Reviewed by: Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations by Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot Elisabeth van Meer (bio) Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations. By Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 396. $95. The European Union (EU) generates considerable controversy, much of it centered on its techno-economic legislative activities. For example, in 1994, before there even was a euro, the European Commission issued Regulation 2257. It required bananas produced or imported into the European Community to have “a minimum grade of 27 mm,” while bananas of the highest class could not have “abnormal curvature.” Euroskeptics ridiculed “Eurocrats” for regulating away the nature of a banana. Supporters insisted the law protected consumers and did not ban anything; the lowest class of bananas was allowed all “defects of shape” as long as “the flesh of the fruit” was not affected. How today’s EU has become such a defining yet controversial legislative project is explained in Writing the Rules for Europe. The book offers an exciting new history of European integration, finding its answers in Europe’s long technological trajectories. It dismantles the official account, in which the EU was first envisioned by politicians, like Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and Paul-Henri Spaak, at the end of World War II. “The Europe of this volume has been constituted during the last 150 years or so,” the authors emphasize, “through the creation of a set of rules by a variety of organizations, committees, and experts operating inside them” (p. 1). The earliest precursors to the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community (EEC), and the EU include the Association of German Railway Companies in Berlin (1846), the International Telegraph Union in Paris (1865), and the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome (1905). These initiatives already pursued border-crossing obligations, liabilities, rates, rights, shared data pools, signaling systems, standards, etc. Their ambitious rule-writing forged the first fragmented, often competing, technologically integrated “Europes” (p. xiv). [End Page 483] The authors also stress such expert competition over “Europe” did not end when the postwar institutions started: “The EEC’s great difficulties with creating a common transport policy [is one case] in point” (p. 299). In the 1950s, the Union International des Chemins de Fer (UIC) refused to be superseded by a new European transport authority. The UIC preferred its own sector-specific, pan-European, even global, railway regime, dating back to 1922. UIC experts did not want to serve as a vehicle for economic integration (beyond rail transportation), particularly not one committed to start with just six “core” West European states; they feared losing their rule-writing autonomy (as delegates of Ministries of Transportation) to foreign offices and economic ministries. The longevity of an organization like the UIC also exemplifies how experts forged continuities, for their own careers and their institutions, across the ruptures of world wars and cold war. Europe’s long twentieth-century history was consequently produced by “hidden” integration processes that “were (and are) not obvious to ordinary citizens of Europe” (pp. 4–5). Because experts cultivated a “technified realm,” outside of established parliamentary and diplomatic processes, Europe’s rules have always been written behind closed doors, at congresses and committee rooms, long before the EU was criticized for its lack of transparency in the postwar era. This book also breaks considerable new grounds with its format. It is the fourth volume in the series Making Europe, each co-written by two or three authors. This facilitates the multilingual research required for transnational conclusions: the authors draw on West European (English, French, German, and Italian) and East European (Czech, Polish, and Hungarian) archives and publications. The text also includes dozens of archival images that visualize and underscore arguments. The book is further divided into three sections: chapters 1–3 lay out the foundation, growth, and crises of European technocratic expertise; chapters 4–7 offer sector-specific analyses of transportation (particularly railways) and heavy industry (particularly steel cartelization); chapter 8 provides a final account of “Europe” post-1945. All chapters offer a wealth of new institutional evidence, though that does mean that between the intro, the three...
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Aug 1, 2022
Brooks Tucker Swett 
