Suchergebnisse

To sign the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands met in Paris in April 1951. In a solemn Joint Declaration they stressed that through the newly created organisation, 'the Contracting Parties have given their determination to set up the first supranational institution and thus lay the real foundations of an organised Europe'. The ministers represented the ECSC as a radical rupture with history, as if Europe had been completely disorganised until the new organisation's creation. In a similar vein, the ECSC Treaty emphasised the member states' resolution 'to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community amongst peoples long divided by bloody conflicts'. Since 1951 official European Union (EU) documents and other sources have forged a similar image, one which has been undergirded by assumptions about the creation of the 'core Europe' of the ECSC as a collective 'supranational' break with a past characterised by severe ideological divisions and extreme nationalism.

International organisations are ubiquitous in contemporary Europe and the wider world. This special issue takes a historical approach to exploring their relations with each other in Western Europe between 1967 and 1992. We seek to "provincialise" and "de-centre" the European Union's role, exploring the interactions of its predecessors with other organisations like NATO, the OECD and the Council of Europe. This article develops the new historical research agenda of cooperation and competition among IOs and their role in European co-operation. The first section discusses the limited existing work on such questions among historians and in adjacent disciplines. The second section introduces the five articles and their main arguments. The third section goes on to elaborate common findings, especially regarding what we call the vectors for the development of policy ideas and practices and their transfer across different institutional platforms.

The roots of EU action in the field of culture lie in the 1970s. At the time, the Council of Europe (CoE), the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other organizations were already established players in the field. This article analyses the incremental and often haphazard process in which the European Community (EC) became the key organization at the European level by the end of the Cold War. It stresses the role of the EC's specific governance structure, its considerable financial resources, and its objectives of market integration and expanding powers as drivers of this process, along with selective forms of adaptation of practices first tried out in other forums. Besides scrutinizing general tendencies of inter-organizational exchange during the 1970s and 1980s, the article zooms in on two concrete case studies. For the 1970s, it highlights the debates about cultural heritage and the European Architectural Heritage Year (EAHY) project: although initiated by the CoE, the EAHY became one of the first cases of EC policy import, strongly facilitated by transnational networks. The second case study, for the 1980s, deals with the development of a European audio-visual policy. Here again the CoE took the lead and worked as a laboratory for schemes later adapted by the EC.

This article introduces the special section on the history of social engineering and Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s. It sketches the object of social engineering, the historiographical debates surrounding it, the place of Nazism in this discussion and the role of transnationality. Moreover, it introduces the contributions and discusses questions for further research.

AbstractTaking the comparison of agricultural and transport policies as an example, this article argues for a new way of writing European integration history. It goes beyond the state-centric confines of the diplomatic history which has dominated the field so far and challenges the teleologies in most accounts. Instead, it argues for the need to take into account long-term perspectives as well as the role of transnational actors with a more contingent narrative. Moreover, it demonstrates that the availability of alternative inter- and transnational regimes can be decisive for the trajectory of integration within EC/EU parameters.

Der einleitende Beitrag zum vorliegenden Sammelband rekapituliert in knapper Form die Entwicklung und den Stand der Totalitarismusforschung. In den 1960er Jahren geriet die Totalitarismustheorie zunächst auch jenseits der Geschichtswissenschaft in die Kritik, weil sie die Ähnlichkeit, nicht aber die Verschiedenheit kommunistischer und faschistischer Regime thematisierte und totale Ansprüche mit totaler Beherrschung verwechselte. Erst nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges, als die kommunistischen Regime zusammengebrochen waren, erlebte sie eine bemerkenswerte Renaissance, die sich auch auf die Geschichtswissenschaft erstreckte. Manche Historiker verbanden die Totalitarismustheorie nunmehr mit dem Konzept der politischen Religion, andere verknüpften sie mit dem Machtkonzept Michel Foucaults. Bis heute gibt es jedoch keine verbindliche Definition totalitärer Herrschaft. Einigkeit besteht allenfalls darin, dass sie totale Ansprüche nicht nur stellt, sondern auch durchzusetzen versucht. Ob sie dabei erfolgreich sein muss, um als totalitär zu gelten - darüber gehen die Meinungen auseinander. Totalitär ist, was den Anspruch formuliert, "aufs Ganze zu gehen", so eine knappe Arbeitsdefinition des Autors. Die Beiträge des Hefts versuchen, das Totalitarismuskonzept für den Vergleich der Regime fruchtbar zu machen, aber auch seine Grenzen zu thematisieren. Im Vordergrund steht allerdings nicht die Verifizierung von Theorien, sondern der empirische Vergleich, der es ermöglicht, generalisierende Aussagen über den Charakter des Nationalsozialismus und Stalinismus zu überprüfen. (ICA2)

As a reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s, many countries introduced labour services. These institutions organized unemployed persons for unskilled work projects for the common good. Labour services focused on unemployed youth and had an explicit educational dimension. In the 1930s, nazi Germany offered the most important example of a labour service in practice. Therefore, all democratic countries with a labour service faced the problem of delimitation. This article examines the discussions and politics surrounding the labour services in the USA and Sweden against the backdrop of the 'fascist model'. The transnational comparative study analyses how these two Western democracies reacted to this challenge. It demonstrates that the perceptions of the nazi labour service left a deep imprint on both democratic societies. Moreover, there are many parallels in the way in which the Third Reich impinged on their social policies in the 1930s and 1940s.

Europäische Integration hat viele Ursprünge und reicht weniger weit zurück, als man oft¬ meint. Kiran Klaus Patel führt in ihre Geschichte und Gegenwart ein. Dabei zeigt er, wie die europäischen Staaten sich nach 1945 immer enger vernetzten und wie EG und EU zu den Institutionen wurden, die diesen Prozess bündelten und befeuerten.

Seit einigen Jahren verdichtet sich auch in Deutschland das Gespräch über Herausforderungen und Perspektiven des digitalen Zeitalters für die Geschichtswissenschaft. Auf jedem Historikertag seit 2010 gab es mehrere Sektionen, die sich unterschiedlichen Facetten des Themas zuwandten. Es entstehen Fachpublikationen, Überblickswerke, Dissertationen und erste Ansätze, das Feld institutionell neu zu gestalten. Die Geschichtswissenschaft bemüht sich, produktiv auf die Veränderungen einzugehen. Punktuell ist es auch bereits zu einem Dialog mit Archiven und der Archivwissenschaft gekommen. So hat der Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands (VHD) 2015 unter Federführung der Vorsitzenden Eva Schlotheuber und Frank Bösch ein Grundsatzpapier verabschiedet, das sich der Quellenkritik im digitalen Zeitalter annimmt. Die Forderung, Elemente der Digital Humanities in die Historischen Grundwissenschaften zu integrieren, wurde seitdem noch weiter unterstrichen.