The Intellectual Prehistory of European Unification, 1919-1957
The history of the European project is filled with ‘roads not taken’: alternative proposals for European unity that lost out over the course of European integration. These roads are largely forgotten in European policymaking and European studies, yet they offer illuminating lessons and prescient warnings for Europe’s future. This project challenges the dominant narratives of Europeanisation by uncovering these ‘roads not taken’, democratic as well as totalitarian, and from a variety of national and ideological backgrounds.
This project constructs an ideological map of the competing strands of Europeanist thought between the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Rome, with continuations to the present day. It introduces to Anglophone audiences for the first time the ideas and writings of seven French, German, and Italian thinkers who made influential contributions to Europeanist thought, including the ‘integral federalist’ philosopher Alexandre Marc and the liberal journalist Claus Schöndube. In collaboration with European thinktanks, it also leverages insights from these ‘roads not taken’ to inform policy responses to current crises in European society.
Selected publications:
This project constructs an ideological map of the competing strands of Europeanist thought between the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Rome, with continuations to the present day. It introduces to Anglophone audiences for the first time the ideas and writings of seven French, German, and Italian thinkers who made influential contributions to Europeanist thought, including the ‘integral federalist’ philosopher Alexandre Marc and the liberal journalist Claus Schöndube. In collaboration with European thinktanks, it also leverages insights from these ‘roads not taken’ to inform policy responses to current crises in European society.
Selected publications:
- ‘Book Review: Benjamin Leruth, Nicholas Startin, and Simon Usherwood (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Euroscepticism’, Journal of Common Market Studies (forthcoming 2020)
- ‘Social democracy and the “Europe question”: Lessons from Weimar?’, Renewal 27(1) (2019), 41-51.