The European Commission of the Danube, 1856-1948

Front matter

The European Commission of the Danube, 1856-1948

An Experiment in International Administration

Constantin Ardeleanu

Contents

Acknowledgments xi List of Illustrations and Tables xii11

Introduction i

1 An Experiment in International Administration’ 1

Introduction

1 An ‘Experiment in International Administration’

By the early twentieth century Edward Benjamin Krehbiel was one of America’s most prominent peace activists. Krehbiel had completed a PhD in medieval European history, but shortly after his appointment at Stanford University in 1908 he directed his research towards contemporary history, political science and international relations. Although his initial interest in peace came from his German Mennonite background, Krehbiel abandoned a religious approach and looked for pragmatic and ‘scientific’ solutions to peacemaking and peacekeeping. With imperial powers scrambling for territories and waterways around the globe, he strongly believed that international commissions endowed with large executive attributions could limit national jealousies and create a more secure world.!

Krehbiel taught a pioneering course in international conciliation, and in 1916 authored a handbook entitled Nationalism, War, and Society. A Study of Nationalism and its Concomitant, War, in Their Relation to Civilization; and of the Fundamentals and the Progress of the Opposition to War. Nations, he thought, were gradually becoming anachronical, so their 'beneficial successor' was internationalism, based on the rule of international law and order. Krehbiel lobbied to keep the US out of the First World War, but he eventually supported President Woodrow Wilson's decision to take part in the conflict and attempt to impose his idealistic worldview.2

In 1917, Krehbiel became involved with the Inquiry, a body of experts who assisted the American administration in preparing the future peace negotiations. In his academic and political pieces, he often alluded to the 'exceptional' case of the European Commission of the Danube ('the Commission, an organisation that embodied his views on transnational cooperation. In a paper presented at a meeting of the West Coast Branch of the American Historical Association in Berkeley (California) on 30 November 1917 and published in 1918, Krehbiel detailed the history of the Commission, which he penned to

1 Gerlof Homan, 'Edward Benjamin Krehbiel: Progressive Peace Advocate and "Professor of

Eternal Peace,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 76.2 (2002): 189—214. 2 Ibid.

© CONSTANTIN ARDELEANU, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004425965 002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc BY-NC 4.0 license.

be ‘the most ambitious and the most successful experiment in international administration’?

Krehbiel was not the first scholar to write extensively about the organisation’s history; he, however, was one of the early supporters of its being used as a model for post-war international organisations (IO s)* around the globe. There was indeed an increasing variety of supranational entities, spanning from the Universal Postal Union and the Red Cross to International Sanitary Councils and the International Sugar Union, but Krehbiel believed that the Commission was, in many ways, special. It was the harbinger of a new age, one in which narrow national partisanships were to make room for expert cooperation with greater supranational benefits.

The Commission had been created in 1856 through a decision inscribed in the Paris Peace Treaty. Although meant to be a provisional institution with limited technical scope (removing the obstacles that hindered navigation along the Maritime Danube - see Fig. 15), it had managed to survive and gradually extended its reach. By the early twentieth century it had acquired many of the attributes usually associated with an independent state: a ‘territory’ over which it exercised its ‘sovereignty’ based on a ‘constitution’ backed by Europe’s Great Powers, a self-governing bureaucracy and complete financial independence.

To Krehbiel, the Commission’s success came from the organisation focusing its resources on ‘a single problem’ - Danube navigation — which it managed to resolve efficiently. Its reach however was much greater: international administrative agents, a category for which the Commission was a functional prototype, contributed to the peaceful resolution of larger transnational problems in southeastern Europe and beyond. IOs needed to be allowed to evolve naturally from the simple to the more complex, and ‘each will develop a body of custom that will harden into law’. In time, they would develop ‘a whole body of rules which will in effect be the foundation of the super-state itself’.®

Krehbiel’s lecture in institutional Darwinism and his warm support for worldwide organisational reproduction were fuelled by the Commission’s

3 Edward Benjamin Krehbiel, ‘The European Commission of the Danube: An Experiment in International Administration, Political Science Quarterly 33.1 (1918): 38-55.

4 For simplicity, ‘international organisation’ (IO) will be used throughout this volume, though in a modern taxonomy the European Commission of the Danube would fit into the category of ‘intergovernmental organisations.

5 The ‘Maritime Danube’ is the 170-kilometre long section of the river accessible to seagoing vessels. It stretches from the inland port of Braila downstream to the Black Sea. References to the ‘Lower Danube’ relate to the entire river section stretching for about 900 kilometres from the Iron Gates gorge to the Black Sea. The ‘Fluvial Danube’ covers the rest of the ‘Lower Danube’ section, between the Iron Gates and Braila.

6 Krehbiel, ‘The European Commission’: 55.

DAS - DONAU-DELTA misce f À on Lerma abs nas der ven de eon are enter

FIGURE1 Map of the Danube Delta SOURCE: HTTPS://UPLOAD.WIKIMEDIA.ORG /WIKIPEDIA/COMMONS/8/81/ DANUBE_MOUTHS_1867.JPG noteworthy history. As the offspring of Europe’s Concert of Powers, it had long challenged the very meaning of ‘territorial sovereignty’, one of the cornerstones of the world order. To fulfil the complex tasks the Commission had received at a critical juncture in 1856, experts had pushed the boundaries of what an early IO could be, could have and could do. Imperial rivals agreed to closer cooperation,’ and their representatives in the Commission claimed attributions that turned the IO into a ‘quasi-state’. The 1878 Berlin Treaty consecrated this status and decided that it was to function in complete independence of Romania’s territorial authority.

Asithappened, Krehbiel's scholarly piece, published at another critical juncture in 1918, proved equally influential in illuminating the Commission's past and shaping its future. An American historian writing about a techno-political

7 Seethe recent analysis of Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (eds.), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930: Empires and Encounters (London and New York 2015).

organisation in Eastern Europe to influence decision-making at the end of a devastating global war was, after all, a feature of the new world order.

Beyond his laudatory, though rather static review of the organisations ‘powers and international character’, Krehbiel captured some of the essential features which turned the Commission — then and now - into a remarkable object of academic research: the *wonder' that the IO acquired 'such great powers as it did’ — given the many national jealousies it encountered and local governments’ natural reluctance to ‘surrender of national sovereignty’ — and its fruitful working as a forum of transnational cooperation, where ‘nations can approach one another on the basis of common or united action, instead of as rivals"?

Starting from Krehbiel's text — echoed in the title of this volume — and trying to contextualise his views, we aim to follow the Commission's institutional genesis and progress and assess its pioneering character and outcomes by answering questions such as: What were the forces, actors and junctures at play that allowed the Commission to evolve from a 'hand-to-mouth existence' to an 'exceptional' and 'experimental' organisation? Was it predominantly a top-down teleological construct coming from wise political masterminds or did it emerge via bottom-up professional expertise acting beyond imperial ambitions? Were there any voices silenced in the process? Was it as innovative and successful as Krehbiel and other authors claimed? What benchmarks and perspectives should one use to assess the degree of successfulness and experimentalism of such an early IO? Did it influence theoretical conceptualisations, such as those of British diplomat James Arthur Salter, who became a pioneer of IR functionalist theory? (rendered more famous through David Mitrany's works) following his involvement with another 'experiment in international administration, the Allied Maritime Transport Council of 1917-1919?!9 The focus will fall, in the chapters below, on the Commission's history from its onset in 1856 to the First World War, while the last chapter will look at its institutional metamorphoses during the interwar and early post-war years, as

Krehbiel, ‘The European Commission’: 49.

Leonie Holthaus and Jens Steffek, ‘Experiments in International Administration: The Forgotten Functionalism of James Arthur Salter; Review of International Studies 42.1 (2016): 114-135.

10 James Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in International Administration (Oxford 1921); also Egon Ferdinand Ranshofen-Wertheimer, The International Secretariat: A Great Experiment in International Administration (Washington DC 1945) and for a similarly ‘experimental’ IO George Arthur Codding, The International Telecommunication Union: An Experiment in International Cooperation (Leiden 1952).

it gradually lost its ‘experimental’ character and eventually fell, in 1948, under Soviet control.

2 Expert Mobilisation and the Study of International Rivers

Krehbiel was not the only academic who, a century ago, was interested in replicating the Commission and populating the world with similar entities. By 1917, as governments prepared for the coming peace congress, scholars in the humanities came to the fore in contributing to the discussion of their countries’ interests." Philosophers insisted that it was vital to set out the moral principles for a new and just world order; historians and linguists, geographers and jurists engaged to produce accounts that could help settle the myriad of open disputes between belligerents. After all, with nationalism as a driving force of war, knowledge about the history, literature, beliefs or political aspirations of nations around the world was essential in galvanising their support both during the conflict and at its end.

In France, Great Britain and the United States, academic centres for producing expert knowledge needed for the coming peace congress were fully functional by 1917. Eminent professors brainstormed on pressing global issues; they collected, organised and synthesised critical information into handbooks for the confidential use of their diplomats. Each of these scholarly groups relied on vast networks of experts and had access to some of the best research resources available in those times. The American team, for example, worked in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library under the academic supervision of philosopher Sidney Mezes. They later moved to the offices of the American Geographical Society and assembled under the guidance of geographer Isaiah Bowman.!? The Inquiry, as it came to be known, divided its activity into five fields of analysis, representative of its internationalist approach to the new world order: the powers (friends, enemies, neutrals); debatable areas and unfortunate peoples (from Alsace-Lorraine to the Jews and the nationalities of Eastern Europe); international business; international law; and international cooperation.

11 George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War (Lexington 1970), 16-33.

12 Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 2003), 13-138.

13 Lawrence Emerson Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919 (New Haven 1963), 347. A recent view on its contribution to international relations scholarship

Expert committees paid special attention to international rivers and the commissions for regulating navigation along Europe’s largest transboundary waterways. The Rhine and the Danube had been bones of contention between states during the previous centuries, but disputes had been largely solved by transnational cooperation. Their ‘lessons’ deserved wider attention.

Thus, in Paris, London and New York, scholars wrote handbooks on the history and legal status of the Rhine and the Danube. Like Krehbiel, they advertised river commissions as efficient organisations to be multiplied around the globe’s transboundary waterways. Joseph Perkins Chamberlain, a legal expert working for Columbia University, was the author of such a handbook on the Danube Question for the use of the US Department of State. Chamberlain employed a topical structure in his monograph, with references to Danube’s geography, its diplomatic history, pending international issues and the hydrotechnical projects along its watercourse, all with policy suggestions to be followed at the upcoming peace negotiations.# Chamberlain would defend his PhD at Columbia in the early interwar years with a comparative study of the regime of the Rhine and the Danube, derived from his policy-oriented work. In his dissertation he focused on changes in international law and river organisations from a juridical perspective and reckoned that the main issue in the practical resolution of disputes was to reconcile the general common interest (i.e. free navigation for all flags) with each state's sovereign rights.’ By 1918, similar liberal ideas were entertained by the French historian Émile Bourgeois!ó and the Belgian jurist Georges Kaeckenbeeck, scholars tasked in France and Britain respectively to deal with the study of international rivers.

The Commission's commendation among early IOs is remarkable and deserves more scholarly attention. For the proponents of internationalism writing in that period, such as political scientist Leonard Woolf, river commissions provided the first example of 'deliberate international legislation' which led to in David M. McCourt, ‘The Inquiry and the Birth of International Relations, 1917-19; Australian Journal of Politics & History 63.3 (2017): 394—405.

14 Joseph P. Chamberlain, The Danube. In Five Parts, November 1, 1918 (Washington 1918).

15 Chamberlain, The Regime of the International Rivers: Danube and Rhine (New York 1923), 5-6.

16 Émile Bourgeois, Liberté et neutralité de navigation du Danube, in: Travaux du Comité d'études, Questions européennes, vol. 11 (Paris 1919), 663-682; the context in Olivier Lowczyk, La fabrique de la paix: du Comité d'études à la Conférence de la Paix, l'élaboration par la France des traités de la Premiére Guerre Mondiale (Paris 2010), 425.

17 Georges Kaeckenbeeck, International Rivers: A Monograph Based on Diplomatic Documents (London 1918), v-1x; the context in Erik Goldstein, ‘Historians Outside the Academy: G.W. Prothero and the Experience of the Foreign Office Historical Section, 1917-20, Historical Research 63.151 (1990): 195-211.

the ‘creation of the first international executive in the Danube Commission! ‘Administrative nationalism’, Woolf further stated, had gradually given way to an international administration, which, ‘by reason of its superior efficiency, superseded the national’.!®

In one of his confidential reports, William S. Monroe, another of the American experts tasked to advise on the political organisation of the Balkans at the forthcoming peace congress, insisted on several of the Commission’s multilateral accomplishments. Those of a commercial nature were particularly impressive: following the organisation’s hydraulic and administrative works, ‘annual exportation of wheat from the Danube basin’ and the total tonnage of ships frequenting the river increased five-fold, while the ‘mean size of individual ships’ calling at Danubian ports increased ten-fold. Monroe’s own recommendations on the Commission (which he considered, in the line of Krehbiel’s piece, as ‘a signal success as an experiment in international administration’) were to have its membership enlarged and ‘its powers broadened"!?

The Commission was a handy example for such internationalist and institutionalist optimism at a time when 'experiments in international administration' were in great demand among the theorists of the new world order. As a long-lasting embodiment of Europe's Concert of Powers, the Commission was used to showcase that cooperation in pursuit of limited goals was possible and beneficial. As an organ endowed with 'substantial governing power' and which was ‘met with generally acknowledged success’ it was advertised, especially in the imperial western world, as a functionalist prototype for internationalising and securing some of the globe's most pressing issues.20

In 1917, for instance, British legal scholar Coleman Phillipson and liberal politician Noel Buxton, an expert in Balkan affairs, considered that the Commission could serve as a model for a future International Commission of the Straits. They had in mind the Danube Commission's unprecedented legal status, which explained the efficiency and success of 'a remarkable precursor in the art of international government’! A British Foreign Office

18 Leonard Woolf, International Government (Westminster 1916), 26, 220; idem, The Future of Constantinople (London 1917), 37. More on his views in Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: A Study in Twentieth-Century Idealism (New York 2005), 42, 102.

19 WS. Monroe, Balkan Peninsula; The Danube and Its Internationalization (10 April 1918), V & 12-13, in: The Inquiry Papers (MS 10). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, No. 138.

20 Francis Bowes Sayre, Experiments in International Administration (New York 1919), XI-XI1, 38-47.

21 Coleman Phillipson and Noel Buxton, The Question of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles (London 1917), 241.

memorandum of November 1918, while discussing solutions for the organisation of the Caucasus region, concluded that Baku and its accompanying oil wells could fall directly under international control, ‘on the model, perhaps, of the Danube Commission’.2?

David Hunter Miller, a member of the Inquiry and one of the American delegates in the Commission on Ports, Waterways and Railways assembled in Paris in 1919, repeatedly referred to ‘the well-known precedent of the European Commission of the Danube’ which was employed in setting up the legal basis of interwar international river commissions.2? Numerous other scholars insisted in their works on the same leitmotifs: the Commission had proved to be a very efficient permanent international body and was a noteworthy example of a ‘successful international administration?^ at a time when world leaders were looking for prototypical organisation for the new global order. The case of the Commission was well known to Romanian-born David Mitrany, who would later use this example in his functionalist approach to international relations, contaminated with some less experimental interwar political context.?5

3 The Commission and Europe's Nascent Security Cooperation

Inspired by recent scholarship in transnational history, international relations and security studies, this volume aims to detail the creation and evolution of the Commission as an IO that crafted a 'security regime, based on rules and enforcing institutions (see below), along the maritime section of the Danube. To do so, it brings together three fields in which security is a key concept: 1) European diplomacy and international relations, 2) institutional history, and 3) river histories. On all these analytical layers, security?6 is understood as a) an objective, an ideal state of being free from risk, threat, or danger; and b) the proactive actions taken by actors to secure this ideal state by removing the sources of insecurity and uncertainty. In historicising security, in line

22 Alex Marshall, The Caucasus under Soviet Rule (London and New York 2010), 105.

23 David Hunter Miller, ‘The International Regime of Ports, Waterways and Railways; American Journal of International Law 13.4 (1919): 678.

24 Cecil Delisle Burns, International Politics (London 1920), 150.

25 David Mitrany, A Working Peace System. An Argument for the Functional Development of International Organization (London 1943), 30; more context in Jan Klabbers, ‘The Emergence of Functionalism in International Institutional Law: Colonial Inspirations, European Journal of International Law 25.3 (2014): 645-675.

26 Also in relation to the sectorial analysis as proposed in Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security. A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder CO 2013).

with similar endeavours by colleagues from Utrecht University, this narrative goes beyond the realist, state-centred perspective in historical security studies and regards the Commission as one of the world’s earliest IOs with a coherent security-oriented programme. Moreover, by its multi-layered and increasingly complex activity, the Commission contributed towards the creation of a ‘European security culture’, defined as ‘a collective defence against and concomitant discourse regarding transnational threats’27

The first — outer — layer of analysis is the political and diplomatic environment, part of the so-called Danube Question, in relation to which the Commission was established and in the framework of which it acted. The Lower Danubian area was caught in the vortex of inter-imperial politics, as it was placed at the forefront of Russia's march against the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1830s, inland Danubian ports increasingly became busy hubs for capitalist grain traders. To them, political instability in the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (hereafter ‘the Principalities’), in the backdrop of the Eastern Question, was translated into economic unpredictability. This impacted not only their own profits, but the replenishment of Western Europe’s grain storehouses and thus the continent’s food security. The construction of political and economic threats and interests at the Lower Danube comes within the classical narrative of a backward periphery integrated into the world market, with all the structural changes and disruptions that such a process entails for the regional economy?

Inter-imperial political competition will be analysed within Europe's new ideological framework — the gradual emergence of internationalism after the 1815 Vienna Congress, with an increasing number of conferences to settle interstate disputes and the making of a European system of law.?9 International rivers are especially relevant for such approaches, and much scholarship has

27 Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan and Brian Vick, ‘Vienna 1815: Introducing a European Security Culture’ in: de Graaf, de Haan and Vick (eds.), Securing Europe after Napoleon. 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge 2019), 1-18. See other recent theoretical contributions in Matthias Schulz, 'Cultures of Peace and Security from the Vienna Congress to the Twenty-First Century: 1815 and the New European Security Culture; ibid., 21-39 and Eckart Conze, ‘Historicising a Security Culture: Peace, Security and the Vienna System in History and Politics, ibid., 40-55.

28 Giovanni Federico and Karl Gunnar Persson, ‘Market Integration and Convergence in the World Wheat Market, 1800-2000, in: Timothy J. Hatton, Kevin H. O’Rourke and Alan M. Taylor (eds.), The New Comparative Economic History: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge MA and London 2007), 87-113.

29 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (London 2012); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton 2015).

already been devoted to the emerging field of hydropolitics, defined as ‘the systematic study of conflict and cooperation between states over water resources that transcend international borders’.30

On this layer of high international politics or historical hydropolitics, this approach aims to explain how shipping insecurity and commercial unpredictability were translated into inter-imperial political disputes, but also how they contributed to increasing cooperation between relevant state actors. Complex dynamics at the 1856 Paris Congress, another critical juncture in the making of the internationalist order, allowed Europe's decision-makers?! to reinterpret the principle of free navigation on transboundary rivers and to reinforce it with more political and juridical authority. It marked the beginnings of an interesting episode in, to paraphrase a seminal article in economic history,?? the collective imperialism of free trade, which led to the creation of an informal collective colony in the Danube Delta.

The Danube made its way into European law and remained there for the next century, together with the IO that incarnated the victors' liberal principle of free navigation on international waterways: the European Commission of the Danube. In its turn it was not only an object of imperial politics, but also a subject of regional security-making as a fully independent international organ and a source of stability in an insecure inter-imperial borderland.

The second — middle - layer of analysis is the institutionalist one, centring on the Commission's metamorphosis into a functional IO. New institutionalist theories (rational choice, sociological, and historical) provide an excellent insight into how transnational cooperation is advanced via such IOs.33 Historical institutionalism is the most relevant one, and the evolution of the Commission will follow, on the lines of Orfeo Fioretos’ approach, the story of

30 Arun P. Elhance, Hydropolitics in the Third World: Conflict and Cooperation in International River Basins (Washington DC 1999), 3; Susanne Schmeier, Governing International Watercourses: River Basin Organizations and the Sustainable Governance of Internationally Shared Rivers and Lakes (London 2015). Other major contributions to hydropolitics are: David LeMarquand, International Rivers: The Politics of Cooperation (Vancouver 1977); John Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley (Syracuse NY 1979); Shlomi Dinar, International Water Treaties. Negotiation and Cooperation along Transboundary Rivers (London and New York 2008).

31 ‘Europe will define, in many circumstances related to international politics, the seven Great Powers signatories of the peace treaties and the multilateral conventions relevant for the Eastern Question.

32 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade, Economic History Review 6.1 (1953): 1-15.

33 Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms, Political Studies 44.5 (1996): 936-957.

the Commission with details of the ‘legacies of founding moments in shaping long-term power relations and whether new ideas become consequential, the ubiquity of unintended consequences, and especially the prevalence of incremental reform over stasis and fundamental transformations’.*+ Lately, historians have joined in such attempts to historicise international relations in the nineteenth century, in the vein of Glenda Sluga's or Beatrice de Graaf's interest in, for example, transnational institutions that increased cooperation between state actors.35

In order to determine the effectiveness of the Commission it is necessary to consider its general organisational characteristics (institutional scope, membership structure, degree of institutionalisation) and the governance solutions commissioners designed for the international river (decision-making mechanisms, dispute resolution procedures, funding).96 Comparisons with other early IOs — such as the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine?" — will help crystallise the distinctive features of the Commission in a busier constellation of transnational non-state agents.

Looking at the role of human resources at play in the Commission, two aspects are worth being investigated with their specialised conceptual instruments: IOs as bureaucracies and the making of ‘communities of experts’ within such organisations. It may be safely claimed that the Commission’s success in establishing a security regime at the Lower Danube came with its gradual transformation into a bureaucratic institution. The Commission was not born as such, but it evolved organically into a complex bureaucracy and technocracy. The theoretical contributions of Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore on the relationships between bureaucracy and rulemaking illuminate important aspects for the Commission's corporate identity.#8 Created to

34 Orfeo Fioretos, ‘Historical Institutionalism in International Relations; International Organization 65.2 (2011): 369.

35 Glenda Sluga, ‘Editorial - the Transnational History of International Institutions, Journal of Global History 6.2 (2011): 219-222; de Graaf, ‘Bringing Sense and Sensibility to the Continent: Vienna 1815 Revisited, Journal of Modern European History 13.4 (2015): 447-457.

36 Schmeier, Governing International Watercourses, 59-60.

37 See the recent pieces by Hein A.M. Klemann, ‘The Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, 1815-1914. Nineteenth Century European Integration, in: Ralf Banken and Ben Wubs (eds.), The Rhine: A Transnational Economic History (Baden-Baden 2017), 31-68 and Joep Schenk, ‘The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine: A First Step towards European Economic Security? in: de Graaf, de Haan and Vick (eds.), Securing Europe, 75-94.

38 Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations, International Organization 53.4 (1999): 699-732; eidem, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca 2004).

solve a technical mission, the Commission gradually turned into a community of experts?? in transboundary rivers, a specialisation that combined knowledge in seamanship, international law, public administration and engineering. Since the nineteenth century such epistemic communities thrived, and specialised knowledge started to be produced and disseminated across national and disciplinary boundaries. Scholarship on epistemic communities and their transnational networks is as useful for showing how specialised knowledge translated security practices into actual regulations.^?

In terms of actual results of cooperation, the Commission contributed towards the establishment of navigational rules, norms and procedures for the Danube. For Stephen D. Krasner, regimes are ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures’, and a security regime came into being with the creation of a coherent corpus of rules and its application.*! James C. Scott's view on the modern bureaucratic state’s objective of imposing legibility and simplification is also relevant here,*? especially in proving that the Commission acted as a ‘state’ whose drive for standardisation was part of its logics of stability and security over its ‘liquid’ jurisdiction. As it did so, its state building measures were those of modern states, the Leviathan 2.0 based on new methods of governmentality,*3 with a view to ‘order’ an area that needed not only technological improvement, but also law, taxation procedures and communication systems. As in the case of the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, the Commission contributed towards ‘European economic security'^^ and European integration, as well as through the supranational character of its

39 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 2002); Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise. Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke 2014); Wolfram Kaiser and Johan W. Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels and International Organizations (Basingstoke 2014).

40 Peter M. Haas, ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination, International Organization 46.1 (1992): 1-35; Maïa K. Davis Cross, ‘Rethinking Epistemic Communities Twenty Years Later’ Review of International Studies 39.1 (2013): 137-160.

41 Stephen D. Krasner, ‘Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables; in: idem (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca and London 1983), 2.

42 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London 1998).

43 Charles S. Maier, ‘Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood, in: Emily R. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting. 1870-1945 (Cambridge MA and London 2012), 29-282.

44 Schenk, ‘The Central Commission’ cit.

decisions, voted for by a majority, but binding for all member states in relation to Danubian navigation.*5

The creation and development of the Commission was a lengthy political and institutional process, but also an intellectual and cultural one. The Commission evolved with the establishment of corporate symbols and rituals, and eventually bred a culture that was inherited within the organisation and spread beyond it. According to French anthropologist Marc Abélès, the production of an institutional culture takes place on two levels — an individual and an institutional one — when ‘the norms, practices and models that the institution creates are diffused beyond that institutional framework'^6 Institutional anthropology and sociological analysis^? on the Commission's bureaucracy are relevant for understanding the spread of this organisational culture beyond the Maritime Danube towards, for example, the Rhine or the Suez. This culture had security as its core value. Created to deal with threats to the security of Danubian navigation and to the economic and political interests associated with free shipping, the Commission gradually turned into a 'security community' which designed efficient policies and control mechanisms to protect those interests.

The third — or inner - layer of analysis is the international river, the object of the Commission's transformative programme. Turning the Danube into the commercial highway of southeastern Europe was a complex process, which started with removing physical insecurity from its lower section, the most sensitive portion of its course. This exercise in river history involved actors within and outside the Commission — diplomats and engineers, cartographers and bureaucrats, merchants and ship-owners — who joined forces to ‘correct’ the river and provide it with the proper legislation needed to make it a predictable and safe transportation artery.