Via Europa

When asked to assess the state of the process of European integration, economists like E. Tuchtfeld were often exuberant in the late 1950s. They projected European integration would proceed full speed ahead. Tuchtfeld's quote above demonstrates he was convinced of the important role mobility played in the process. The citation comes from a compilation of essays resulting from two gatherings of twenty-five economists organized by the Centre Européen de la Culture with a six-month interval. The question mark of its title Demain l’Europe sans frontières? might just as well have been replaced by an exclamation mark. The compilation came at a moment of unbridled optimism about European integration, a period in which many pundits predicted that a Free Trade Area would be forged from the young European Economic Community and other wealthy European regions like Scandinavia or the British Isles. The essays echoed the more general, genuine positivism reigning at the time.

Would the same exercise have been undertaken a decade later, it is likely that the results would have looked much darker. We know from available literature that the cheering sentiment of Demain l’Europe sans frontières? faded away when the integration process got stuck some years later. The same borders that Tuchtfeld and others claimed were on the verge of disappearing then came to represent the bumps in the road towards more unity. Border checks and customs hassles made it clear for travelers that Europe had still not reached a stage of completion. In 1967, when European integration looked much less rosy, the Dutch journalist Aben wrote