This project started in the course of a walk in North Oxfordshire a couple of years ago. The two co-editors noted that 2019 would mark the 40th anniversary of the first direct elections to the European Parliament and felt that it was a good moment to look back at what the Parliament has and has not achieved over the last four decades. The anniversary provided, in our eyes, an opportunity to see how the institution has developed and how far it has been able to go in contributing to the creation of a parliamentary democracy at European level. In addition, it offered a yardstick against which the future development of the Parliament could be judged at a time of major turmoil in the history of the European Union (EU).

As former civil servants of the institution, we felt we should aim to achieve these goals in a different way from the traditional academic textbook. We did not wish to compete with the many works that already exist on the evolution of the powers of the Parliament.¹ Scholars much more competent than us have analysed all the nuances of the institutional development of the EP. We wanted rather to grasp the human side of a remarkable journey of 40 years during which MEPs from all parts of Europe, with very different political and cultural backgrounds, came together and succeeded in making the institution work and in turning it into a major player in the preparation of European legislation.

Hence we decided instead to aim to create an oral archive containing interviews with former Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who were active between 1979 and 2019. We wanted them to provide their memories of their time in the institution even if, and perhaps particularly if, it was now many years since they had been MEPs. We noted that with the passage of time, the early years of the directly-elected Parliament in particular were in danger of becoming lost in the mists of time, more and more unfamiliar to new MEPs and researchers alike.

How was this to be done? First, we convinced three former colleagues (and friends) to join the project. Like us, they had all worked in parliamentary committees but they also could bring other experiences to the project, such as working in a political group or serving in the Private Office of a Parliament President. With five of us we were able to cover several countries and languages, though we decided at an early stage to use English as the main vehicle of communication (a minority of interviews are in French, Italian and Spanish). All five have contributed to this book, with each of us writing two of the following chapters.

We decided not to seek outside funding for the project but realised that enthusiasm and commitment to our old institution would not be enough to create the archives that we had in mind. So we set about finding sponsors who could help us to make a reality of our ideas. Three institutions were particularly important in making the archives possible.

First, we enlisted the support of the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). The Director, Dieter Schlenker, supported our project—the first oral archive of material from the European Parliament—and included it amongst those to be carried out by the European University Institute. The support of the HAEU was particularly important not just for the material and technical support in establishing the website for the archives but above all, for the long-term visibility of the project and of this book, given that the archives in Florence are a central point of reference for most researchers interested in the history of European integration. You will find the website at: https://​archives.​eui.​eu/​en/​oral_​history#CM_​EP.

Second, we needed to find a way of approaching former members and were given full support by the Former Members Association of the European Parliament. The Secretary General of the Association, Elisabetta Fonck, obtained the backing of the Board of the Association and launched the project by asking all members of the FMA to volunteer to contribute to our project. We were then able to contact directly those who had expressed an interest and to avoid pestering those who, for whatever reason, did not wish to participate.

Third, we approached Maastricht University, where one of us is a Visiting Professor, to bring together a group of students, supervised by Professor Christine Neuhold, who could help us find ways to make the archives as visible and user-friendly as possible. Their enthusiasm increased our own motivation for the project and also led us towards presenting the material in the archives not just by name but also by theme. Together we identified the ten themes that structure this book and the archives itself.

We want to express our gratitude here for the contribution that all three institutions made to the launch of the project but also to explain the context in which the project has developed, with its weaknesses as well as its strengths. It is fair to say that the lack of any financial support did not limit our activity but in some cases, the interviews did not take place under perfect conditions. This is reflected in the low quality of the audio of some interviews and also in the fact that we were not always able to meet former members face-to-face and were obliged to talk to them over the phone.

The choice of former MEPs rather than existing ones was deliberate. Current members are generally too much taken up by the hectic day-to-day life of the Parliament, with more limited time and inclination to look back over the development of the institution. We have only made a very limited number of exceptions to this rule where we felt that the particular experience of the members concerned warranted it. As indicated earlier, the FMA invited former members to volunteer to contribute to the project. Hence if you are looking for geographical and political balance, you will search in vain. However, the total number of contributions from members in this phase of the project is close to 100.

Who are the MEPs that we interviewed and in which parliamentary legislature did they serve? You will find at the end of the book the full list of MEPs, indicating when they were MEPs, what groups they belonged to and what formal office, if any, they held. From this information one can point to the following conclusions:

Women represent 30% of those interviewed, a higher percentage than the average proportion of women MEPs per legislature since 1979 (26%).

Most of the MEPs interviewed were active in the first thirty of the forty years covered by the archive: 69% served the Institution during the period 1989–2009, a period when the Parliament was changing very rapidly as the chronological glossary that follows the eleven main chapters indicates, and almost a fifth were active in the first decade of the elected Parliament after 1979. Only 7 Members served during the term ending in 2019.

The majority (about 60%) of the MEPs interviewed were formal office holders and in some cases, cumulated several positions in the Parliament (President, Vice-President, Quaestor or Committee Chair). Many of the remaining 40% played an active role as rapporteurs either in the budgetary or legislative procedures or as coordinators and delegation leaders within their political group. Their heavy involvement in the Parliament’s activities may explain their willingness to contribute to our project and certainly reinforces the relevance of their interviews.

In geographical terms, there is a large majority (53%) who come from the six founding countries, as well as 31% from the UK. The latter, irrespective of their political party, all expressed their sadness at the prospect of the UK leaving the EU. By contrast, no members committed to Brexit volunteered to be interviewed. In addition, very few members from Central and Eastern Europe responded to our invitation, a situation we would hope would be remedied in the years to come.

Finally, what of the division into political groups? More than 65% of our interviewees are from the PES and EPP groups, thereby matching the composition of the House over the last forty years. More PES than EPP members were interviewed, partly reflecting the fact that this group was the largest up until 1999 and the majority of our interviewees were from that period. Interviewees from the third largest group, ALDE, represent 15% of the total, the remainder divided amongst the smaller groups. These figures need to be treated with some caution. National parties switched from one group to another and this was reflected in the changing titles of the groups. The Socialist group became in the last decade Socialists and Democrats; the Liberal group became ALDE, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. The European Peoples’ Party was known as the EPP-ED (European Democrat) group from 1992 to 2009 when the British Conservatives were members. The same is true for some Italian delegations who were seated in the EPP and ALDE groups and then were with the Socialists and Democrats.

It is worth repeating that the aim of the project has not been to compete with academic analyses of the European Parliament. Rather our intention has been to tell the story of the institution based on personal experiences, which in our view, is an essential complement to what has already been written on the history of the Parliament and its role in European integration. However, we did not want to provide researchers simply with a set of alphabetically-ordered interviews and invite them to listen to them. We wanted to present the archives in a way that would facilitate the work of the listener.

First, we sent former members a questionnaire, which you can find in the annexes to this book, inviting them to answer a series of questions about their experience inside the institution. Not all members wanted to fill out this questionnaire and we did not make it a condition for making an interview. However, the written material provided often constituted a starting point for the subsequent interview. The questionnaires that were completed are to be found in the HAEU archive, alongside the interviews.

Second, the interviews themselves normally follow a similar pattern: you will hear the same kind of questions being asked by all five interviewers. The interviewees are usually invited to indicate why they came to the Parliament in the first place and what their first impressions were, to give an indication of their or the institution’s successes and failures during their mandate and to talk about the relation between their work in Brussels and Strasbourg and back home. We attempted in most cases to limit the interviews to around one hour and this did not always give us time to cover everything the member wanted to talk about. However, the central point was to let the member give their own impressions: we only wanted to provide them with a framework within which to place those impressions, impressions which may also contain material errors over dates and names which we did not attempt to correct.

Third, the interviews are not left to speak for themselves. With the help of our Maastricht students, we decided to organise the interviews around ten themes, the themes that are discussed in the following chapters. Hence if you are particularly interested in scrutiny and accountability or shaping and influencing policy, you can identify from the tables at the end of each chapter and on the HAEU website the interviews that concentrate on these themes and where in the interview you can find the relevant material. These tables are not created by an algorithm but by human beings and thus they may be imprecise as to timings and your own appreciation may be different. Nevertheless, we felt that it is worth the effort to create such tables to enable researchers to home in on particular sections of the different interviews. It also increases the possible uses of the interviews. Some may be interested in a particular person or group of persons, such as former Presidents of the Parliament (we have interviewed seven of them) or members of a particular nationality but probably more will want to consider specific issues or events. We hope that the way we have structured the project will make this easier and will also enable comparison between members whose opinions naturally differ.

In our minds, the project does not end with the publication of this book or the inclusion of our interviews in the archive. The Collecting Memories section of the Historical Archives of the European Union will remain open for further interviews and we certainly have the ambition that others take over from us to continue what has been a great adventure, with a certain dose of nostalgia. Every five years about half of the membership of the Parliament changes; it is therefore an ideal moment for them to add their contribution to the oral history for the interest of researchers but also of potential future members.

The chapters that follow aim to link the interviews held in the archives to the themes that we identified and thereby to offer an encouragement for all to dip into the interview material. They do not aim to offer a full picture of the stories that we have heard but rather to pick up common threads linking the material together. Each chapter has as its author, one of the five of us who did the interviews, all with somewhat different styles and approaches (as in all edited volumes). All the chapters, however, follow four simple rules: