In ‘Göttingen’, the French singer Barbara, who as a Jewish child hid in German-occupied France during the Second World War, celebrated Franco-German reconciliation after the bloodshed and hatred that had marked bilateral relations in the past. The song, recorded in 1964 first in French and later in German, was hailed as a hymn to Franco-German reconciliation and credited for improving post-war Franco-German relations. The song’s melancholic tunes certainly captured the Zeitgeist of an era: it was recorded roughly a year after the signature of the Élysée ‘friendship’ treaty on 22 January 1963. The treaty was instrumental in forging a narrative of how the two countries overcame a shared history of conflict and rivalry to become a driving force of European integration.

This chapter sets out to conceptualise the institutional and legal evolution of the European Communities (EC) over time from the Treaties of Paris and Rome to the Treaty of Maastricht.

The founding treaties of Paris and Rome were essentially open-ended efforts for integration, despite their undeniable differences in nature. At the moment of negotiating the founding treaties and during the first years of the Communities, it was unforeseeable whether the Communities would go through a process of gradual and increasing federalisation, or whether member states would eventually manage to dominate the Communities. The balance between these contradictory tendencies inherent in the founding treaties was clarified only through the open political battles in the 1960s. In a sense, the battle between federalist and intergovernmentalist streams has continued beyond Maastricht to the present day.

After a dozen years of Eurosclerosis, a European revival was ready in 1985 to transform the European Communities. With the aim of creating an internal (or single) market without internal frontiers by the end of 1992, the new Commission presided over by Frenchman Jacques Delors launched a very important legislative programme which was to be adopted in 8 years and which succeeded in convincing the member states to modify the founding treaties of the 1950s. Accordingly, the Single European Act (SEA) was signed in 1986 and entered into force in 1987. The single market programme (SMP) captivated the minds of Europeans and had a lasting influence on the construction of Europe. We will examine several crucial questions in this chapter. What did the SMP and the SEA consist of? What was the motivation behind the will to complete the internal market? What was the outcome? How and in what way has the SMP had a lasting influence on the construction of Europe? Where are we today, almost 30 years after the supposed completion of the internal market?

In October 1949, the Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin recalled the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreements of July 1944. From a luxurious hotel in the secluded forests of New Hampshire, the world had aimed to stabilise the international economic system by creating a new rules-based global monetary order. At the time, the financial experts of continental Europe had little to say in bringing about this new order, which was predominantly of Anglo-American design. In a parallel effort to the Anglo-American financial experts, most notably John Maynard Keynes and Harry D. White, Europe’s leaders envisioned the post-war monetary system differently. They deliberated ‘regional monetary groups’ that should tie in with a ‘skeleton world council’ in the form of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

European integration as the solution that brought peace and democracy after the devastating wars ravaging Europe in the early twentieth century: this is still one of the most widespread narratives about European cooperation. It is, and was, also the pivot of the discourse of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors to justify their existence and create their success in a bold form of self-fashioning.1 Just like the German Stunde Null (zero hour) and the international caesura that the United Nations emphasised between itself and the League of Nations, European cooperation projects after the Second World War emphasised the novelty of their endeavours and the break with the preceding, violent era.

In 1979 the French economist Jean Fourastié, who had been a member of Jean Monnet’s ‘Commissariat au Plan’ and an expert both in the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) and in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), published the volume Les Trente Glorieuses ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. The book analysed the development of the French economy after the Second World War until the aftermath of the oil shock which hit the Western world in late 1973, after the Yom Kippur War. When it was published, Western countries had already launched a number of initiatives to respond to the economic troubles caused by the oil shock. At the same time, they had begun to seek solutions to the monetary problems caused by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the start of the Group of Seven meetings and the first attempts at monetary coordination among the European Economic Community (EEC) member countries.

This chapter engages with the under-explored knots of European memory politics both theoretically and empirically, linking theories of European Union (EU) integration with the study of collective memory at transnational, EU level. Collective memory is a deeply political phenomenon: it is politically embedded, reflecting political visions, and enacting social and political worlds. Traditionally studied in Sociology and History, Nationalism and Cultural Studies, the politics of manifold memory practices has more recently emerged as an object of academic interest for International Relations (IR), International Law, Peace and Conflict Studies, Political Theory, Comparative Politics and the transdisciplinary field of Memory Studies proper. However, only recently has the study of collective memory overcome the boundaries of methodological nationalism to question and analyse the impact the EU has had on nation-state memories, and vice versa.

Solidarity has been consistently the cornerstone of prevailing narratives about the continent’s unification. From Schuman’s solidarité de fait (de facto solidarity) until today’s Commission President von der Leyen, who made solidarity the buzzword underpinning the measures taken by the European Union (EU) to tackle the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, European elites have repeatedly legitimised further steps on the path of integration through the notion that centralisation was generating more prosperity for all instead of war, disunion and socio-economic stagnation. The idea that supranational institutions and policies were unilaterally vectors of pan-European solidarity has nevertheless proved contentious.1 This is especially true when considering solidarity in terms of social justice and welfare shared equally among all Europeans regardless of their country of origin.

Integration research has dealt with ‘founding fathers’ of the European Union (EU)1 as an ambiguous subject in order not to speak of ‘saints’ right away. Is that an appropriate term? If yes and this notion is taken seriously, who should be considered for it? In fact, there are different categories. This issue is about recognising, naming and valuing reference persons and personalities in the history of Europe’s unification, but is it really about ‘saints’? Further questions arise. How far back should we focus? Should we go back to the nineteenth century, or should we start after the First World War, or even after the Second World War? Is it about those who gave us the idea of Europe’s unification or about the founders of the communities?

The European Union’s (EU’s) space policy (EUSP) is one of the more interesting EU policy areas, even though it is one of the newer and lesser known ones. Officially, there is no EUSP, but rather a European Space Policy (ESP). Space became one of the EU’s competence areas in 2009, when the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), also known as the Lisbon Treaty, was ratified. Satellite navigation and positioning have security dimensions and it is odd, to say the least, that the EU owns Galileo, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) comparable to the better-known Global Positioning System (GPS) owned by the US government.

Originally a mere side-product of economic integration in the first decades of European integration, European Union (EU) environmental and climate policy has evolved towards a comprehensive and dense regulatory framework. A complex set of rules, standards and procedures to protect the environment is in force in all major subfields of environmental policy, including water and air pollution, nature conservation, chemicals and the fight against climate change. Moreover, in environmental and climate policy, the EU prides itself on being an international leader.

The multilateral regional system built in post-war western Europe became the world’s most robust and integrated such system, both economically and politically. This chapter proposes that the birth, development and sustainability of European integration that occurred in the period spanning from the late 1940s to 1989 benefited from a synthesis of Christian, nationalist and liberal ideas, and that this synthesis underscored the emergence of European integration and legitimated its development in the four decades of the Cold War.

The synthesis describing Europe’s regime and historical evolution – termed here the ‘Catholic narrative’ – served as the analytical and prescriptive basis for the generation of Christian Democrats that played a crucial role in the reconstruction of the democratic order after the Second World War. To add to the understanding of the history of post-war Europe, this chapter describes the emergence of this synthesis in the early days of the Cold War, its consolidation in the four decades that followed, its demise after 1989 and the reconfiguration it has undergone since 2015. The specific religious origins of the post-war Catholic narrative are uncovered, and its functions in the context of the emerging bipolar system are established. In a historical moment when political actors were in dire need of innovative solutions to overcome Europe’s security dilemma, the Catholic Church set the ground for new avenues of action by using its narrative power to rally liberal, religious and nationalist identities to counter the communist threat.

The European Union (EU) and its forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC), have been economically organised around a market-oriented philosophy, which has been fed by a constant debate between two opposite poles: indicative planning and competition. This chapter will revisit the history of internal European economic policies, notably in the monetary, industrial and competition realms, by demonstrating that European institutions have usually carried on thanks to successive compromises between planning and competition and that, despite the latter’s rise since the 1990s, the contest is not yet over, especially since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.

More generally, the debate between planning and competition echoes the long-term controversy between the promoters of free trade and those who are willing to bend free-market rules.