Daniela Preda – författare

The fight against Fascism and Nazism during the Second World War gave rise to a strong "desire for Europe": a desire for a united, peaceful, democratic Europe. In many countries, there was a flowering of movements, actions, newspapers and constitutional projects in which the vision of the "United States of Europe" was an essential element, enriching the Resistance with a new, profound and lasting political and historical dimension. By interpreting the changes that the Second World War generated, the Europeanists and federalist forerunners of the times mentioned in this volume were able to identify, ahead of their time, the basis for the construction of the new united Europe and, with it, a new peaceful and democratic international order.

This volume is dedicated to the debate on European unification developed between the end of World War II and 1979 in two types of magazines. The first type of magazines are those not exclusively dedicated to the «European» themes, but particularly significant for the impact they had in the cultural-political debate and in the concrete unfolding of the process of European integration; while the second type are militant magazines, belonging to the European and federalist area, whose proactive role was fundamental both for the theoretical elaboration of the ideas as the basis of the future of the European continent, and for the practical propaganda. All these publications contributed in different ways to the spread of knowledge of European integration, of its implications and of its political, social and economic consequences. No less important – and this is the third type of journals taken into consideration in the book – has been the birth and development of magazines directly sponsored by the Community institutions, whose action was framed within a real «European communication», made by the EC institutions, particularly the Commission in Brussels, since their origins.

This volume contains the proceedings of the international conference The Road Europe Travelled Along. The Evolution of the EEC/EU Institutions and Policies, organized by the Associazione Universitaria di Studi Europei (AUSE) (European Community Studies Association - ECSA Italy) at the University of Siena in May 2008. The editors of this book hope it will contribute to the debate on an interpretative thesis which is widespread among scholars dealing with European integration. This thesis holds that the political and institutional circuit of the European Community/Union should be entirely dependent on the nation-states. The immediate implication of this view is that the moments of crisis in the EEC/EU, as well as its periods of relaunch, are due only to the will of and decisions made by the national states, more specifically their governments. On the contrary, many of the essays in this book show that community institutions have also played an important role in the developments in the EEC/EU. From this point of view the evolution of the Community, and subsequently of the European Union, can be examined also by analyzing the gradual extension of its area of intervention, and thus through a study of its common policies and actions. Moreover, an interdisciplinary reflection on the rules, procedures and practices behind the community decision-making process would also be very important. It would be extremely useful to examine the weakness or effectiveness of the decision-making mechanism, and to reconstruct the historical, political and legal reasons that have led to the evolution of this mechanism in order to have a better understanding of the historical-political path taken over the years by the European Community/Union.