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- Volume 130, Issue 1, 2017
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 130, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 130, Issue 1, 2017
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Et tu, EU-historicus?
More LessAbstractEt tu, EU historian? The history of European integration and today’s crises
In political science European integration studies has become a thriving specialism since the 1980s. Conversely, historians of European integration have remained a rather isolated community in between national history and international relations. Making sense of past and present realities of multilayered governance, however, is not the only challenge both political scientists and historians face today. They also have to come to terms with polarised public and political debate on Europe’s democratic deficit. The fact that a narrative of the European Union as a modern-day salvation history is a thing of the past opens up new opportunities for research. An equally finalistic narrative, reducing EU integration to an ever-widening gap between citizens and politicans, however, would be a poor substitute and no great analytical help in the current crises.
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Europa vóór de Europese Gemeenschap van Kolen en Staal
More LessAbstractEurope before the European Coal and Steel Community. Dutch civil society organisations in the interwar period
Before Robert Schuman proposed the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, European cooperation had been long discussed, in particular by civil society actors. If we follow the New Political History approach and understand European integration as a process rather than as a set of events that started in the late ’40s, we need to analyse the interaction between state and civil society actors and examine this from a longer-term and global perspective.
The period after World War I saw intense debate on how to prevent war in Europe and about the changing position of Europe in the world. Ideas of European cooperation were central to these debates. This article will analyse the interaction between grass roots and elite activists in the interwar Dutch European movement. It will show how objectives and imaginations of a European future differed, included colonial arguments, and how this activity prepared the ground for initiatives after 1945.
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‘Gelovige ambachtslieden, bezig met een nuchter handwerk’
More LessAbstract‘Faithful artisans doing respectable work.’ The Dutch identification with the process of European integration in the 1950s
This article takes issue with the dominant ‘realist’ and ‘neo-realist’ views in Dutch historiography, in which a major role is attributed to national interests in the process of integration and which devalues the role of ideas and ideals. The enthusiasm in the Netherlands for the European cause in the 1950s is indicated by a consultative referendum held on 17 December 1952 in Delft and Bolsward, two towns with populations politically and religiously representative of the Netherlands as a whole. The vast majority voted in favour of the idea of a European government, overseen by a democratically elected European Parliament. This article introduces the generation theory into the field of European integration history. It asks whether the enthusiasm for European integration in the 1950s can be attributed especially to the formative experiences of the pre-war generation (1910-29) with the economic crisis of the 1930s and the horrors of totalitarianism during the Second World War.
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Inbraak in ‘sprookjesland’
More LessAbstractBreaking into ‘fairy tale country’. European law and the political battle on commercial television in the Netherlands
As a typical case study that brings to the fore new actors and themes in European integration, this article analyses the battle fought over the introduction of commercial television in the 1980s Netherlands. While technological developments such as satellite broadcasting quickly transformed television broadcasting into a transnational affair, the eventual breakthrough in the deeply entrenched Dutch broadcasting policy was enforced in court rooms rather than in the more classical arenas of national and European policymaking. By taking the road to court, organisations such as advertisement associations opened up a new way of influencing political decision-making, which later would be followed up by new commercial broadcasters such as RTL Véronique and TV10. Such companies benefitted from the activist jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice that since the 1970s had pushed member states in spite of national resistance to foster liberalisation of transnational trade and services.
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Milieuactivisten in maatpak
Authors: Liesbeth van de Grift, Hans Rodenburg & Guus WiemanAbstractThe Europeanization of Greenpeace International (1987-93)
This article will analyze the ways in which an important societal actor, Greenpeace International, adapted to the Europeanization of environmental policy-making. Greenpeace was a relative latecomer to the European scene. Only towards the end of the 1980s did it acknowledge the opportunities that the developing EC might offer in the field of environmental policy-making. In 1988 it was decided that a professional European Communities Unit (EC-Unit) would be established. Due to its late arrival, Greenpeace International was forced to operate within an already existing institutional framework. The organization was thus faced with a difficult question: how to use the EC to advance its own objectives, while at the same time keeping true to its identity as an independent and activist NGO. This paper is based on research in the archives of Greenpeace International, including policy documents, internal correspondence, and minutes of board meetings concerning European lobbying practices.
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