number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

Allegiance – The Past and the Future 11
follow that the Treaty of Rome was a rejection of the ideas implicit in the Treaty of
Paris. To come to such a conclusion, which would also be to ignore the conclusions
of research from other sources then foreign ministry papers, would perhaps best
expose the danger of pursuing the history of diplomacy as though it had nothing to
do with the history of economy and society. It would be wiser to consider the recent
spate of publications on the first British application as interesting preliminary comments,
from a strictly British perspective, based on a very narrow selection of evidence
and paying only scant attention to the history of the Communities
themselves. 8
In reality, many of the underlying assumptions in earlier comprehensive theories
of integration remain untested by historians. This is particularly the case with
assumptions made about long-run social and economic developments. The underlying
assumption of Deutsch's 'community' theory, for example, that within western
Europe and the north Atlantic area there was a sudden upward leap in the frequency
of contacts between elites has not been studied in any systematic way. Neither have
the many assertions of theorists of the international economy that increasing international
trade in goods and capital has combined with changes in technology to
make controls on national frontiers, and thus the demarcation of the nation-state's
boundaries, meaningless, together with the concept of 'national income' which
governments in the 1950s used as a basic tool of government. There are only observations
about these ideas, no chronologically or technologically specific history
which could confirm, refute or modify them or make them operable for detailed
historical analysis. These are not the only examples. If historical research into the
history of European integration is now to have its own proper agenda, including its
own theoretical hypotheses, it should certainly not reject the assumptions of earlier
integration theory, except where they have been disproved. The working hypotheses
of historians in the present state of ignorance have to be heuristic. They must
encourage and facilitate as wide a field of enquiry as possible.
At the moment there seem to exist four different, but overlapping, ideas about
the fundamental causes of the process of European integration. One is the idea,
which the recent literature on the British application seems to support, that it
responds to the traditional objectives of the foreign policy of states, a sort of
alliance system adjusted to the realities of the world after 1945. Another is the idea
that it originates in the modification, perhaps even the rejection, of the traditional
objectives of the foreign policies of states. This idea emphasises the altruism of
integration and reposes on the belief that its profoundest cause is the will to unify
Europe, or parts of it. Integration springs from a deeply-held desire to change, for
ever, the nation-state structure of the continent. 9 A third idea is that the process of
integration was deliberately conceived and developed to preserve the nation-state
by supporting a range of new social and economic policies whose very purpose
8. For the best recent summary of the relationship between the history of the separate states and that of
the Community up to the signing of the Treaty of Rome, and one which puts the diplomatic history
of integration into a more balanced perspective, P. GERBET, La naissance du Marché Commun,
Paris, 1987.