Adam Tooze on the Rhine River Drying Up | Ones and Tooze Ep. 256

Hi.

Yeah, rivers always do have this strange dualism. They're both connectors and barriers, hence the strategic significance of bridges in wars and in blockades and things like that. And Kaub is a case in point. So folks who are perhaps not terribly familiar with the geography of Germany, if you've ever seen a picture of the River Rhine with a castle in the middle of the river and kind of wondered why you'd put a castle there, well, one of the reasons to put a castle in the middle of the river is it's hard to attack because it's been surrounded by a moat. But the other reason to put a castle in the middle of the river is to exact tolls on people on the river. So precisely this dualistic fashion, and that's what Kaub has been doing since the medieval period. The buildings which are there now, which are one of those really picturesque, it's really the classic shot of the Rhine is of Kaub, some of the other castles in this particular section rising out of the water, is to act as a kind of highway toll on what, through to the advent of the railway, was the only real way of moving heavy goods over long distance, was water, and you couldn't really do it efficiently. There were no paved roads in Europe on a very large scale since the Roman period. They only start getting built again in the late 17th, 18th century. So the way you move things was on water, which is why, I think we've discussed this before, practically every major city in the world is either on the sea coast, in a bay, in a harbor, or an estuary, or on a river. I looked today and I think Johannesburg in South Africa is practically the only major global city with no river. So yes, they always have this dualism and the Rhine is absolutely fundamental. If you go to Versailles and you look up in the great hall of mirrors in Versailles, the palace of Louis XIV, the center of French absolutist power, and at the heart of that palace is this famous room which is covered in mirrors, the Hall of Mirrors, where Germany forced France to surrender in 1871 and where the French forced the Germans to surrender at the Treaty of Versailles. If you look up at the ceilings, what it shows you is Louis XIV's armies crossing the Rhine. And in World War II as well, the famous Bridge Too Far is not about the Rhine. It's about the Dutch bridges that take you to the Rhine. So the Arnhem operation that went terribly wrong in '44, when the British and the Americans were trying to leapfrog as quickly as possible to the Rhine, and then ultimately the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen that was crucial to allowing the Allies to rapidly advance from the west. So yes, this river has this deep dualism and it is indeed a major infrastructural industrial hub because the German chemicals industry is centered in central western Germany around Ludwigshafen, Mannheim in particular, and the connection from there and then upstream all the way to Switzerland and downstream all the way to Rotterdam is really one of the great arteries of the world economy. In terms of industrial conglomeration and concentration, it's even more intense presumably than the great rivers of China or even the Mississippi in the US. So it's a major event that water should have dried up the extent it has. It's also a German infrastructure story because there's some rocks there and they should have dug them out or at least reduced their size and they haven't gotten around to it even though they've been thinking about it since the 1990s.

Some people claim that it is. It certainly goes back a long way. It was a product of the Congress of Vienna of 1815. That's what set this in motion. This was the great peace conference after the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps the classic demonstration of the kind of logic, not to say wisdom, of post-revolutionary conservative geopolitics, the idea that you could organize the world in a concerted way, a kind of concert of powers that would manage the world, the dream of Kissinger and everyone that came afterwards in the 20th century. This had a technological side, and that was in this case, before the advent of railways, the management of waterways. And out of that came a convention signed at Mainz in 1831 that began to remove those river tolls that were so pesky and that Kaub was all about. And it's out of that that the Mannheim Convention was signed in 1868. The timing is not altogether accidental. The mid-19th century is the moment of the emergence of modern internationalism. I immediately thought, well, what about the International Red Cross, which is also a product of that same moment. It comes into existence in 1863. The first big scientific congresses began to meet internationally in the 1850s. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the biggest trade fair in history. So this mid-19th century moment is precisely where you would expect this kind of institution to emerge from. It's not at all surprising in that way, though it was news to me, and thanks to the prompt, that this one was very early and is continuously operating. And in terms of international relations theory, I think you would say it's a powerful confirmation of the basic logic of what international relations theory calls functionalism. In other words, there is great power politics which produces the tragedy of international politics, which is the security dilemma, like my security is your insecurity and the more security I search for, the more insecure you become. And so there is this problem, this tragedy of international relations. But there is another liberal functionalist view that says, hold your horses. That's all very well. Yes, states do conflict. But we also have all these common interests. And so it's not surprising that we see institutions and innovations emerging to take care of those common interests along functional lines. This was a theory that really took off in the early 20th century and is commonly invoked to explain things like European integration. Because in the end, on this same border dissected by the Rhine, are the Germans, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch. And it all turns out they actually all have profoundly similar and identical economic interests, which lead to things like the Coal and Steel Community and the European Common Market in the 1950s. And this, a hundred years earlier, would be the seed of that kind of logic, which is, hey, we may fight wars, but in the end this is a waterway and we've got to figure out how to manage it, and so let's do some internationalism. And then there's only so many times you can sit down with your counterparts from the other side of the Rhine and agree on technical management logics without in the end constituting some kind of community which supersedes, goes beyond, and somehow transcends pure national interest and security logic. And so that's, I think, you could invoke this as a rather striking example of that kind of functionalist logic in international relations.

Yeah. I did bring my kids to the World War I site and they were interested. So, you know, these kinds of historical pilgrimages can satisfy everybody, I suppose.