Introduction
European integration is not the result of a preconceived plan. It rather consists of messy procedures and heated discussions. Ad hoc decision-making, crises and even utter chaos have been constants in the history of the European Union (EU). This complex reality has induced scholars to zoom in on its infamous ‘muddling through’ to better understand what is going on in European integration. Consequently, the primary focus of research has been on ways, means and outcomes: inter-state bargaining, and the resulting treaties and European institutions. However, this focus on institutional ways and means, and on the outcomes of inter-state bargaining, has implied that ideas about Europe’s future mostly have been treated as proxies of specific, rather one-dimensional, state, or institutional, interests. This leads to distorted images of history. If the recent crisis years made one thing very clear, it is this: that it proves quite complex to adequately analyse the multilevel, multipolicy and demoi-cracy muddling through that characterises the EU’s laborious management of crises and day-to-day politics and policies, let alone that a mere focus on institutional interests would be sufficient. Putting it even more strongly, existing theories to understand European integration, which were developed mostly during the heyday of integration, turn out to be insufficient to fathom the evolution of European integration, especially since the Treaty of Maastricht (1992).
Indeed, the Treaty of Maastricht redefined European integration afresh in terms of ‘deepening’ and ‘widening’ in the totally new, and largely unforeseen, situation of a post-Cold-War world order. Stylised images of conflicting national interests, archetypical antitheses between federalist Europhiles and patriotic Eurosceptics, or one-dimensional alternatives in terms of supranational versus intergovernmental integration proved insufficient to grasp the essence either of this plot of history or of its narrative, let alone to understand why and how European integration engaged itself in the highly risky undertakings of a single currency and an unprecedented enlargement process on ‘shaky foundations’, as the former German minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, characterised the state of play in the EU in terms of institutional groundwork in 2011.
To get an answer to (revived traditional) grand questions like whether the Treaty of Maastricht was a crucial moment of metamorphoses of European integration or an episode of continuation, or what the ‘nature’ of the historical process of European integration in essence entails, research ought to delve into the history underneath the surface of European integration’s day-to-day institutional development. On that deeper level, we find that European integration is drawn from an ongoing ‘battle of ideas’ concerning what Europe may or should become in the future. Indeed, European integration is the product of never-ending battles among such plans, which have sprung from ideas (both causal and principled) as well as from ideals. In addition, these ideas and ideals often have been working across national frontiers, crosscutting member states, as well as political parties and conventional political camps within them.Footnote 1 Rival designs and grand designs for Europe continuously usher in rivalling concrete proposals in various policy fields, which then become the subject of European negotiations on different levels. However, the continuous competition of concepts and plans this induces has often been hidden from public and scholarly view, also because ‘loser grand designs’ disappear in the ex post facto depictions that dominate the historiography.
European Integration: What It Is and What It Is about
After they had actively engaged themselves in integration through the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, the governments of the six founding members (Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) were able neither to escape the ongoing battles of ideas over the future of European integration, nor to control what sprang from the widely popular idea of European unification. Instead, the new phenomenon of European integration penetrated domestic politics and caused deep splits within cabinets and parliaments, crosscutting conventional political camps, and stirring up national versions of heated debate between federalists, confederalists, Eurosceptics and others. At the same time, however, behind the scenes, the lack of national control of this process encouraged unorthodox coalition formation across national frontiers, bureaucracies and transnational lobbies and networks – as recent archival research and fresh investigations within the neo-functionalist approach underscore. Moreover, European negotiations encapsulated both state and non-state actors right from the start – including transnational lobbies such as Jean Monnet’s Action Committee and the Roundtable of Industrialists, but certainly also less well-known lobbies such as those organised in the world of churches and international banking, allowing for coalition formation across national frontiers and state and European institutions, such as the European Commission and the European Parliament (then still in the making). Influencing the integration process thus presupposed a certain ‘transnationalisation’ of European policies right from its earliest days.
This all has been underrated in the historiography. And there is an empirical reason: the governments’ convincing but false claim to control the integration process. However, the idea of a striking match between the emerging integration and clear-cut national economic and/or geopolitical rationales essentially was an ex post facto depiction of largely unforeseen developments, in which ad hoc issue linkages and path dependences have been shaping forces. The situation was continually characterised by contested actor positions and unclear coalitions. This is the ‘normal condition’ in the unprecedented process of European integration. In such instances, ideas can facilitate institutional reform and/or radical policy change, for instance, through redefinition of actors’ interests as a result of ‘inter-elite persuasion’.Footnote 2
So far, research has had serious difficulties in the attempt to master these national ex post facto rationalisations. Moreover, state-centric and issue-specific subdivisions still hinder the design of projects concerned with ‘European’ path dependences and issue linkages from a more diachronic perspective. In the exceptional cases in which these phenomena have been studied over a longer period, the scope has been limited to either path dependence or issue linkage. This is a serious shortcoming in the historigraphy, for instance because long-term institutional consequences may well have been ‘by-products’ of actions taken for short-term reasons inherent in specific issue linkages in earlier episodes.
During the 1940s the western quest for more international stability and coordination resulted in an institutional ‘system’ that the American political scientist John Ruggie famously described as the ‘regime of embedded liberalism’.Footnote 3 Although the scholars of embedded liberalism never really engaged with it,Footnote 4 European integration may have formed an integral and inspirational – yet subdued – part of this primary financial-economic dimension of the pax Americana. After all, if they were to stand a chance, plans of European integration had to be nested within the transatlantic institutional structures that were already in the making. Pre-1950 western multilateralism built a ‘laboratory’ in which different initiatives for European integration were developed and tested, long before the process of European integration took root. The evolution of ideas for a new order in Europe within this transatlantic world was shaped by ongoing – and still highly topical – debates about the ‘dialectics’ of free world capitalism, such as those between domestic and international stability and social cohesion and competitiveness. To a certain extent institutions like Land-Lease, Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Trade Organization (ITO, later General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT), the Marshall Plan, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC, later Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD), the European Payments Union (EPU), the ECSC and the European Common Market were all part of the same quest for welfare and stability via resilient capitalism and democracy, with a special focus on Europe and/or western Europe. Regarding the latter, the fact that early common market grand designs were often inspired by Cold War and/or colonial geography has long been omitted in the existing literature. It is telling in this regard that the inter-linkage of the process of European integration with the history of decolonisation has scarcely been researched as an integral part of European integration.Footnote 5
In more general historical terms, the evolution of the Common Market can be considered illustrative for the dynamics sketched out above. Europe’s market project has been offered detailed counter plans and nuanced alternatives ever since its inception. Starting from the treaty negotiations over the European Economic Community (EEC) during the mid 1950s, premature EEC concepts clashed with other plans, among others, plans for a European free trade area (which later became the European Free Trade Association, EFTA), a plan for an institutionalised Atlantic market and schemes for a (non-American) continental market. This can be considered a striking example of an ongoing battle of ideas, in the form of clashing grand designs for a future Europe of cooperation. Moreover, the above-mentioned EFTA and Atlantic market plan implied the membership of the United Kingdom (UK), whereas the EEC concepts were very sceptical about this, and continental schemes argued in favour of widening towards eastern Europe, instead of in Atlantic directions. Moreover, traditional historiography paid little attention to the neo-colonial undertones that were very present in the first plans and practices concerning the European common market, and connected this project to a history that stretched back far beyond the Second World War and the twentieth century – it is only very recently that historians of European integration have begun to take this dimension and its imperial and racial features more seriously as an integral part of the history of European integration (see below).
The crucial point here is that the existing historiography merely deals with the EEC extensively. The EFTA appears only at the margins. There is a simple reason for this. Plans and projects like the EEC and EFTA can be attributed to the conflicting ‘national interests’ of France and the UK, respectively. History has been bent accordingly, and a biased image of the history of the making of Europe’s common market may have been the result. The consequences thereof still resonate in (mis)understandings of what is going on in the Europe of integration until today, while European integration, in essence, is a history of many plans and ideas, not just one, as is so often claimed and believed. Indeed, no idea, ideal, plan, design or grand design has ever been strong enough to continuously subordinate the alternatives to its institutional logic, despite the fact that post-war European integration did channel Europe’s (classic) drift towards unification within an unprecedented institutional framework of ‘community method integration’ and its self-reinforcing boundaries of integration–expansion (see, for example, Articles 38, 39 and 237 of the EEC Treaty).
If we want to better understand why things went how they did in European integration, we must do more work on the reconstruction of this unique episode in contemporary history that continues until today, by both broadening the conceptual scope (in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary ways) and deepening the historical perspective (by stretching European integration history, harking back to histories before 1950 and the Second World War). This is exactly what this Cambridge History of the European Union (CHEU) aims to do.
The Genealogy of Post-war (Western) EuropeFootnote 6
The unprecedented stability and prosperity realized in (western) Europe in the second half of the twentieth century was neither ‘evident in 1945’ nor ‘an automatic consequence’ of the horrors of the Second World War. While the western Europe that was to emerge in the first post-war decades started to take shape in the mid 1940s, this ‘new Europe’ was not created during or after the Second World War. Instead, crucial pieces amongst the wreckage of the first decades of the twentieth century formed its central building blocks. The post-war developments in western Europe were strongly linked to the inter-war years, when, on the one hand, the juxtaposed processes of ‘de-globalisation’ and ‘nationalisation’, accompanied by a transnational ‘turn to private corporatism’, shook up the societal and political order, while, on the other hand, possibilities for ‘one-worldism’ and lofty pacifism were being explored in international politics.Footnote 7
After the unmatched horrors of the First World War, American President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a ‘worldwide settlement’ gained traction at the Paris Peace Conference. Hopes were high that, as the British commentator and writer H. G. Wells had put it during the first year of the Great War, this war would be ‘the war that will end war’.Footnote 8 At Versailles in 1919, the ‘Big Four’ powers – the United States, the UK, France and Italy – knew all too well ‘that there had never been an attempt at a worldwide settlement’; indeed, as the historian Margaret McMillan wrote in 2013, ‘there has never been one since’. While the post-Great War period was unique in that the populations of the warring states were ready and keen to embrace universalism and world peace, McMillan noted that, if anything, the Treaty of Versailles made the Great War into ‘the war that ended peace’.Footnote 9 In other words, the peace settlement of 1919 failed to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ (this is the phrase Wilson used on 2 April 1917 in a speech before Congress to obtain permission to declare war against Germany, which he obtained 4 days later) – quite the contrary. Moreover, this was the moment the United States became definitively involved in European and world politics. By the time Wilson was bypassed as presidential candidate for the 1920 elections, his ‘Fourteen Points’ outlining his principles of peace had already been dead in the water for quite some time. Wilson’s proactive and idealistic vision for world cooperation became buried under the essentially reactive and opportunistic cost–benefit reasoning enshrined in the agreements of the Versailles Peace Treaty. This was also ‘an illustration of how ill-defined Wilson’s ideas were as practical politics’.Footnote 10
The brute reality on the ground in Europe tore down the American-inspired aspirations for a better world and relegated them to naïve utopianism, ultimately symbolised by the fate of the League of Nations, which proved to be tragically dysfunctional in the inter-war years. Europeans turned a deaf ear to the politics of reconciliation touted by politicians such as Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand.Footnote 11 What re-emerged was a Europe of conflict, violence, uncertainty and poverty. It was a Europe that was plunging into even greater darkness than before, transfixed by a feverish search for an escape. This was the Europe of the Spanish Civil War and of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the mural-sized painting portraying the suffering of people and animals during the bombing of the eponymous city by German and Italian aircraft. This was the Europe of rampant poverty and gloom, which the young American journalist Walter Lippmann had implicitly warned about in his coverage of the Paris Peace Conference. This was the Europe that was captured by the German-Swiss painter Paul Klee in his painting Europa (1933): a goddess still, but one of wild despair and expressionism.
A new generation of American descendants of well-to-do East Coast families came to know Europe while living there during the inter-war years as part of the twentieth-century American variant of the Grand Tour, often travelling together with the intellectual American avant-garde in Paris. It was this generation of Americans that fell in love with the struggling old continent, and it was this emotional attachment that partly explains why key figures among these Americans – who were to take up influential positions in government and business during the 1940s – pushed passionately for a brighter European future after the Second World War. Indeed, the outlook of their generation would carry the ‘American century’ along with an emerging, ‘altogether new, emblematic, Atlantic world, bound together in mind and deed’.Footnote 12 Politically, their activism often had its origins in the direct involvement of the United States in the post-First World War peace negotiations, then also labelled ‘America’s geopolitical coming-out party’,Footnote 13 where many of them had been present as diplomatic youngsters or journalists.
Indeed, the American point of view on the Second World War was that it was the Great Depression and the devastating inequality, nationalism and racism it had unleashed that were at the root of the extraordinary violence that ravaged Europe during Hitler’s war. This meant that the work of the many American diplomats, policy-makers, journalists, businessmen and politicians involved in the American mission of ‘building Europe’ entailed a dual battle against both poverty and the collapse in international coordination. This mission eventually culminated in the Marshall Plan in 1947 – the programme Wilson didn’t have.
It was crucial, however, that the Europeans themselves promote and defend the new transnational policies of international organisation, mobilising the commitment of their fellow Europeans to embrace a radically different post-war experience from the one 25 years earlier. To American analysts, it was immediately obvious that making this work would be no walk in the park, to say the least.Footnote 14 Or, to put it in more cynical terms: to be acceptable, and paradoxically enough, real unity was not allowed to exist.Footnote 15 This was the harsh dictum on a continent of warring nation-states. It also was one of the key lessons of the failure of Wilsonian idealism in 1919. Any new Europe must also remain an old Europe. In practice, this meant that post-war Europe was still to be based on its nation-states (no matter how worn out and discredited they may have been) and their traditions (no matter how dark these may have been). Moreover, the ‘new Old World’ of post-war Europe would remain an ongoing experiment in new and more just forms of capitalism and democracy, oscillating between the past and the future, the national and the supranational.Footnote 16
Planning a New Europe
But whatever the ideas of politicians and intellectuals, one constant remained dominant in Europe’s realities: the ordinary people of Europe were not really interested in the grandiose plans of the elites. Matters of individual security, food, housing and clothing simply took precedence. Indeed, this was the most evident continuity in the lives of many Europeans.Footnote 17 It made European societies fundamentally insecure, uncertain and desperate for stability and security. That was the case after the Second World War, just as it had been before that war had started.
The uncertainty that accompanied these parallel developments – the increasingly nationalist focus of governments in parallel with talk of a world government – did not arise in a historical vacuum. According to the Romanian-British policy expert and scholar David Mitrany – the father of functionalism and champion of post-war functionalist planning – it was during the nineteenth century that two political trends emerged that ‘moved on two and opposite lines’. The first line enhanced ‘the enfranchisement of the individual, the person becoming a citizen’ (anchored in the Renaissance, humanism and anti-totalitarianism). The second line led to ‘the enfranchisement of national groups through states of their own’ – a process that would radically intensify during the first five decades of the twentieth century, when Europe’s nation-states became more ethnically homogeneous, often as a result of very violent politics.Footnote 18 Mitrany stressed that it was the task of post-war Europe ‘to reconcile these two trends’.Footnote 19 Indeed, this may have been the key challenge of the post-war era in western Europe, given that the uncertainty mentioned above persisted into the first post-war years.
This confronted the planners of the post-war West, and European integration in particular, with the dilemma endemic to the multilateral management of interdependence. The ‘two trends’ identified by Mitrany continued unabated in a geopolitical and geo-cultural context marked by unremitting ambiguity. On the one hand, this context was characterised by nation-states that were increasingly becoming culturally homogeneous. On the other hand, it was coloured by the phenomenon of economic, political and cultural ‘Americanisation’, especially in western Europe,Footnote 20 where societies increasingly became spellbound by the United States and its films, its music, its automobiles, its stimulation of the senses, its money.Footnote 21
This cultural–commercial trend was mirrored in new political visions. The backdrop of Americanisation allowed the idea of an ‘Atlantic Community’ to win relevance in western Europe. But it had been the outbreak of the war against Hitler’s Germany that allowed this idea to truly catch the mood of the time, as the concept of the Atlantic Community could be easily linked to Allied cooperation, in particular to the politics and policies that sprang from the strongly intensified Anglo-American partnership but also to the drafting of plans for post-war Europe by the European exile governments in wartime London.Footnote 22 Nonetheless, the translation of this ‘easy link’ into a concrete and coherent grand design ultimately failed. As a result, the visionary concept of an Atlantic Community was put on the back burner and turned into a transatlantic politico-economic incubator space facilitating the international cooperation of open societies and promoting ‘liberalism as a pan-Western exercise’ but remaining ‘unguided by overall strategy’.Footnote 23
Be that as it may, the ‘better world’ envisaged during the inter-war decades and the war years did build the foundation for stability, prosperity and well-being in post-war western Europe. Moreover, despite the global aspirations often simmering below the surface in post-war planning, this new reality of free societies, progress and international cooperation remained a strictly Western affair for more than four decades, crafted from ideas of an ‘Atlantic civilisation’ and a distinct and coherent Western unity – or even union – and identity. In the 1966 republication of his influential pamphlet A Working Peace System (first published in 1943), David Mitrany starts the reworked introduction as follows: ‘When this short study was first published in the summer of 1943, there was great confidence in the unity which had grown up during the war, and [we] were thinking mainly of how to consolidate that unity and expand it.’Footnote 24 However, when the time was ripe to put such ideas into practice in post-war western Europe, this ‘Atlantic imagination’ of a ‘better world’Footnote 25 had already lost much of its power. In its place, a messier western European variant emerged, morally indebted to its American precursors, yet focused in practical terms on devising a European method of American-inspired socio-economic and financial-economic planning, a European style of state intervention, inter-state coordination and supranational organisation.
If there was a clean historical break with the post-First World War past after 1945, it was reflected in the modern phenomenon of economically legitimised state intervention elaborated in projects of planning and the policies of the welfare state. The credibility of planning and policy offered a fresh solution to the political problems that had torn Europe apart in the first decades of the twentieth century. During the 1940s, planning and policy even evolved into something much bigger than a set of instruments to organise society. It became a belief, a movement, a kind of pseudo-religion. It became the binding mission that drove the Western quest for a resilient, free world: ‘if a democracy was to work, if it was to recover its appeal, it would have to be planned’;Footnote 26 and primarily economically planned, focused on the battle against unemployment and on providing ‘welfare for all’.Footnote 27
In taking on this mission, the leading planners designed a society that was more organised than the inter-war societies had been when Europeans had experimented with a mix of wild capitalism and even wilder politics. These experiments had only led the continent into economic depression and societal unrest. Given this dark historical backdrop, it was felt that the adventures of the inter-war years had to be avoided at all costs. Planners now took the lead, presenting themselves as unsullied by political ideology. And there was a reason. They were not only able to learn from their own sobering experiences of the 1920s and 1930s, but also had recourse to the preparatory work carried out by the bureaus of the League of Nations and its academic and non-governmental partners. The moribund committees and bureaus of the League – which had found themselves increasingly orphaned in a Europe under the spell of fascism, nationalism and Nazism – had formed a breeding ground for what would turn out to be an ‘epistemic community in the making’.Footnote 28 With the benefit of hindsight, the broad, loose and diverse community of internationally oriented and universalistic inspired people, scattered over and around the League’s committees and secretariats, can be seen to have been a kind of ‘training centre’ for the post-war years of reconstruction. It was here that thinking was focused on practical and implementable plans.
These planners and designers helped politicians build their promised ‘better world’ of prosperity and multilateralism by drawing up a programme of practical politics that the Western world had lacked. This earned them political trust, and it made their claim that rational policies of international cooperation could prevent disaster even more convincing and thus appealing. The most prominent of the planners even presented themselves as ‘statesmen of interdependence’ – as apolitical experts operating within an emerging international order based on the cooperation of free and open societies, social justice and the practical and material benefits of functionalism and market expansion, cheap production and mass consumption.Footnote 29 Initially, this conversion of American ideas into Atlantic and western European practices of international cooperation and organisation was achieved mainly by promoting and managing economic interdependence in the fields of monetary policy, trade and financial-economic affairs.
Renewing the Historiography of European Integration
The work undertaken by the planners of a new (western) Europe was soon given a powerful boost by the success story – unparalleled in history – of economic growth, prosperity and general progress. As Alan Milward has noted, ‘nothing in the history of western Europe resembles its experience between 1945 and 1968 … the material standard of living for most people improved uninterruptedly and often very rapidly’.Footnote 30 In combination with the geopolitical and ideological black-and-white logic of the Cold War, this makes it seem – ex post facto – as though the early post-war rationalist planners had triumphed. This influential perception, however, is fundamentally incomplete because it obfuscates the non-economic origins of European integration and falsely portrays European integration as a purely rational affair.
This notion forms the starting point for the historical research that underpins the CHEU and mirrors a relatively recent development in the historiography of European integration.Footnote 31 The CHEU aims to make an important contribution to the existing historiography by integrating three relatively new insights from the emerging revisionist literature into a new comprehensive approach.
The first new insight derived from the revisionist literature is that the governments involved in initiating European integration were unable to control what emerged out of the widely popular idea of European unification. Once the genie was let out of the bottle, European integration took on a life of its own, penetrating domestic politics and causing deep splits within cabinets and parliaments, cutting across conventional political camps and stirring up heated debates between federalists, confederalists, isolationists, nationalists and so on. The lack of national control over this process of integration also led to the formation of unorthodox transnational coalitions, lobbies and networks. Moreover, the transatlantic and European negotiations that prepared the ground for the revolutionary first steps of European integration involved both state and non-state actors from the very beginning, which meant that the drafting of plans and the formation of coalitions occurred across national frontiers and that state and non-state institutions worked together. This was, in essence, its own ‘polity’ in the making.Footnote 32 Influencing the integration process presupposed access to this polity. In addition, there was a certain degree of ‘transnationalisation’ of European politics and policies from its earliest days. This has not been given sufficient attention in the historiography, and the CHEU strives to correct this.
The second new insight is the need to delve deeper into the past to understand the origins of European integration. The state-centric and issue-specific historiography mentioned above impedes efforts to understand transatlantic path dependences and issue linkages from a more diachronic perspective. In the rare cases in which these phenomena have been studied over a longer period, the scope has been limited either to intellectual history or to institutional path dependence or issue linkage within and between certain policy domains – of which the latter two typically remain limited to the traditional timeframe of European integration, meaning post-1950 or even post-1990.Footnote 33 Obviously, this is a major shortcoming in the literature, for instance because long-term institutional consequences may well have been ‘by-products’ of decisions taken for short-term reasons inherent in specific issue linkages (of earlier episodes). It is essential for historians to go back beyond 1950, beyond 1945, and even beyond the Second World War to the inter-war period and the First World War in order to widen their diachronic scope of research.Footnote 34 The ‘new Europe’ of cooperation and integration was not created from scratch after the Second World War; instead, post-war developments were deeply rooted in the inter-war years, if only because it was ultimately the Great War that plunged Europe into a period of 75 years of war, unrest and division – ‘the longest of its civil wars’Footnote 35 – that ended only in 1990 with the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany allowing the two German states to reunite. It was this treaty that laid the foundations for the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Europe, facilitated by the process of European integration and re-enshrined in the Treaty on European Union in 2007. Together, these treaties explicitly built on the multilateral order of the post-war West and its ideals of international cooperation and human rights. The CHEU also entails an effort to reconstruct this fragmented history of the Western world in the twentieth century in which post-war (western) Europe was – and still is – so firmly embedded.
The third new insight that has emerged from recent historiography is the conviction that to understand how European integration developed the way it did, historians must delve beneath the surface of day-to-day politics, diplomacy and the development of institutions. On that deeper level, it becomes apparent that European integration was drawn from a relentless ‘battle of ideas’ over Europe’s future. It was not the result of a preconceived plan but the product of never-ending battles over such plans – battles that were fuelled by ideas and ideals that crossed national frontiers as well as political parties. Grand designs for a new European, regional and world order inevitably ushered in a competition of proposals from very general and political ones to ones that were extremely technical and focused on very specific policy fields. This ceaseless competition between different concepts and plans is key to understanding what happened and why. And yet the unsuccessful grand designs are largely neglected in the ex post facto depictions that dominate the historiography. The CHEU hopes to paint a more complete picture of these ideational dynamics and struggles than is usually presented in scholarly works on European integration.
Other ways in which the CHEU aims to enrich the existing literature on European integration are the addition of innovative conceptual elements (from disciplines other than contemporary history) and the highlighting of key dimensions in the history of European integration that often have been overlooked, such as the above-mentioned neo-colonial dimension, which was very present in the initial phases of European market integration. Another example of such an overlooked dimension is the (very) active role of the churches and leading ecclesiastics, often made possible through the trans-European and transatlantic networks of Christian Democracy, especially in the first phases of European integration. This represented a vital political force in all free societies of post-war Europe, where political, technocratic and clerical networks often overlapped in an emerging world of transatlantic cooperation that fostered partnerships that were pivotal in the post-war West. The interconnectedness of the world of the churches and the process of (re)building Europe has been largely ignored in the historiography.Footnote 36
Theorising European Integration: A Brief History
Generally speaking, European integration theories, fuelled by various strands of political science, have taken these insights – like the role of ideas or non-state actors and the power of path dependence or transnational networks – into account. Historically, these theories – borrowed from international relations, comparative politics and public management and applied to a unique case often labelled as sui generis – followed clear trends in trying to explain the range, degree and speed of European integration, or the lack thereof. The big questions of how and why followed certain waves, clearly corresponding to the ups and downs of the process of (political) integration itself.
Neo-functionalism was the first theory trying to explain this unique phenomenon in international politics.Footnote 37 Neo-functionalism explained the coming about of the ECSC and the Rome Treaties (EEC and Euratom) by noting the internal logic and dynamics of the integration process, with special emphasis on processes of socialisation. Its failure to provide explanations for certain shortcomings or even stagnation in the process of European integration – such as the failure of the European Defence Community (EDC) or the Empty Chair Crisis – triggered a renewed attention towards actors’ self-interests and preferences, first and foremost driven by national interests of the member states. This theory of intergovernmentalism became dominant when neo-functionalist (and rather linear) explanations and predictions had been disavowed by events like the failure of the EDC.Footnote 38 Intergovernmentalism assumes that integration proceeds only when states envisage more benefits than costs in cooperating with each other. Consequently, intergovernmentalists consider European integration to be the reflection of the national interests of the most powerful states and corresponding policy choices, be they ‘geopolitical’, ‘socio-economic’ or ‘commercial’, under the banner of ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’.Footnote 39
These long-dominant ‘varieties of intergovernmentalism’, however, share comparable problems in their efforts to capture the institutional dynamics of the Community system, as this system clearly contains normative features, transnational dynamics, fragmented national governments, caprices of public support for European integration, and non-state actors – and also in the accurate and/or balanced use of sources.Footnote 40
From this perspective it may not be a surprise that the quest for a grand theory – shaping much of the infant historiography in the early decades of integration – that can explain the overall European integration process has been increasingly abandoned by scholars in the past two decades.Footnote 41 Instead, so-called meso-theories (such as social constructivism, multilevel governance and ‘Europe as an empire’) tried to analyse specific elements or phenomena within European integration, which seem located at the heart of the process – for instance the variation inherent in it.Footnote 42 Most of the time, however, this has been done by borrowing frameworks and concepts from existing academic disciplines and subdisciplines, mainly in the social sciences, which were not focused on European integration per se.Footnote 43 Even the efforts to theoretically explain ‘the age of crisis’ (the euro and Schengen/migration, ‘the two flagship integration projects of the 1990s’),Footnote 44 as well as forms of ‘differentiated integration’ and disintegration,Footnote 45 particularly Brexit, did not preclude the appearance of a new grand theory. What did happen was the adaption and nuancing of the ‘old grand theories’ so as to include new insights and relate them to a decade of crises. This led to theories such as postfunctionalism (which assesses the causes and effects of the increasing ‘politicisation’ of European integration) and new varieties of ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’.Footnote 46 The communis opinio more and more seems to be that the relevance of European integration theories lies in ‘elucidating the EU’s polycrisis or its distinctive features’, also given that ‘one theory might not be apt for explaining all the crises the EU has faced since 2009, different theories explain distinct empirical realities’.Footnote 47
Interestingly, by giving up the ambition to understand what is going on in Europe in a more general sense, the ‘new theories’ do generally indicate that the Treaty of Maastricht has been a turning point in the history of European integration. In other words, ‘Maastricht’ may have changed the nature of the integration process as such. For some ‘Maastricht’, for instance, finally proved that the ultimate nature of European integration is in building a common political future and for the EU to become a more political player, both internally and externally, in one way or another.Footnote 48 And there is an obvious, albeit still not much mentioned, direct reason for this turn to Realpolitik: the post-Maastricht era was also characterised by geographical ‘widening’ of integration, next to nation-state penetrating ‘deepening’; the latter especially via the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).
Indeed, what the last 30 years of European integration do force us to confront is the far-reaching significance of a Europe of the euro, namely the money and the banks. That Europe has actually been achieved. The deep grooves that the euro crisis has gouged across the EU and its member states have pushed the history of the EU towards other, new perspectives. It is difficult as yet to see what they are, but we can already conclude that the origins of the monetary dimension of European integration will perhaps prove even more important for the history of integration than was long asserted, believed or estimated. That is one reason why the CHEU devotes considerable attention to the origins and developments of the EMU, and the ‘order of Maastricht’ (replacing the ‘order of Rome’), within which the EMU became a reality. Moreover, the pre-history of the EMU explains much of the how and why of the Europe of European integration and its endemic internal and external struggles. All in all, the state of the art of the historical research on the EMU, as presented in the CHEU, provides new insights into the tangled state of crisis in which the enlarged Europe of European integration of today finds itself.
It is, however, only since the EU launched its overwhelming enlargement policy towards the central and eastern European countries that enlargement has become a serious topic of scholarly debate.Footnote 49 Until now, studies have either presented insightful, yet single, case studies focusing on specific key dimensions and/or actors,Footnote 50 or remain preoccupied by post-Cold War eastern enlargement as the ultimate falsification of rational choice theories.Footnote 51 These shifts in scholarly efforts to elucidate what European integration is have implications for the study of the general phenomenon itself.
Moreover, these shifts suggest that new ways of thinking and other disciplines (next to the usual suspects and their ‘European studies’ sub-branches: history, political science, law and economics) ought to be encapsulated in the study concerning the ‘why and how’ of European integration, to rejuvenate the research and anticipate new perspectives the transformation of ‘Maastricht’ may require. At the same time, however, the traditional ‘big questions’ of European integration history, about the role of ideas, interests and institutions, have neither been answered sufficiently nor lost their relevance. One of the most prominent of these concerns the position of reunified Germany, ‘the German Question’ in the reality of post-Cold War history. Since ‘Maastricht’, and even more so since the euro crisis, the migration crisis, the Covid-19 crisis and the Russian war in Ukraine, this old European question has again become very topical and is hotly debated. The same holds true for that other traditional European question: the British relationship with the continent. The latter is more topical than ever in the present context of Brexit – a feverish search to understand why and how the British struggle with post-Maastricht Europe culminated in the Brexit vote. Or, more generally, the geopolitical questions: what role is left for the EU, next to its Anglo-Saxon allies, in the immediate neighbourhood of the western Balkans, along its unstable borders in the east and the south, vis-à-vis openly revisionist powers like Russia and China.
Aim and Organisation of the CHEU
The CHEU offers a unique opportunity to open up a truly diachronic research scope on the history of European integration. Next to that, it also offers a rare opportunity – on the basis of this research scope – to re-conceptualise the history of European integration, taking on board the latest insights from sub-branches of the study of European integration and interdisciplinary research on the theme. In other words, the CHEU entails a re-visiting of the big questions of the why and how of this European integration process. Indeed, the CHEU offers the opportunity to take on this challenge from an interdisciplinary and empirically, historically, informed angle, which fits the essentially sui generis aspects of the process. The key questions are as follows: why did we do it, and how does it work? How does the interplay between contingency, clashing ideas and the inherent urge for endurance and expansion of the integration process function? What are the outcomes of this interplay?
In order to find answers to these questions, the present book studies European integration history from a (1) diachronic, (2) multidisciplinary and (3) multi-actor angle in order to present an innovative, comprehensive and up-to-date CHEU. Therefore, unlike many textbooks as well as edited volumes on this topic, we do not organise the two volumes along a strict and classical timeline, starting with the first steps of European integration and finishing with the latest developments. Instead, time and change over time are integrated within the various chapters. Moreover, we invited historians as well as political scientists (and other social scientists and colleagues from other disciplines) to shed light both on traditional topics (such as foreign policy or economic and monetary cooperation and integration) and on non-traditional topics of European integration (like the role of narratives). Such a multidisciplinary approach is guaranteed between but also often within the different chapters. Finally, we neither analyse the European integration process from a state-centric perspective (with chapters on Germany, France, the UK, etc.), nor with a primary focus on European institutions (the European Commission, European Parliament, etc.). Instead, we introduce a thematic approach in which countries and institutions will be discussed from a variety of angles.
In the first volume of the CHEU the outside-in approach is dominant: what does the EU look like from the outside, and which outside forces shaped and co-designed the process of European integration? External events have played a major role in the tempo and direction of European integration. Moreover, research on European integration was nourished by a fairly long tradition of deep interest from US scholars – the influence of their ‘eye of the beholder’ perspective on European integration has been profound, both in the reality of the making of European integration and in the historiography concerning the why and how of the take-off of European integration and its development. This volume builds on these insights, yet also on recent developments in history and political science that have laid more emphasis on the limits of a Western or western European perspective. In addition, this volume of the CHEU also benefits from how European integration is understood outside the typical European Studies disciplines.
Part I (Critical Junctures) pays attention to the main external events that have steered the European integration process. Instead of treaties, the emphasis is on ‘critical junctures’, defining moments in post-Second World War world history, as well as in international geopolitical arenas, in which (western) Europe evolved, found its form and transformed into the EU; this includes the division and reunification of Germany, the history of the Cold War and its legacy, decolonisation and the EU’s eastern enlargement.
Part II (Multilateralism and Geopolitics) considers various international trends that are not unique to the European integration process, but have been strong shaping forces in European integration, such as globalisation and (the return of) geopolitics (to post-war Europe). The analyses in this second part of the first volume specifically focus on causes and effects of these trends on the market, in society and with regard to global challenges adopted by the Europe of European integration. This ‘outside-focus’ mirrors the ‘inside-focus’ on instruments of the Europe of integration discussed in the second part of the second volume (see below).
While the first two parts have institutions, countries and international organisations as the main actors, Part III (Perspectives and Ideas) focuses on the role of ideas, people, networks, public opinion, culture, religion and memory in the development of what is today the EU. Non-exclusive to the EU but increasingly salient within contemporary academic research, the analyses of these phenomena by scholars from various disciplines certainly contribute to an innovative take on the history of European integration.
The second volume takes an opposite perspective by looking at European integration from an inside-out perspective, an ‘inside the black box’ approach with a keen eye for the outside effects of internal dynamics in the process of European integration. This means that the authors first of all focus on the internal developments that have shaped the European integration process. The aim of the volume is to shed light on the most important aspects of this process by looking at this process from an inside-out perspective. With the benefit of hindsight and with the typical academic distance, we cover the main events, instruments of European integration and narratives that have shaped the internal development of European integration.
The scope of Part I (Milestones) concerns the basic rules that have defined European integration. In other words, in this part of the CHEU the treaties and their many changes are (chronologically) analysed by referring to the partly event-driven internal dynamics that have led to the establishment of a legal and political architecture of European integration. Brexit is considered here as a milestone in the history of European integration.
Part II (Instruments of Integration) zooms in on the different instruments within the architecture of European integration and elucidates how policies are developed, with a special focus on the (pre-)history of the EMU and the euro, so central to today’s European integration. To a certain extent similar to political entities at lower levels, the Europe of European integration has rules, money and coordinated management of economic and monetary policies at its disposal to steer the behaviour of public and private organisations, as well as that of its citizens. To make the system work, it also produces specific internal and external policies. In other words, by studying these instruments this part will make clear how European integration developed (in terms of politics and policy-making) within an expanding range of competences (policies). Special attention is paid to enlargement and the wider challenges of expansion of European integration, because, amongst other reasons, the (unforeseen) swift accession of new countries to the EU has had a profound impact on the internal development of European integration.
In Part III (Narratives and Outcomes) the focus is on the many narratives the Europe of European integration is historically linked to and/or produced itself for internal use. More ‘longue durée’ concepts, goals and ideas such as peace, (the promise of) prosperity, (the lack of) solidarity and democracy over time have all played a crucial mobilising role in the making of European integration (both in material terms and in mental and (collective) psychological terms). These concepts and ideas, as well as their evolutions and impact, deserve a critical and innovative analysis, since they constitute an essential force in the history of European integration, and determine how the process both spoke and failed to speak to the hearts and minds of Europeans.
The choice of this particular organisation of the two volumes, especially the outside-in and inside-out perspectives (in that order) is a deliberate choice by us, the editors. We believe it offers the best chances for an adequate, up-to-date and innovative approach to the history of the Europe of European integration and enables us to present the wide variety of relevant insights and perspectives in the making of the history and historiography in a comprehensive way.
Outlook
History is never finished, and neither is historiography. This also applies for the EU, and its still fairly recent history and pre-histories. Nonetheless, its past determines to a great extent its present and prefigures its future in ways we do not know yet.
Knowing and understanding integration history helps us to distinguish between what is acquired – like peace (or the absence of war) in (the western part of) the European continent – and what is not, and what is at stake. This is an urgent matter, not only of the research agenda of European integration history. The achievements of more than seven decades of European integration – economic prosperity, solidarity and democracy – are increasingly under pressure. On the one hand this is happening from within: think about the rise of illiberalism in a number of member states and the difficulties in coping with that for the EU institutions. But certainly the pressure is coming also from outside, with the volatility of the United States, the aggression of Russia and the so-called new Cold War with China. It puts the very idea of European integration under stress. This project is criticised because of its ambitions and goals (‘why European integration?’) that are never really reached, or tend to satisfy too few. Also its competences, institutions, modes of decision-making and geographical scope trigger multiple unanswered questions. Evidently, the complexity of the EU is more of a certainty than its results. Given the fact that there is no consensus on what the project is and where it should lead, it is easier (but also elucidatory) to focus on the process. This means that European integration might be defined not by its destiny (like the United States of America) but rather as a permanent series of actions, in reaction to but also anticipating events. From this perspective, EU history often seems a flux of conflicts, crises and compromises.
The latter view is certainly true for the way in which the EU handled the Covid-19 pandemic and the war Russia started in Ukraine on 24 February 2022. After a decade in which European integration was almost identified with crisis management, these extraordinary new challenges shook the foundations of the EU anew. The jury is still out as the long-term consequences of the Covid-19 crisis are still unclear at the time of writing, and the horrific war in Ukraine is radically changing Europe’s post-war history and the history of the EU while the two volumes of the present Cambridge History are being copy-edited and produced. The complete manuscript of the CHEU was handed in on 1 February 2022. This means that these two volumes cover the history of European integration until the Russian war in Ukraine.
In relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, three things are already clear. First of all, like many previous crises, it did not in the end lead to a quantum leap in European integration. Secondly, it did trigger some change within the EU, but without entirely changing the EU itself.Footnote 52 Here too, resilience is a characteristic of (the empirical) reality in the first place, although many would like to attribute it more to the EU itself. Thirdly, the crisis management of the pandemic reaffirmed that European integration is about messy procedures and heated discussions. Ad hoc decision-making, crises and even utter chaos have been constants in the recent history of the EU, as the EU’s reaction to the war in Ukraine reconfirms once more. And yet, at the same time, the history of European integration also remains a history of persistent ideas about some sort of European unity and purpose in world history – these ideas represent a deeper and older Europe, an undercurrent to the history of treaties of European integration, a history regarding which we feel that it must not be neglected in analysing the latest trends and modes, if only because it represents a certain resilience of European civilisation and its promises, an urge – despite everything – to look forward, to define a purpose, to imagine a better world.
Note on Archival and Primary Sources
Given the 30-year rule of archival release (that mostly applies for key archives), most relevant archival sources are accessible to researchers of the history of European integration only after that period of 30 years. Consequently, broad international archival research into the history of European integration did not really start until the beginning of the 1980s (and now extends up to the end of the 1980s). Since then, time and time again, one conclusion has proved inescapable: none of the parties involved – the governments of the member states, European institutions and their predecessors, the business community, lobbies, political parties, individuals and so on – have ever been able to control the integration process, let alone dominate it, not even for a short time. The process has been uncontrollable from the very beginning, even for the United States.
This general insight into the history of European integration has consequences for the research agenda. From an operational and methodological perspective any research approach that sets itself the task of attempting to fathom what has been going on in the history of European integration must build also on multinational and/or transnational archival research. Every chapter in the CHEU is based on original multinational archival research, or (regarding the chapters dealing with the more recent history) on new primary sources (for instance those made available through the EU institutions), new combinations of primary sources, or new original empirical research. All of the chapters encapsulate the ambition to stretch the research across the boundaries of ‘silo studies’ (on, for example, the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, the European Payments Union, the ECSC) and try to approach their subject matter from a richer and more comprehensive perspective, including a keen eye for the inter-linkages between the silos.
Vast collections of governmental and European documents are accessible for the period from 1950 up to the early 1990s, including the key episodes around the coming about and first crystallisations of the Treaty of Maastricht. Moreover, for the more recent history, a significant number of published sources, EU sources and private paper collections/ego-documents are available and accessible already, also in the form of interviews with key figures and numerous ego-documents, and – most notably – in other, and in a way enriching, forms, such as films and interactive datasets. Indeed, the list of relevant archives is extensive, and includes, next to the national archives, among many others ‘European archives’ such as the Historical Archives of the EU (HAEU) in Florence, the Jean Monnet Foundation in Lausanne, the Archives of European Integration (AEI) at the University of Pittsburgh, the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE) in Luxembourg, and national, European and trans-European political party archival collections.
Thanks to its initial focus on archival and primary source research, the CHEU unearthed a true wealth of archival and empirical sources. This obviously includes the archives from numerous EU member states and key countries outside the EU, including the United States, the UK and Switzerland, but, in addition, many of the CHEU’s chapters also build upon in-depth research in private paper collections and non-governmental archival collections all over the world, many of them less well known. References to the archival and primary sources used are available in detail in the footnotes to each chapter. We, the editors, believe that this makes these sources checkable and accessible for follow-up research in the most adequate way.
