To remember like a diplomat

To remember like a diplomatThis article investigates how a tight-knit group of multilateral economic diplomats – simply called the Europeans – retell their story of the shock of the Norwegian non-joining of the European Community (EC) in September 1972. Drawing on concepts from Paul Ricoeur and Iver B. Neumann, combining oral and archive-based history, this article argues that the Europeans have reconciled the ingrained heroic story of ‘the diplomat’ with the traumatic experience of the Norwegian ‘no’ by narrating themselves as martyrs metaphorically sacrificing themselves for a just cause. Rather than fundamentally changing their story – for example portraying themselves as failures – they elevate their cause to something unassailably virtuous: Peace in Europe

Rethinking European integration history in light of capitalism: the case of the long 1970s

This introduction outlines the possibilities and perspectives of an intertwining between European integration history and the history of capitalism. Although debates on capitalism have been making a comeback since the 2008 crisis, to date the concept of capitalism remains almost completely avoided by historians of European integration. This introduction thus conceptualizes ‘capitalism’ as a useful analytical tool that should be used by historians of European integration and proposes three major approaches for them to do so: first, by bringing the question of social conflict, integral to the concept of capitalism, into European integration history; second, by better conceptualizing the link between European governance, Europeanization and the globalization of capitalism; and thirdly by investigating the economic, political and ideological models or doctrines that underlie European cooperation, integration, policies and institutions. Finally, the introduction addresses the question of the analytical benefits of an encounter between capitalism and European integration history, focusing on the case of the 1970s. This allows us to qualify the idea of a clear-cut rupture, and better highlight how the shift of these years resulted from a complex bargaining that took place in part at the European level

TID OG BIOGRAFI: Forventninger og forhandlinger rundt det wilsonske øyeblikket

Artikkelen utforsker hvordan biografiens fokus på opplevd tid, erfaringer og forventninger kan få oss til å tenke annerledes om typiske «brudd» i historien. Med utgangspunkt i Reinhart Kosellecks tidsteorier følger vi Thanassis Aghnides, en gresk-osmansk jurist og diplomat som gjennom sitt arbeid for realiseringen av Stor-Hellas endte opp i Folkeforbundets sekretariat ved første verdenskrigs slutt. Aghnides’ ideer om hva freden kunne innebære for Hellas ble hurtig knust, noe som igangsatte en smertefull gjenforhandling av hans mange og store forventninger. Artikkelen viser hvordan det såkalte wilsonske øyblikket – da mange av verdens ledere så til fredskonferansen i Paris i 1919 i håp om selvbestemmelse og territorier – var besjelet av et nærmest uendelig spekter av fremtidsvisjoner. Øyeblikket var «overbelastet» med uforenelige intensjoner. 1919 er i dette perspektivet først og fremst et klimaks – fra da av minsket spekteret av mulige fremtider drastisk for hver dag som gikk. Fra de historiske aktørers perspektiv er et «forventet» klimatisk øyeblikk, som slutten på første verdenskrig var, dermed langt mer langstrakt. Det skjerper ens blikk langt før det inntreffer, og det blør inn i erfaringene som kommer i ettertid. Det er en avgjørende betraktning for å forstå aktørers motiver og beslutningsprosesser i – og særlig rundt – «brudd» i historien

Europeans : Norwegian diplomats and the enlargement of the European Community, 1960-1972

Defence date: 29 April 2016Examining Board: Professor Federico Romero (European University Institute EUI); Professor Youssef Cassis (European University Institute, EUI); Doctor N. Piers Ludlow (London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE); Doctor Morten Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen).Awarded the Prize for the 'Best Thesis in EU Integration' at the European University Institute conferring ceremony on 9 June 2017September 25, 1972, marked the end of the most bitterly fought political struggle of Norwegian postwar history. With a slight majority, those opposed to membership in the European Community (EC) prevailed in a popular referendum. With the Norwegian 'no', the date also marked the first non-enlargement of the EC. This thesis investigates how a group of diplomats – who worked throughout the 1960s and early 1970s to negotiate a Norwegian EC membership – became Europeans. Being a European meant developing an emotional and professional conviction that membership in the EC was a good thing in itself. But it also entailed a certain displacement: who the Europeans were and how they worked with the EC-case was determined by their in-betweenness. The study of who the Europeans were, and how they worked with the EC-case, is structured around a three-level analysis: 1)The anthropo-institutional investigation 2)The discursive framework, and 3)The study of the Europeans' diplomatic practice regarding the EC-case. The Europeans profoundly shaped Norwegian European policy between 1960 and 1972, helping to redirect the Norwegian postwar foreign policy in quite a fundamental way, and also changed the Community itself. The Europeans were forged into a community and received their political potency/weakness from their in-betweenness: both professionally and personally invested in the membership issue, their actions lay between traditional diplomacy and politics, their ideas, practices and spaces were constituted between 'Europe' and 'Norway' in multiple ways, and their ultimate task remained to bridge the division between the two entities. In brevity, the thesis tells the story of a handful of Norwegian diplomats that became passionately pro-European in the 1960s, and who worked to get Norway on the inside of the EC – a failed elite, shaped in the middle, which nonetheless made a lasting, yet untold, mark on Norway, Europe and the diplomatic trade

Crisis, capitalism and common policies : Greek and Norwegian responses to common shipping policy efforts in the 1960s and 1970s

This chapter was previously published as an article in the European review of history in 2019.This article argues that the global liberal outlook of the major European maritime powers and the international framework of international organizations and regimes already in place made any strictly regional Common Shipping Policy, under the auspices of the European Community, superfluous. Alliances among Shipowners and associations ran across the member- and non-member divide, and were informed by global economic considerations such as the oil shock, competition from South East Asia and structural changes in the sector, rather than integrationist efforts. Instead, the Commission came to act as an interlocutor alongside a liberal alliance, with particular European aims within a global context. This alliance was an unlikely one, seeing Greek–Norwegian hopes in Britain as a possible guarantor of a liberal shipping regime within the enlarged Community in the early 1970s. In the end, the European response to the crisis and structural changes of the 1970s proved unsatisfactory, and only those who fully embraced the ‘new’ rules of the game (like Greece) reaped the benefits of the structural changes

Crisis, capitalism and common policies : Greek and Norwegian responses to common shipping policy efforts in the 1960s and 1970s

First published online: 17 April 2019This article argues that the global liberal outlook of the major European maritime powers and the international framework of international organizations and regimes already in place made any strictly regional Common Shipping Policy, under the auspices of the European Community, superfluous. Alliances among Shipowners and associations ran across the member- and non-member divide, and were informed by global economic considerations such as the oil shock, competition from South East Asia and structural changes in the sector, rather than integrationist efforts. Instead, the Commission came to act as an interlocutor alongside a liberal alliance, with particular European aims within a global context. This alliance was an unlikely one, seeing Greek–Norwegian hopes in Britain as a possible guarantor of a liberal shipping regime within the enlarged Community in the early 1970s. In the end, the European response to the crisis and structural changes of the 1970s proved unsatisfactory, and only those who fully embraced the ‘new’ rules of the game (like Greece) reaped the benefits of the structural changes

Irish Foreign Policy and European Political Cooperation from Membership to Maastricht: Navigating Neutrality

This chapter examines Irish conceptions of neutrality from the interwar period until the 1990s, and the impact that accession to the European Communities had on Irish foreign policy during the first two decades after EC membership. Specifically, it investigates how Irish governments attempted to pursue a foreign policy of military neutrality in parallel with the Community’s on-going efforts at deepening foreign policy cooperation. It challenges the existing scholarly narrative that a process of creeping Europeanisation took place after accession and argues that, in the Irish case, exposure to the integration process resulted in non-change rather than adaptation regarding foreign policy. Moreover, eutrality, rather than being whittled away through membership in the EC/EU, was recast as an important part of Ireland’s European identity