discuss this with you at the Q&A session thank you very much for your presentation thank you very much for having shown us a portal that shows how amateurs and historian amateurs can access archives differently so now we're going to hand the floor to Bob Ronaldo who is specialist in the history of international organizations and in particular he has been working on a very interesting biographical database which covers the main leaders within those organizations and what he's going to tell us is very important in terms of the organization of the UPU's archives so the floor is yours yes congratulations to 150 years of UPU however none of the directors has an entry in iobio iobio is the biographical dictionaries of secretary general of international organization it's an open access scientific project and you'll find it on this website of my university in Amsterdam I hope that among you there are historians or other scientists who will contribute an entry to iobio um or better look there our directors or whatever title they have executive heads of ios are the prominent actors in IR some will argue realist major states matter and non-state actors are a bit less relevant however when you do research you find out ios are not simply forums for governments and secretaries do more than just administrative work as in any organization organizational leadership by the heads matters okay that goes too fast um the UPU historian George Culling before argued to have true knowledge of the UPU one must know its international bureau and I would we should also know its directors and directors general um the emergence of secretariats of international organization is a history in itself and the international telegraph union already mentioned its constitution did not provide for a secretariat but its director Louis Courgeau created a bureau and this bureau allowed him to make it into a permanent organ which enabled him to lead the organization and over time to lead it more and more this is Louis Courgeau and his secretariat model was copied by other public international unions and you can say that the history of IOs and their secretariat was a process of evolution of trial and error and also of copying what about the UPU the international bureau gets some attention in the literature and scrutiny of that literature show that there's more room of maneuver for the bureau and for the directors than I expected in the original form what do we know about them in my paper which I sent around in annex 1 you find all the 17 DGs that have existed and it shows how difficult it is to get even the smallest basic info for example what is the exact starting or ending date of a director I also give an overview of the main sources of information on the directors it's what is easily available but it's insufficient information to write entries and IO by your entries cover the entire life of the person and all the different careers you can find it on the internet now you can what I did in the paper is characterize all the directors since the very beginning and you can see the elements creating the office expanding the office the relationship with the state of Switzerland and the Swiss coastal office functioning during world wars or dining in office quite a few of the directors died in office I can't change it working next to the League of Nations but not being a member becoming a UN specialized agency having a first non-swiss director and development aid which is an important topic handling competitors like the ITU and the technical revolution so it's not yet possible to make a group analysis which I would like to do if you have enough life and career description you can see what kind of characteristics you find with the different directors so they may have a common professional background it was referred to you need an internal leadership making the organization move but also external leadership capacities in relation to member states to other NGOs to NGOs and there are relevant networks so hence we have to start writing entries for IO Bio and that's an invitation to the specialist historians present why do we need them when you go to the websites of IO's in general they don't mention very much information about the DGs but most of all they don't mention information what they did when they were in office they do mention when there is a big award when there is a Nobel prize awarded they will mention it what the successes or failures of a director are hence to write an entry for IO Bio we need historians who know who are familiar what is happening within the organizations so I focus now on a few of them the first the UPU director is the frontiers person on the edge of unclaimed territory he's the pioneer who builds up the administrative machinery and sets the first institutional processes into motion well you all know this is Eugène Borel the first director and he was appointed by the Swiss government he was 17 years in office did his position develop similar to the one in the ITU or was it different how did he develop the administrative machinery how did he increase his room of maneuver as a director versus the states the issue of colonies fossils semi sovereigns as members mentioned before was it just the secretariat that had a room of maneuver to take decision in this field how did he work with or against the Swiss state Eugène Ruffi he was the third director he was the one who received the German proposal for the monument but he ensured he took the liberty to say it in that way that the monument would be in burn and that the Swiss government was the one who handled the whole procedure this was not the German idea but anyway the monument arrived what else did he achieve in his 20 years in office what kind of leadership style did he have how did he lead during the first world war when sending mail was restricted what was his position vis-à-vis the league of nation initiative I just moved one world war Alois Murie who was the director between 1945 and 1949 so this was the time that the UN was created and in 1948 the postal union entered the UN system but kept its international bureau under Swiss supervision where Switzerland was not a member of the UN it received observer status so this was a specific position as far as I know it was the UN secretary general Tariq Ali who initiated this and prepared draft agreement for the UPU congress in 1947 I'm interested in what was Murie's role during this entire event and as you all know it took a long history of ending Swiss supervision Edward Weber who was director, a later director general between 1961 and 1967 he's a special character it was the first time that there was one abstention on the government's proposal but nonetheless it succeeded and Weber had very strong ideas about freedom of transit he proposed a new organization of the secretariat and most of all he was busy with the issue of should the postal union keep its distance from development aid as it was developing within the UN he did something very special in my eyes when he was on a trip to a committee meeting in Tokyo in Japan he also wanted to know some first-hand information by some of these countries so he visited those countries and requested first-hand information and when he returned from Tokyo he visited seven Asian countries he also visited African countries and nobody had told him to do so but he simply did and he had information there were some postal administrations and there was a UN representative in those countries so he had very exact information and result was that his autonomous action to put it like that resulted in more cooperation with the United Nations development aid so I think this is very remarkable Michel Rachid the director between 67 and 1973 was the first non-swiss director general he was Egyptian he had an internal career director general real director general and he strengthened the collaboration with the UN family he made all kinds of staff and other regulations and he created the first technical assistant division it is very difficult to find information about him the most important piece of document that he could find is his portrait I have no information about him except of course his formal positions so my invitation to the historian to write an entry of one of the elder directors our director general for iobio there are many ways to write a history of an IO you can base it on expertise as it was mentioned on its congresses and decisions you can make an institutional analysis you can have regionalism there are all very good inroads my focus is on the senior staff, the executive head senior staff that belongs to the directorship the administrative machinery and leadership both internal and external interesting enough if you study the leader of an IO and his or her policies that provides very good entry into understanding the organization and it provides some clues about their importance and when we have a group of executive heads it's also possible to have a group analysis so you're welcome to contribute an entry to iobio more details are in my paper and I have a few copies with me for those who haven't received it and you can find everything on the iobio project on the website thank you very much thank you very much colleagues and also for sticking to the limited time I was discussing a matter for my colleague Mrs Koch and we think that the major contribution of these international events is to contribute something and I must confess that before with the and Leonard and others that we co-organize this international event I didn't know anything or I didn't almost know anything about Anand Luke's presentation and so I'd like to ask you about where you found your sources and how we might have access to those documents and what drives your foundation so what was the aim of the foundation perhaps you could tell us about the nature of the documents that we might find there and with regards to Bob communication so the this story of leaders, director-general there's something that I'm very interested in so I have a couple of questions but also I wanted to take stock about the use of these biographies it's not just about putting online the stories of people's lives or their professional backgrounds but it's also in order to give us food for thought and to perhaps take some perspective on what we think that this self-analysis is to perhaps review prior conclusions or interpretations of the archives and what Bob communicated is that through this network of UP leaders and through the story of the staff of the UP's International Bureau we should gain information about the relations between states and international organizations on the one hand there are international speeches but there are always shadows behind the scene and we don't know much about these we only know about what states and international organizations are authorized to unveil so perhaps is a work that is online is very minute will give citizens an overview of how this anthill was built because very often we see organizations from the perspective of the organizations the history of the UP by the UP or the history of the French post by the French post for post-french masters and historians but this morning we talked about the fact that these organizations involve national, bilateral, domestic international and also cross-border relations and so what I was trying to get at is that what our colleagues have been telling us today by showing us and making new sources available and showing us new bodies of work we are able to think about with a new perspective think about these organizations and by taking a look from above what is the UP how did it become a technical agency of the United Nations because it's not a neutral state of affairs all the organizations that preceded the United Nations didn't become technical agencies under the United Nations so why at some point in time did one feel necessary to sanctuaries these communications we all have some ideas about the reasons why certain data of fundamental elements of states development but thanks to the sources that we were given this afternoon perhaps we can analyze these international organizations differently have a different perspective on them and perhaps put each of the protagonists in the right role because what is striking from what we've heard is that behind the different acronyms the official names there is a huge amount of individual acts that explain how the UPU has lasted so long so far and so I'd like to hand the floor back to the the people in the room to try to get answers to the way we could get new sources and access new archives. Sebastian Sebastian from the committee for the history of post so thanks allow me to thank Bob for his intervention I don't think I would be betraying my thoughts or Leonard's thoughts by saying that when we thought about the organization of this event we were aiming at having new research dynamics through community of historians that were either directly interested in the history of domestic post or in cross-border diplomatic relations a usefulness of posts and post organizations therein so your intervention was like a call for help for general mobilization among historians interested in posts and then to my left I see the outlines of this chronology that shows the different director generals of the post this post of organization that was Swiss up until two decades after the Second World War and then I look around I see a couple of Swiss historians chairing you talked about logistical issues because not all live next to the UP's archives but perhaps we could call for the appropriate researchers to get involved I think perhaps could publish a biographical notice of the posts and then the one that shows the ways in which the French post mutated and evolved I think there is quite a lot that could be done by doing so it would be a new momentum and would enable us as you were saying to work on the human dynamics on the human commitment and look into the contribution of these leaders of the post in these international relations so I think this notice would be quite easy to draft as high ranking civil servants in the organizations of posts with contacts and businesses it would be possible to find the biographies to make progress on obtaining information so thank you for that awareness raising and for that call for us to mobilize Yes Richard and it is quite that the leadership has come from Switzerland for so long and that Switzerland has successfully maintained a low profile in international geopolitics and the two may not be unrelated the success of the UPU owes at least something to its ability to maintain a low profile internationally and I think it would surprise historians of international relations to recognize how tightly controlled it was within Switzerland Gabrielle Ballby has written about the international strategy of the Swiss government to rebrand itself in the second half of the 19th century and this rebranding may have something to do with the low profile of the man I assume they are all men who actually ran the organization so I more research is worthwhile of course but it's interesting that so little is known So if you'd like to put your question also Thank you I'd like to take a question to Bob Reinalda I'd like you to talk more, a little bit more about the general director Advaldo Cardoso Boto de Oliveira, Boto de Barros which is general director between 1985 to 1994 I think he was a Brazilian director and it's very interesting because he was director during the democratic opening in Brazil Brazil faced a military regime just before his entrance in New York and in this time in 1985 Brazil was opening in a democratic way and I've already spoke with the retired secretary of him that by instance lives in my his mountain nowadays he is retired and he told me that this director Boto de Oliveira has a close relationship with military so who put him there so the connections between the relations I think this case exemplifies the relations between the DGs in their countries and this is a topic that I think it's important in your research is about thank you so if you could take the microphone please microphone please Bob the question my neighbors how is it how can I find out about all the fine work you are doing are you making some propaganda in certain official circles etc because I'm really moved by all the kind of things you do but it's fair because I know it's very help yeah so it's partly through things like this partly through things like grants and one of the things we do is digitalization grants where one of the conditions is also that the digitized catalogs go on to the website so that's a way of both raising awareness and also building up materials but really the aim is to get European history and heritage as open and available as possible and one of the best ways really is just to share it one of the things you can do is you can register for free and then you can create a bibliography on the website and you can then share that with other people and it really does sort of rely on partly on word of mouth of it being a collaborative effort through doing things like topics hacking and things like that so that's kind of it really, it's the other thing to Ash but yeah it's basically we just want as much of Europe's history on the portal as we can because that's how it becomes as valuable the resource as it can be is when you have all the perspectives both geographically and in terms of range of places and it's for content providers completely free to ingest your catalogue and data into the website and it's also very easy for the user to use it because you're not having to load all the documents themselves solely the descriptions that you're loading so it's the the aim is to make it as accessible as possible and make it completely free and have it be something that anyone can use with more or less any level of technology that's kind of like the ambition really but yeah word of mouth is the best way of sharing the resources on there and have a go playing around with the search tool thank you very much for that further information I have another question for you you don't keep the documents you create inventories and digitalize them but the documents remain in the places that hold them and manage them so the website itself doesn't actually hold the documents which is it's a good thing in a way because it means that so much more can be held it means that it can run much faster so what it does is it stores the archival descriptions of what's available some of those things are then digitized and you can then view them through the institution's own website so things like the videos and pictures that we showed towards the end those are viewable on the website because they're hosted through the the institution's own website but yeah anything that is digitized can be viewed through us but it has to, it relies on it being digitized by the institution but that's another sort of key aim things like the digitization grants is getting things, getting as much digitized as we can get because one of the useful things about it is that it teaches you about all the things that are available to view it shows you the range of materials that are out there and even if you can't see the document itself it informs you about things that you didn't know existed in places that you didn't know existed particularly when so much history has moved around over the centuries and over the years but obviously it's much better when the thing is actually digitized and you can view that but yeah we don't host anything ourselves it's always through the institution if I may okay if I may, you can also apply a filter in your search in the portal at the access to digital objects when they are available it's not the same for all entries it depends if they are digital objects if the archival institution has digitalized its collections if they have granted access to these digitalized items to the portal or only to just descriptions it depends but as Lukos already said that we also stated during our presentation it does historian researcher how we see it archives portal in Europe can serve as a compass for our research it can be the starting point of our research to see what items are available in archival institutions related to our research it helps us to better organize the next steps which collections we should see which institutions should we contact with also the portal provides as a contact form for its institution so it's just a tool that facilitates our research that sometimes it helps us to avoid unnecessary traveling it helps us to save time and resources thank you we have two questions two gentlemen here and Mr. Forseville I was going to ask you a question so if you could go ahead first please introduce yourself I am Isaac Mambayo from the post in Côte d'Ivoire and I chair the Council of Administration it's really a pilgrimage for us when we look at the postal sector and I'd like to thank the IB for having taken this initiative I have quite a lot of things going around in my mind and I'm going to try and share the ones that are most interesting but I'd like to thank everyone for their very good contributions and note that Mr. Reinalda called for contributions to add to the portal he works on and I listened that one of and heard that one of the director generals from 1964 or 67 travelled to Africa mainly in relation to work with the United Nations correspondent to collect information about the joining of countries in Africa to the Universal Postal Union I haven't been here very long but at the beginning about 10 years ago of my career in the postal sector I had that I met a gentleman who was almost 100 years old in my country who said that it was the postal service it was very important for the colonisers but also for the administrations in our country that had been set up by the colonisers and that the African continent is a very large continent and one where oral history is very important so we have oral history far more than written history so I wonder if it's relevant that we could think about setting up a link with African historians or a harbour for African historians in order to share the experiences of the colonial postal administration which was the first steps in terms of our African postal services when they started modernising joining the UPU but before that we had a strong postal traditional because our traditional chiefs and village chiefs corresponded and there wasn't an infrastructure there weren't roads but they covered many kilometres of foot to distribute correspondence to those who were administering the region to know how we could create a bridge so that information can be shared from Africa on the postal sector which grew more sophisticated through it's addition to the UPU but which has a rich history that we've been hearing from you and that we could add to and I'm certain that Mr there may be more information but I saw that on your portal you have information about colonial buildings that held the post and the treasury buildings but which were elements of colonisation but there were other types of postal relations that existed that may not have been picked up because they're not described they're not in documents of history that may have been forgotten so I think we're going to continue discussing all these matters beyond our session I'm going to take up the other two questions I have a biography of Franco-African historians who started to work with the committee with our history history committee and have been looking at some of the points you've raised but we're going to give the floor now to this gentleman if you'd like to pose your question South Africa to be particular, Rhodes University I'm going to be briefing to the point and address my question to those who set up the platforming in the European archive are there any plans of foot to approach the UPU archives to get the material included I spent an afternoon in the archives here yesterday and I was struck by the fact that there's no inventories there's no catalogue it's hit and miss afraid yeah I mean it does it does sort of rely on there being a catalogue in the first place which is kind of the chicken and egg situation we'd love to have the UPU's archives on the systems so they become more available and also so people don't have to travel to learn to know what's there but I think it's obviously it's relies on there being a catalogue in the first place so that's yeah that's kind of the difficult answer is I think that in order to put the catalogue on it has to exist but certainly if that catalogue did exist then yeah but also I mean like yeah we can always work with people to put together the digital the data and then ingest that into the portal but it does rely on there being some level of catalogue to start with I think do you have anything if I may okay as Bob said he had an open invitation to contribute to his project also archives portal Europe has an open invitation to anyone who is interested to join there are various ways to join the portal as a content provider this may refers to UPU archives they can provide access to their collections in their in a way they feel comfortable to do so it can be just a description for the collections held it can be access to digitalize if any material etc and also there are other ways to be involved to be collaborating with the portal as for example ambassador usually are working on disseminating the portal's mission its scope and as country managers also there is also this role this usually is for people also just one quick sentence I thank you very much for the point for Africa I think that the process for other licensing histories ongoing it's very much important thank you for this comment Thank you Thank you and I beg your pardon I wanted to give the floor to Mr. Jean-Paul Forseville and Christian to hear their questions so Jean-Paul is an eminent high level member who should have his biography included well that's really what Jean-Paul Forseville I'm in charge of European and international groups of La Post Group and I chair the POC I'd like to thank the chair of the administrative council and our representatives of the three major pillars here now it's often said that I mean I don't know if the UPU is a very happy lucky organization but we've waited 150 years to have an event such as today's event but first of all we need to move forward with the time and I had one question but I also wanted to make a comment to our colleague from Brazil we knew Mr. we met him at his last congress towards the end of his term of office and we have good memories now at the POC I ask for us to have debriefing on today's meeting because I think it will be of interest to everyone and when we hear about archives this is a bit of a side we see that the international organization realized that it was a little behind with this archiving and codifying the archive so this raising of awareness has been done so that's important but if I may as chair of the POC could I ask something of our members what could they ask them what is of interest in terms of archives how should they proceed if they wish to assist in really building the historiography of the UPU and more information on the system John Paul I was going to give the same responses I just gave to the other president I knew this exchange of my later but in France the French posts that were in a similar situation to the UPU in 1995 looked at the issue and recruited someone to look after the conservation someone who had the task of going through the archives removing the kilometers of archives and then making sure it was available to citizens and to postal workers so none of this is lost this 150th anniversary denotes the importance of carrying out an audit of in the same way that the French poster did in the 1990s and last question so mainly questions from Denmark at the University of Roscoe so first of all I'd like to thank everyone for being here I have two comments the first is that there are staff and former staff of the UPU who have an incredible knowledge of the history as well as of the documentation that exists so we mustn't forget these people as sources of information and I'm certain there are current staff members Josie Hansen for example here beside me who would be very happy to provide names and email addresses telephone numbers and unless I'm mistaken there's even a meeting an association of UPU retirees which without any doubt would be very happy to help historians in finding what they're looking for and that's my first comment and second it's more for the UPU I think it would be an excellent project for students to try and collect and sort through all the documentation and maybe to digitize some of the documents that takes place in many organizations and libraries and so forth it's often given as a student project so maybe history students why not that's one way of doing this in a slightly less expensive manner than taking on a whole team to carry out the work of making it digital thank you Christian I'd just like to give the floor back to Bob to reply very briefly because I'm told our time has run out and we'll have to continue our discussions over coffee you are right and you are revisiting the history through its sources you suddenly understand that decision making is sometimes very special there are things that you didn't take into account before but that do play a role and that's one of the things we find out through this indeed collective project we do that on purpose because several people can help us get such an entry because they collaborate yes Switzerland had low profile but you could also say Switzerland had its own assumptions and that continued in that history so that Brazil one of the things you find out through this kind of biographical research is that you find out about what's happening between the international level and the national level and that's something we don't discuss that much it's under research but the interesting thing about Brazil is that its foreign ministry had a very explicit policy to engage in international organization and through that enhances its position so I don't know enough about your Brazilian director general of the UPU but I would not be surprised that there was all kind of support in order to make him function or to deal with certain problematics that would be to be expected in the Brazilian case to put it like that and regarding Africa doing our research at the moment we should discuss what is the function of an international organization like the United Nations is it promoting independence and is there an opportunity for certain African countries to engage in that opportunity or is it continuation of something that existed I think that's a proper question to ask and in particular we are discussing whether international organizations provide a platform, a forum for these countries either by themselves or as a group to participate in something that's happening in the world that's also going on at the moment so I don't know about the case myself but I would be interested to hear more about them Thank you very much Merci Thank you to our panelists and I'd like to thank all of the audience as well and I have taken note that we should write the history of the UPU to typographies collector information look at oral archives we need to catalog and digitize the UPU documents so we have a lot of work so I think we'll meet up again for the 180th now we've got coffee awaiting us now we are moving toward globalization well focused on the states by the way so we start in English sorry John Richard I will move to the French so we will have a new session and because we are running out of time we will try to focus and keep the agenda and the schedule so the next session is focused on making of national postal services we have three speakers the first one Richard John is here and the two of the one are supposed to be online so in order to keep the time I will just say very briefly one or two sorry Richard sorry we will talk about the birth so we are going to talk about the birth in a way of their different cross-border models most of this sessions and the Paris Sessions presentations have emphasized that many of the events and developments appeared at the 19th century at a time when nation states were slowly being built and then the creation of this cross-border model also raised the problem of the complex situation with national sentiments and how to coordinate this with tools management models, organizational models that would be super national in that context so I will say no more Richard John you have the floor from Columbia University you will introduce us the way how the way in which the universal postal union shaped policy in the United States in 1974 in 1913 you have the floor thank you Eric and thank you all for persevering we're almost there end of the first day what do I do Will Trump pull the United States out of the universal postal union so ran a teaser for an article that appeared in the online version of the storied U.S. magazine time in September 2019 my slide this isn't recent chapter in the long history of the relationship of the United States and the universal postal union is not what I'm talking about today thankfully yet the frustration of the U.S. president with the regulatory status quo had been occasioned by an issue that is various points in time has troubled the relationship between the United States government and the universal postal union of course the standard setting body that is coordinated the circulation of postal items across political boundaries in a quest to create as our conference theme proclaims a single postal territory Trump's main concern if the news coverage of this set to can be believed was the supposed advantage that current U.P.U. regulations have offered to Chinese manufacturers intent on reaching U.S. market a distinct yet in some ways oddly related issue surrounded the long and often acrimonious 30 year public debate that had been waged in the United States in the period between 1883 and 1913 over the admission of parcels into the U.S. mail that's what I'm talking about today the U.P.U. and parcels in the mail this controversy originated in 1880 when the then recently established universal postal union agreed to set up an international parcels post the service went into effect the United Kingdom three years later 1883 it was this event that is the advent of a parcels post in the United Kingdom and not the prior U.P.U. directive that attracted the attention of reformers in the United States including Connecticut based parcels post enthusiast James L. Cowles who editorialized in favor of a U.S. parcels post almost continuously the next 20 years the international postal union cows gushed in a book published in 1894 that called for the establishment of a general freight and passenger post in effect the nationalization of the railroad such a such an international postal union was the greatest of all associations for the preservation of international peace and the advancement of international prosperity well cows thought so but a lot of Americans weren't paying attention and incidentally cows referred to the organization as the international postal union and not the universal postal union and that convention was common in the United States at the time to continue with cows the ideal conditions of things cows went on was the complete annihilation of time and space and the perfect transit within the limits of the planet and it is toward this goal that the world is hastening nationalization of the railroad parcels and the mail were all part of this decision that call cows articulated well President Trump would assuredly have found cows optimism troubling for would have led to an enormous influx parcels yet Trump was far from alone in his concern for the potential extension in the mandate of the U.S. post office department to include the circulation of items weighing more than four pounds which when cows wrote with the limit four pounds this would prove enormously contentious for 30 years now little if any of the public debate over the mandate of the post office department in this period would concern the U.P.U. the U.P.U. was neither a target of public a program it wasn't in the press nor with few exceptions was it even a bit player in the public mind had a very very low profile indeed perhaps one of the most durable conclusions that one can venture about the U.P.U. and the United States in this period is that few Americans knew of its existence and even fewer cared and we can reach that generalization which we can now do lots of keyword searches and see what got into the press well this obliviousness that is to say the U.P.U. in the United States it was reciprocated when for example the burn based lithographer Rudolf Munger designed a color lithograph to celebrate the U.P.U. it's a lithograph on my slide this is very similar to official materials that Munger prepared but this was a commercial product when he designed this color lithograph he chose to depict what the U.P.U. today calls its postal territory well what was the postal territory well it's five women each of whom is dressed in the characteristic garb of a different continent Asia, Australia Africa, the Americas and these five this is a model for the U.P.U. monument the five women surround a globe right upon which there's a document celebrating the establishment of the U.P.U. in Berner the postal union then called the German postal union in 1874 now the woman symbolizing Europe holds a quill pen in one hand and the proclamation in the other leaving little doubt that the postal union is a gift from Europe to the world the Americas are depicted as an indigenous supplicant not entirely fully clothed but garbed in traditional attire there on it would be on the far left so this is a very Eurocentric view of global communication now patriotic minded American journalists would occasionally point out that the first international postal conference had been proposed in the 1860s we heard this this morning by the U.S. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair and at the ensuing event Paris Postal Convention of 1863 had been coordinated by a U.S. diplomat named John Cassin there he is there in the bottom right but this was not by 1900 how the history of the U.P.U. would come to be remembered either in the United States or in Europe and it's interesting Blair is held up he's the postmaster the expert but it was Cassin the diplomat who actually did the work but all that would be swept aside by the Franco-Prussian war and by the quarrels between the French and the Germans that defined the identity of the organization the next 30 years how did Americans in the Fandeseekla then view the U.P.U. entirely through the lens of letter writing not parcels but letter writing and this is not surprising since there was no parcels post in the United States United States in fact was the last of the major countries to establish a parcel post not until 1913 from a U.S. perspective instead of here's the burden perspective from a U.S. perspective the postal territory as it were consisted not of five continents as it had been for Munger but of two worlds as you see here in this image this would be popularized this idea of two worlds would be popularized by the world's Colombian exposition took place in Chicago in 1893 and to underscore the unity that letter mail communication had wrought New York City postmaster and his staff commissioned holiday greeting for his U.P.U. colleague that's the picture I'm showing you here so this is from the New York City postmaster who was colleagues I hypothesized probably colleagues who might be coming to Chicago for the Colombian exposition in this holiday greeting the old world and the new world are quite literally tied up in a bow with letters flowing freely between them left unspecified is the mode of transportation the only means of propulsion in this image is a horse which was a part of the official logo of the post office department you can see it up there in the left if you look closely you can find the staff or what I take to be the staff of the ancient Roman messenger god Mercury but that's it allegorical as was the U.P.U. and as is the U.P.U. monument well how long in the delay how can the long delay sorry in the adoption by the U.S. post office department parcel's post be explained for cows the culprit was the railroad in his view railroads charged outrageously high rates to convey the letter mail and for this reason they should be bought out by the national government operated as a public utility that was a common view in the United States in the 1880s this was the era of Edward Bellamy's looking backward when he envisioned the entire economy being nationalized that was a Christian socialist view nothing to do with the later socialist arguments that would be controversial for different reasons others would point to parcel delivery firms as the antagonist such as Wells Fargo Adams and Co. and American Express it was these parcel delivery firms that performed the task of transporting parcels weighing more than four pounds and that was the postal limit until 1913 so you got railroads you got express companies now none of the largest and most powerful parcel delivery firms were corporations yet critics in Congress and the press would sometimes depict them as monopolistic trusts as a cartoonist Eudo Kepler would in 1910 and you have to take a look at this image did cut to get the point did the trust control of Congress to back parcels post Kepler asks so the express companies here are those cows fattening on one side of the fence and it's the preciality of Congress which is blocking this positive innovation they refuse to back parcels post because they've been bought off by special interests parcel carrying profits accrue to the expresses of a cartoonist Kepler he's the son of the famous journalist Joseph Kepler if you know that parcel carrying profits accrue to the expresses while the government is forced to pass on to the people a mail carrying deficit that parcels post would presumably eliminate this is a popular image this is not what actually happened this is a popular image for it was not only or really at all the expresses that blocked the rapid adoption of parcels posts this is a mistake parcels post is blocked by express from the inception of the post office department in 1775 lawmakers had confined the agency to the circulation of lightweight items that contained what lock lawmakers called intelligence letters newspapers magazines anything weighing more than four pounds was banned from the mail I was just at the swiss national history museum magnificent institution in Zurich the swiss post was bound up with moving passengers and stagecoach is nothing like that was ever contemplated United States just information or intelligence as they called it and this intelligence only policy had been instituted to facilitate the circulation of the time specific broadcasts on commerce and public affairs and that's where the U.S. post office department excelled when the United States joined the U.P.U. United States postal administrators limited circulation within the United States to letters intelligence information but they found themselves obliged to convey parcels that originated outside of the United States in a different way and to meet the letter of the law without expanding the mandate of the agency they relied on the expresses this compromise appealed not only the expresses but also to radical reformers such as Gardner Green Hubbard who upheld the distinction between information which in Hubbard's view justified the extension of the mandate of the post office department to include the electric telegraph telegraph transmitted information therefore the government should run a telegraph distinction between that and goods which for Hubbard should not be part of the post office department so he could lobby for the expresses to block the extension of the mandate to parcels because parcels were not intelligence telegraph was intelligence well historical writing on the slow adoption of the parcels post in the United States makes much of these expresses but having studied the thousands of petitions to congress on parcel post related issues in this 30 year period I've gone through every one of them that makes it clear that the primary obstacle of parcels post was neither the shippers as the reformers Cowles and the cartoonist Kepler assumed nor constitutional originists as postal telegraph enthusiasts like Hubbard might contend but instead the opposition came from merchants terrified by the dislocations that a parcel post would cause for country storekeepers and the distribution network that had sprung up to keep their store fronts well stocked they wanted to be the middlemen between the farmer and manufacturers and they recognized with the parcel post they'd lose that role and once again the cartoonist that makes this point well parcels post this is Eido Kepler again he informs his readership in 1911 will hasten a revolution in commerce by directly uniting the producer who is there on the right and the consumer on the left and cut out not only the express but also the middleman and that's a more accurate understanding of what's going on from having worked in the archives wholesalers retail storekeepers and their many allies in the press an interest group that is a result of its spatial dispersion its political influence at the grassroots was far more influential in the expresses these groups wholesalers retail storekeepers and their allies blocked the adoption of a parcels post for many many years it was this special interest that best explains why the United States would be the last major industrial nation to adopt a parcels post during the presidential administration of theater Roosevelt 1901 1909 the first major step toward a parcels post would occur with the establishment by lawmakers of a partial limited it was called rural parcels post partial limited rural's parcels post the key event came in 1907 when the U.S. postmaster general through his reputation behind the establishment of such an institution now this postmaster general was not a western populist not a champion of the farmers who wanted a parcel post which they were deprived of for many years but instead it was a prim and proper Massachusetts conservative named George von Langerkey Meyer that sounds like a prim and proper Massachusetts conservative George von Langerkey Meyer his biographers say well you know Langerkey is German but on his mother's side he had pure New England ancestry going back to the 17th century it was Meyer and his successor another New England born republican named Frank Hitchcock who oversaw the implementation of the parcels post and with the opening of a parcels post tunnel as the cartoonist Kepler depicted the advent of parcels post in 1913 the U.S. government has finally conquered Mount Middleman creating a single postal through way linking producer and consumer well what did the U.S. what did the U.P.U. have to do with this reform the answer's mixed without a doubt the U.P.U. had furnished a precedent that reformers like Cowles found it advantageous to cite even critics of parcels post would sometimes concede as one hardware industry lobbyist Wooderrod 99 that the U.P.U. guidelines were the best rationale for the reform the U.P.U. had it right we just don't want to do it yet what is perhaps most remarkable about the second phase of the debate over parcels post from 1907 to 1913 is the extent to which it had the support of easterners who saw it as a convenient tool to expand the domestic market easterners supported it and it was opposed by westerners including mid westerners fearful of its impact on small towns that is to say the impact of economic consolidation neither a much concerned with international competition as was trump recently the issue is the domestic market the resulting parcels post zone map made a last page made allowances for distance yet after 1913 the die is cast a new kind of society had been hastened to existence by the government consumer society in which you would become increasingly possible for anyone the city and the countryside were in between to get access to the latest consumer goods the extent to which the prospect of a consumer society remained a threat can perhaps best be illustrated by taking a look at the 12 postage stamps the U.S. government issued in 1913 is the first parcel post issues there's not a single consumer in that image there was this transformation consumer society that is the most enduring legacy of parcels post just as it was the international implications of this transformation for the international balance of trade that so troubled President Trump to conclude did the U.P.U. shape U.S. policy in the period between 1874 and 1913 with regard to parcel delivery what I've talked about the answer is a well-qualified yes lawmakers in the United States had good reason to limit postal expansion to embrace goods as well as information they wanted information not goods that was what their constituents the shippers and the wholesalers told them had there not been outside pressure postal administrators might well have continued to rely on non-governmental parcel delivery firms well beyond the First World War no pressure from Congress yet it was the Atlantic Islands rather than the hinterland Democrats who at least in the United States with the leading agents of change overcoming resistance that originated among merchants who feared with considerable justice the creation of a single postal territory would destroy their local monopoly on trade a monopoly power no less onerous for the nation's farmers if we think of them as consumers and not as producers no less onerous for the farmers a monopoly power that had been long exercised by the railroad and the express thank you next speaker Stefan Koschenberg I don't know if he's online I am here welcome Richard so Richard I'm sorry I'm skipping to French Richard Koschenberg Richard Kochersberger I'd like to present a paper on transnational influence on the development of the United States parcel post okay we're going to share our screen I wish I could be in burden with you but thanks to this amazing technology I am able to join you from Washington let's see if we get the right screen up this time are we seeing the correct screen I can't tell from here your screen looks correct thanks very much so the title of this research is transnational influence on the development of international parcel posts but to put it more simply a single parcel post for hello could you put in full screen if you click on the down below the right hand side of the screen of your screen because now we've got the surroundings of the power point oh perhaps you could control it from your end okay we will thank you yeah could you stop sharing please thank you here we are thank you very much I want to thank Richard for his excellent presentation we will have a bit of overlap but my presentation will take us up to 1984 we could subtext this a single postal for parcel next slide please on November in November in 1887 Nicholas Bell superintendent of foreign mail for the United States post office department made a personal delivery to the White House the package was addressed to President Cleveland's Young Bride First Lady Francis Cleveland inside the package was a ladies fan made from native Jamaican woods ferns and flowers it was made by the self-help society of Jamaica the sender was the postmaster at Kingston Jamaica Frederick Sullivan in a letter accompanying the fan Sullivan wrote it's not intended as a present but as the first offering of what Jamaica has to give in return for the great boon of parcel post exchange between United States and Jamaica while we have no record of what Mrs. Cleveland thought of the fan her package was the very first piece of parcel post delivered in the United States next slide please over the next quarter century thousands more parcels were mailed between the United States and scores of other nations yet during that time not a single piece of parcel post could be sent from one U.S. address to another on January 1, 1913 after 25 years of exchanging packages with distant lands and parcel post to each other 97 years elapsed between the United States delivering its first parcel in 1887 and when it joined the U.P.U. parcel post agreement in 1984 in the interim many factors went into shaping United States policy on parcel post many of those factors stem from internal ideologies and domestic politics less obvious is how transnational influences the U.P.U. parcel post policy next slide please starting with the 1863 postal conference in Paris the United States was an early advocate for international postal reform it lagged however in implementing some of those reforms it was one of the world's last major nations to establish a domestic parcel post and among the last to join the U.P.U. parcel post agreement long after most of the world's nations signed the U.P.U. parcel post agreement the United States maintained an array of bilateral and multilateral agreements next slide please the U.P.U. concluded its first international parcel post convention 1880 at that time the United States had no domestic parcel post and could not accept items weighing more than two kilograms the barriers to domestic parcel post were geographic technological and political the political impediments were rooted in the philosophy of laissez-faire and the belief that government should never compete with the private sector the opponents of domestic parcel post were able to delay its establishment for three decades at the same time a variety of transnational forces influenced the development of the United States parcel post domestically and internationally next slide when he became postmaster general in 1889 he had a serious anomaly in our postal system he attributed the lack of domestic parcel post service to the political power of the railroads and express companies that controlled the delivery business he wrote nearly every country in Europe has established a parcels post and managed it successfully to the great satisfaction of the people it can only be a question of time before it will be undertaken in some better form in this country next slide protectionism was a driving force in the United States international parcel post policy European powers were seen as economic rivals Pan-Americanism meant that the United States favored parcel post agreements with western hemisphere countries and avoided agreements with European nations even when the United States eventually entered European agreements they were more limited than the agreements with American nations following the successful introduction of domestic parcel post in 1913 the United States did not join the UPU agreement on parcels but continued to negotiate bilateral agreements next slide following the UPU's 1920 Madrid Congress representatives of western hemisphere countries focused on a restricted postal union of their own in 1921 next slide the United States joined the Pan-American postal union now known as the postal union of the Americas, Spain and Portugal and signed on to the parcel post agreement of that union next slide World War II caused a dramatic shift in the United States parcel post due to new economic realities political realignments and technological advances the economies of most European and Asian nations were in ruins after the war, former competitors were suddenly partners in the mutual project of rebuilding the United States policy on international parcels adjusted accordingly next slide after World War II international parcel post played an important part in the European recovery plan better known as the Marshall Plan over four years starting in 1948 the United States provided 13 billion dollars in aid to help prevent starvation repair the devastation and begin economic reconstruction the economic cooperation administration or ECA was created in April 1948 to oversee the Marshall Plan next slide the famous care package was created at that time by non-profit organizations but ordinary Americans could send relief packages of their own the ECA subsidized international parcel post rates to encourage private individuals to conduct their own foreign aid program postage rates on relief parcels were cut by 4 cents per pound to be eligible for reduced postage the parcels had to be clearly marked USA gift parcel and contain food clothing, medical supplies or household goods in 1949 some 14 million gift parcels were dispatched to countries in Europe and Asia by 1951 conditions had improved enough that the postage subsidies for gift packages were ended next slide wartime advances in shipping and aviation facilitated the post war movement of goods in 1948 the United States Congress authorized a new service called air parcel post air parcels could reach their destinations in days rather than weeks demand for air parcel post grew quickly with over one million pounds dispatched in 1954 next slide containerization bulk billing and computerization streamlined the handling of parcels new technologies increased demands for goods and faster delivery in the 1960s and 70s the UPU devised methods so that parcels could travel and clear customs more quickly next slide the UPU worked to refine rates and regulations and tackled the thorny issues of land and sea rates transit charges and terminal dues the lack of a consensus coupled with new technologies created openings for private sector competition well at the same time the reorganization of the postal operations in many countries including the United States Postal Service required the post to now be self funded next slide advances in aviation, telecommunications and computer technology made it possible for private couriers and express companies to gain a foothold in the marketplace these companies initially specialized in urgent documents and small parcels as more private couriers entered the marketplace they challenged the post monopoly through litigation and legislation in 1979 the United States Postal Service modified its regulations to permit private couriers to carry extremely urgent letters and international ocean carrier documents next slide the world's postal administrations faced an increasingly competitive global parcel post network in 1984 congress and Hamburg these transnational forces came to a head leading the United States to join the UPU Postal agreement next slide the last slide accession to the postal parcel agreement was not the end of debate new technologies globalization and private competition continued to challenge the world's posts during subsequent congresses the UPU parcel post committee took up many contentious issues the key difference was that those discussions took place within the UPU with the United States as a full participant as far as parcels were concerned the world was now a single postal territory thank you very much Stefan, so we'll move to the last speaker our last Monica yes, I am here hello how are you thank you for Spanish our last presentation will be given by Ms Monica Farcas from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and it looks at postal universalization transformation of the space and time imaginaries for the second half of the 19th century in Argentina thank you good afternoon I thank the organizers of the colloquium and the participants for this very interesting space this paper is written within the framework of wider research in connection with my doctorate thesis titled Argentinian postage stamps and the debate around the building of the nation 1856 1915 where we intend to restore these postal devices to the conflictive social political network involved in the constitution process of the Argentinian national state the proposed time frame allows to look at them in the light of debates as associated to the place these documents hold in the nation projects at play the postal system was visualized as an instrument capable of modeling the territorial and national imaginary from the postal telegraph agency strategies were developed in order to set criteria regulation publishing and postal artifacts which contemplated both iconic and non-iconic aspects aligned with the regulation of the universal postal view on April 1st 1878 Argentina had become a member of the general postal union although Argentina was not represented at the Japan Congress of 1874 where the general postal union was established in September 1875 Dr. von Steffen sent the minutes of the Japan Congress to the minister in Paris Mariano Valcarse and request Argentina's other events Valcarse was minister of national imaginary representative of the Argentine Republic in France and to highlight his importance sonny law of general José de San Martín liberator of Argentina Chile and Peru the general director of postal offices and telegraphs Eduardo Oliveira agreed to the request and maintain correspondence von Steffen he should be noted that Oliveira was responsible for merging the post office and telegraphs into a single institution the first article of the Paris Convention in 1978 established that all member nations configure one postal territory with the aim of warranty with their reciprocal exchange of correspondence this originated to fundamental outcomes on the one hand freedom of transit on the other hand unification of postal rates and the prohibition of tariffs which had not been authorized by the organization Argentina's incorporation into Val's postal convention is regarded as the most relevant event after the implementation of postal stamps since it would make available to all Argentinian residents safe easy communication with countries all over the world however for the second postal congress to be held in Paris in May of that year Eduardo Oliveira director of postal offices and telegraphs suggests that the change he raised proposed by Switzerland France being revised his initiative rested in the fundamental understanding that low rates always mean an increase in revenue which the Argentinian administrator stressed among the arguments built by Oliveira by Oliveira against universalization we may highlight the scarce population in vast desert areas and a large population regarding epistolary communication issues their education to bolster his argument he compared the number of inhabitants per square kilometer Belgium 183 England 152 and Argentina a half and the convention agreed to his request likewise this paper attempts to point out some of the futures of that centralizing intent of dividing Argentinian state a process not without contradiction in permanent emotion the product of negotiation which were we were hardly ever simple whose protagonists had the agreement between countries in the region interpenetrated by longer term supranational and rational objectives considering that context a set of documents will be tackled to recover the multidimensional nature of that device technical aspects of the execution of the regulation the hybrid character regarding the diplomatic aspects and the circulation of a specific postal and telegraphic knowledge of postal congresses and epistolary exchange with consolidated UPS union postal UPU intangible intangible network the field booklets of the technicians and the postal strikes of 1888 it's been a paper it's been a paper presented at the Prato congress we focus on the transformation of imaginaries and narratives of space and time to re-aspect or re-elected with this war they were the political project of the province of Corrientes which issued the considered first postal stamp in the Argentine territory when the Argentine Republic was not yet constituent it's iconographic affiliation the French service was an expression of the national model of the order professionalization through the creation of the national school of postal and telegraph engineers of the Argentine Republic configuration of the simononic sociability and visual imaginaries through famous postal artifacts that allow immigrants to show visual reference of the new country of residence the development of collecting and and incident tourist industry for the universal postal union conformity to international parameters not only mean gaining visibility by means of the development of South American postal conventions held with UI and Paraguay or the exhibition of instruments and plates both at the continental and international level it's also involved understanding how images circulated at an unprecedented rate in catalogs, albums, periodical publications postcards and among stamp collectors very active agents in the exchange of knowledge elating to postal administration live bikes we are interested in accounting for the knowledge exchanges generated by the invisible network around the UPU express in rational and supranational agreements live bikes here we have the text of those agreements live bikes to address the conflict that is not present we want we would like to address the conflict that is not present in the official documents through other sources in this context of the search for unification and essentialization due to transnationalization we have an artifact a field notebook and field notes from the expedition to install the telegraph line in Rauson which reflects various aspects of that process the calendar and live time the live time reveals differences from the official account here's a letter from the Julio Oliveira archive here Oliveira it's the time it's raining and I spend my time writing to kill the black sorrow to top it all I have to penetrate career because I can work due to lack of materials if it rains you will get wet if it rains you will get wet if it rains you will get wet if it rains you will get wet if it rains you will get wet this beside of the official account illustrations and cartoons of the postal workers drive due to the imposition of the uniform in 1888 I will ban my site my suite in the presence of the execute executioners America is a land of the free not of slaves Posse Codileu is an anarchist worker from Spain who lived in Argentina to finish and also it exceeds the period covered in this work I want to show the iconographic record of the universal postal congress held in Buenos Aires Argentina in 1939 materialized in postal objects and a volume published by Ramon Columba containing illustrated portraits of the represented representatives attending the event it reflects Argentina's growing interest in maintaining the universal postal union network and also serve as a small preview of online web conference platforms thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much so we still have eight minutes for one or two questions perhaps if you may introduce yourself if you can introduce yourself please I would like to ask to our American contributors today why the fate of the US postal savings bank was different compared to the fate of the parcel US parcel post eventually the US parcel post exists but the role of USPS in postal financial services has been severely limited from 1907 if I understand well beginning of the 20th century so why would you have the explanation in terms of comparative analysis of why this fate for parcel but the different end of the story for the postal savings in the US thank you very much thank you Stefan or perhaps if you may please yes I could say postal banking ended in the 1960s the initiative was primarily for geared towards immigrants to the United States who were familiar with postal banking in their home countries and as the country became less more homogenized the demand for that sort of banking and it was not full service banking it was a savings program it didn't offer checking or credit cards that's my take perhaps Richard has some other input just a quick that's right it's actually a proposal very down a law professor who's trying to provide postal banking today immigrant European background is in the Republican program microphone please please yeah everything Stephen said is right there's been a proposal to revive it Elizabeth Warren Massachusetts Senators behind that it was a Republican initiative um a ferocious lobbying against it by the banking industry which is in some ways analogous to the lobbying against parcel the interesting question is why does the one succeed and the other fail breakdown and resistance to banking banking was boring in the United States in the 1950s so it was seen as safe that's not necessarily the case today there's a very large unbanked population in the United States it's confronted with predatory landings it'd be a rationale to bring back a postal banking but opposition of banks and as Stephen said the inability to get into new services because of how tightly the sector was constrained I think it may be hard for Europeans to understand just how the mandate of governmental regulatory agencies in the United States is constrained by the power of private lobbies it's a very good question you might then ask why was not parcel post eliminating United States and you have powerful domestic groups behind it but the powerful domestic groups behind postal savings were not as strong as those that opposed them so that's what we got it's a good question one, two okay so I would like on your behalf to thank our three speakers and I'll call the chair of the next session to Mathieu Gillaber is invited to come to the lectern thank you so welcome to this last panel and our last panelist I'm Mathieu Gillaber I'm professor at University of Freiburg in Switzerland not so far away from here and I promise that we will launch some new research about you as we have heard today we have heard today presentations on the technical issues so we've heard the various presentations today some of them technical relating to the sovereignty of countries that were dominated and to legitimize that in the case of Japan we've also seen presentations on the pressure of imperial powers in the development of communication spaces and the UPU each time appears as an organization with technical skills but of course also working in the realm of politics I will be relatively strict with the management of the time available to us each of you will have 15 minutes for your presentation in the case of this panel we're going to talk about postal policies and the role of UPU to foster transnational exchanges but also the importance of treaties with respect to the definition of nation states and their importance and we're going to talk about decolonization and postal politics, sovereignty in the stamps of pseudo states in sub-Saharan Africa 1961-1980, Gary Baines History Department Rhodes University South Africa who's going to talk to us about this topic so you are a professor of history at Rhodes University specialized in South African border wars and urban history and culture you have the floor, dear colleague thank you and good afternoon I guess by the small number of questions asked in the previous session our tension is flagging we'll try to get it back on track the essential thesis of my paper is that international postal system is inherently political and I'm going to try illustrate this argument with reference to case studies of three secessionist or unilaterally illegal states in Africa during the period of decolonization of the early 1960s and to set the scene I need to make a few comments about sovereignty and secession and what I've chosen to call pseudo states which I will define as you can see from the first slide please okay we all know that the UPU is a specialized agency in the United Nations and it follows the lead of that body in declaring or recognizing or not states that are legal or not in other words if the United Nations deems a regime to be illegitimate the UPU follows suit organization of Africa was founded in 1963 it committed member states to preserve the territorial integrity of the continent's colonial boundaries and it opposed the recognition of new states through secession in other words this was deemed necessary to avoid chaotic decolonization to preserve the colonial boundaries so the post colonial states adopted the same political makeup and of course it has been a bone of contention in Africa ever since the common standpoint of the United Nations and the the UPU contributed then to an international climate against secessionism and this was also in keeping with the norms of sovereignty during this period now as I've indicated the case studies that I'm going to turn to are three that are sought to try attain sovereign status and independence by breaking away from the mother countries the three case studies being Katanga which broke away from the Republic of Congo Leopoldville by Afra which attempted to secede from Nigeria and Rhodesia which is somewhat different in that it sought to sever ties with Whitehall in a sense they have certain similarities and can be compared and people have used scholars have used different terms to describe this category of states and as I've indicated I've chosen to use the term pseudo state which is defined on the slide I won't read it scholars have also used terms like proto state or quasi state as well I see slight differences in these meanings and terminology but essentially what I think one can say of the kinds of states is that they make claims to be sovereign nations they issue stamps for example to assert sovereignty I haven't found any information in the archives to suggest that they applied for UP membership but again that would if that happened it would be a means to assert sovereignty but sovereignty is a discursive claim as such it is contingent it is contested and of course stamps only are invested with sovereignty if they are accepted as a valid receipt for prepayment of postage on a reciprocal basis with other states and of course as I'll illustrate in this presentation that didn't happen okay I've got a map for those who are unaware of the location of Katanga on the eastern part of Konga now known as the Democratic Republic of Konga then just simply Konga Republic it was granted independence by Belgium in 1960 it was the mineral rich area of the eastern parts of Katanga that declared independence under its leadership self-styled most of Chombi in July of 1960 but it was not recognised by other countries and eventually its short existence came to an end when the United Nations forces commonly known as Onak defeated the Katangi's and the military forces in that region and Chombi was pressed into signing a treaty of conciliation in other words its sovereignty if you like was denied by virtue of intervention by the United Nations I have to provide parted histories of these regions but just to set some kind of context moving on to Biafra Biafra attempted to secede from the Nigerian Federation in 1967 under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Amjoukwu who declared independence of from Nigeria and called in what became known as the Biafran Republic on the 30th of May 1967 it too like Katanga was potentially rich in resources and oil had been recently discovered and promised to bring a bit of a revenue bonanza to Nigeria and of course Biafran's political elite at any rate in Biafra hoped to benefit from such revenue the world at large refused to recognize Biafra however there were five countries that did so and four of them happened to have been in Africa including one of its neighbors Gabon, near neighbors Gabon eventually the Biafran Rebellion also was defeated but this time by the federal forces not by outside intervention except to say that of course the Nigerian Federation did receive external aid from the former mother country Britain but also interestingly Russia or what was then the Soviet Union exactly a partnership and thirdly if I may move to sorry that is right to the white set the state of Rhodesia which declared UDI in 1965 as I've already stated it didn't attempt to redraw boundaries but to sever ties with London with Whitehall of course Louise White has famously said that Rhodesia was more of a cause in the country its population was very mobile the white settler population at any rate and the Smith regime attempted to uphold white supremacy and construct a Rhodesian Biafran British identity as part of the the ruling Rhodesian Front's political agenda however of course it wasn't accepted by Britain which still regarded Rhodesia and used the name Southern Rhodesia, still regarded Rhodesia as a colony an illegal secession of states they didn't use the term UDI, they didn't accept the term UDI instead they used the term UDI which means illegal declaration of independence so that was the stance of officialdom and the Wilson government at that time of course eventually Rhodesia became embroiled in a civil war a long protracted civil war which saw the Smith regime eventually surrender power and hand back the state to Britain who arranged for transition to majority rule now as I say each of these states or would be states aspirants states if you like issued stamps to assert their sovereignty and I'm just referencing here the independence stamps that they issued just to exemplify the symbolism involved in asserting this sovereignty on the first anniversary of independence, Katanga issued this set of three stamps the three denominations over the same design and as you can see from the slide in the upper right left corner a portrait of Bambé the date in the green diagonal band of independence and then in the lower right band the handa as they were called these are crosses which had traditional symbolism in the region of Katanga some believed it was associated with mineral wealth but more likely it has to do as much with traditional crafts and so on in addition you'll note that a surcharge was added to these stamps and this money presumably went into Jambé's war chest in the case of Biafra the independence stamps issued some time about eight months after the came to independence or to sovereignty was made the two penny value shows the map of Biafra with the sun prominent as you'll see in all three stamps because it was part of the Biafra flag the two penny value also shows a map of Africa in the insert which pinpoints the location of Biafra which suggests that the target audience or the intended audience for these stamps was a broad philatelist and foreign sympathizers, lobbyists and so on but there's a bit of an ambiguity here because the value of the stamp would only have been good for local postage and of course for the most part as we'll see these stamps were used only locally but the use of them further refilled a broad became a highly contentious issue these four penny value just shows the date of independence and the one selling value portrays a mother and a child gazing upwards towards the rising sun which is an emblem that the Biafans seem to stolen from the Japanese to depict new beginnings and bright futures I should just add that this image of the Biafran child or the Biafran babies of course became synonymous with the war the great suffering and the loss of life that was inflicted during the course of the war and in particularly the image of the child with Qashid this is a word I struggled to pronounce Qashid you call which is the symptom of malnutrition this became a humanitarian crisis and in effect in the public imagination Biafra wasn't seen as a nation an aspirant nation but rather a humanitarian affair and that of course detracted from any claims to sovereignty that it might have had lastly just to illustrate the Radesian case its independent stamp which was unlike the case of Biafra where stamps were produced abroad Radisia produced its own stamps and the design on the independence two-shelving six pin stamp the emblems are quite or the symbols are quite self-evident on the left hand side one sees the coat of arms of Radisia including part of the heraldry drawn from the roads as family or Cecil John Rhodes who is regarded as the founder of the the white nation at any rate and then to show the continuity with the colonial administration there's the head of Queen Elizabeth the second who Radisians claimed was their monarch they didn't recognize the the Labour government but they were trying to say she was her queen sorry I've totally run out of time I was going to also show some of the postal sanctions imposed upon these states but we'll have to call it a day sorry about thank you very much it's very exciting in addition to working on very original sources for this story thank you very much very original we now have a second presentation a more general presentation on the necessary conditions for international collaboration within the UPU by Hideki Sato macro micro and long-term perspectives to the UPU Hideki Sako is professor of international finance in the faculty of economics and management and Kanazawa University in Japan and associate staff member of the financial market group at the London School of Economics please the floor is yours for 15 minutes thank you thank you very much secretary general thank you very much staff of the IB of the UPU thank you for everyone for preparation for great conference in advance my name is Hideki Sato as a second machine to pronounce my 8th sound and he all of the French person says to cut the A so I'm just Hideki so I always correct my name so thank you machine so my presentation focused on macro micro and long-term perspective to the UPU the three dimensions for international harmonization so my fundamental question is what's the focal point to understand the importance of cross-border cooperation to have an efficacious efficient system of postal services the presentation will be based on three points namely macro perspective micro perspective and long-term perspective so of course the logical aspects is based on the long-term perspective over 150 years but the macro important thing is very important and the Nego very some kind of a lot of conflicts or compromise between the member states so that means that to divide line between the micro perspective and macro perspective so my question is how to harmonize the international organization this is a commonality not only the UPU but also in any kind of the UN committees or by the committee on banking supervision as well is a lot of commonality to divide in line or what is the minimize standardized approach and what is to make a leeway for the traditional approach remained in member states so background for conclusion even though the current data in 2024 should be different from the historical experiences so we have a serious mission to pave the way to thrive as a service provider in tandem with the competition with private sectors we are commonality with privatization not only Japan but also the UK or other countries switching from also relative sector to the privatization to compete with example the DHL or any kind of private sectors this is a very impeding point for us therefore services competition, speed, accuracy assurance and indispensable to enhance the reliable and high quality services among member states in the sense of free and open discussion in the UPU including formal and informal approach should be necessitated as for macro perspective the UPU are focused on features of UPU with respect to international harmonization by trace by the macro perspective for example in order to forge international cooperation for postal services it's not easy task to discern what is the subject should be standardized and what issue should be a leeway for member states as I mentioned so I oftentimes visit a postal service a postal museum in London so many times including in the exhibition is very activating for not only professional but also the students and the very activated in the very friendly manner in the sense so as for the post 33 as part one is a Congress universal in the London Congress in 1929 this is a very interesting point about the discourse by the N. Rachel Long in the secret tool I mean through to commerce and industry they post a telegraphic to France so in 1928 for the preparation for the 1929 Congress his discourse should be emphasized about the condition that different regime so it's a very important point at the time of 1929 so is a so might diversitize a regime for it's a complication intolerable for the execution of the implementation on terms of service postal so it's a long lasting issue not only the 29th but also the 2024 of course as we know about the first conference was held in 15 September 1984 in Berlin but the preparation are also very substantive point about the two 1988-63 as a commission held in Paris the authority contrast union on general store a synod of October meeting with some so some can so so this input I have a strong interest about what's the combination between the relationship between France Switzerland and Germany because to dive into the documentation of the archives as and is a lot of congress about the Washington law and Madrid and Stockholm Stockholm is very important 1924 is a making if you catch this point to effective make effective the postal services before the 1929 but another thing is principle so this is also the principle because solidarity under the it's very substantial point is to unite even though it's a so many differentiated approach the postal services before enactment of 1974 as including progress a routine as a routine issues and some kind of the difficult things of fiscal or some kind of the frontier circulation of idea frontiers but another one is times consuming so we have to should write on not only the accuracy but also speeding delivery service as well but very huge policies a to contract about the piece of every member states as a whole so of course even though the 1970s are very important water shared to enact effectiveness and but prior to the 1970s is also important so I have an interest about not only just bureaucratic services but also imperialism or colonialism or commercialism as well so as for the general postal union this is a photo in the museum in London it's very some kind of easy to flash so we have to take care of the one place to another place it's a very beautiful ambience so this is a 1978 French initiative for the convention of the police in the archive I have to learn about the domination of Union postal service article 6 major to clarify about the role of the national union so the function is a function is very important first for the high quality of surveillance another ways is how to handle ways the administration of the union of course the bureau is casking down about the 19th century 20th century and 21st century as well but the decision making also complicated but the principle is the majority absolute so this is a very simple but some kind of symmetric system or a symmetric system as well so as for micro perspective to the UPU I have to shed right on the UK as well as Japan as well so the British postal this type of services is around 1512 is the Henry A. Subway and Duke as master of the posts and 6061 and the bishop master general introduces the world's first post mark this is very interesting so documents are very fragile to we have to take care of it but through documentation of London 20 and 1929 so about the micro perspective so there is some complication between the approach for general administration propose a more simplified the system is a bureaucratic level for example the present method is laid down in convention and detail regulation provides a very considerable trouble and difficulty this is a point of making about what is the crux of matter but it's hardly possible to arrive with 80 degree of certainty of a really representative figure so the German scheme of proposal is more simplified such as the amount of weight of the process up to 5 kilograms 5 to 15 kilograms and 15 to 30 kilograms to the range of the three levels but as the host countries of the UK propose and compromise about our critique about this was too high and this suggests a more moderate weight such as the accurate 2.5 kilograms in the first range but the support figure is 3 kilograms 10 kilograms and 20 kilograms so this is a compromising version of the UK counter measures to react to the German approach as for a pretty package so it's a different kind of the variation between the among Japan, France and Germany 50 grams of 20 cents to 10 cents as well as for it's very precise of the minimum rate of dimensions are different and the transits rates are also different as the three four main clauses of proposal should be proposed for abolishing transits rates general proposal regarding the method of taking statistics so the two horizontal line equal footing of the statistical data is very important this is not only the UPU program but also another institutional organization of United Nations as well so as for the Tokyo Congress in the 1969 to jumping forward 40 years later the Congress of Tokyo to be terse the emphasis point is CCPS so to clarify about the union bodies not as a weakness of the committee to updating about the to strengthen from committee to council so consultive council for process studies so studies means is a very important to the academic levels we're on the same page about to make a very detailed analyze and to analyze and detail but the important thing is who is making as a final decision so it is very complicated about the issue but the study is very important so not only the analysis but also the practical tools for the handling of UPU so to learn more quickly about the CCPS decision and the study fighting is very a point so the documentation and results of the CCPS studies should be emphasized as a Tokyo Congress as well so it's skip to the ITU approach answer last one is a long term approach so I'd like to pose a question about the three diamond dichotomy the first one is diversity first one is software or non-biting approach versus hydro or jurisdictional approach last one is discretion versus convergence so there are strong commonality not only the UPU but all of the needs international organization including further committee so another point is to maximize cost effectiveness and competitive phenomenon how to strive such as current status should be concluded as three points first one is competition so in tandem with the privatization our sector we have to compatible between the competition and speed this is a commonality between the rising cost of employees inflation pressures macroeconomic situation even so generally as well as reducing about the manpower for manipulating even so AI is developed but the accuracy and reliable services is the end of last result so we have to have a credence for postal services so in a sense the UPU have a vital role for the usage of 150 years accumulation of expenses so as I clue thank you very much and great contribution for the interview in advance thank you merci pour avoir aussi respecté parfaitement le temps à partie Thank you very much for having stuck to the time that was allotted to you thank you for giving us these different analyses I will now give the floor to Etienne Morales whose presentation echoes the first contribution that we heard he will be coming back to the political dimension of postal services and will look into solutions when postal services are interrupted what are the challenges which states in such situations have to face we'll have the example of the Cold War and the tensions between Cuba and the USA with this contribution between embargo and bypass routes 1960s and 1970s Etienne Morales wrote a PhD Cuba and the world recalling that airlines and postal services are very closely linked and achieved a distinction for his PhD Etienne you have the floor for 15 minutes Good afternoon one and all first of all I would like to thank the organizers of this colloquium especially the international bureau of the Universal Postal Union who has invited us here as well as the scientific committee Leonardo LaBaurie who invited me to speak here not only about airlines which is my field of specialty but to take up other issues that are not really in my area of specialty strictly speaking by means of an introduction I'd like to talk about a document which you can see at the Cuban Postal Museum you see a replica of the European Postal Union it's an envelope from 1971 that went to show that air mail between the United States and Cuba transited through Spain in my contribution I will be telling you about the postal embargo around Cuba in the early 1960s and the strategies that were put in place to circumvent this embargo there was a postal blockade around Cuba but the presence of this envelope at the Cuban Postal Museum goes to show that there were solutions to circumvent this embargo I'd like to go back to the development of air mail after the Second World War it started with Pan American Airways which was the first airline in the U.S. and Havana ever since Pan American Airways developed its network in Latin America through postal contracts it had a monopoly in Latin America until 1945 this monopoly finished after the Second World War and with regard to Cuba it's a company called Expresso Aero Interim and McConnell went a contract for postal services between Havana and Miami opening up to competition made it possible to decrease prices air mail went from four dollars per pound to eight cents per pound it is now possible to send mail through air mail air post traffic statistics of that time go to show that there's a huge increase you see a diagram which shows in red inter-American air post traffic and in orange transatlantic and trans-pacific air post traffic which doesn't decrease quite as much now this increase in volume goes hand in hand with a decrease in price and therefore source of income have to be diversified mail which used to be the basis for their turnover between the two world wars this source of income decreases in favor of passenger and fret postal relations by air between the USA and Cuba these two countries have a particular relationship ever since 1898 but following the second world war the link between Miami and Havana is the main air freight link for the United States this is where most freight goes to from the United States so there's huge dichotomy when it comes to air mail in terms of volume there are usually three times more letters going to Cuba compared to letters outgoing letters from Cuba another major destination in Spain at the time with the opening up in 1947 after the first service postal air mail service that's a major break if we think of the colonial history of the Spanish empire it only takes 24 hours to go from Spain to Cuba Iberia and Cuba de Aviación shared the market so a Spanish company and a Cuban company air mail frequency matched to the frequency of flights you see advertisement here for the Cuban company which shows the exchange of mail in the context of migration there's still quite a few Spanish people living in Cuba and here you see on the advertisement someone opening a letter that comes from the other side of the world at that time before the revolution the presidency of the president especially under the presidency of Batista postal contracts are the opportunity to receive hidden subsidies under Batista the Cuban company received a $50,000 in subsidies underhand whereas the total cost of postal services is $150,000 so it's underhand manner to support business in the hand of his cronies now the idea is to moralize the economy at the turn of 1961 now coming back to the postal embargo around Cuba things went south around the summer of 1960 when Cuba decided to nationalize oil refineries American companies present in Cuba and that's when there started being problems in the dispatch of air mail and the press it was one of the tasks of postal services to send newspapers and the press they were considered as propaganda and were therefore destroyed in American airports and Latin America airports in Marike Olduski the minister of communications in Cuba said we are under attack even when it comes to letters in air mail then came the missile crisis for a few weeks Cuba was cut off from the rest of the world this is something that we see when we look at the dispatches from diplomats diplomats can still send telegrams the diplomatic pouch we cannot circulate let us say you will read this whenever you can Hugh Thomas historian from Britain said that the most important aspect of the missile crisis for Cubans is the fact that Pan Am flights were interrupted between Cuba and the USA in October 1962 Cubans no longer have any solution to leave Cuba and mail which still circulated despite the severing of diplomatic relationship between Cuba and the United States no longer flows directly at this stage the Cuban chancellor receives telegram from the postal union from the of the Americas and Spain inviting it to a conference to which it had not been invited it received it by mistake at the same time right around 1962 Cuba had been excluded from oh yeah here you have an excerpt of the letter of the time mocking the postal union of the Americas and Spain now which just follows instructions from the State Department in the USA and follows a long piece from a former guerrero attacking the United States and the defending the inalienable right to communicate and criticising economic sanctions at this point in time when direct lines were interrupted it is mainly Iberia which is in charge of flights between Spain and Cuba continue to fly passengers and air mail but no longer transports freight it says that it continues to transport and dispatch parcels for humanitarian purposes as well as exiles Cuba tries to circumvent the embargo by opening other lines to Nassau for example in the Bahamas an agreement pre-revolution agreement allows Cuba to have lines but measures are taken to print passengers to get off planes and Buenton that comes out of these flights may continue to the United States but the lines are organised and therefore the line is interrupted there may have been an intervention by the Cuban government at the Universal Postal Union to criticise this fact I didn't have time to make any research but there doesn't seem to be any request in this regard I looked at what happened at the IKO and at the UPU Cuba criticises neocolonialist stance but not the embargo directly there are other measures that are coupled with the embargo there are many examples of checking mail here's one on the screen it is the link between embargo and checking the mail François Miquéran travelled to Cuba at the time and in the letter that he sent to Anpajo at the time he sent his card where nothing was written he sent a letter with the news saying that from Cuba it was not possible to send any mail because the fact that the mail was checked with the end of the direct flights in 1963 there were certain schemes that were developed medication food clothes were sent from the state via third countries not subject to embargo and I'm trying to move ahead as quickly as I can because time is running out and time is of the essence and this is a first card from 1962 we see that there's an internalisation of a parcel post by consumers from Cuba and Florida and we see that it is possible to send objects of a very little value like chewing gum for less than 10 pesos it was possible to send that via parcel into Cuba and in 1968 there was a parcel that exploded in Havana the Ministry of Telecommunications called this is a 90 Castro magazine and the idea here is to send a parcel with a bomb to Fidel Castro so this possibility of sending parcels was immediately suspended at the time because of this incident and thousands of parcels were circulating in various airports including in Europe including Madrid airport and here parcels are suspended play on words with suspended for Cuban people in exile and everything was controlled the content of the parcel, the weight of the parcel in the 1970s there's an improvement in the circulation of letters and parcels so there are new air services, new flights are opened up to the end of or the lifting of certain sanctions by the organization of American states and if we compare the pre-revolution levels with the 1970s 140 tons in 1957 part of the revolution and more than 850 tons of mail in 1970 so we see that the flow of mail grew significantly over that period but the lack of direct relationship between Cuba and the United States and I'm talking about postal relations this existed until 2016 and Barack Obama visited Cuba at the time and decided to revive the direct postal relations between the US and Cuba after a long period of no relations at all it was an assumption of direct mail between Cuba and the USA so oh yes I've been told to stop my presentation but I'm nearing the end so the opening of mail all of that seized parcels with bombs this is also something that is seized in terms of political economics so this can be analyzed I can tell you that in Cuba this is considered something that can lead to speculation and counterfeit goods something that is considered as being an attack against the freedom of movement of goods in particular of mail and it is considered to be a form of trade with Fidel Castro and his regime and we know that there have been various concrete arrangements that have made it possible to keep alive these very important postal relations thank you and sorry for having overshot the time that was allotted to me thank you for this presentation we now come to the last presentation we're going to listen to Rajiv of Venugopal Canada Post Corporation Canada he's going to speak to us from Canada can you hear us? yes sir and can you hear me okay okay thank you very much so Rayef Venugopal is a general manager of international relations in Canada he has also worked in the new Brunswick government also in the Canadian Senate and he's presenting a contribution entitled Delivering Diplomacy the Universal Postal Union's Role in a Post-Westphalian Global Order quite a title, a new dimension altogether you have the floor thank you very much chair and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share some remarks I do apologize for not being there in person and joining the conference virtually. I have spent a lot of time on that stage as well as on the floor and burn over the past few years as Canada's head of delegation to the UPU and of course in this Abhijan cycle as the co-chair of committee 2 of the Council of Administration quite honestly earlier in my career if someone had asked me about my thoughts about global postal business I probably would have shrugged my shoulders and had a blank look on my face but these days I must admit that the global postal business is not only my professional focus it is an academic passion it's been about 10 years since I've been in the classroom and I do miss this aspect of looking at the UPU and certainly looking at my work quickly for those of you in the von Steffen room a few words just enjoy the experience and breathe in air deeply. The UPU is one of the great multilateral wonders of the world and a testament to the dream of a world in which multilateral governance and the single postal territory were once little more than ethereal imaginary concepts and nothing more than fairy dust I want to thank the conference organisers for giving me this opportunity to speak to you and given that I have a deep and abiding disdain for PowerPoint I have no slides now I am a political scientist by training and therefore view the world through the lens of power now given that this is a historian's colloquium I'm told that a political scientist is a cousin to historians I was told however that economists were discouraged from applying and that accountants would have to pay a registration fee just kidding there one of the formative events affecting modern geopolitics was the conclusion of the piece of Westphalia in 1648 which ended the 30 years and the 30 years war that ravaged Europe as a result of the creation of a new international order that displaced the rule of religious orders and the rule of kings the global system of sovereign and border delineated independent states was born in this system states within their territories had exclusive use of coercion, of force to ensure conformity with domestic laws as applied to my interest and career in global postal affairs and having this colloquium convened I was curious to better understand how the UPU operated in this system in which sovereignty was at the core of the international system but the UPU was afforded the opportunity to pursue its mandate for the most part as if those borders didn't really matter now in this regard I've tabled with the conference organizers a fairly lengthy conference paper I encourage all of you to not only read it but comment critically and I hope that my IB colleagues and member country colleagues who I'll be seeing later in April for S5 will also have the opportunity to read the paper my previous experience studying international relations and geopolitics involved challenged to multilateralism that one would associate with the travails of the UN Security Council, UN peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention where conflicting interests of sovereign states was de rigueur. When I joined the post and specifically the international team I was surprised to learn how global post deliver items between one another as if sovereignty was not a barrier and that it was a given that the unions members were aligned in pooling their sovereignty to achieve shared objectives. In 1874 as we've heard throughout this conference 21 countries or entities came to burn to align on terms and conditions under which they would exchange global globally postal items amongst their respective geographies. An agreement emerged that we would know as the Treaty of Burn which would eventually result in the creation of the universal postal union as we know today. At that 1874 table there were multiple dynamics at play including the significant influence of colonialism, the growing and waning of empires and even resistance to some of the core principles that would later define the union including differences over freedom of transit. The first observation I had in writing my paper had to do with this apparent paradox between on the one hand an international order defined by individual sovereign states with borders and on the other hand the notion that borders were permeable in terms of the work of the specialized organization a state made possible by its members agreeing to pool or share their sovereignty in order to achieve a common system. Such a trade-off as one can imagine would be very difficult to pull off unless strict terms were in place. Here my second observation is that the UPU has been able to pursue its multilateral work given that it has worked hard over the years to stick to its lane meaning that it sticks to issues within its postal purview and generally avoids implicating itself and its members into sensitive areas such as territorial sovereignty diplomacy etc. Put another way, the incredible latitude that the UPU enjoys today is not being constrained by the bounds of sovereignty or that the UPU enjoys this latitude is a function of its specificity. Of course from time to time temporal issues will rise to the four which motivate member countries to comment on those issues particularly if they impact any aspect of postal exchange. To limit the diminishing of the postal focus of what would become the UPU the US Postmaster General at the time Montgomery Blair in 1862 called for a postal conference that would be attended later in Paris led by postal experts and not the usual brand of diplomats that did not have postal expertise but specialized in perhaps more general areas. My paper discusses various aspects of the Union's creation and background considerations. In order to dig a little deeper into specific issues and understand how the UPU could balance its need to exist in a world defined by state sovereignty while also having the great gift of being able to conduct its business across a single postal territory my paper examined two specific areas freedom of transit and one of the UN SDGs, SDG number 5. With respect to the former freedom of transit the paper provides some history into how the concept evolved but takes a specific look at recent changes to the customs regimes in place for Europe specifically the impact of import control system released to simply referred to as ICS-2 and its application to the members of the European Union which were 27 plus Norway, Switzerland and Northern Ireland. Without delving into the technical matter that is explained in the paper the main issue of contention appears that implementation of this new customs regime by the European Commission requires electronic data for postal items flowing to or through the previously named countries to be sent, acknowledged and cleared electronically prior to the items being dispatched. Here is the idea that the new requirements would apply to items both destined to the EU and going through the EU in other words being transited to another destination country which has been argued created an impediment for member countries trying to move items internationally across the single postal territory. Nearly all member countries from outside the EU believe that this is a violation of the freedom principle and treats transit items in a prejudicial manner. What is driving much of the debate and contention has to do with understanding how EU member countries treaty obligations overlay with their obligations to the European Union and what to do regarding the philosophical conflict between the two concepts. Given that the European Union is governed as per the very same supranational governance construct that rules and regulations of the EU it is not an easy philosophical nut to crack. What makes the issue even harder to grasp is the proliferation of other multilateral agreements such as the GATT which is now the WTO, the WCO and IKO agreements that all contain provisions concerning freedom of transit and or principles of non-discrimination that member countries both in and outside the EU 27 plus 3 have agreed to. Notwithstanding the various efforts undertaken by the Director General the International Bureau and the bodies of the POC and the CA to work in a collaborative fashion with the European Commission to find a suitable outcome, the issue today remains delicate as both multilaterally governed communities appeared to have conflicting or at least apparent conflicting aims and objectives. Having said that, interviews that conducted in the preparation of the paper seem to pardon me, the danger of having a mobile connection. The interviews that I had conducted with subject matter experts from the European Commission as well as designated postal operators from France provided balanced input into how the issue is perceived by the European Union. Here the third observation I have is that the UPU is located at the nexus and confluence of supranationalism and state sovereignty management of the UPU and the need to remain 100% focused on resolution of postal operational issues which may become a proxy for complicated governance matters. With respect to the UN sustainable development goals there is an emphasis on the implementation of 17 goals intended to serve the common benefit of humanity. One of them, SDG 5 relates to gender equality. Here we can see an excellent example of how sovereign member countries accept that the UPU has a role to play in pursuit of goals common to the UN system while at the same time accepting that their inherent sovereignty accords them the right to retain deeply held domestic positions. In this case, two member countries had differing views on how gender equality policy should either include or exclude reference to LGBT rights or should be exclusive of them. Both countries which had definitely differing points of view raised their positions in open sessions of the postal operations council delicately but without prejudice or malignment of the other points of view. Here the fourth observation I wish to share with you relates to how important it is for the Union to deliver on its specialized and technical mandate while at the same time navigating complex social issues that may involve deeply entrenched member country positions that are not subject to negotiation or at least not subject to negotiation in real time on the floor of the room in which you're sitting today. In my curiosity regarding the intersection between member country sovereignty and the founding of the Union I was also curious as to whether creating the single postal territory was a uniquely normative and qualitative undertaking or whether in the spirit of Morgantau's realism there were perhaps other motivations at play. Here the paper looks at several examples of how member country and empire interests may have been influenced in what would become the Treaty of Bern. And I think in the previous papers there's been some discussion on Turkey's reasons and some of the diplomatic challenges they had in 1874 with regards to the Ottoman Empire. We understand that in the case of Japan that there were certain geopolitical factors as well that informed itself in terms of joining the Union later on these are all interesting aspects that I look at in the paper. As a political realist it seems to me that in 1874 a confluence of complex geopolitical interests that Paul Kennedy discusses in the rise and fall of the Great Powers resulted in the original signatory seeking a way to maximize a few things including acquisition of weapons, equipping of armies, establishing transportation networks, building their industrial base and most relevant for us improving communications between the telegraph and the post. When Swiss chair Eugene Morel pointed out in 1874 that the goal of the 21 founding fathers at the table sought to replicate what the ITU had already done for the ubiquity of the telegraph there may have in fact been a larger calculus at play a geopolitical calculus. My fifth observation therefore ponders whether the immutable laws of power politics are at play in considering concerns over freedom of transit in 2024 implementation of the SDGs and whether there is a need for today's Union of 192 diverse members to be mindful that the latitude the UPU enjoys is proportional to the discipline it has in not straying too far from its specialization in postal matters. In conclusion the UPU has survived a number of existential crises over the past 150 years. During my involvement in UPU affairs I have been a participant in some rather great debates concerning serious issues such as the potential withdrawal of the United States from the Union the upending of the terminal due system and the COVID-19 global pandemic. To be certain there have been other political issues which have drawn the UPU into quasi-diplomatic territory some of which were even featured at the 2021 Abidjan Congress. Despite these challenges however the UPU has deep experience as a trailblazer in the area of global multilateral governance. It is in my experience a north star for the conduct of global multilateralism and a shining example of how a commitment to supranationalism and a defined and delimited mandate can serve the lofty goal of globalization. My sixth observation is that the historical care that the UPU has paid to not passing too deeply into what Montgomery Blair described as quote the usual dilatory course of diplomacy and the UPU has stuck to its postal mandate and raison d'etre has served it well and will in the future allow it to conduct its business across the single postal territory. To conclude the UPU is at an inflection point on its journey and serving its members and humanity at large this conference which is dedicated to looking at its past will no doubt inform the future to which it aspires. I hope that I've done justice to the paper I've tabled with the organizers but perhaps more importantly to the attention you have afforded me. Thank you and Chair if I may just two more quick comments as I listened to the various papers that were presented today reflected them on my on my own paper I asked myself the question well so what what are what are these risks that I'm discussing in my paper and what why should historians care about them and what can it tell us about the road in the future on ICS to release to if member countries that will be discussing this issue are unable to come to an understanding on what overlapping or at least touching jurisdictions require barriers may go up various regions of the world may reciprocate what they see as limitations on the freedom of transit principle and the single postal territory will erode on the basis of freedom of transit with regards to governance and the SDGs there is a risk that common non-technical goals and aspirations can take the center stage and actually replace discipline consideration of technical and specialized postal issues and the UPU ends up behaving in a way that Montgomery Blair originally in 1862 had warned against which is the usual course of diplomacy so again if I could conclude on on a single point it would be that the future of the UPU will be bright but it does have to always remember the reason for which it was created thank you Chair Theorique Thank you for your presentation we have a very diverse panel you have seen that we have certain recurring themes globalization the universal values of the UPU and we could also almost talk about deglobalization when we talk about secessionist movements with the tensions that can arise between states with postal services I think we have four or five minutes left so we can take one or two questions yes thank you Sébastien Richet I have a question for Mr. Baines you mentioned the role of stamps the materiality of these stamps in secessionist states was there a strategy to do with the network of post offices or postal staff are you getting at with the question Mike Koopis sorry am I audible I'm not quite sure of the intent of the question can could you rephrase that sorry my question was regarding the networks of post offices and postal employees the symbol of the stamps but what about the postal network and the staff any strategy by this composition of posts or not do you know that or you have any no information about that not that I I can't quite see the connection between the symbolism which was a kind of process of decolonisation or symbolic decolonisation itself and what networks are being referred to networks within countries or between the network inside sorry now I'm going to have to pass I'm not quite sure of the thrust of the question okay we will speak about that after thank you the question was were there networks of post offices in secessionist countries yes I'm sure there were and there was staff as well but was there a secessionist strategy that used or called on the networks or the staff as there was with the stamps did the strategy include postal networks and staff did postal networks and postal staff were they part of a secessionist strategy like the stamps that you showed I think this is a discussion for after the meeting because I think you need to find yourselves on the same page let's go on to the next question heritage an administration that a postal system an administration that already existed and I can only assume that they bought into the as officials of the secessionist states they bought into the vision of the leadership and the political elite of those states that's just an assumption I can make I'm sure it didn't hold true for all officials and in as far as they continued to serve the state they I would imagine did feel convinced that what they were doing is correct in disseminating the stamps and the symbolism that was used as messengers of state sovereignty on these stamps that's probably about as much as I can say about that thank you we will take another question yes a question for Mr Rajiv Venagopal that was a splendid paper I look forward to reading it I'm slightly surprised at the invocation of Montgomery Blair as a expert non-political inspiration for the UPU he did not attend and attended who wrote the Republican platform in 1860 this is a political project which the United States is trying to insert itself into international affairs during the Civil War Von Steppan tried to reshape the institution following the Franco-Prussian war and then Rufi tried to beat back and successfully did the German proposal to honor Steppan to affirm the French which he did with the Marceau sculpture which we have today I admire the commitment of UPU administrators to a narrow technical mandate but that mandate has a politics and the organization has a politics and it seems to me that in a historical congress we need to recognize that the organization has been and will remain embedded as you know so well in an international geopolitical order in which the movement of goods people and information has a politics so I guess I'm asking to respond to that but I am surprised about the re-conceptualization of Montgomery Blair one of the wildest in Lincoln's cabinet thank you sir if I may respond but let me reciprocate I found your presentation outstanding and captivating and I was sitting roughly in the chair that you are in when the United States rose to make its notice of withdrawal from the UPU in 2018 so you're sitting in an auspicious spot in the room in regards to the comments that were made by Montgomery Blair to the then US Secretary of State my readings and preparation in the paper suggested to me that what Blair was looking for was for the conference, the Paris conference to focus on the technical and operational in other words the specialized mandate that global postal exchange would require now that's not to say he wasn't a wily political actor unto himself but what I gathered is that he was trying to differentiate any mandate that would be accorded to what would become the general postal union then later the universal postal union he tried to differentiate what would be the political mandate and what would be the operational mandate so that's the distinction that I'm looking to draw not to say that he wasn't a political character or had political influence but it seems to me that as we look back in order to look forward it is precisely in these areas of politics and diplomacy that the UPU finds itself in perhaps forced waters but not waters in which it naturally swims for example when we dealt with the potential withdrawal of the United States from the UPU or as the record will show there has been treatment of various other issues such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine these are areas that typically we see the postal experts per se step back from and we tend to have the involvement of diplomatic or member state actors that tend to take over in those discussions and there's a whole host of other geopolitical diplomacy type issues that would fall to their address in their discussion but as the further that the UPU with its international bureau and the representatives that sit in the POC and the CA that represent their countries, the further they stray from that postal mandate I think the more dangerous waters they swim in. Does that address your comments sir? Does that in any way address the point that you're making? Thank you I think all right go ahead. I'm afraid to say that the time is over. I would like to thank you the panellists for very interesting presentations the last presentation of the day and I give the floor to the organizers for the following events. Thank you very much.