I

Maria Gainar's Aux Origines de la diplomatie européenne. Les Neuf et la coopération politique européenne de 1973 à 1980 offers a broad chronological description of the genesis and implementation of European Political Cooperation (EPC), the first attempt to harmonise and coordinate EC member states’ foreign policies within a single coherent framework. The fundamental rationale behind this diplomatic coordination was to reinforce cooperation between member states in areas that were not covered by the founding treaties, to introduce some tools to favour the evolution of the Community into a truly European Political Union and to adapt European diplomacy to the transformations of the international environment. In discussing the inception of a European diplomacy, Gainar focuses on nation states, thus implying that European diplomacy arose principally from the interplay of national diplomacies. Indeed, as she clearly states, the EPC took place outside the institutional framework of the EC, although both the Commission and the European Parliament sought to influence it. Through a detailed analysis of the many projects, proposals and discussions for the implementation of a common European diplomacy, Gainar reveals the constant interaction between the high politics of European integration, bureaucratic infighting and national interests. This framework transformed the EPC, which became ‘a third way, less supranational but something more than intergovernmental’ (Gainar, 30). To trace the path followed by the EPC, Gainar focuses on several important case studies, ranging from the European approach to the Middle East and the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) to South Africa and the 1979 crises in Iran and Afghanistan. As she rightly argues, the EPC entered a period of difficulties and limits in the late 1970s. Nevertheless, the harmonisation of European foreign policies continued in the years that followed.

Aurélie Élisa Gfeller's Building a European Identity: France, the United States, and the Oil Shock, 1973–74 and Alessandra Bitumi's Un ponte sull'Atlantico: Il “Programma di visitatori” e la diplomazia pubblica della Comunità europea negli anni Settanta focus on a narrow period, namely the early 1970s, in order to explore the interaction between European integration and transatlantic relations. Gfeller demonstrates how French reactions to one episode in the turbulent transatlantic relations of the 1970s, namely Kissinger's initiative for a ‘Year of Europe’, triggered a broad debate about the definition of a distinctive European identity, the place of Europe in the world and the future of European integration. As Gfeller suggests, this is an original addition to French diplomatic history, and yet it also represents an important contribution to both European and transatlantic studies. Through the lens of French policy, Gfeller discusses the adoption of the 1973 Declaration on European Identity, the evolution of the EPC and the inception of a European policy toward the Arab–Israeli conflict. Together these developments certainly pushed the United States and the EC apart. Yet as the problem of adequate oil supplies and prices in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War became less significant, disagreement among the EC NineFootnote ⁵ re-emerged and relations improved at a transatlantic level, as demonstrated by the Gymnich formula on the importance of US–EC consultation and European participation in Kissinger's Washington energy conference. To Gfeller, however, while this turn may have represented a setback for the development of the EPC, it did not halt the discourse on a distinct European identity, which instead found a new area of realisation in EC institutional engineering. In this sense Gfeller does not limit her discussion to the accomplishments and limits of the early years of the European Political Cooperation. Instead she moves the spotlight towards its long-term implications, namely a step forward in European political union.

The transatlantic dimension is central to the analysis in Bitumi's monograph, which addresses the question of the complex and multifaceted interplay between Atlantic alliance politics and European integration in the 1970s. In so doing, she focuses on the creation of the European Community Visitors Programme (now the European Union Visitors Programme), the first programme of EC cultural diplomacy. As the title of the book suggests, this was meant to build a ‘bridge over the Atlantic’, with its original aim being to bring American public officials, journalists and politicians to Europe and to European institutions, clarifying the nature of the integration process and fostering mutual understanding between the EC and the United States. For Bitumi, the programme's relevance is twofold: on the one hand, it contributed to the ongoing definition of a European identity and to worldwide recognition of the EC; on the other, it facilitated alliance management during the 1970s. Against this backdrop, Bitumi adds considerably to the discussion on the inception of a European foreign policy.Footnote ⁶ Focusing on a programme that was managed along supranational lines rather than at an intergovernmental level, Bitumi suggests that the affirmation of the EC as a political player in the international system embraced many initiatives. In so doing, she adds a further layer of complexity to historical discussions of the inception of a European diplomacy, turning the spotlight towards those supranational institutions (namely the European Commission and the European Parliament) that were supposed to have exercised only minor roles in this area. For this reason, she rarely refers to the notion of a centralised ‘European foreign policy’, preferring the concept of ‘EC external relations’.

II

At a very general level, these books contribute to an ongoing reappraisal of the 1970s in European and international history. The story we are familiar with is a tale of a multifaceted crisis. For Europe and for the EC, the decade opened with high hopes, many of them linked to Charles de Gaulle's retirement from the political scene, the proclaimed new start for Europe (‘relance européenne’) promoted by the 1969 Hague Summit and the American President, Richard Nixon, committing himself to giving an important role to European partners. Yet, in just a few months, these hopes were eclipsed by fears, anxieties and disillusionment, both in transatlantic relations and also in Europe. The international environment in which Western Europe began its integration process was rapidly changing and traditional certainties began to fade. After the surprising economic growth and political stabilisation Western Europe experienced in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s introduced a ubiquitous sense of crisis. A drastic decrease in productivity, the simultaneous rise of unemployment and inflation and the appearance of stagflation, the spectre of deindustrialisation, monetary and oil shocks and even political terrorism in Italy and Germany combined to transform general anxieties into fears of decline. The seventies have thus often been presented as a decade of crisis – by Richard T. Griffiths and Piers Ludlow, for example, in their contributions to Desmond Dinan's now classic Origins and Evolution of the European Union, or by Gerhard Brunn, who has maintained that the ‘paralytic crisis’ of the seventies was overcome ‘only in the first half of the eighties’.Footnote ⁷ However, as the books under review here and as other recent scholarship suggest, we can now see the ‘long seventies’ as a period of transition in which difficulties coexisted with creative solutions and political debates about the future of Europe.Footnote ⁸

What leaps out from Europe's ‘shock of the global’Footnote ⁹, however, is the existence of a general consensus among European leaders that the solution to the growing sense of malaise could be found at a European level by deepening integration and strengthening the EC. Indeed, it was in this moment that the EC entered a period of dynamism and ambitious political planning. In this sense, the Hague Summit triggered many transformations in and for the EC, from the adoption of a definitive financial rule for the Common Agricultural Policy to the first enlargement of the Community (to the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark). But the focus of these books is the fact that the Hague Summit paved the way for the adoption of two documents: first the Luxembourg (or Davignon) Report in 1970 on political union and the definition of an EC foreign policy and second the Declaration on European Identity in 1973.

The importance of the 1973 Declaration on European Identity offers a significant common thread within these books. For many years the adoption of such a declaration has been neglected in histories of European integration. To Pierre Gerbet, it is just a ‘vague text’, while Elisabeth du Réau devotes only seven lines to describing its content. Even at the time of its adoption the Declaration did not attract general attention: it was energy crises and economic difficulties that captured the interest of Europeans.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet these recent works paint a different picture. Following many of the ideas and findings of Daniel Möckli's 2009 work on the rise of the EPC, the three books argue that, far from being a mere ‘footnote in EU history’ or a ‘vague text’, the Declaration on European Identity played a major role in the development of the EPC and, more generally, in the evolution of the EC.Footnote ¹¹ The concept itself is an ambiguous one. The 1973 Declaration defined European identity as being based on shared norms of representative democracy, the rule of law, social justice and human rights and the common will to achieve ‘an active role of European foreign policy in world politics’.Footnote ¹² Hence, since its affirmation, European identity was meant to achieve unity in the EC's external relations: ‘international developments and the growing concentration of power and responsibility in the hands of a very small number of great powers mean that Europe must unite and speak increasingly with one voice if it wants to make itself heard and play its proper role in the world’.Footnote ¹³ By prioritising this external dimension, the document emphasised the belief that definition of the ‘self’ had to be found in relation to ‘others’, rather than exclusively on proclaimed European values. To all three authors, the ‘others’ meant above all the United States.

It is true – as Gainar recalls in her book – that the very concept of European identity emerged during the 1960s as a rhetorical artifice for Charles de Gaulle's notion of a European Europe based on nation states, equally distant from the United States as from the Soviet Union. The expression assumed a partially new meaning in the early 1970s when the European Commission President, Franco Maria Malfatti (and also his successor Sicco Mansholt), addressed both the issue of British accession to the EC and also the many questions on the nature and status of the Community that the Community's international partners were raising at the time. The famous question posed in the seventies and commonly attributed to Henry Kissinger, ‘who do I call if I want to call Europe?’, offers a clear example that reflects not only the perception of a leadership vacuum in the EC institutional machinery, but also the lack of a well-defined identity for the Community. A lesser-known example is offered by the dialogue which developed in the early seventies between the European Community and the People's Republic of China and which culminated with the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1975.Footnote ¹⁴

As Gainar admits, however, it was against the backdrop of 1970s transatlantic relations and the unprecedented coolness, even hostility, of the United States towards European integration that the EC Nine found a conceptual framework and political horizon to affirm their own identity. To Gainar three key developments gave momentum to the definition of a particular European identity vis-à-vis the United States and the rest of the world: the growing difficulties in transatlantic relations in the early 1970s, the evolution of bipolar détente, which fostered Western European fears (more imaginary than real) of an American–Soviet condominium over Europe, and the on-going Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe negotiations, within which EC member states acted for the first time as a single political unity and spoke with a single voice. However, Gainar's focus is the creation and implementation of the EPC. Accordingly, she fails to give a clear definition of European identity, considering it as a further political layer for the development of the EPC.

Gfeller provides a clue as to how to grasp the meaning and implications of European identity, focusing on both the context in which it was adopted and the consequences it had for further developments within the EC. Discussing French diplomacy and the French origins of the concept, she argues that the notion of a particular European identity was not meant as a substitute for the nation state and national identities as the defining categories for French (and European) political life. Rather, it was an additional point in an ongoing political discourse, the aim of which was to strengthen the role of Europe in international affairs by reinforcing its political unity at a moment in which Western solidarity was overshadowed by disagreements. Kissinger's ‘Year of Europe’ initiative and the Yom Kippur War fostered the political debate about the distinctiveness of a united Europe, able to speak with a single voice in international affairs, a point that was eventually affirmed in the Declaration on European Identity. Gfeller suggests that the adoption of the Declaration was both a product and a cause of the transatlantic crisis, which deepened the gulf between the two shores of the Atlantic. In so doing, Gfeller argues that political unity among the EC Nine vis-à-vis the United States was not as short-lived as previous scholars have suggested.Footnote ¹⁵ The 1973 oil shock, the Gymnich compromise and the Washington energy conference in 1974 did not stop the European search for a proper role in world affairs, although they favoured realignment within the Atlantic Community. Instead, Gfeller argues that the affirmation of a distinctive European identity vis-à-vis the United States had two further consequences: the institutional evolution of the Community (a point I will discuss later) and the pursuit of an autonomous policy toward the Middle East. The November 1973 EC Declaration on the Middle East, a document which was promoted by the French and the British because they were excluded from the talks over the Arab–Israeli conflict, not only represented the first public statement by the EC on international affairs but also proved the existence of a European understanding of the Middle East which was – and still is – different from the American one. In emphasising these aspects, Gfeller advances two further points. Firstly, she seems to suggest that the roots of contemporary Euro-exceptionalism should be found in this moment and in the EC reactions to the crisis in transatlantic relations. It is no coincidence that, as early as 1972, François Duchêne (journalist, political analyst and key adviser to Jean Monnet) referred for the first time to Europe's role in the world as a ‘civilian power’, thus inaugurating an on-going debate about European exceptionalism in international affairs.Footnote ¹⁶ Secondly, by linking the crisis in transatlantic relations to European identity and to the inception of a European policy toward the Middle East, Gfeller reminds us that we cannot analyse transatlantic relations and European integration as occurring in a vacuum and without linking them to the wider context of the 1970s. Yet she fails to pursue her point to its logical conclusion – an analysis of European–American relations at the various levels at which these developed, from national bilateral contacts to international multilateral fora such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the CSCE and, of course, the EC. These fora were interlinked, and negotiations at one level necessarily influenced other negotiations as well.

Focusing on Transatlantica, the crowded web of economic, political, social and cultural relations between the United States and Western Europe, Bitumi discusses the many links between Western Europe and the United States, thus bypassing this problem. As she recalls, disagreements and difficulties were an inherent part of the transatlantic dialogue even at the height of Atlanticism, when the EC took its first steps under the umbrella of the US commitment to the military protection of Western Europe and its economic integration. Yet, until the early 1970s, cooperation overshadowed confrontation and disagreement. Sharing many of Gfeller's views on the difficulties in transatlantic relations and the emergence of a sort of Euro-exceptionalism, Bitumi argues that the debate on European identity was meant to affirm European distinctiveness vis-à-vis the United States on the world stage: despite its own difficulties, the EC began to offer the world a political model which was eventually different from the US one. By studying a cultural programme whose aim was to explain European integration to the American public at a moment when misunderstandings and disagreements were rife, Bitumi analyses the Atlantic Community as a space in which the more traditional political, diplomatic, military and economic links were integrated into a broader social and cultural framework. In so doing, she reaches a conclusion that differs partially from that of Gfeller. In particular, she underlines the European attempt to strengthen the Atlantic bond without renouncing European integration and the discourse on identity. To Bitumi, the Atlantic community became a discursive space in which shared ‘Western’ values, ranging from democracy and basic human rights to market economy, coexisted with different American and European identities.

In both Gfeller and Bitumi's works an important paradox emerges: while the economic integration of Western Europe took place under a US attitude of benevolence, the early attempt to build a political union among EC members took place against a less supportive US stance. This point is likely to attract continuing attention in historical research. Indeed, the seventies witnessed an attempt by EC members to modify their approach to the Cold War and the United States while, at the very same moment, the United States was reorienting its hegemony along new ideological lines and buzzwords (Kissinger and Nixon's realism, Jimmy Carter's new universalism based on human rights and later Ronald Reagan's rhetorical rearmament). How members of the European Community – both singularly and collectively – reacted to, and interacted with, these transformations will surely be an important topic for future research.

III

This brings us to the second point, namely the links between the external dimension of the EC, the discourse on European identity and the evolution of EC institutions. In the construction of a particular European identity and the development of the EPC, there was much more at stake than a merely diplomatic action vis-à-vis the United States and other international interlocutors. Negotiations among member states and between the EC and other countries reflected the way in which European governments imagined the future of a strengthened Community, which would be able to act as a single political entity. In this sense, in all three books, the affirmation of a particular European identity in international affairs and the creation of the EPC were directly linked to institutional change in the EC. Yet the books differ significantly in evaluating the essential nature of this strengthened Community.

Maria Gainar suggests that the evolution of the EC was in the direction of a more intergovernmental community. As regards the EPC, the adoption of the second Davignon Report in 1973 confirmed its separation from the EC and gave the EPC its own institutions and mechanisms, although links were reinforced and the EC's supranational institutions (namely the Commission and the European Parliament) tried to exert pressure on the implementation of the EPC. As Gainar writes, the European Commission saw a limited increase in its role in the EPC: through a ‘small-steps policy’, the Commission became an ‘indispensable player in a certain number of issues, [. . .] participated in discussions and brought its own information and experiences’ (Gainar, 359). Yet decisions were firmly in the hands of national governments. Even the European Parliament tried to exert influence on the EPC, but its ambitions to play a major role remained frustrated. Confirming Gainar's point, the member states officially established the European Council in 1974. Bringing together the heads of state and governments of member states, the European Council was intended to provide a political impetus to the integration process, thus prioritising the interest of member states rather than favouring the EC evolution along supranational lines.

If Gainar defines this evolution in intergovernmental terms, Gfeller offers a more nuanced interpretation, one in which supranationalism and intergovernmentalism are balanced. She identifies a clear link between the definition of a European identity in the international arena and the EC institutional adaptation to this new reality. After the affirmation of European identity in international relations and the inception of a coordinated European foreign policy, institutional reforms became a logical corollary to making Europe relevant in international affairs. As she writes, the EPC and institutional reforms ‘were two sides of the same coin’ (Gfeller, 11). The story of the institutional relance and its links with the definition of a European identity as well as with the creation of the European Monetary System has yet to be studied.Footnote ¹⁷ However, Gfeller offers an intriguing interpretation, arguing that Giscard sought to create a three-branched Europe, balancing supranational and intergovernmental aspects: the European Council would be an executive institution, the European Commission would act as a bureaucratic-administrative institution and the European Parliament would become an elected legislative institution with a limited increase in its powers.

Focusing on the European Community Visitor Programme, a cultural diplomacy initiative managed by the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the European Commission, Bitumi pushes this point to a persuasive conclusion, and one that has so far been little researched – a change in the institutional balance in favour of the Commission and the Parliament. The European Parliament, which at the time was still a powerless, expensive, polyglot talking-shop, ‘innocent of legislative powers’,Footnote ¹⁸ challenged the intergovernmental lead in integration and external relations. Limited and marginal in itself, the European Community Visitors Programme was part of the European Parliament's broader diplomatic action based on contacts with legislative assemblies, starting with the US Congress. Indeed, since 1971 Members of the European Parliament have met regularly with members of the US Congress to discuss the state of transatlantic relations and to propose solutions to common problems. These inter-parliamentary missions stimulated a transatlantic debate about the nature of European supranational democracy and the role of the European Parliament. It would be misleading to suggest that the newly established inter-parliamentary dialogue triggered the institutional process that reinforced the role of the European Parliament and turned it into an elective Assembly.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet a comprehensive history of Europe in the 1970s, both in its external dimension and in its institutional aspects, should also take into consideration these transnational connections.

This is probably the major contribution Bitumi's work makes to the field of European integration history. Although the historiography on European integration has evolved considerably over the last decades, it remains predominately centred on national governments and preferences, inter-state negotiations, bargains and moments of crisis, leaving the supranational and transnational dynamics of integration in the background. It would be wrong to believe that the transnational history of European integration is a completely unstudied subject. Yet, contrary to most of its practitioners, who add a transnational perspective to local, national and international accounts, Bitumi's work goes beyond this schematic division and, focusing on the relatively marginal European Community Visitor Programme, directly combines these perspectives into a single coherent and transnational framework.Footnote ²⁰

IV

How was a European consensus, based on the affirmation of a European identity vis-à-vis the United States and a degree of European foreign policy, built in a world so different from that of the preceding twenty years? To answer this question, the authors adopt three contrasting approaches. Gainar's study offers a more traditional methodology for studying the evolution of the EPC. She focuses on national governments’ preferences, interests, motivations and objectives, inter-state negotiations and bargains and moments of crisis. In so doing, she reminds us that the EPC developed along intergovernmental lines. On the contrary, Gfeller tries to break new ground by studying the affirmation of a distinctive European identity, the genesis of the EPC and the institutional evolution of the EC with a perspective that is simultaneously transnational, international and national. Gfeller's book intertwines the crisis in transatlantic relations with a French diplomatic initiative that transformed European integration by introducing new ideas, a new political jargon and new European institutions. Bitumi's approach is even more challenging and innovative. Neglecting the national dimension, Bitumi focuses on a cultural diplomacy initiative that was promoted and implemented at the supranational level. In so doing, she positions the European Community Visitors Programme at both the international and transnational level; after all, the programme was a European supranational initiative towards the United States, the aim of which was to strengthen the Atlantic bond in an epistemic community forged by the keyword of Atlanticism. In this sense, Bitumi both consolidates and challenges a growing body of scholarship investigating the meanings and forms of member states’ cultural diplomacy initiatives beyond the Cold War, by arguing that a supranational institution – rather than a nation state – developed its own cultural diplomacy programme.Footnote ²¹

This difference aside, all three monographs clearly implement a multidisciplinary analysis of European integration. Following historian Wolfram Kaiser's invitation to ‘utilize social science pragmatically as a heuristic tool’ to guide empirical research, both Gainar and Gfeller contribute to a historical analysis of a concept that was developed outside the historical field, namely the ‘Europeanisation of foreign policies’.Footnote ²² In early works, ‘Europeanisation’ was described as the ‘emergence and development at the European level of a distinctive structure of governance’, and it has been studied both as a bottom-up process that begins at the level of member states and produces changes at the European level and also as a top-down process, in which stimuli at the European level produce changes at the national one.Footnote ²³ Being an intergovernmental, informal and non-binding forum, outside of the EC mechanism, the EPC has traditionally been considered to have had a limited impact on domestic policy choices. Yet both Gfeller and Gainar move in the opposite direction, arguing that some kind of Europeanisation occurred with the inception of the EPC. Gfeller's emphasis on French political and diplomatic language, which relied increasingly on the notion of European identity, is a clear example of a historically based analysis of Europeanisation. Through the lens offered by this concept, Gfeller challenges the traditional narrative about French policy toward European integration, which suggests a strong continuity from Charles de Gaulle to Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Rather, she highlights a strong discontinuity between them: Charles de Gaulle's identity discourse on France and Europe was different in scope and ambition to Pompidou's emphasis on European identity and the EPC. At the same time, Giscard's renewed emphasis on institutional engineering was far removed from Pompidou's firm objection to a more supranational EC, although they shared a similar vision of Europe in the world. Gainar offers a further analysis of this concept. By focusing on the implementation and evolution of the EPC, she describes the institutional evolution that occurred at both European and national levels. After the adoption of the second Davignon Report, the EPC was based on a complex structure, headed by the European Council and the Council of Ministers, and with the group of correspondants from national ministries as the chain linking national and European offices. This complex structure favoured a growing convergence in political systems and national bureaucratic machineries that were in fact radically different.

Bitumi's work offers another example of a multidisciplinary approach to the history of European integration. As she explains in the introduction to her volume, she takes into consideration the cultural turn in diplomatic history and skilfully employs concepts developed in sociological thinking, such as ‘epistemic communities’, ‘information multipliers’ and ‘opinion makers’, in order to explain the impact and importance of the European Community Visitors Programme. True, the very nature of this relatively unknown programme and its features make such an analysis pertinent.Footnote ²⁴ Yet sociological concepts are also helpful in evaluating the programme's wider impact. As Bitumi writes: ‘the goal [of the programme] was to create a transnational network, made by individuals who could give the Community influential and useful contact in the US. In other words, [it was] to identify those information multipliers and opinion makers to promote the knowledge and deepen the understanding of the United Europe, as well as to promote the international dialogue on it, thus improving the political relations between the EC and the US.’ (Bitumi, 13). In so doing, Bitumi points out three major achievements: the Programme was a contribution to ‘the process of forming a distinct European identity’, a knowledge transfer for European integration and a transatlantic bridge builder ‘which favoured dialogue and reciprocal understanding, strengthened the sense of belonging to the Atlantic Community and placed tensions in a broader context, thus favouring their solution’. (Bitumi, 134)

Despite these works’ richness and methodological innovation, there remain two significant problems. Firstly, the three books are primarily historical accounts that rely extensively on the traditional tools and sources of diplomatic history. They are based on a wide range of primary sources, drawn from a considerable number of European and American archives and from both public and private collections. Only marginal attention is devoted to oral sources, with a small number of interviews in each book, and no attention at all to mass movements, public opinion and the emergence of a grassroots activism that since the seventies has played a major role in international politics. It is somehow surprising that Gfeller does not discuss the rise of reflections and legislation on European environmentalism in connection with the oil shock, or how this contributed to affirm a sort of Euro-exceptionalism vis-à-vis the United States, and that Gainar, for example, fails to link European diplomatic initiatives within the CSCE process to the rise of a transnational movement for the promotion of human rights in the Soviet Union (the so-called ‘Helsinki lobby’). It is equally surprising that Bitumi chooses to dismiss the memories, experiences and interviews of those men and women who participated in the European Community Visitors Programme because – as she writes – ‘memory is selective, mediated and fickle’ (Bitumi, 136). A stronger emphasis on these points would have contributed to a better understanding of European integration in connection with the global transformations of the 1970s.

Secondly, an important risk remains – that of considering the notion of ‘crisis’ as the engine of European integration. Certainly, these works are far from the dominant teleological narrative in European integration historiography, but they do contribute to a narrative of European integration as a process that moves forward through crises. By juxtaposing the crisis of the 1970s and the rise of a European identity discourse and its consequences for both the external dimension of the Community and its institutional evolution, they tend to reinforce a progress-through-crisis approach to the history of European integration.Footnote ²⁵

V

These two minor reservations apart, these books make a strong case for a multidisciplinary approach to the history of European integration during the 1970s. In so doing, they offer fresh, detailed and original additions to our understanding of European integration and transatlantic relations in a decade that transformed the world. The erosion of Cold War dichotomies and the emergence of new international players, the rise of grassroots activism and its impact on international affairs, the transformations in the global economic system and the (difficult) deepening of European integration were some of the most visible aspects of what was defined as the global interdependence of the seventies.

Until very recently, historians have tended to label these global transformations as symptoms of a crisis. These books, among others, contribute to an academic re-evaluation of the 1970s. Focusing on the external dimension of European integration, they show how the emergence of a political discourse about a distinct European identity vis-à-vis the United States and the rest of the world had important consequences both for the development of an embryonic European foreign policy and also for its institutional evolution. As the very existence of a European identity is increasingly questioned in today's Europe, the need to understand its origins and evolution will only grow in importance.