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 long-term context. A first school, known as „federalist“, kept in the direct line of the „hagiographical“ historiography, seeking to trace the steps of the „Europeans“ within the decision-making bodies of parties and governments and to analyse the formation of „unionist“ or „federalist“ pan-European groups, whose actions were to culminate in their coming together at the May 1948 Hague Congress, regarded as the birth of the integrated Europe that was to lead to the creation of the Council of Europe. These authors were still most often tempted to avoid any theorizing by setting the various tendencies or accents on the same plane, with no indication of any hierarchy of causes. Visionary conceptions and statesmen in the historical line of development met with equal caution in the consulation of their archives6 7.

An alternative response was given by the „functionalist“ literature: for historians like Pierre Gerbet, Enrico Serra or Hans Jürgen Küsters, supra-national solutions were employed because pressing national problems could no longer be solved by purely national means. On this view, the ECSC’s purpose was to maintain controls on renascent German industry, while making it acceptable to the French. The ECD was seen the same way: as limiting the freedom of a German rearmament that the tension with the East following the Korean conflict was making inevitable.

The EEC looked a more complex business with its interactions not yet clearly unravelled, but with the stamp of national interests apparently strongly present.

In all cases, in solving these problems by partical transfers of sovereignty, the balance between national and supra-national powers was in the view of the „functionalist“ authors sufficiently shifted to make the make the effects become cumulative in favour of the transnational side. Accordingly, just like the federalist approach, the functionalist interpretation started from a deterministic assumption’. As from the late 1960s, a number of historians began to challenge this fine harmony by expressing doubts that the history of European integration might hitherto have been nothing but „influenced history“. In fact, when the integration process went through crises during the 1960s with the resurgence of the „Europe des Patries“ and the so-called „empty chair“ crisis of 1965, and when the ensuring immobility in the 1970s seemed to refute the optimism of the „federalist“ or „functionalist“ schools, though without displaying the collapse prophesied by the Marxists, these theories had lost much of their credibility.

At the same time, most national archives of European countries had, by adopting the thirty-year rule, reduced the time for access to documents. In 1983 the Community, applying the same thirty-year rule, opened its archives to the public. Though many of the files on the negotiations leading up to the Rome Treaties remained

6 Among the burgeoning literature we shall cite: Levi, Lucio: L’unificazione europea, SEI. Turin 1983; Brugmans, Henri: L’idée européenne; Lecerf, J.: Histoire de l’unité européenne. Paris 1965-1970; Bonnefous.E.: L’Europe face à son destin. Paris 1952.

7 The most exhaustive of these „hermeneutic“ researches appear in the works of Küsters, H. X: Die Gründung der Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft. Baden-Baden 1982; Serra, Enrico: Il rilancio dell’Europa e i tratti di Roma. Brussels 1989 and Gerbet, Pierre: Histoire de la construction européenne. Paris 1989.

396