Preliminary Programme

The founding document for today's status quo of European integration was the Treaty on the European Community of Coal and Steel. It was supposed to create a superordinate framework in which comprehensive policy fields were intended to be organized later (Bitsch 2007, Kahn 2018). It turned out, though, that the institutional order provided by the treaty and the approach to European integration had a strong influence on the development of European political organisation.

Despite the final success of the European Community of Coal and Steel, the founding phase is characterised by failures: the Coal crisis has mostly been forgotten in European integration theory, although the crisis remained unsolved and national protectionism was tolerated instead of coordinating the crisis on the supranational level (Dreyfus 2007). Much more present in the collective memorey are the failures of the European Defense Community and the European Political Community. What does it mean for the foundation of the European legal community that failures are an indispensable part of integration history?

In my paper, I will look at the mentioned four treaty drafts: the European Community of Coal and Steel, the European Defense Community, the European Political Community and the European Economic Community. I will compare the symbolic and emotional language used in the treaty drafts, emphasizing particularly the differences between the succeeding and failing treaties.

The aim is to address the following questions:

1. What kind of ambitions, dreams and dreads are visible in the treaty drafts, particularly in the preamble and the expression of goals?
2. What narratives were used to promote the early European integration project?
3. Do the leading authors of the first European treaties choose to make a case for European integration or quite in contrast strategically try to understate the integration proceedings?
4. What - if anything - can we learn from early integration narratives for current (dis-)integration processes?

Methodologically, I will integrate the general approach of narrative analysis in discourses (Somers 1994) with the narrative analysis in European studies (Manners and Murry 2016) applying it to the early integration phase in the 1950s. (Show less)

This paper looks at transfers of political ideas in the post-WWII European Federalist Movement. Founded in Paris in December 1946, the movement served for the coordination and collaboration of various national traditions of federalism in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. The traditions differed quite dramatically, some stemming from the Resistance movement that promoted the ideas of Europeanism and values of liberal democracy, others having background in the communitarian and anti-parliamentary ideologies that were aiming at the destruction of nation states. Taking into consideration the differences, and yet the common aim of constructing a European federation, this paper will ask: what was the political space created by the European federalist movement, and what was its significance in the context of early European integration? (Show less)

I would like to present a case study of comparative history which includes West-Germany, Great-Britain and France. Discourses about the European continent being in decline as well as about the necessity of unifying the continent after the atrocities of two world wars were omnipresent in most countries immediately after (and already before) the liberation from fascism in 1945. In addition to that, the self-understanding as Europeans was connected in many Western European countries to the accelerated decolonization and the perception of being thus provincialized.
In my talk I aim to take a closer look into the expressed emotions within these national discourses, which were, so I will argue, filled with fear and mistrust towards each other. After all, the recent research in this field indicates that Charles de Gaulle was driven by deep mistrust towards the German state (Patel 2018), as well as by cultural aversion towards Great Britain. The, then former, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee bitterly claimed as late as in the 1960s: „We are asked to join the Six. […] I seem to remember that we spent a lot of blood and treasure during the War rescuing four of them from the other two.“
European integration in the 1950s happened while all countries strongly feared a quickly recovering German economy. I argue that since the first big failure of a plans for a common European defense strategy in 1954, all steps into integration can be seen as driven by crisis, unanimity, fear and thus be described as failing forward. The european project perpetuated itself out of a permanent fear of a glooming and threatening decline.
I am choosing France and Germany as case studies as the founding members of all European endeavours in the 1950s as well as Great Britian as the moral winner of the 2nd World War and at the same time having its sense of untouchable identity deeply shattered by the decline of its Empire.
My sources to understand in which way those above mentioned emotions played a role in the discourses are files from three National Archives, stemming from holdings of the highest layer of governmental politics (Chancelor, Prime Minister), down to discussions in the relevant ministries, such as foreign, economy and defense. (Show less)

In the early years of European integration, one of the most contested debates concerned the development of a European army, as part of a European Defence Community (EDC). The idea for a European Army was first launched by Churchill in the Assembly of the CoE in 1950 and buried 4 years later in French parliament – to either great relief or deep disappointment.
Existing research on the EDC has focused on the role of particular Member States or key figures. Much less attention has been paid to the transnational emotional dimension of this critical episode of European integration. Hence, this paper focuses on the emotional beliefs of transnational coalitions and emotional contestation among coalitions. The paper distinguishes between emotional frames with a positive and negative valence that were evoked either in favour or against a European army.
This way it aims to make a threefold contribution:
1. Historicize the contestation over a European army, unpacking the notion of “fear” as an accelerating, delaying or blocking force.
2. Conceptually, develop the concept of emotional contestation in the context of security and defence
3. Methodologically, integrate Koschut’s emotion discourse analysis with Leifeld’s Discourse Network Analysis

To study the emotional contestation among transnational coalitions, this paper analyses transnational debates over a European army in the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Council and the negotiations of the European Defence Community. (Show less)

While these days fear of changing world order lead many across Europe to turn to various forms of Euroscepticism, in the interwar period fear of a change in Europe’s position in the world did not just lead to a rise in nationalism, it also lead significant groups to explore European cooperation. From the end of World War One (WWI) the number of individuals and transnational groups working for European cooperation increased significantly. Their motives and objectives differed, ranging from the political and economic to cultural affinities, but a common factor amongst many of these initiatives was a concern/preoccupation with the position of Europe in the world on all these terrains. Since the end of the 19th century they had witnessed the rise of the United States, the creation of the anti-systemic Soviet Union, unrest across the colonial world and particularly in Asia, where the Japanese example had been making the headlines since the turn of the century. Europe, which many perceived to be at the top of the civilizational and racial ladder, had just committed a very deadly suicide along the banks of the Somme. An important impetus for exploring possibilities of European cooperation was therefore fear. While much of the literature has explored the importance of the theme of ‘no more war’ for European cooperation, we need to take a global view to fully understand the fundamental challenge from all corners of the globe that some felt.
This paper will show how fear of Europe losing its predominant position in the world led a number of transnational groups and individuals to explore European cooperation in the interwar period. Drawing on extensive research on the workings of numerous Dutch and French interwar European organisations, this paper will explore the worldview and activities of Paneuropa and its founder, Richard Coudenhove Kalergi. In particular, it will focus on the transnational networks of politicians, industrialists and ordinary activists they operated in, ranging from Aristide Briand to Anton Philips and Robert Bosch.
Focusing on Paneuropa and Coudenhove-Kalergi opens up two perspectives. Firstly, we can explore the importance of racial and civilisational hierarchies in visions for a united Europe. Secondly, since ‘Paneuropa’ became a synonym for European cooperation, the outspoken personality of Coudenhove-Kalergi highlights the impact of personal likes and dislikes amongst international activists and the effect this had on support for the European idea across Europe.
This affective component therefore operates on two levels: on a geopolitical level connected to the position of Europe in the world and on a personal level since people’s attitudes to Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi to a certain extent determined their attitudes to European cooperation. While his personality and his relationship to the German Paneuropa Union have been studied, the larger question of emotion and its effects on the idea of European cooperation has not been explored in this context.
European cooperation thus became a way to deal with a changing world order in the interwar period. This process of change was of course magnified after WWII, when a number of the processes and projects that had started during the interwar period came to fruition. (Show less)