Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)

4. Session / Séance. Strategies for Links with Historical Research / Stratégies de Communication envers la Recherche historique - Palayret Jean-Marie: Towards a New History of Europe (integration period) / Pour une nouvelle Histoire européenne. La période de l’intégration) (english 393 - français 413)

4. Session/Séance: Palayret, Towards a new History of Europe

the Community will nessarily lead to further coordination of archival practices in Member or applicant States4. Among the possible fields or application of this cooperation, two areas concentrate the attention of contemporary historians: access and means of communication. In his documentary search, the historian of integration comes up against not just the scattered nature of the sources. The major obstacle he faces has to do with the diversity of archival regulations and traditions, firmly rooted for over two countries in the „establishments“ of the national archives, which are reflections of the government machinery.

I. European Unification in a Historical perspective:

The Role of sources

To summarize the position today, one has to start by stating two obvious facts.

The recent proliferation of books and articles on the history of European integration contrasts with the brad disinterest that long marked historical research in this field, at the same time bringing out a deepening in and radical change to the image one might, a mere fifteen years ago, have had of the integration process.

The reason is a new phenomenon that has come along to revolutionize the historiography of European integration over these last fifteen years: access to government archives has permitted a renewal of methodology and the broadening of hypotheses needed to bring in a research topic that may be treated as new and seperate.

Until nearly fifteen years ago, historians had contributed minimally to the literature tracing the first stages of European integration. This is because until the early 1980s studies on the first attempts at regional union in Western Europe draw essentially on two categories of published sources. First were the memoirs produced by those involved. Here, since the narrator is himself the object of his own study, the demarkation between explanation, rationalization and justification was hard to draw. On top of this were press articles, the reports of the various national Parlaments, the annual reports of international organizations or the propaganda material produced by pro-European movements. The nature of these sources strongly influenced the writings of what we shall, somewhat schematically, call the „hagiographical school“.

The authors constituting it regard European unification with sympathy and present integration as an inexorable process with a dynamic of its own. They regard the 1949 and 1950 Treaties creating the Council of Europe and then the European Coal and Steel Community as resulting from the irreversible awareness arrived at immediately after the war that European union was in the air. This is held to the the result of the crisis of the Nation-State (culminating in the dictatorship of the fascist regimes) and of the „leadership“ of a few visionaries (Jean Monnet, Altiero Spinelli) or inspired statesmen (Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi, Paul Henri Speak, Konrad Adenauer). These key figures or small groups of decision makers occupy the whole stage.

4 Resolution of the Council of Ministers of Culture, 14 November 1991, EC Official Journal.

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