Research Projects

The European Investment Bank and the ‘Mezzogiorno’ in the context of regional development (1958-1973)

The research project "The European Investment Bank and the ‘Mezzogiorno’ in the context of regional development (1958-1973)" aims at investigating the European Investment Bank’s activities in the Italian South in a comparative way within the context of the Bank’s regional development interventions. The project is financed by the STAREBEI (STAges de REcherche BEI) programme promoted by the EIB. It is conducted by Antonio Bonatesta, Associate Researcher at the ADGRC, under the supervision of Federico Romero and Carlo Spagnolo. The research strives to reconstruct various aspects of the EIB’s investments into Southern Italy, such as the Bank’s internal debates on the rationale of investments and the interplay of European Community bodies and the Italian government and public organizations and questions whether the investments achieved their goals of economic growth and entrepreneurship in the South of Italy.

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The European ambition: study on the EPP Group's contribution and its impact on the European integration process and on the directly elected European Parliament

The EPP academic study will analyze the EPP Group’s contribution and impact on key episodes in the development of the European integration process in general and of the directly elected European Parliament in particular. The project has a proposed completion date of May 2019 and will examine the following topics: the history of the EPP, the role of EPP in EU treaty reform, how the EPP made itself relevant within the EP party system and finally the role and contribution of the EPP Group in shaping the development of EU policies. 

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Collecting memories: European Parliament 1979-2019

The project Collecting memories: European Parliament 1979-2019 aims to provide an assessment of what the European Parliament has and has not achieved since 1979. To set this assessment in motion, the project will collect memories, written and oral, from MEPs who worked inside the institution during that period. The aim is to publish the results during the first semester of 2019 and thereby mark the 40th anniversary of the first direct elections to the European Parliament.

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Looking West: the European Socialist regimes facing pan-European cooperation and the European Community (PanEur1970s)

PanEur1970s is a five-year project (2015-2020) – based at the European University Institute (EUI) – to investigate the European Socialist regimes’ expectations and predicaments vis-à-vis the opening of a space of pan-European cooperation in the long 1970s.

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Histcom3 – The European Commission (1986-2000) – History and Memories of an Institution

In 2007 and 2014, the European Commission published two volumes of the “History of the European Commission”, covering the period from the founding of the European Communities (1958) until the signing of the European Single Act (1986). Following these successful publications, the Histcom3 project aims at gathering first-hand accounts and original archival sources, so as to publish a third inside story of the European Commission from 1986 to 2000.

Hitcom3 is coordinated by an international European network of academics, led by Professor Vincent Dujardin of the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, which include:

• Eric Bussière (Université de Paris-Sorbonne/Paris IV)
• Piers Ludlow (London School of Economics)
• Federico Romero (European University Institute)
• Antonio Varsori (Università di Padova)
• Dieter Schlenker (Historical Archives of the European Union, European University Institute)

Between 2015 and 2018, forty-two researchers belonging to several European universities will gather first hand sources, including a large number of interviews with former Commissioners and officials, with a view to writing a collective volume focusing on the administrative, economic, social, and international dimensions of the European Commission from 1986 to 2000. The Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre is actively involved in the project and will cooperate actively with the consortium of researchers to coordinate interviews and provide access to primary archival sources stored at the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence. 

Towards a New History of European Public Law

The collective research project: ‘Towards a New History of European Public Law’ funded by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation and placed at the University of Copenhagen will in the period from 2013-2015 produce a new body of historical literature dealing with the history of European public law from 1950 to 1993. An inherent part of the project is to uncover and make available new archival sources to the history of European public law to the broader academic community. In addition the project intends to produce an oral history of the legal service of the European Commission from 1958 to 1986. It is to further these specific aims that ‘Towards a New History of European Public Law’ and the Historical Archives agree to collaborate.

Learn more about Sources on the History of European Law