The History and Theory of European Integration

抄録

The lecture analysed the nature of the earliest historical research on post-war European integration, explaining its defects. It then passed on to a consideration of various political theories on which both political scientists and historians attempted to construct longer-run studies, sometimes predictive or teleological, of the development of the European Communities. Most of this work had been demolished by historical research into national and community archves. What had emerged from historical research was a detailed account of the primacy of national policies and of the national stategies of the member-states in the construction of the European Communities. In this picture the role of foreign trade and of national commercial interests meant that the Common Market of the EEC and its Common Agricultural Policy were securely anchored in agreements from which all EEC member-states benefited.
Historical research into archives being only rarely possible for any date after 1970, the question therefore arose whether the later development of the Communities into the European Union could be plausibly analysed in the same way. The lecture then analysed developments up to the Treaty of Maastricht, setting out various possibilities of explanation and theory without deciding in favour of any particular one.
Finally, the lecture passed on to a consideration of the EU's future in the light of its history, discussing the threats that history seems to reveal both to the European Monetary Union and, to a lesser degree, to the eastward expansion. No threat appears to the common commercial policy of the EU, however. The lecture concluded with the hope that the EU would endure in spite of foreseeable difficulties.