The field of European Community history deals with economic and political integration, but it is not integrated especially deeply into the broader field of contemporary history. A quick JSTOR search reveals that this journal has published several articles; the Journal of Contemporary History, the Historical Journal, the Economic History Review and the Journal of Modern History provide scarce pickings. The top French and, especially, German reviews have published work on the history of European integration more frequently, but still hardly copiously. Even in Italy, where scholars mutter the virtues of ‘Europe’ under their breath like old ladies saying their rosary, such leading journals as Contemporanea, Ricerche di storia politica and Studi storici have published far less on European integration than one might expect.Footnote ¹

Yet to judge by this assortment of books, it is a field in which dozens of historians are working and which is notably able to excite the interest of postgraduate researchers. Counting introductions, there are nearly one hundred chapters in these volumes, by more than sixty different authors. Four of the five books are in English, but a mere seven authors hold posts or study at anglophone universities. By contrast, there are numerous contributions by scholars at German institutions, an even greater number of Italians (although Italians are disproportionately represented as a result of the Craveri and Varsori volume, which includes several authors whose main interests are in other areas of international or economic history), and scholars from Dutch, Belgian, Danish, Spanish, Swiss and, of course, French universities. The European University Institute (EUI) is home to eight contributors. Interestingly, there are no scholars at all from ‘new Europe’.

While such numbers testify to the vitality and breadth of the field, it is also necessary to preface this review with the general admonition that these books do contain chapters that could have been pruned or even omitted altogether. Several of these volumes are the result of conferences or seminars and the editors have perhaps erred on the side of charity with some contributors. Also, while one envies the linguistic facility of some of the authors here (chapters with references to sources in four or more languages are common), the general level of written English is adequate but not exemplary.

The books are nevertheless a representative and timely cross-section of recent work on European integration and will contain much of interest to scholars writing on general post-1945 European history and to advanced students of European history and politics. Rather than deal with the books one by one – which would inevitably turn this review into an annotated bibliography – this article will, like little Jack Horner, strive to pull out interpretative and thematic plums from these particular pies.

The first such plum is the observation that the historiography of this subject has moved on from the analysis of the inter-state bargains and ideas that gave birth to the institutions of the European Community and has become predominately the historical study of a supranational political entity and its activities; in short, of how the European Community (EC) worked and what it did. Many of the contributions here can only be described as essays in the history of (supranational) public policy, rather than political, diplomatic or even economic history. Chapter titles such as ‘Transnational business networks propagating EC industrial policy: the role of the Committee of Common Market Automobile Constructors’, ‘Making Europe through the CAP: DG VI and its high officials’, ‘Airy promises: Senegal and the EEC's Common Agricultural Policy in the 1960s’, ‘At the origins of the European structural policy: the Community's social and regional policies from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s’, and ‘Building a European cultural and educational model: another face of the integration process, 1969–1974’, to some extent tell their own tale. The second half of The European Commission, 1958–1972 is entirely given over to the policies implemented by the EC in these years, via some fourteen lavishly illustrated chapters. Eric Bussière's chapter, ‘Moves towards an economic and monetary policy’, Antonio Varsori's expert discussion of regional policy and Jan van der Harst's overview of the Commission's role in the 1970–1973 accession negotiations are all very useful chapters indeed: overall, the ‘policy’ half of this book works rather better than the section on ‘politics and personalities’ that constitutes the first half of the book.

One side effect of this interest in public policy is that intellectual history, so important in earlier work on European integration, has seemingly almost vanished: there are few historians here interested in remote normative debates over what the EC should become and what its purpose was to be. How the EC presented itself to its future citizens and communicated its policies, which is the subject of a lengthy and informative essay by Michel Dumoulin in The European Commission 1958–1972 and of a theoretically informed piece on ‘The origins of Community information policy: educating Europeans’, by Lisa Rye, in the volume edited by Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, might have provided a partial substitute for intellectual history, but both chapters are in fact intricate studies of bureaucratic politics. An illustrated analysis of the ideology, assumptions and language of Community publicity might have been fascinating, but there is unfortunately no essay in any of these collections on such themes. The tone of all these books is, alas, emphatically scientific, not literary.

The chapters contributed by Wolfram Kaiser and Morten Rasmussen to The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity, 1950–1972 are, in effect, the theoretical sublimation of this growing tendency to concentrate empirical research on the institutions and policy of the EEC itself and, above all, to break from a ‘state-centric’ approach. Both writers see the future subject matter of European integration history lying primarily in the reconstruction of the actions, ideas and behaviours of non-state actors, and in the interactions between the institutions of the emerging European polity and the member states; both think that it makes little sense to take as one's starting point the notion that the member states were somehow fully controlling the process of integration in the light of rational calculations of their own national interests. From the beginning, European integration took on a life of its own, and member states were as often reacting to developments in Brussels and Strasbourg as shaping them.

Kaiser and Rasmussen see their work as marking the ‘establishment of a new historiography of the European institutions’. After a first phase in which scholars were centrally concerned with the emergence of the idea of European unity propounded by the wartime resistance movements (e.g. Walter Lipgens) and a second phase in which historians such as Alan Milward concentrated on the member states’ self-interested motivations for constructing the institutions of economic co-operation, Kaiser suggests that the emphasis should now pass to the ‘informal politics’ of European integration. In practical terms, this means studying how transnational ‘policy networks’ of individuals – political movements, informal policy coalitions of like-minded scholars, lawyers and officials – were able to shape developments and drive new agendas. He expresses his argument with some rather forbidding jargon drawn from social science theory, but his intent is clear and actually rather traditional in methodological terms: he hopes that this new focus on governance rather than diplomacy will enable European integration historians to revisit the events of the 1940s and 1950s and produce richer, more complex interpretations of what happened than those we currently possess. At present, research is to some extent dominated by the annual flood of documents from the national archives (at the moment, the 1970s are every postgraduate's hunting ground) and with describing what abstractions called ‘France’, ‘Britain’, ‘Denmark’ or ‘Italy’ had to say about the principal events of thirty years ago. Kaiser fairly obviously considers such work to be mostly ephemeral stuff.

Rasmussen's chapter, in a way that was clearly concerted, takes the case for theory further. He is a strong proponent of historians utilising the conceptual tools provided by political science, albeit ‘pragmatically’ as ‘heuristic tools’ to guide empirical research. It is not enough, Rasmussen implies, just to leaf through the archives of the transport directorate and compose dense, fact-rich tomes on the evolution of EC transport policy between two apparently significant dates. Historians should go beyond fact-grubbing; or, more accurately, they should grub facts for the purpose of serious scientific verification. In his chapter, Rasmussen gives a very able summary indeed of some of the principal conceptual debates in European Union studies – I will spare the reader – and contends (p. 44) that ‘future historiography has much to offer the social sciences if historians apply and test the various theoretical propositions’ he has outlined. He proceeds to indicate five research areas where, in his opinion, such theory-informed scholarship might pay dividends: the history of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the impact of its decisions on the member states is seen as an area particularly neglected by historians.

Kaiser and Rasmussen's theory-driven approach is arguably more thoughtful (and thought-provoking) than almost any other work going on right now in European Union studies – not just European integration history. Unlike the political scientists, most of whom work entirely in English, they know what historians in several languages understand to have happened. Unlike most historians, they want to interrogate sources differently and to broaden the scope of the historiography at present on offer. If their theorising is taken to heart, we should see more transnational studies of the press; more attempts to reconstruct party political debates over Europe; more collective biography; more histories of business lobbies and pressure groups; more accounts of how Community initiatives compelled domestic political changes; more social history recording the impact of Community policies on people's lives; more collaborative volumes with political scientists and sociologists.

A shift from diplomacy to governance and from formal to informal politics would enrich the field, though whether the concepts of political science are necessary baggage or an exercise in ornamentalism is a moot point for which there is no space here. There would also seem to be a risk of encouraging micro-history, to writing more and more about less and less. Herbert Butterfield's observation (in the Whig Interpretation of History) that the tendency of historical writing is always away from the general and towards more detail and more complexity came to mind while reading Kaiser and Rasmussen's chapters: in effect, they are arguing that European integration history has hitherto been dominated by grandes simplifications, be those simplifications the ‘construction of European unity’ or the ‘European Rescue of the Nation State’, or else by a simplistic bashing through foreign ministry documents. They are suggesting that the time has come to flesh out the story in all its complexity. So long as the fleshing out does not make European integration history seem excessively Brussels-centred and concerned with minutiae (a condition that I am bound to say some of the essays in The History of the European Union do not meet) this seems to be a positive and important development. I am going to take a chance and say that Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen's volume will achieve a certain historiographical importance within the field.

Having expressed this worry that European integration history might become lost in the maze of the Brussels policy process, it is important to notice that there is a notable interest among the specialists collected in these volumes in finding out what impact the EC's policies have had on the rest of the world. Kiran Klaus Patel stresses in his introduction to Fertile Ground for Europe? that the book's case studies ‘move beyond a Eurocentric view of EU history and demonstrate how firmly European integration was embedded in global connections and exchanges’ (p. 16) and he is right to do so. This awareness that the process of European integration has had major ‘spillover’ effects on the rest of the world (and that these effects have not always been salutary) is the second plum we can pull from the pie.

Two examples will have to suffice to illustrate this point. First, the impact of the CAP. Anybody who reads the chapters by Lucia Coppolaro and Giovanni Federico in Fertile Ground for Europe? will appreciate the wisdom of the editor's decision to place a question mark in the title. Coppolaro, a researcher at the University of Lisbon, argues in her paper (‘The Six, agriculture and GATT: an international history of the CAP negotiations, 1958–1967’) that the CAP itself was formulated in response to the liberalising challenge presented by the Kennedy Round; the US administration's push for greater trade openness effectively compelled the EC to ‘define its position in world trade and decide how liberal it wanted to be’ (p. 201).

In effect, Coppolaro shows in her chapter that the EC concluded that in agriculture, at least, it did not want to be liberal at all. Without mincing her words, Coppolaro states that the Six ‘implemented a fully protectionist and non-negotiable CAP that represented the sum of all their protectionist stances’ (p. 218). The consequences of this stand were genuinely dramatic. As Coppolaro points out in the conclusion to her excellent piece, the decision to adopt the CAP during the Kennedy Round negotiations left the EC as the world's main stumbling block in agricultural trade; it left the EC free to accentuate its protection of agricultural interests in the following years and, although she does not use the word, it empowered the Community to follow an essentially mercantilist trade policy. The Common Market countries, which were major net importers of agricultural products before the late 1960s, ‘shifted from being the prime importing bloc to being the prime exporting bloc’ (p. 219). Federico, professor of economic history at the EUI, assesses the economic costs of this development. He unambiguously concludes his technical but nevertheless readable chapter by saying that the CAP ‘can hardly be defended from any point of view’. While the agricultural protectionism of South Korea, Japan and the Scandinavians was even more egregious than the CAP, and hence even more costly for domestic consumers, the EC's agricultural policy, as a result of the ‘spoilsport role’ it played in international trade negotiations from the Kennedy Round onwards, justifies its being awarded the dubious title of the ‘worst agricultural policy of the late twentieth century’.

Such trenchant judgements conflict with the interpretations of the EC's more ardent defenders. Jan van der Harst, in his chapter on the CAP in The European Commission 1958–1972, argues that the ‘creation of the CAP was a major contribution through which the divergent interests of the Member States became to a great extent, and almost miraculously, mutually complementary. It is worth underlining that the spillover effect from the agricultural policy helped to bring about European integration’ (p. 336). Van der Harst's argument, in short, is a utilitarian one. Yes, the CAP was probably economically unsound, but it generated political unity between the Six and hence was a Good Thing, despite the havoc it played with world trade flows.

Such a judgement, of course, depends entirely upon whether you think the emergence of a supranational polity in western Europe was historically desirable. Probably most historians – certainly most of the contributors to these volumes – would agree that it was (although grain farmers in Minnesota or Alberta, not to mention breadline banana producers in Ecuador, might reasonably beg to differ), but it is surely encouraging and right that European integration history is now being written with a critical eye and with a thought to the many who lost out from the EC's policies.

For, after all, the questions raised by the CAP, and its centrality to European integration, are of a fundamental nature for historians of the ‘process’. The EC's characterising policy – the policy on which over 60 percent of the Community budget was spent until the 1990s – was one that would inevitably be labelled crude economic nationalism had it been practised by, say, the United States or Australia. The mythology of European integration sees ‘Europe’ as being constructed by statesmen whose experience of totalitarianism and war had chastened them into realising the necessity of overcoming nationalism in the spheres of politics and autarky in economics. But in agriculture, the same politicians and their immediate heirs unhesitatingly put their own farmers’ welfare first, boosted Europe's production almost regardless of cost, dumped surplus production abroad and let the rest of the world cope with the consequences.

The second area in which the EC's growing status as a polity had a definite impact is relations with the United States. In particular, several contributors to Beyond the Customs Union, which, of all the volumes reviewed here, is the one that contains the most diplomatic history, contend that the period 1969–75 saw the emergence of the EC as a ‘distinct entity’ in international affairs; the EC, in short, became an international actor with its own collective identity over and above those of its component member states, although it did not fulfil the injunction of the December 1969 Hague conference that EC co-operation in foreign policy should lead to a ‘united Europe capable of assuming its responsibilities in the world of tomorrow and of making a contribution commensurate with its tradition and its mission’.

Angela Romano's somewhat loosely organised chapter (‘The Nine and the Conference of Helsinki: a challenging game with the Soviets’) nevertheless makes a strong case for believing that the ‘CSCE [Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe] experience fostered European integration’ (p. 102). For the first time, the EC was recognised as an international actor in its own right (Aldo Moro, the Italian premier, signed the Final Act in August 1975 on behalf of both Italy and the EC, since Italy was the president of the Community at the time). It obtained this recognition, moreover, by imposing its collective will on the Soviets, who were reluctant to accord the EC such a prominent role. The Nine were ‘as firm as stone’ in response to Soviet objections and made it clear that they would sink the whole conference rather than have their status as a collective actor called into question. The USSR was forced to back down: ‘the toughest negotiators in the world were beaten at their own game’, Romano gloats (p. 97). EC member states also deserve much of the credit for having launched the idea of a pan-European conference on border issues and human rights in the first place and for having compelled the USSR to accept the third-basket provisions for respect of human rights and human contacts. With the inevitable exception of France, which broke ranks regularly, the Nine maintained a united front throughout the Helsinki process and pushed the United States into a subordinate role. Romano, a research assistant at the University of Florence, clearly sees the successful outcome of the CSCE as a model for the EU today: her piece is pervaded with the conviction that ‘Europe’ could count much more in the world if only it were consistently more than the sum of its component parts.

A definitive picture of the EC as an emerging force in world politics is also drawn by the pieces in the van der Harst volume that deal with various aspects of transatlantic relations. In her chapter ‘The United States and EEC enlargement (1969–1973)’, which despite its title is actually more of an overview of Nixon's shifting policy towards Europe, Lucia Coppolaro highlights how the EC's growing economic power (increased by enlargement to include Britain) caused Washington to be ‘less disposed to accept the disadvantages and more inclined to openly confront the Community’ (p. 161). As Pascaline Winand shows in her contribution, ‘Loaded words and disputed meanings: the Year of Europe speech and its genesis from an American perspective’, Kissinger and Nixon could not accept ‘a united Europe speaking with a single voice in the political field, sometimes at odds with that of the US’ (p. 315). Kissinger's assumption in his original speech that European unity was instrumental to the greater goal of transatlantic co-operation, rather than an important value itself, is convincingly shown to be at the root of the near breakdown in transatlantic relations that took place in autumn 1973. Taken together, these two chapters show that Washington was regarding the EC as a separate entity in world affairs. Kissinger's clumsy initiative was designed to ensure that the EC's growing power was harnessed to US purposes.

The EC badly overplayed its hand in response to Kissinger's lead. The Nine responded coolly and bureaucratically to Kissinger's speech, excluded the United States from its deliberations, broke with the United States over the Arab–Israeli war and adopted, after due negotiation and compromise, the December 1973 ‘Declaration of European Identity’, a document that did go some way (though not as far as the French foreign minister, Michel Jobert, would have liked) to distance the EC from the United States in the foreign policy arena. This half-baked policy crumbled as soon as the United States asserted itself and the EC leaders were forced to eat humble pie at the February 1974 Washington Energy Conference and, in spring 1974, to readmit the United States to its decision-making on foreign policy questions. The two contributions in Beyond the Customs Union that discuss the European perspective on the ‘Year of Europe’, both prefer to laud the precedent of the EC's acting together rather than analyse the debacle that the EC's ill-starred attempt to obtain autonomy created. Ine Megens of the University of Groningen ruefully admits that the ‘Declaration on European Identity’ has since become a ‘footnote to EU history’, but insists that it is nevertheless worth studying and remembering, since the ‘mere fact’ that the EC Nine asserted their European identity collectively is significant. In exactly the same way, the Duisberg-Essen scholar Claudia Hiepel's chapter in Beyond the Customs Union (‘Kissinger's Year of Europe: a challenge for the EC and the Franco-German relationship’) argues that during the ‘Year of Europe’ the EC's ‘success’ lay not so much in what it achieved as in the ‘mere fact’ that the Nine attempted to do it. Transatlantic relations plunged to ‘a nadir’, but at least ‘Europe’ spoke with one voice. It was hence a step in the right direction, Hiepel implies.

This brings us to plum number three. Although European integration history is no longer as blatantly normative as it once was, these volumes do contain many contributors who regard the ‘European construction’ as a self-evident good and who depict those who have worked to realise it in a golden glow of approval, while those who have opposed it are consigned to the outer darkness where there is wailing and much gnashing of teeth. I am being deliberately rhetorical, but the point is a serious one. Obviously, no historian is free, or even should be free, of personal political convictions; equally obviously such convictions are traceable in the narratives that historians write. But equally, if such convictions prevent the historian from presenting points of view fairly, or from performing the quintessential historian's task of thinking oneself back into the past, of seeing past events as the protagonists at the time saw them, not as they remember them now, then something has gone awry.

A particularly sharp example of what I am talking about comes in Wilfried Loth's in many ways admirable chapters in The European Commission, 1958–1972 on ‘Walter Hallstein, a committed European’ and ‘The Empty Chair crisis’. On a page illustrated with a charming photograph of Hallstein cuddling a baby in the Commission crèche, Loth says (p. 85) that De Gaulle ‘vilified’ Hallstein in his memoirs as a ‘power-hungry technocrat’ and the proponent of a European super-state; during his analysis of the crisis itself, he comments approvingly that Hallstein had ‘managed to fight off de Gaulle's attacks on the Treaty and the Commission’.

‘Vilify’ is a very strong word; perhaps something has been lost in translation. Loth's emotive language is rendered all the odder, however, by the fact that his own informative account of the ‘Empty Chair’ affair does much to confirm de Gaulle's case. Loth's chapter on ‘Walter Hallstein, a committed European’ revolves around Hallstein's passionate commitment to the European cause. It includes a box in which Hallstein is quoted as saying that there is ‘no aspect of European politics more important to us than European unity. It is the final objective, the reason behind all European endeavours’ (p. 82); and a second box on Sachlogik (material logic) in which Hallstein comments on the ‘dynamic character of integration’, namely that every ‘new solution produces new requirements, which in turn demand a European solution’ (p. 89).

Loth's reconstruction of the ‘Empty Chair’ crisis itself reminds us moreover that it began when the Commission proposed amending the EEC Treaty to give the EC's supranational institutions all but untrammelled authority over budget questions. This may or may not have been a desirable thing to do, but, as French Commissioner Robert Marjolin pointed out at the time, it was bound to antagonise de Gaulle. Hallstein, moreover, by Loth's account, incited the other five member states against the French government. In a highlighted box in the text (p. 94), Loth actually reprints a 13 May 1965 memorandum from Karl-Heinz Narjes, Hallstein's chef de cabinet, to the president of the Commission, which recommends that Hallstein should brief the West German government to the effect that the five other governments should confront France ‘unremittingly’ leaving ‘German diplomacy’ to ‘effectively guide the five others from behind the scenes’. This is what happened during the crucial June 1965 meetings in which there was a ‘multiple rejection’ of France's compromise proposal to pay for the EC via national contributions until the end of the transitional period foreseen by the EEC Treaty. As another box in the text, quoting extracts from Peyrefitte's C'était de Gaulle, shows, these aggressive tactics led de Gaulle to conclude in July that, first, there were ‘hidden political agendas’ that France would have to confront if she were not to be ‘put in danger’ by the ‘dictates of other nations’ and that, second, the Commission would have to be ‘sent packing’ (p. 100).

From de Gaulle's perspective, Hallstein's conspiratorial behaviour and ardently supranationalist views must have seemed deliberately provocative, disruptive of the compromise between nations underlying the EEC Treaty, professionally incorrect and a menace to the prerogatives of the French state. His subsequent comments on Hallstein were thus in his own terms anything but vilification. Committed ‘Europeanists’ struggle to empathise with Europeans who are equally committed to other causes. But empathy is surely essential for historians.

In general, the first half of The European Commission, 1958–1972 suffers from a one-eyed view of the Commission and its doings. It is too plainly an all but official history. In the introduction, Michel Dumoulin makes elegant use of euphemism by stating that the volume is a ‘negotiated interpretation’ (p. 26) between the historians who took part in the project and the European Commission, although he concedes that there were ‘sometimes heated discussions’ (p. 27) over the content of chapters. If ‘negotiated interpretation’ means compromise, it must be said that the final result is one loaded on the side of the Commission. The chapters on the individual presidents of the Commission in this period (Walter Hallstein, Jean Rey, that ‘great old boy’ Sicco Mansholt and Franco Maria Malfatti) compete to show that their subjects were ‘good Europeans’ and admirable people to work for (‘Was he naïve? The fact is that Rey believed that people were reasonable and intelligent. That was one of his weaknesses, one of the very few, there can be no doubt, but it also reflects his nobility of spirit’). The book is the outcome of an enormous oral history project with dozens of former senior Commission officials and it is hence full of anecdotes, recollections and insights from people who all seem to have experienced their work as a period of immense personal fulfilment as they laboured to construct Europe. Such implacable one-sidedness becomes a bit of a strain on the reader after a while and is arguably counterproductive.

The most committed Europeanists of all have traditionally been the Italians, and it is in Italy that European integration history has been undergoing the biggest changes. Throughout the post-war period Italy has possessed a powerful tradition of federalist scholarship which, while highly normative, has done valuable work on the intellectual history of European integration and also, from a critical standpoint, has highlighted the EC's democratic deficit and its tendency to put market liberalisation ahead of social justice. More recently, under the influence of Antonio Varsori, one of the editors of L'Italia nella costruzione europea, a generation of young historians have done substantial work – most of it in Italian or French – on the EC's social and policy dimensions, on the EC's role in the world (especially its policy towards the Third World) and on the EC in the context of Italy's wider foreign policy ambitions. There are also numerous historians of contemporary Italy who are very conscious of the role membership of the EC has played in the post-war economic, social and political modernisation of Italy itself.

The book under review is a meeting place for scholars from all three of these branches of scholarship, together with insights on Italy's relations with other European countries by non-Italian scholars (there is a particularly subtle chapter on ‘L'Italie et le couple franco-allemand’ by Georges-Henri Soutou). In all, there are twenty-two substantial chapters covering, from an Italian perspective, many of the topics that have already been discussed above. Not every chapter is top-notch. But there are – among others – very good chapters here on the role European integration has played as a vincolo esterno (outside constraint) on domestic Italian politics; on the role played by Italian members of the European Parliament in pressing for political union; on the attitude of Confindustria, the employers’ federation, towards European integration between 1947 and 1964; on the ‘challenge overcome’ by Italian industry when it joined the common market; on the relationship between Antonio Segni and Konrad Adenauer (Segni is a good example of a statesman of European stature who is ignored in the English-language literature, and not only English, because he is Italian); on the place occupied by European integration in Catholic thought. There is a thoughtful overview of the Italian federalist tradition in historiography by Daniele Pasquinucci of the University of Siena, which perhaps deserves to be singled out for the fair-minded way in which it deals with the merits and demerits of this partisan but rich tradition of scholarship.

Overall, despite a few false notes, the book deserves to be widely read as much by scholars of Italian history as by historians of European integration. It is a pity, however, as the editors themselves acknowledge in the introduction, that the attitude of the political parties towards European integration (and, I would add, the intellectuals) should have found no space.

The book's interest for Italianists would be in itself a justification for reviewing it in an English-language journal. There seems to me, however, to be a second reason for reviewing it together with these other works on the history of European integration. This is that although this work is very far from being the marriage of social science theory and archives that Kaiser and Rasmussen are advocating, Italian historical scholarship seems to be doing essentially what they propose. It comes naturally to Italian historians to investigate how lobbies, political networks, social movements and religious affiliation can influence politics. This book is full of such analysis. Moreover, because ‘Europe’ has been so crucial a part of the Italian national experience in the post-war period, anybody studying the legal, economic, intellectual and social history of the country is forced to weave the process of European integration into the story she tells (or else tell a story that is untrue).

The same, incidentally, is true of Germany, the Low Countries and France. The paucity of British-born historians working on European integration history – can there be another major field of contemporary history from which the leading British universities are so comprehensively absent? – suggests that Britain is different kettle of fish. Or else that British historians are being too aloof.