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.

The narrative of European integration was long dominated by the role of the participating member states, as personified in their respective presidents and prime ministers, in forging an ever-expanding set of institutions and an increasingly dense legal framework. This orthodox view saw nation states at the centre of the process, gradually pooling sovereignty to construct an ever-closer union. Analyses have differed as to the driving forces behind these processes. Debates in the 1990s between advocates of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism as the guiding explanatory frameworks still focused on an apparently self-contained European context, although the role of non-state actors did begin to feature more in the analysis. In contrast, more recent scholarship has contested the way the history of European integration has generally been framed in isolation from wider social, economic and political developments. Repositioning the processes of European integration in a global context requires that Europe as an historical entity be ‘provincialised’.

Just as Rome opened up its Pantheon to gods of every race and put men with black skin on the imperial throne […] Europe should declare itself ready, by virtue of these very roots, to include every other cultural and ethnic contribution, since openness is one of its most distinguished cultural features.’

As in Umberto Eco’s appeal to European cultural inclusivity on the basis of Roman history, Europe’s narrative about its culture(s) is almost as rich as its past. And it is similarly complex and convoluted, with the European Union (EU) appropriating the idea of ‘Europe’ as a unifying signifier that awkwardly balances the EU’s official motto ‘unity in diversity’, as it aims to be representative of the current twenty-seven constituent member states’ cultures. Yet this conceptual framework leaves out, for instance, European countries that are not EU members, as well as tendentiously the non-European ethnic and cultural minorities that have found a home on the continent and have historically contributed to the region’s culture and history.

From the late eighteenth century, Europe started rising to the top of the world. The first industrial revolution in Britain gradually spread over the continent and the first important steps of a second industrial revolution, partly by Germany, were made after the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1870, Europe produced 45 per cent of the world’s total income. Around the turn of the century, however, Europe lost its leading position, and produced only 27 per cent of the world’s total income by 1913. The combined per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of the overseas West (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) was already more than 70 per cent higher than that of western Europe.

On 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi declared in front of a group of about 200 London business people that he would do ‘whatever it takes to save the euro’.1 These seven words have been analysed to have made all the difference.2 By doing so, the European Central Bank (ECB) effectively ended a long period of uncertainty and indecisiveness. The markets needed a strong signal so that they knew that the young European currency would be supported politically and economically.

After summer 2012, the euro area did not experience the same level of crisis, although the sovereign debt crisis was truly resolved only in 2015 and there were still challenging times until then.

In July 1944, delegations from forty-five nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods to devise a monetary regime for the post-war world that aimed to replace the currency warfare of the 1930s and to provide a firm basis for the restoration of a multilateral world economy. Between 1971 and 1973, this system fell apart – and during the fruitless attempts at reform, the European Economic Community (EEC) took initial steps to move from the customs union and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to monetary union. This shift in priorities is usually explained as an internal European process, but this chapter indicates that it needs to be understood within a wider context of the design flaws of the Bretton Woods system, failed reform by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and growing European criticism of the American response.

This chapter presents the relevant integration policy decisions from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Conference in Messina (1955) to the Single European Act (SEA) (1987). It will trace the genesis of the Rome Treaties (1955–7), the foundation of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) (1958–60), de Gaulle’s policies (1958–65), the development from the Merger Treaty to the Hague Summit (1965–9), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the ‘northern enlargement’ (1973). The question of whether the 1970s were times of ‘Eurosclerosis’ is answered. The path to ‘southern enlargement’, the settlement of the British budget dispute and the departure for reforms follow as further topics, whereby the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the European Monetary System (EMS) as well as the SEA are dealt with.

When did the first institutional forms of contemporary European unity emerge? There are essentially two approaches to answering this question. The first is to take the perspective of poets, writers and intellectuals. The second is to consider the projects and achievements of politicians. If we take the first approach, we must refer to all thinkers of European consciousness who imagined European unity, from the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Victor Hugo to Émile Mayrisch and, more recently, Stefan Zweig. If we take the second, we must focus instead on institutional forms of unity, the ways in which citizens participate in it, and then assess its effects. We must present the most effective agents of unity, and explain their reasons for taking action.