Danish butter for France

Loudly blowing its horn the truck proceeded towards the French border. In a suburb of Copenhagen the Danish trucker had picked up his fellow driver. Together they went full speed ahead across the fields. In the distance a building loomed ahead on the side of the road. Austere border officials summoned the approaching vehicle to stop. They closely examined the content of each and every barrel of butter in the truck's cargo. Precious time was lost, but as soon as they entered France the truck drivers forgot all of that. During one of their stops at a roadside café, they even succumbed to a great French tradition and hesitantly sipped some wine.

The Marshall Plan film from which these scenes are taken cleverly selected Strasbourg as the final destination for the journey of the Danish truckers. There the Council of Europe engaged in lofty discussions on European cooperation to guarantee fraternity and peace in Europe. In their documentary the filmmakers therefore interspersed a second story line of a simultaneous interpreter working at the Council of Europe. The depiction of the lives of a Dutch barge shipper and his wife traveling down the Rhine from Strasbourg completed the film.2 The choice of riverine transport on the Rhine was certainly not coincidental either. Protected by the liberal inland navigation regime on the Rhine dating back to the Congress of Vienna (1815), the Dutch captain only needed to have his cargo of drainage pipes checked at Strasbourg, his port of departure There customs officials sealed his cargo, which would further remain undisturbed at other ports along the Rhine, customs officials merely glancing at his paperwork and briefly checking if the seals remained intact.

The case of the barge shipper formed a shrill contrast with that of the truck drivers – both in the movie and in reality. The professional road transport sector publicly voiced its discontent over the restrictions imposed on road traffic that did not apply for inland navigation or railroad traffic.