The Rhine as the Stake of International Competition and Cooperation in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The Lessons of a Recent Congress

Formed in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (CCNR) is the oldest surviving international organisation. Despite its central role in the navigation of the Rhine and its importance in the history of Western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, the CCNR has not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. An international interdisciplinary congress organised in Strasbourg in 2015 by the Centre Raymond Poidevin (UMR Dynamiques europeennes) and the CCNR has helped to remedy this situation. The participants showed how the CCNR had been the source of cooperation between European states while at the same time the site of tensions and confrontations between them. The communications underlined the productivity of the CCNR in its own fields cartography, navigational techniques, social rights of boatmen and showed how the CCNR established itself as a model for the management of other international waterways. Overall, this congress brought out the breadth of the CCNR's action in a wide variety of contexts, and showed how its history was linked to domains as diverse as the history of international relations, economic and social history, the history of technology and the history of organisations.