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 EURATOM or on Community enterprises) - unfortunately today still means the withholding of a not insignificant proportion of important material for over thirty years in intermediate archives. This is true of the files on the negotiations for the Rome Treaties, where the declassification procedure is in hand, and for the documents coming from the cabinets of the ECSC High Authority. Very soon, ideas turned in the direction of setting up „central“ Community Historical Archives at the European University Institute in Florence. Among the factors favouring this solution was the desire to entrust study of integration to a university institution offering undisputed guarantees of academic standards and of multinationalism. The EUI, an international post-graduate teaching and research institution founded by the Member States in 1976, covers in its four department the full range of the human sciences. Since its mission is to contribute by its action and influence to developing the cultural and scientific heritage of Europe, in this context it constituted an unparalleled „think tank“. In particular, it concentrated work on a permanent research project on European integration, implying a multi-national team of researchers under the leadership of recognized historians of international relations and economics (Professor Walter Lipgens, Alan Milward and Richard Griffiths have been the successive directors)13. It is the case, as Commission President Gaston Thorn indicated at a colloquium preceding the opening of the Community Archives14, that historians, who in the 19th century had helped to convey and justify the nationalist positions, remained in the 20th century all too often conditioned, for good or for ill, by the socio-political background they belonged to. Living in a Nation-State with a supposedly inalienable sovereignty, they tended to regard the latter as the apogee of a historically determined process. It was in any case hard for them to overcome the obstacles to the development of a common European history constituted by the „establishment“ entrenched in the national archival systems. Many archive directors of Member States in fact indicated reservations over the installation of the EC Historical Archives in Florence, because of the distance between these archives and the originating institutions in Brussels and Luxembourg (1200 km), but also because of the concern they displayed over too great concentration on highly specialized research interests, in the absence of a uniform, systematic archival structure. These apprehensions have been denied by experience. Since their creation in late 1984, the general archives from Brussels and from the other institutions have transferred - with no noteworthy incidents - nearly two thousand shelf 13 Palayret, Jean-Marie: Les archives historiques des Communautés européenes Florence, in: Yearbook of European Administrative History 41 (1992): „Les débuts de l’administration des CE“; idem: Guide des archives historiques des Communautés européennes. Florence H992. 14 Thorn, Gaston: Opening address to the International Conference of professors of contemporary history: „Study of the Beginnings of European Integration: the value of source material and records“, reports and papers, Luxembourg, 28-29 January 1982. 400
