Europe is a continent whose history has, in one form or another, long been dominated by integration. In the era of the nation state this was arguably first detectable in the early 1800s with the French-led Continental System which, somewhat prophetically in the context of Brexit, brought together much of mainland Europe in a trade war against the United Kingdom.1 In time this episode would itself spawn the creation of the Concert of Europe, an ambitious mid-nineteenth-century dispute resolution system founded by the regionâs then-dominant powers Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and Britain.2 Naturally, though, one need not travel as far back as Napoleon I to find examples of European states uniting or collaborating more closely with one another. From at least the mid-nineteenth century there emerged numerous initiatives to help solve the problems of, and set standards for, the technological revolution of the Victorian era.3 This same period also witnessed a proliferation of literary works promoting the broader ideals of European unity.4 Victor Hugo for one was consistent in his support of economic and political unification, building on the letters of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the essays of William Penn.5 Later on, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergiâs analogous quest for a unified European state became the basis of the Paneuropean Movement formed in 1923.6 Having witnessed the horrors of the First World War, Arthur Salterâs The United States of Europe appealed for European countries to merge under the watch of a centralised technocratic government.7 And many of these same sentiments resurfaced in the speeches and writings, if not always the deeds, of twentieth-century political heavyweights like Aristide Briand, John Maynard Keynes, Jean Monnet and Winston Churchill.
It took the full horrors of the Second World War, however, and thereafter the challenges generated by the nascent Cold War divide, to bring about sufficient pressure to formalise these integrationist trends on a widespread scale.8 A host of institutions and schemes soon sprung up designed to bring together European states in a bid to serve a multitude of economic, political, cultural and technical needs. For sure, many of these were Western in outlook. Amid mounting fears of communist expansion, for instance, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) sought to encourage intra-Western European trade. The Brussels Treaty Organisation (BTO) and subsequently the Western European Union (WEU), as with the wider North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), added a military edge to this economic cooperation. The Council of Europe was formed in 1949 to promote human rights and democracy, while the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) emerged in 1950 as a cultural basis for collaboration. Other regions of Europe were not immune, however. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) was to the Eastern bloc what the OEEC was to Western Europe. The Warsaw Pact offered a neat counterbalance to the WEU/NATO . By contrast, both the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and Conference on (later Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE/OSCE) drew members from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The fall of the Berlin Wall then ushered in a number of new alliances created by former Soviet satellites. The Central European Visegrad Group (V4) of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, like the Baltic Assembly members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, certainly showed themselves keen to foster subregional unity, evoking similarities with associations like the Benelux Union established in 1944 and the Nordic Council founded in 1952. Even today the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) stands as an example of supranational European cooperation concentrated closer to the Pacific rather than Atlantic Ocean.
Given all this, it is perhaps a little surprising that the majority of writing on European integration history since the start of this century has focused almost exclusively on the evolution of one particular, and until recently geographically quite narrow organisation: the European Union (EU). Key debates in the literature have hence tended to centre on the diverse national interests which in 1950 drove just six Western European countries to negotiate what became the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and, some seven years later, create the European Economic Community (EEC) and European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom)âconsolidated in 1967 in the European Communities (EC)âand thereafter the various internal and external battles fought to reform and expand that same organisation into one which until 2004 was still only a club of 15 mostly small West European states.9 This picture may well have broadened in more recent years. We now have for instance a much better idea of the ways non-state actors like political parties and interest groupsâoften acting transnationally across national boundariesâwere instrumental to and ultimately helped shape todayâs EU political system.10 We also have a much greater sense of the institutional dimension of the EU, thanks in part to official histories sanctioned by the European Commission and the European Parliament (EP).11 And there has likewise been a welcome recent shift in favour of studying the emergence of some of the most important early common policies pursued by EU states, including in the realm of agriculture, social welfare and competition.12 But the starting point nevertheless remains stubbornly EU-centric.
Against this backdrop, this edited collection, and the conference at the University of Helsinki upon which it is based, is designed as an exercise in looking beyond the EU and investigating in depth some of the various European structures which developed before and in parallel to it. Our participants, as with the chapters included in this volume, were driven by four overriding principles.
First was the desire to expose those other forms of European unity which clearly existed, and continue to do so, but have been generally sidelined by scholars. These include not only the various international organisations (IOs) mentioned above but various types of formal and informal cooperation like transnational party networks, cultural federations and trade and economic agreements.13 Each in their own way has done much to enhance the unity and cohesion of particular concoctions of European states around a specific goal. Seldom have these different forms of collaboration been given the detailed academic treatment within the literature on European integration that they deserve. Important exceptions do of course exist. Most notable are those works produced in the 1990s as part of the Europe-wide IdentitĂ©s europĂ©ennes or âEuropean identityâ research projectâled by Robert Frank and, before him, RenĂ© Giraultâwhich dwelt at length with several competitors of the early EU.14 That this trend has since stalled, though, perhaps means that it is time to shift our attention from the EU and assessâeven if momentarilyâonce more both the origins and internal workings of other European actors and agents and, more broadly, how they might have influenced the political and institutional landscape of modern Europe.
A second characteristic binding the contributors to this volume was the sense that by concentrating so singly on the EC/EU framework we risk portraying it as the sole embodiment or inevitable outcome of European integration. It is not entirely uncommon to see the EU styled in the literature as the solitary success story of European cooperation.15 Nor is it altogether surprising to see the so-called âfounding fathersâ like Jean Monnet and former French Prime Minister Robert Schuman described as architects not just of the European Union per se but âof the European integration projectâ in its entirety.16 To be clear, the point we are making here should not be misinterpreted as EU-scepticism. Nor would we be so brash as to deny the sheer political, economic and cultural significance of the EU and its predecessors. On the contrary, by expanding the remit of European integration we can in fact help comprehend the environment in which the EU itself has emerged and better grasp the facets which make it...