We'll Always Have Paris (or New York, Moscow, Shanghai, etc.)

Back in the Pleistocene, law students used to take a course called “conflict of laws.” Some still do. It was/is a course with roots going back at least as far as the Roman Empire: how to orchestrate a coherent theme out of the cacophony of competing legal systems. For the saving remnant who still care about this sort of thing, I offer the makings of a final exam. It’s a sketch of the background of Jean Monnet, the man who, more than anyone else, created the European Union:

As a young man Monnet traveled the world to market the family wares [French cognac—ed.], from the Yukon to rural Egypt. He spent a long time in North America, giving him an understanding of American business practices, business partners in the United States, and good English.

Monnet had an exporter’s belief in economic internationalism. He was a globe-trotter long before people realized that the globe could be trotted. A convoluted episode from his personal life is illustrative. In 1929 Monnet fell in love with a married woman, the Istanbul-born daughter of an Italian publisher of a French-language newspaper. In 1935, in an era of difficult divorces, they arranged to converge on Moscow, he from financial consulting in Shanghai, she from her temporary home in Switzerland. There Silvia took out Soviet citizenship and took advantage of the liberal Soviet divorce code to divorce her husband and marry Monnet. They moved to Shanghai, then set up housekeeping in New York, in part because they needed to stay away from Europe to avoid a custody dispute over Silvia’s daughter by her first husband. Over the next decade they moved back and forth among New York, Washington, London, Algiers and (once the daughter was grown) Paris.

Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism 284 (2006)