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The Search for a European Identity in the Long 1970s: External Relations and Institutional Evolution in the European Community

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Aurélie ÉlisaGfeller, Building a European Identity: France, the United States, and the Oil Shock, 1973–74 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), x + 252 pp., $75.00, ISBN 9780857452252.
MariaGainar, Aux Origines de la diplomatie européenne. Les Neuf et la coopération politique européenne de 1973 à 1980 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012), 642 pp., €59.50, ISBN 9789052018454.
AlessandraBitumi, Un ponte sull'Atlantico. Il “Programma di visitatori” e la diplomazia pubblica della Comunità europea negli anni Settanta (Bologna: il Mulino, 2014), 145 pp., €16.00, ISBN 9788815251442.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2016

UMBERTO TULLI
UMBERTO TULLI*
Affiliation:
School of International Studies, University of Trento, via T. Gar, 14, I-38100, Italy; umberto.tulli@unitn.it
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Extract

The past decade has seen an explosion of scholarly work on the European Community (EC)’s attempts to develop an international role during the ‘long 1970s’. This is hardly surprising: historians tend to follow the opening of the archives, and now is the best moment to examine primary sources from the period. There are, however, two further reasons for this growing interest in European integration during the 1970s. Firstly, writing in the aftermath of the crisis in relations between the United States and Europe provoked by the US's global war on terrorism and at the height of the European financial crisis, many scholars – historians and political scientists alike – have looked back at the crisis of the 1970s, searching for precedents, similarities and differences. Secondly, thanks to the number of studies now available, the decade is widely recognised as a pivotal period of global transformation – a period in which new global dynamics produced radical change for Europe and for the international system as a whole. In many ways, this decade represented a crisis of modernity that saw the emergence of new actors and processes. Cold War categories became too rigid to usefully define – or even explain – an increasingly pluralistic world, in which new international actors, ranging from transnational grassroots movements to international institutions and regular international summits, began to play major roles. The oppressive but unambiguous Cold War order started to crumble, and a new one, characterised by ‘interdependence’ and ‘globalisation’, began to emerge. The effects of this transformation were particularly dramatic for Europe: it was in the seventies that Europe ‘entered a different world’.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 25 , Special Issue 3: European Integration , August 2016 , pp. 537 - 550
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 See, for example, Schwartz, Thomas A. and Schultz, Matthias, ‘Epilogue: The Superpower and the Union in the Making, U.S. European Relations, 1969–80’, in idem, eds., The Strained Alliance. U.S. – European Relations from Nixon to Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 355–76Google Scholar; Romero, Federico and Del Pero, Mario, Le Crisi Transatlantiche. Continuità e Trasformazioni (Roma: Storia e Letteratura, 2007)Google Scholar; Hanhimäki, Jussi M., Schoenborn, Benedikt and Zanchetta, Barbara, Transatlantic Relations since 1945: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar.

2 Maier, Charles, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, American Historical Review, 105, 3 (2000), 807–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arrighi, Giovanni, Il Lungo XX secolo (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1994)Google Scholar. The concept of interdependence was first discussed in Keohane, Robert and Nye, Joseph, Power and Interdependence. World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1977)Google Scholar.

3 Varsori, Antonio and Migani, Guia, eds., Europe in the International Arena during the 1970s. Entering a Different World (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011)Google Scholar.

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5 In 1973 Britain, Denmark and Ireland joined the six founding members of the European Community, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands and West Germany.

6 Traditionally, the genesis of an EC foreign policy has been considered as an attempt to harmonise member states’ foreign policies. Besides the other two books reviewed here see, for example, Allen, David, Rummel, Reinhardt and Wessels, Wolfgang, European Political Cooperation: Towards a Foreign Policy for Western Europe (London: Butterworth Scientific, 1982)Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher, National Foreign Policies and European Political Cooperation (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1983)Google Scholar; Nuttall, Simon, European Political Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Richard T. Griffiths, ‘Under the Shadow of Stagflation: European Integration in the 1970s’, and N. Piers Ludlow, ‘From Deadlock to Dynamism: The European Community in the 1980s’, both in Dinan, Desmond, Origins and Evolution of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 169–90Google Scholar and 218–32; Brunn, Gerhard, Die Europäische Einigung von 1945 bis heute (Stuttgart: Reclam-Verlag, 2002), 228Google Scholar.

8 See, for example, Marhold, Hartmut, ‘How to Tell the History of European Integration in the 1970s’, L'Europe en formation, 2009/3, 353–4 (2009), 13–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Varsori and Migani, Europe in the International Arena.

9 Ferguson, Niall, Maier, Charles, Sargent, Daniel and Manela, Erez, The Shock of the Global. The Seventies in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

10 Sticht, Pamela, Culture Européenne ou Europe des Cultures? (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000)Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion of the Declaration and its historiography see Philippe Chaissagne, ‘Identité et Consciences Européennes. L’Émergence d'un Débat Inachevé. Le Sommet de Copenhague, 14–15 décembre 1973’, in Varsori and Migani, Europe in the International Arena, 243–52.

11 Möckli, Daniel, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War: Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the Dream of Political Unity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008)Google Scholar.

12 The document can be easily consulted online at http://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/02798dc9-9c69-4b7d-b2c9-f03a8db7da32/publishable_en.pdf (last visited 27 Jan. 2015).

13 Ibid.

14 Waele, Henri de and Kuipers, Jan-Jaap, eds., The European Union's Emerging International Identity: Views from the Global Arena (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2013), 4Google Scholar; Marie Julie Chenard, ‘The European Community's Opening to the People's Republic of China, 1969–1979: Internal Decision-Making on External Relations’, Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics, 2012, 93.

15 See, for example, Daniel Möckli, European Foreign Policy, 318–9; Pietrantonio, Silvia, ‘The Year That Never Was: 1973 and the Crisis between the United States and the European Community’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 8, 2 (2010), 158–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 The concept of ‘civilian power Europe’ made its first appearance in Duchêne, François, ‘Europe's Role in World Peace’, in Mayne, Richard J., ed., Europe Tomorrow: Sixteen Europeans Look Ahead (London: Fontana, 1972), 32–47Google Scholar.

17 An important contribution in this direction is Mourlon-Druol, Emmanuel, A Europe Made of Money: The Emergence of the European Monetary System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Allan Hovey, J., The Superparliaments. Interparliamentary Consultation and Atlantic Cooperation (New York: Praeger, 1966)Google Scholar, vii.

19 The decision to elect the European Parliament was adopted by the European Council in 1974 and confirmed by the Council of Ministers in 1976. Elections took place in 1979.

20 For a discussion of transnational approaches to European integration see Kaiser, Wolfram, Leucht, Brigitte and Rasmussen, Morten, The History of the European Union. Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity, 1950–1972 (New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Transnational History’, EGO – European History Online (2013), available at http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/theories-and-methods/transnational-history (last visited 13 Apr. 2016).

21 See, for example, Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. and Donfried, Mark C., eds., Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Berghahn, 2010)Google Scholar; Romijn, Peter, Scott-Smith, Giles and Segal, Joes, eds., Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and especially Rodin, Siniša and Topic, Martina, Cultural Diplomacy and Cultural Imperialism: European Perspective(s) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012)Google Scholar.

22 Kaiser, Wolfram, ‘From Isolation to Centrality: Contemporary History meets European Studies’, in Kaiser, Wolfram and Varsori, Antonio, eds., European Union History: Themes and Debates (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Cowles, Maria Green, Caporaso, James A. and Risse-Kappen, Thomas, eds., Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3Google Scholar.

24 Before Bitumi's research, only Giles Scott-Smith had discussed the origins of this programme. See Scott-Smith, Giles, ‘Mending the Unhinged Alliance in the 1970s: Transatlantic Relations, Public Diplomacy, and the Origins of the European Union Visitors Program’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 16 (2005), 749–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 For a discussion of this narrative see Kühnhardt, Ludger, ed., Crises in European Integration. Challenges and Responses, 1945–2005 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009)Google Scholar; and the more critical Craig Parsons and Matthijs, Matthias, ‘European Integration: Past, Present, and Future’, in Matthijs, Matthias and Blyth, Mark, eds., The Future of the Euro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 21–31Google Scholar.