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

rights. Problems are grasped at the roots, thanks to the contribution of increasingly diversified archives penetrating deeper into the apparatus of governments worked out and formulated national policies in this or that specific area, trade, agriculture, defence or energy, and how they endeavoured to achieve these sectoral ambitions at international and European level. These new research projects further reject the concept of „objective national interest“ a priori, in favour of the perceived interest. This is a radical change in interpretation that seeks to bring out the deployment of persuasion exercised by parties or pressure groups in the selection of priorities within government structures.

This return towards a sectoral approach and an analysis of the complex reality of the successive levels of decision-making is leading researchers to favour deeper searching of Member States’ public archives. A whole range of subjects of study hitherto left fallow are also being opened up through progressive access to archival sources of firms, political parties and the protagonists in the fight for European federalism, which will undoubtedly enable light to be thrown on the specific features of sectoral inertia, and also the rate and methods of adapting industry and commerce to Community markets to be followed.

The studies of opinion, just like those devoted to specific milieux, have put the finger on the need to consider the „human“ dimensions of European construction. Little has been said of the views of the French, the British or the Spanish on other Europeans, not only in terms of opinions derived from sifting press cuttings or surveys, but also through tourism, cooking and other indicators of a mode of consumption that integrates the other’s products. One must accordingly welcome the initiative for the international research project „Towards a European Identity and Awareness in the 20th century“, started in 1990 under the aegis of Professor Ren Girault, to which a number of French, Italian, Belgian and German researchers are contributing.

The historiography of European construction is accordingly very much alive today. It derives as legitimatly from the history of international relations as from the history of Nation-States. But it still has to find its own voice, since it stands at the intersection of three types of research: on bilateral relations between European neighbours, on trans-national European institutions and on international political, economic and cultural relations. It might take as its goal to highlight the functioning and interaction of the bonds of interest and civilization that unite Europeans (including Eastern Europeans) across the fracture lines of the 19th and 20th centuries.

II. The Archives of European Construction: A Dispersed Patrimony

At the present state of affairs, research by the historian of integration or the „European“ citizen seeking to exploit unpublished sources is a cross between a police investigation and a road rally.

Firstly, arriving at a list of sites and finding the nature of the public and private archives conserved there on the matter is extremely difficult because both the classi398