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)
access to archives of other ministerial departments (in particular economy, finance and agriculture) remains outstanding. The general secretariat of Benelux, the customs union that acted as a genuine „laboratory for Europe“, conserves important classical archives, for the most part accessible. The desire to offer working tools able to allow researchers to advance more readily in their heuristic research has led the Belgian Public Archives to produce inventories of archives of papers of people who played an important part in European construction (Jean Charles Snoy and d’Oppuers in the general archives of the Kingdom, van der Meulen in the Foreign Ministry archives). The archives of the Netherlands are undoubtedly among the most accessible in Europe. The access to unpublished sources after a period of twenty-five years (or even twenty in certain cases) in the archives of the Rijksarchiv and the archives of the ministerial departments mean that research possibilities are no longer confined here to the 1950s alone. Projects under way in the Netherlands are already concentrated on the accomplishment of the Mansholt Plan for the Common Agricultural Policy (which took full effect after 1962) and on the way in which the small countries defended their specific interests in the face of the threats regarded „hegemonic“ of the big Community countries. The Luns government’s opposition to the attempts at an „Europe des parties“ being pushed by General de Gaulle, the history of negota- tions in the Fouchet committee and the „empty chair crisis“, with ups and downs of the conflictual relations between France and the Netherlands and the friendly ones between the Netherlands and Britain, are exemplary in this respect. Luxembourg’s administrative archives are little used and not always easily accessible. However, they are outstandingly classified and, given the relatively short chain in the decision making process in the Grand Duchy, astonishingly rich in information. Luxembourg played an essential part in questions relating to the seat of the institutions and those concerning Franco-German reconciliation. The archives of Ireland, long closed to researchers, are now accessible to consu- lation by bona fide researchers on the thirty-year rule, pursuant to the general law on archives of January 1991. They include the documents of the Taoiseach (prime minister) and of the various ministerial departments. The opening of the official archives is likely to have a beneficial knock-on effect by inducing the families of political leaders to deposit their personal papers with the „Irish National Archives“. The archival department of University College Dublin also holds important deposits. Among those concerning Ireland are those of Desmond Fitzgerald and those of Patrick MacGilligan and Sean McBirde, illustrating the beginnings of the European movement in Ireland and the various attempts at Irish entry in the Early 1960s and then in 1970/7122. The Spanish archives, though they apply a twenty-five year rule without discrimination on access, as yet offer little material concerning the process that led the 4. Session/Séance: Palayret, Towards a new History of Europe Keogh, Dermot: Ireland and the History of European Integration, in: Historians of Contemporary Europe Newsletter, vol. 7/1-2 (June 1992), p. 37. 405
