Ever Closer Union?: Histories of Europea

This class offers an introduction to the history and the practice of European integration since 1945. In 1945, western Europe lay in ruins after one of the largest and most destructive wars in world history. By 1957, however, six European governments decided to come together in a European Economic Community and, some sixty years later, they had built a European Union that included twenty-seven countries and, by combined size, constituted the second largest economy in the world. Why would six states just ravaged by occupation and war so quickly volunteer to share sovereignty with one another and why did so many other governments decide to join up later? What kinds of European unification did they envisage, how did these visions of European integration change, and what kind of united Europe did they build?

To answer these questions, this class explores the evolution of European integration from the end of the Second World War and the collapse of European empires to the end of the Cold War and the creation of the European Union. We will reconstruct various and evolving visions for the integration of Europe, studying the place of Europe in a world of empires to the place of Europe in a globalizing economy. We will examine the rise of the major policies and institutions of the European Community: from agricultural policy to environmental law, from demands for democratic representation to the regulation of international migration. All the while, we will assess how the European Community responded to the major events of the late twentieth century – including decolonization, the oil crisis, neoliberalism, the end of the Cold War, the migrant crisis, and the rise of right-wing populism – and interrogate the impact of European institutions upon those events. To do so, we will read widely across history and political science and we will make extensive use of new primary source collections, especially those newly digitized by the Historical Archives of the European Union. This course thus doubles as a history of European integration and an examination of Europe’s changing place in the world.