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Allegiance – The Past and the Future 7
Allegiance
The Past and the Future
Alan S. Milward
There are now so many historical journals in which the only page read with any
attention is the list of contents that the appearance of a new one demands either an
apology or an explanation. The explanation for the appearance of this one is that it
is confined to one subject only. It does not concentrate on any particular type of
historiography, on any single country, or even in principle on any particular period;
it is concerned solely with the history of what has come to be called the 'integration'
of Europe. It is not a word whose origins were propitious, the offspring of American
disillusionment with the dangerous political disunity of the European continent
and naive progressivist optimism. But it has become established in historical, economic
and political discussion as summing up all those trends in whatever sphere
of activity, business, law, culture, politics, ideology, or the more everyday life of
Europeans which are widely, although by no means universally, thought to have
brought European nations into a much closer unity. And since the obvious political
expression of these trends is the evolution since 1952 of the successive European
Communities into the European Union the history of that evolution has been
usually called the history of European integration. The subject thus has its own
unity and has become an area of historical discussion and analysis in its own right.
As so often happens in historical research this separate historiography of integration
was forced into independent existence partly by the conservatism of the
historical profession. Early historical research in this area was for example typically
published in journals whose primary concern was with political science, international
relations, or sometimes applied economics. One distinguishing trait of the
historiography of European integration has been its close links to political and economic
theory, simply because political scientists and economists had offered theoretical
explanations of the process of European integration before detailed
historical research became possible. It followed that much research was centrally
concerned with testing the validity of these theoretical propositions. The publication
of this journal should mark the end of this process and the beginning of a
new period of research where history now has its own theories and a research
agenda which derives from them. If the theoretical flow were now to be reversed,
so that it ran from historical research to the social sciences this journal will mark an
important turning-point.
There is not much left intact of the complex rival theoretical positions on this
subject of the political science of the 1960s. Under the weight of historical events
since then and under factual bombardment by historians political science has
retreated to a more pragmatic and less teleological ground. Indeed for many political
scientists the process of European integration is now seen much more as one
directed by the greater powers in their own interests, – as many diplomatic historians
would always have liked to see it –, and not as a new and inevitable trend. 1