Bulletin n. 2/2011
October 2011
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Lion Christian
    French Insurances, the Saar and European Integration from 1945 to the Sixties
    in Journal of European Integration History , vol. 15, n. 2 ,  2009 ,  47-66
    It is well known that, with the creation in 1951 of the European Community of Coal and Steel, Europe’s Founding Fathers, opting for a pragmatic approach, gave their project a first tangible shape. What is less known is that insurance activities played a not inconsiderable part in the adventure of European integration, the Saar becoming in this respect an experimental laboratory. Incorporated into the French occupied zone since 1945, this German territory, in matter of insurance, first obeyed the purely national interests of the French State, by means of a juridically baroque organization, conceived to keep away German competitors. But then, from 1949, destabilized by its own internal contradictions, under the revival of local patriotism, the pressure of new economic conditions on the world market and the stakes of the Cold War, this system was doomed to change. Paradoxically, a project like that of setting up Franco-Saar insurance companies, still permeated by national motives, gets the Saar, from 1949 up to the end of the Sixties, going the way of a transnational insurance management between French and German partners working in Franco-German companies, in the middle of an open and shared space.
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