Enveloping Europe: Plans and Practices in Postal Governance, 1929–1959

Abstract

This article sets out why and how plans to build Europe on mail, both commercially (rates) and symbolically (stamps), were discussed from the end of the 1920s and have failed up to today. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunication Administrations (CEPT) was created during the intense phase of European integration in the 1950s. In the 1980s it was a key resource for the European Commission for building a Single Market in the telecommunication sector. As this article argues, however, the CEPT did not emerge from the multiple plans for postal integration. Rather, it was a new envelope hiding governance practices inherited from the nineteenth century.

Representing the EPTU to a Wider Public – Stamps Commemorating the Union’s Foundation

“…The four administrations emitted stamps that are quite differentthe motifs were not coordinated between them and thus highlight other aspects, most probably due to the national audience that needed to be served. In the 1920s and 1930s, the wish for a European postal union had often been connected to a common stamp that would give the peoples of Europe a feeling of belonging together 6 . It is thus noteworthy that the member administrations of the EPTU did not emit one common stamp and that the creation of one postal area within Europe was not also used to create one common stamp or to publish one collection at the same date in order to establish some sort of transnational audience.…”