Continuity and Change in European Cooperation during the Twentieth Century

Article

We would like to thank the FU Berlin "The Transformative Power of Europe" Research College for support for our research project on continuity and change in European cooperation during the twentieth century, which has resulted in this special issue. Our special thanks go to the Research College's directors Tanja Börzel and Thomas Risse for their valuable insights and friendship over the years. Kiran Klaus Patel would also like to thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation for its support as Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor at the German Historical Institute London and the London School of Economics in 2014/15.

To sign the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands met in Paris in April 1951. In a solemn Joint Declaration they stressed that through the newly created organisation, 'the Contracting Parties have given their determination to set up the first supranational institution and thus lay the real foundations of an organised Europe'.¹The ministers represented the ECSC as a radical rupture with history, as if Europe had been completely disorganised until the new organisation's creation. In a similar vein, the ECSC Treaty emphasised the member states' resolution 'to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community amongst peoples long divided by bloody conflicts'.²Since 1951 official European Union (EU) documents and other sources have forged a similar image, one which has been undergirded by assumptions about the creation of the 'core Europe' of the ECSC as a collective 'supranational' break with a past characterised by severe ideological divisions and extreme nationalism.

This special issue takes a different approach. It challenges the sometimes explicit and more often implicit assumptions that have remained prominent in the broader public and have also impacted the academic literature about 8 May 1945 as a 'zero hour', heralding a new age of European cooperation and integration. Instead, the contributions to this special issue explore a specific form of connections among proposals and practices of 'governing' Europe between the interwar, war and post-war periods during the twentieth century. We do not follow the thread of others who...