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

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Alan S. Milward
was the resurrection of the nation-state after its collapse between 1929 and 1945. 10
A fourth idea is that the loss of sovereignty of the European nation-state is inevitable
because of the long-run path of economic and social development. 11 The state,
this idea emphasises, has lost all control of its own destinies because of the permeability
of its frontiers. Its domestic policies can differ from those of other states
only in such insignificant ways as to make resistance to integration pointless and
costly. Proponents of these four ideas write about different things. The first attracts
historians who write about diplomacy and defence. The second attracts those who
write about ideas and people and search for hidden motivations behind the public
record. The third attracts those who write about the state, its policies, economic
growth, the interactions between policy and markets, and the links between
democracy and social change. The last attracts historians of the international economic
system and its long-run evolution.
The problem in the present stage of research is how to construct a hypothesis
about integration which has the same heuristic usefulness as each of these separate
lines of enquiry but which brings them together. At the least, historians working in
these different fields should be brought to confront each other; at the best, such a
confrontation might lead them to adopt each others' techniques and instead of working
in an isolated intellectual tradition reach a new synthesis.
European integration, if we define it as the voluntary surrender of some elements
of state sovereignty, may not be new, in principle. There are plausible
examples from medieval history. But in modern history on the scale in which it has
occurred since 1945 it is a new phenomenon. It is, however, a phenomenon whose
only new institutional characteristics are the supranational institutions of the successive
European Communities and the European Union. With every respect for
the aspirations of those who support these institutions, they have not been the locus
of power and decision-making. Everything else than those institutions must have a
historical continuity; people and their ideas, the states themselves, which were in
most cases much more assertive and securely founded than in the inter-war period,
and the gradual long-run developments in the European economy and the societies
of which it was composed. The backward linkages of historical continuity must
therefore be built into any hypothesis.
Where such backward linkages appear in the present historiography they are as
separated as the ideas on present trends. Those who see integration primarily as the
9. For a recent example of a work in which this is the underlying idea, C. HACKETT, Cautious Revolution:
The European Community Arrives, Westport, Ct., 1990. For one in which it is also a prominent,
but not the sole, idea, P. WINAND, Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe,
New York, 1993.
10. Recent expositions of this idea are A.S. MILWARD, The European Rescue of the Nation-State,
London, 1992; L. TSOUKALIS, The New European Economy. The Politics and Economics of
Integration, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1993.
11. A. BRESSAND and K. NICOLAIDIS, "Regional Integration in a Networked World Economy"
and M. SHARP, "Technology and the Dynamics of Integration" in W. WALLACE, The Dynamics,
op. cit.; A. BRESSAND, "Beyond Interdependence: 1992 as a global challenge", International
Affairs, vol. 66, no. 1, 1990.