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 second type of sources consisted of the writings of political scientists, who similarly enquired into the immediate past and consulted the available sources. The results were often „Biased“ by the desire to confirm or disprove this or that „model“ or „theory“ which, under cover of rationalizing what at the outset appeared nothing but a jumble of facts, all too often led to reproducing only a truncated version of the historical reality. One typical example of this trend was, where integration was rejected, illustrated by the sombre forecasts of the Marxist historians and political augurs, who managed to claim that everything accomplished in terms of regional integration in Western Europe had been the outcome of the Cold War (one French lady historian wrote that the „Schuman Plan“ had been dictated from Washington to the French government on the telephone) and that integration conceived on „imperialist“ bases remained subject to the laws of history and the inherent contradictions of capitalism. Consequently, organizations like the European Communities were bound not to last.

Paradoxically, the first historical works in the full sense of the term, publications founded on the first accessible unpublished archives, did not directly lead to a new assessment of the event.

It is possible that this attitude was dictated by the sympathies of the historians themselves: H. B. Haas, Henri Rieben, Jean Baptiste Duroselle, Walter Lipgens, Alfred Grosser: authors wellknown for their „European“ convictions5. It is also likely that it reflected the content of archives biased by the contingent and „accidental“ nature of the opening to the public, or in other words by the „timing accessibility“ of documents brought to light in successive strata.

The first archives made public were in fact those of the conquered countries seized by the Allies, fairly quickly augmented by documents relating to the late 1940s. What historians found in the files from the Second World War and immediately after it clearly showed that the brutality of the „new European order“ set up by the Nazis and the importance attaching to the German question on the Continent had not produced, in the resistance movements and exile governments, the traditional nationalist-type response one might have expected.

Instead, they had answered the challenge of Nazi „pan-Europeanism“ by putting themselves at the same level. The war was held to have revealed the crisis of the Nation-State and brought to the fore the need to introduce new forms of supranational cooperation and organisation, which alone could enable Europe to solve the problems of its immediate reconstruction and lay the foundations for its future peace and prosperity.

As first-hand sources became accessible in the late 1960s, historians applied themselves to reconstructing the information gleaned in the sources by setting it in

5 Lipgens, Walter: Die Anfänge der Europäischen Einigungspolitik, 1945-1950. Stuttgart 1977; Grosser, Alfred: Les occidentaux. Paris 1975, and L’Allemgne et l’occident. Paris 1953; Haas, H. B.: The Uniting of Europe: political, social and economic forces 1950-1957. Stanford 1957; Duroselle, Jean Baptiste: L’Idée d’Europe dans l’histoire. Paris 1963.

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