Posted on 05 February 2014
The working group on the history of European Integration was founded in 2013 by PhD researchers at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute and has in the meantime expanded to include post-doc fellows at the Max Weber Programme. A partnership has been established between the working group and the Historical Archives of the European Union and the workshop “Integration and the Cold War” on 25 October hosted at Villa Salviati.
The working group originates from the conviction that European integration history should be understood setting it into a broader context. The activities of the group aim at revisiting European integration history in the light of different themes and concepts. The group uses analytical tools from various academic disciplines and investigates into new research perspectives to bridge European integration history with broader modern European narratives.
The group organizes regularly workshops and seminars, to which researchers from different academic disciplines and from different European universities are invited for discussing their work. Since the inception of the group, encounters around various themes such as ‘Integration & Law’, ‘Integration & Cold War’, ‘Integration & Diplomacy’, and ‘Integration & Decolonization’ have been organised.
The group is inviting researchers on European history to establish contact during their visit at the Historical Archives of the European Union in order to discuss their research and to network in an informal setting.
The following EUI researchers can be contacted:
Aurélie Andry, PhD candidate in the department of History and Civilization at the EUI
Contact: [email protected]
Aurélie holds a BA in History and an MA in European Studies from the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her main field of expertise is contemporary European and transnational history, with a focus on the evolution of ‘Social Europe’, EU social policy and the European social model, industrial relations and European democracy. She is also interested in the relationship between history and the social sciences. Her research on ‘European Social Policy: influences, actors and debates in the European Parliament, 1968-1990’ is a new attempt to retrace the evolution of ideas underlying the European integration process.
Martin Herzer, PhD student at the Department of History and Civilization at the EUI
Contact: [email protected]
Martin’s PhD project deals with the first European correspondents who started reporting on the EC from Brussels in the late 1950s. The research explores how journalists from various countries produced news about European integration in Brussels. It investigates if the correspondents saw themselves as European participants or critical national observers of the EC. Martin holds a Magister degree in Communication Sciences from the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz and a Master in Affaires européennes from Sciences Po Paris.
Haakon Andreas Ikonomou, PhD student at the Department of History and Civilization at the EUI
Contact: [email protected]
Haakon’s PhD project deals with Norwegian diplomats and the enlargement of the EEC/EC between 1960 and 1972. The project explores how a core of multilateral economic diplomats became European through working with the EC-case; how they became part of a network working actively for membership; and how they - after the Norwegian people decided not to join the EC through a referendum – became discredited as ‘unfaithful servants’. The thesis will explore both how the Europeans became an epistemic community, and the role the Europeans had in shaping Norwegian EC-policy. Haakon holds a bachelor and master in history from the University of Oslo. The autumn of 2013 he exchanged to the International History Department of the LSE, and the spring of 2014 he is teaching a seminar on integration history at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen.
Ivan Obadić, second-year PhD researcher at the Department of History and Civilization at the EUI
Contact: [email protected]
Ivan has received his MA degree in General History (2006), a Master of Law (2007) degree from the University of Zagreb and an MSc degree in History of International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (2008). His PhD project entitled In Pursuit of Stability. Yugoslavia and the European Community examines the origins and evolution of EC-Yugoslav relations in the Cold War.