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

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Johnny Laursen
bership, or can the study of European integration embrace wider issues and broader
chronological periods of time than that of the existence of the European community?
Does there exist, beneath the Iron Curtain of the Cold War, a history of European
integration shared by the peoples of both Eastern and Western Europe? Indeed,
the boundaries of the subject matter seem to change as the focus shifts between institutions,
politics, security issues and identities and perceptions.
Fourth, and most important the field has special features which constitute a challenge.
In many ways the study of European integration is and has been – and should
to a large extent be – national history. It is on the other hand also a field that highlights
the limitations of the national history perspective. We are looking at a process
where power and political dynamics are vested into something above the national –
something supranational – so if we want to explain this or that negotiation process or
this or that set of identity patterns we will have to look at the nation state plus something
beyond, a complex pattern of interaction between national governments, Nonstate
actors and more or less supranational institutions and processes.
Even though this issue of the Journal of European Integration History is an open issue
and not a thematic one, the six contributions are nevertheless a fairly representative
selection of the established research areas of the history of European integration.
Milène Wegmann’s study on the Neo-liberal Conception of a European Federation,
1918-1945 can be considered a study of the intellectual pre-history of the European integration
process. The author demonstrates how a group of influential neo-liberal economists
such as von Hayek, Röpke, Einaudi and Robbins developed a set of politico-economic
doctrines in the interwar period, where a customs union within a liberal
economic system was intrinsically linked to a political federation and an international
system of states based on international law. During the Second World War these thinkers
moved towards a stronger focus on the requirements of social and cultural integration
as a necessary foundation for a successful federation. The author is able to trace
back the development of a number of key concepts in the federalist thinking to the intellectual
origins in the period 1918-1945. Bertrand Vayssière’s work on The Italian Origins
of European Federalism during the Second World War investigates the emergence
of the Movimento Federalista Europeo and the influences and the circumstances of the
Manifesto de Ventotene edited by Altiero Spinelli in collaboration with Ernesto Rossi
and Eugenio Colorni in 1943. The militant federalism of these oppositional Italian intellectuals
who were convinced of the central role that a federal European solution would
play in the future peace system explains the particular strength of European federalism
in Italy and throws light on one of the main sources of the emergence of the European
federalist movements. Moreover, Bertrand Vayssière carries the analysis beyond intellectual
and elitist political history with his analysis of how the Italian federalists failed
to adapt to the hard peacetime realities of the primacy of national priorities in the
post-war world. Here we move into another important current in the history of European
integration.
The pursuit by national elites of European power politics and of national political
agendas has with good cause played a central role in the studies of the European
integration process in the 1950’s. This holds good for both the abortive ventures