journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

Introduction 9
about the structures and policies of the emerging community. Beginning with the
1960’s a number of the early policy areas have been studied and mapped in greater
depth than before. Lise Rye Svartvatn’s aforementioned contribution and Erin Delaney’s
The Labour Party’s Changing Relationship to Europe. The Expansion of
European Social Policy, are in fact examples of this trend. While the former looks
at the French strategies used in the field of social policy, the latter focuses on the
British Labour Party’s views on the social policies implemented by the EC. The
first looks at the French position at the time of the Treaty of Rome, while the latter
traces the long term patterns of continuity and change in the British Labour Party’s
views of the EC using the example of the EC’s development of social policies. Both
approaches have their merits. Delaney is thus able to show on the one hand how the
Euro-scepticism of the British Labour Party had strong roots in its initial perception
of the social nature of the Common Market, and on the other hand how the growth
of the community’s social policies had a backlash on the Labour Party’s doctrines
in general and on the Labour Party’s European policy in particular. This contribution
reminds archival researchers of how useful it can be to take a broader look that
underlines the inert nature of political perceptions and ideologies, the importance
of long term change and macro-historical patterns.
One of the fascinating aspects of the policy studies analysing the origins of important
EEC-policies in the 1960’s is that they throw light on the emerging community
institutions and the maze of community decision-making processes. This can
be seen in Piers Ludlow’s studies of the European Commission at important turning
points in the 1960’s as well as in Ann-Christine Lauring Knudsen’s Ph.D.-thesis on
the making of the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy. Other research results in
fields such as the trade policy, the Common Market and the GATT-negotiations and
the relationship to the less developed countries of the world could be mentioned.
Indeed only in the 1960’s the community archives of the EEC institutions really begin
to abound with documents that can offer an alternative or a supplement to the
documents in national archives. With an overall view of the integration process of
the 1960’s and 1970’s emerging, the discipline will have covered a first, long exhaustive
stretch comparable to the political feat marked by the consolidation and
expansion of the European Community at the end of that period. With an in-depth
overview of the integration history of the 1960’s the history of European integration
will furthermore have moved from its origins as either federal history or as a
particular aspect of this or that country’s foreign policy to a discipline that is also
supranational in the sense that its subject matter is more than the accumulated sum
of national policies. The history of European integration is still a quite national
business or a special branch of foreign policy studies. We tend to write on ‘Country
X and the European Y’ or ‘Country X, Country Y and the European Z’. Sources
from the national foreign ministry archives abound in this kind of research. Still,
this is important work – also for the history of European integration. However, with
the shift in focus from the pioneering years of European integration research – the
1950’s – to the following decades one may hope that the history of European integration
will also move even more towards a more supranational focus. The French