HOMER - From History to Memory Culture: Narratives of the European Council Summits
Period of the Project:
October 2014 - September 2017
Funding:
European Commission; Jean Monnet Center of Excellence
Project
HOMER is a six step research-based teaching program that seeks to identify narratives, focusing on three history making summits of national leaders in the history of European integration.
HOMER’s key points:
- HOMER is of high political and societal relevance since it provides historical and cultural orientation on European memory by identifying master narratives of European integration.
- HOMER will have a strong academic impact since it will generate new insights into the perceptions of the role of the European Council and its summits that have received limited scholarly attention thus far.
- HOMER has a strong transnational impact since it brings together the German Sport University Cologne (GSU), the University of Cologne, and the University of Maastricht.
- HOMER is fully interdisciplinary by bringing together four leading EU experts representing history and political science.
HOMER’s background:
- The future of the European Union will increasingly be shaped by the perception of its history and an evolving European memory culture. Against this backdrop, it is necessary to pay more attention to the European Council which has been the key institution in terms of history making decisions.
- The project will address three critical junctures in order to analyse their impact on the development of European narratives: The almost forgotten 1969 summit of The Hague was central to the emergence of the EU and the European Council as an entity. The Maastricht summit of 1991 was a history-making act for the deepening of European integration.The 2007 summit of Lisbon that led to the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon opened a new age for the construction of the EU.The project will assess these summits and analyse their roles in developing a ‘master narrative’ of European integration. The main rationale of the project is to contribute to the evolving European memory culture by scrutinizing past and existing interpretations while simultaneously building on these.
The general structure of HOMER is based on an annual six step-approach:
- a yearly workshop in Brussels (research, dialogue and event dimension)
- a yearly joint seminar (teaching dimension)
- a yearly online module (international dissemination) linked with the respective workshop and seminar
- a series of four annual public lectures (two at each university; local/regional dissemination)
- four annual issues of a newsletter and a regularly updated homepage
- a final journal article at the end of the third year.
Each year one of the three summits will be tackled by HOMER:
- first year: the summit of The Hague 1969
- second year: the European Council taking place in Maastricht 1991
- third year: the Lisbon summit 2009 that opened a new age for the construction of the EU and generally for Europe.
The project will address these three critical junctures in order to analyse their impact on the development of European narratives. It will be of vital interest to explore the question of how contested interpretations of historical and recent events are made active in the present, thereby uniting and dividing European societies.
Team
Heads of the Project :
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Mittag (German Sport University Cologne)
Prof. Dr. Klaus Kiran Patel (University of Maastricht)
Prof. Dr. Sophie Vanhoonacker (University of Maastricht)
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wessels (University of Cologne)
Lecturers and Research Assistants:
Johannes Müller Gomez
Till Müller-Schoell
Diana Wendland
Advisory Board
Prof. Dr. Wilfried Loth has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Essen from 1986 to 2014. Loth was President of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut) in Essen. Since 2013 he serves as President of the Franco-German Committee of Historians and Chairman of the “Groupe de liaison des professeurs d'histoire contemporaine auprès de la Commission européenne”.
Prof. Dr. Brigid Laffan serves as Director and Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and Director of the Global Governance Programme, European University Institute (EUI), Florence. Prior to this she was the founding director of the Dublin European Institute UCD in 1999 and in March 2004 she was elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy. At the University College of Dublin she was Professor of European Politics until 2013.
Baron Philippe de Schoutheete (†) was political director at the Belgian Foreign Ministry and Belgium's permanent representative to the European Union from 1987 to 1997. He was special adviser to Commissioner Michel Barnier, he has been Guest Professor at the University of Louvain and at the College of Europe Natolin (Poland). Currently he acts as Senior Fellow of the European Department of Egmont Institute (Royal Institute for International Relations).
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Marhold is Director of Research and Development of the Centre international de formation européenne (CIFE) and teaches at the University of Cologne. He is member of the executive board of the Institute of European Politics (IEP) in Berlin and of the board of the European Movement Germany. His main research fields are institutional and constitutional developments of the European Union, federalism and history of the European integration. He is involved in many European scientific and political non-governmental associations.
Public Talks and Lectures
At each university a series of at least two public lectures a year has been organized.
German Sport University Cologne:
(1) Dr. Philipp Vonnard (Lausanne): “The only European organization!” Some reflections about the construction of UEFA 1950 1961 (11.11.2014)
(2) Prof. Dr. Harm Kaal (Nijmegen): Popular politics: the friendly matches between sport and politics in the Netherlands, 1960 1980s (16.06.2015)
(3) Martin Schulz (Straßburg/Brüssel): Die Europäische Union als Wirtschafts- und Wertegemeinschaft: Chancen und Grenzen des Sports (6.07.2015)
(4) Dr. Maren Kröger (UN-HCR): The United Nations‘ Perspective on Sport for Development and Peace (15.12.2015)
(5) Dr. Stefan Scholl (Siegen): Das Wissen der europäischen Sportvernetzung (1962-1991): Die sportpolitische Aktivität des Europarats in historischer Perspektive (26.01.2016)
(6) Dr. Ben Weinberg (GIZ Bonn) "The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the project „Sport for Development”: Objectives and Perspectives (15.11.2016)
(7) Prof. Dr. Jeroen Scheerder (Leuven) “National sport authorities and national sport bodies: it takes two to tango” (31.01.2017)
(8) Dr. Philippe Vonnard (Lausanne) "How to write a history of European Football?" (17.5.2017)
University of Cologne:
(1) Günter Verheugen (Brussels): 10 years Eastern Enlargement from the perspective of the „Enlargement Commissioner“ (27.10.2014)
(2) Prof. Dr. Céline Belot: The emergence of the EU as a political issue: cause for despair or source of hope for European integration? (27.10.2014)
(3) Dr. Emiliano Grossmann (Sciences Po Paris): Tensions between the evolution of capitalism and the future of democracy (12.05.2015)
(4) Prof. Dr. Wilfried Loth: The creation of the European council (3.11.2015)
(5) Vassilios Skouris (ECJ): The European Court of Justice and politics (19.11.2015)
(6) Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wessels (University of Cologne): The European Council Who Calls the Shots? The Internal Dynamics: Answers to a Paradox (2.12.2015)
(7) Prof. Dr. Alfred Grosser (Paris) : Ohne Europa keine Zukunft (1.03.2016)
(8) Philippe Etienne (Paris/Berlin) „Germany and France - a common responsibility for Europe“ (15.11.2016)
Maastricht University:
(1) Dr. Julie Smith (University Cambridge): Britain‘s European Future After the Scottish Referendum (23.9.2014).
(2) Commissioner Cecilia Malstrom (Brussels): EU Trade Policy: Why should European citizens care? (17.04.2015)
(3) Dr. Julian Priestly, former Secretary General of the European Parliament: The Making of a European President (21.05.2015)
(4) XXX (2016)
(5) Prof. Dr. Martin Westlake (Bruges/LSE): The Brexit Referendum: taking the longer-term view (9.11.2016).
(6) Prof. Dr. Christine Neuhold (Maastricht): How to influence EU affairs? The role of national parliaments in selected EU member states (7.12.2016)
(7) XXX (2017)
General Information on Joint Seminars
HOMER consists of three joint seminars taking place in Cologne or Maastricht (April 8th and May 21st) and an additional workshops in Brussels with experts (April 17th)
The Hague Summit and European Narratives
Today, the European Council forms the key body in the institutional architecture of the EU. Given its importance, it might come as a surprise that the original Treaties of Rome did not foresee such an institution, and that it only acquired its role incrementally, in the course of several decades. The almost forgotten summit of The Hague in 1969 was of high significance for paving the way for the emergence of the European Council and of the institutional structure that characterizes today’s European Union.
The seminar will address the Hague summit as a critical juncture in the history of European integration. Beyond a focus on actors, motives, negotiations and outcomes of the summit, it will assess the way the Hague summit was perceived at the time, and how it is remembered today. What were and are the views of politicians? How do scholars write about it? How did the media report about it at the time, and do journalists sometimes refer to it today? On all these issues, are there differences between member states, political camps, and generations? Or do interpretations tend to converge? And, more generally, what is the place of the Hague summit in the wider history of EU summitry, and what is the role of summits in narratives of European integration?
This is an interdisciplinary, research-oriented seminar open to students from the German Sport University Cologne, Maastricht University, and the University of Cologne. Students will work with a broad variety of sources (newspaper articles, archival material, memoirs, academic interpretations, interviews, etc.) and will contrast perceptions and narratives of the summit of the time with today’s discussion. The introductory and final sessions will take place in Cologne, but the seminar will include a one-day workshop in Brussels.
The HOMER Project in brief
HOMER is a research-based teaching program that seeks to identify narratives, focusing on history making summits of national leaders in the history of European integration.
HOMER’s background
- The future of the European Union will increasingly be shaped by the perception of its history and an evolving European memory culture. Against this backdrop, it is necessary to pay more attention to the European Council which has been the key institution in terms of history making decisions.
- The project will address three critical junctures in order to analyse their impact on the development of European narratives: The almost forgotten 1969 summit of The Hague was central to the emergence of the EU and the European Council as an entity. The Maastricht summit of 1991 was a history-making act for the deepening of European integration. The 2009 summit of Lisbon opened a new age for the construction of the EU. The project assesses these summits and analyses their roles in developing a ‘master narrative’ of European integration. The main rationale of the project is to contribute to the evolving European memory culture by scrutinizing past and existing interpretations while simultaneously building on these.
HOMER’s organisation:
§ is carried out jointly by the German Sport University Cologne (GSU), the University of Cologne, and the University of Maastricht
§ is supported by the European Commission
§ focuses on the European Council and its summits
§ will be held in English
§ will be credited with a Certificate on European Studies of all three Universities
§ consists of a joint seminar taking place two days in 2015 in Maastricht (X /Y ) and an additional workshop in Brussels with experts (Z)
§ assessment will be based on identifying, collecting and analyzing material for an online-presentation
§ will not cause any additional fees
HOMER’s key targets:
- HOMER is of high political and societal relevance since it provides historical and cultural orientation on European memory by identifying master narratives of European integration.
- HOMER has a strong academic impact since it generates new insights into the perceptions of the role of the European Council and its summits that have received limited scholarly attention thus far.
- HOMER has a strong transnational impact since it brings together the German Sport University Cologne (GSU), the University of Cologne, and the University of Maastricht.
- HOMER is fully interdisciplinary by bringing together four EU experts representing history and political science.
Material and Readings
1. About the European Council
Conclusions of the European Council
2. About the history of summit meetings
3. About dealing with Narratives
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung - virtuelles Erinnern
Klaus Schönhoven - Europa als Erinnerungsgemeinschaft
4. European Integration Research Society
History of European Integration Research Society
5. Further Reading
Dissemination
Kiran Klaus Patel/Alexandros Sianos/Sophie Vanhoonacker: Does the EU Have a Past? Narratives of European Integration History and the Union’s Public Awareness Deficit, in: Journal of European Integration History (currently under review).
Jürgen Mittag: Europanarrative zwischen Krisenerfahrung und Solidaritätssuche, in: Ulrike Kurth (Hg.): „Bildungsprojekt Europa": Zwischen gestern und morgen: Wo steht Europa – heute?, Paderborn 2017 (under review)
Impressions
3. Joint Seminar - Winter term 2016/17: The Lissabon Summit (1997)
3rd Joint Seminar
The HOMER MA-Seminar 2016/17: The Lisbon Summit and European Narratives
The European Council forms the key body in the current institutional architecture of the EU. Based on the debates of the Convention on the Future of Europe (2001-2003) and the aim of a European Constitutional Treaty the Berlin summit in 2007 took up again major targets after the negative referendums on the Constitutional Treaty. The Lisbon summit in 2009 then paved the way to the structures of today’s European Union.
The seminar will address the question whether and to which extent the Lisbon summit (and its forerunners) can be considered as a critical juncture in the history of European integration. This research question is as relevant as challenging since the political incidents just took place in the last decade. Beyond a focus on actors, motives, negotiations and outcomes of the summit, the seminar will assess how the Lisbon summit was perceived at the time, and how it is remembered today. What were and are the views of politicians? How do academic scholars write about it? How did the media report about it at the time, and do journalists sometimes refer to it today? On all these issues, are there differences between member states, political camps, and generations? Or do interpretations tend to converge? And, more generally, what is the place of the Lisbon summit in the wider history of EU summitry, and what is the role of summits in narratives of European integration?
The HOMER-Seminar is an interdisciplinary, research-oriented seminar open to students from the German Sport University Cologne, Maastricht University, and the University of Cologne. Students will work with a broad variety of sources (newspaper articles, archival material, memoirs, academic interpretations, interviews, etc.) and will contrast perceptions and narratives of the summit of the time with today’s discussion. The introductory and final sessions will take place in Cologne and German Sport University; the seminar will include a one-day workshop in Brussels.
The maximum number of students is 30. Up to nine students will come from the University of Cologne; 15 will be recruited from Maastricht and another six from the German Sport University in Cologne.
Introductory Presentations
Students Preliminary Papers
Students Final Presentations
Additional Material
The Lissabon Summit
Wessels_Evolution_European_Council_Generations_of_leaders_2015
The institutions of the European Union before the Lisbon Treaty (simplified diagram)
Conclusions of the Lisbon European Council (26–27 June 1992)
The (Reform) Treaty of Lisbon: What’s in it?
Mapping the Overlapping Spheres: European Constitutionalism after the Treaty of Lisbon
Lisbon Fado: The European Union under Reform
The Treaty of Lisbon – a step towards enhancing leadership in the EU?
2. Joint Seminar - Winter term 2015/16: The Maastricht Summit (1991)
Agenda
The HOMER MA-Seminar 2015/16: The Maastricht Summit and European Narratives
Today, the European Council forms the key body in the institutional architecture of the EU. The Maastricht summit in 1991 has reassured its importance, since this summit paved substantially the way to today’s European Union.
The seminar will, thus, address the question whether and to which extent the Maastricht summit can be considered as a critical juncture in the history of European integration. Beyond a focus on actors, motives, negotiations and outcomes of the summit, it will assess the way the Maastricht summit was perceived at the time, and how it is remembered today. What were and are the views of politicians? How do academic scholars write about it? How did the media report about it at the time, and do journalists sometimes refer to it today? On all these issues, are there differences between member states, political camps, and generations? Or do interpretations tend to converge? And, more generally, what is the place of the Maastricht summit in the wider history of EU summitry, and what is the role of summits in narratives of European integration?
The HOMER-Seminar is an interdisciplinary, research-oriented seminar open to students from the German Sport University Cologne, Maastricht University, and the University of Cologne. Students will work with a broad variety of sources (newspaper articles, archival material, memoirs, academic interpretations, interviews, etc.) and will contrast perceptions and narratives of the summit of the time with today’s discussion. The introductory and final sessions will take place in Maastricht; the seminar will include a one-day workshop in Brussels.
Maximum number of students: 30
Students Final Presentations
1. Joint Seminar - Summer term 2015: The Hague Summit (1969)
Introductory Presentations
Students Final Presentations
Dutch and Belgium Newspaper Analysis
Additional Material
The Hague Summit:
Final communiqué of the Hague Summit (2 December 1969)
The Hague Summit Video (1 and 2 December 1969)
Narratives:
Note from the Political Directorate in the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry (1 October 1969)
‘Let’s get blowing’ from The Guardian (24 November 1969)
Letter from Willy Brandt to Georges Pompidou (Bonn, 27 November 1969)
Statement made by Willy Brandt at the Hague Summit (1 December 1969)
Cartoon by Murschetz on the Hague Summit (2 December 1969)
Statement by Willy Brandt to the Bundestag on the European summit at The Hague (3 December 1969)
Interview with Gaston Thorn: Europe after the Hague Summit (Sound extract) (CLT, 3 December 1969)
‘A kick start for Europe’ from La Libre Belgique (4 December 1969)
'After The Hague', from Luxemburger Wort (4 December 1969)
'A compromise', from Le Monde (4 December 1969)
‘Europe — the following day’, from Süddeutsche Zeitung
Interview with Jean Monnet: the outcome of the Hague Summit (Sound extract) (RTL, 5 December 1969)
