The Road to a United Europe: Interpretations of the Process of European Integration

Historical scholarship has for a long time focused on the foreign policy and commercial dimensions of European integration. At a time when the European Union has become increasingly multidimensional, it is appropriate for historians to follow suit in their approach to studying Europe. This book draws upon traditional areas of research, but crucially also breaks new ground, demonstrating the innovative approaches of a new generation of historians.
In the book, twenty-two young scholars explore five different interpretative strands of the study of the history of European integration. The contributors participated in the second RICHIE conference (Réseau international de jeunes chercheurs en histoire de l’intégration européenne, or International Network of Young Researchers in European Integration History), held in Copenhagen in December 2006.
Their work is based on extensive new research into a number of governmental and international archives, as well the archives of several non-governmental organisations and various personal archives.

The Editors: Morten Rasmussen is Assistant Professor at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. An authority on Denmark’s European policy, he has published widely on this issue and also on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of the historiography of European integration. He is currently working (with Anne Boerger) on a monograph on the history of the European Court of Justice from 1950 to 1970.
Ann-Christina L. Knudsen is Associate Professor at the Institute for History and Area Studies, Aarhus University. Her book Farmers on Welfare: The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy was published in 2009. Her expertise includes the history of financing the European Union and its predecessors, biography and narrativity, and cultural dimensions of the politics of food and farming. Currently she is also working on the emergence of transnational political areas in post-war Europe.