2018 Chapters (Layout Features)

The Public Image of the Universal Postal Union in the Anglophone World, 1874-1949

John, Richard R.

This essay contends that the obscurity of the Postal Union was, to a significant degree, intentional. Postal Union administrators understood that their operational success rested in large part on their ability to convince the public that, unlike generals and diplomats, they were dispassionate experts who lacked a political agenda. Had contemporaries come to regard their deliberations as partisan, rather than as neutral and objective, they risked embroilment in Great Power politics. And should this happen, they would lose the autonomy that they had attained as technical professionals