The Europe of Robert Mangin

In 1930 the Parisian journal La Revue des Vivants organized a contest. Who could design the best Europe? The jury included diplomatic and political heavyweights who had known the Geneva machinery for years. The renowned Czechoslovak Minister of Foreign Affairs Edvard Beneš was on the jury together with the British Lord Robert Cecil, a key figure in the establishment of the League of Nations at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. Further members were the influential veteran politician Nicolas Politis, an international law scholar and former Minister of Foreign Affairs in Greece, and the poet Paul Valery who represented France at the League of Nations with regard to cultural affairs. Twenty-three further members seconded them and shed their light on the five hundred mémoires submitted to the journal.

The winning essay by Robert Mangin sketched a new Europe in some 120 pages. The second chapter of his study entitled “La réalisation de la federation économique européenne” opened with the need to establish a customs union, continuing with the expected transformations in agricultural production, the prime materials sector and European industry. Mangin dedicated the fourth section to the rationalizations of exchange. He claimed that turning Europe into a single industrial and agricultural market implied a commitment to unify exchange and consequently of transport and communications.

Being convinced that the exchange patterns in the continent should be stretched to its very borders, Mangin argued that it was necessary to reorganize and unify the means of transport in Europe. His treatment of the Europeanization of the means of transport basically concerned railways and inland navigation. Mangin devoted little attention to road transport, which he considered of secondary importance. He did not recommend the study of international motorways until after federal European institutions had consolidated. With regard to road transport he restricted himself to mentioning the potential benefits of establishing a European road code to increase safety and the simplification of border crossing formalities, issues with which the League of Nations had already been dealing for several years at that point in time.