European Integration by Cross-Border Exchange: Actors in Transnational and National Spaces in the Emerging Civil Society since the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract

European integration has been promoted — and impeded — ‘from below’ long before terms like ‘Europeanisation’ were coined and the political process of unification started in the early 1950s. This contribution will deal with the gradual, though by no means linear or uninterrupted rapprochement of Europeans by investigating the emergence and transformation of cross-border civil societies since the eighteenth century. A social history of the gradual emergence of self-organisation beyond the borders of territorial nation-states has to include the perspectives of specific groups and actors. Thus, sharp differences in the usage of the term ‘civil society’ by late-eighteenth century hommes de lettres and members of contemporary anti-globalisation movements like Attac or, for example, diplomats in international organisations, can be detected. However, they have been united by the overriding goal of establishing a civil society across territorial, administrative and cultural borders. Historical investigations of this transnational activism must reconstruct the meanings of ‘civil society’, not least in order to grasp its features and explain its impact. As will be argued in this chapter, exchange between crucial actors of civil society initiated a rapprochement. This long-term process can be conceived of as a ‘European integration’ before the concept had been coined and the political process started. By concentrating on actors of civil society in general and international nongovernmental organisations in particular, this chapter will reconstruct the neglected cross-border encounters, transfers and entanglements between Europeans ‘from below’. It will utilise the established and proven historical comparison as well as more recent transnational approaches that have been discussed as methodological tools in historiography in the last two decades (Bauerkamper 2013: 27–42).