In this Alcide De Gasperi seminar, Gábor Egry and Wojciech Białożyt share ongoing research on Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.
Gábor Egry. A forgotten European Empire and the origins of European integration
My current research topic is Austro-Hungarian economic imperialism and economic space from the late 19th century to the 1930s. One important aspect of this story is how economic actors perceived economic space and managed to integrate disparate regions, often transcending political and customs boundaries and how this space was related to imperialist visions of order. In this talk I try to explore the possible consequences of this conjecture for a history of the EU. On the one hand I am looking at these figures inquiring about how their visions of continental empire might have been channelled into EU integration plans. On the other, I am interested in the technical aspects of concrete reorganization plans of Europe, during and after WWI and whether those technical aspects could have been among the sources of crucial elements of the post-WWII institutional design of European integration, most importantly the idea of spillover effects that could gradually transform technical cooperation around a limited number of issues into a political one. In doing so, I also hope to shift the focus of the discussion on the imperial origins of the EU from extra European colonies to continental imperialism.
Gábor Egry is a historian, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and director-general of the Institute of Political History, Budapest. His scholarship focuses on themes such as nationalism, everyday ethnicity, politics of memory, and economic history in modern East Central Europe. Author of five volumes in Hungarian and numerous articles, he has recently been Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Nepostrans – Negotiating Post-imperial Transitions: From Remobilisation to Nation-state Consolidation.
Wojciech Białożyt. The European Parliament's victory of 1989 – EP's outreach and support to the Polish Solidarity union 1979-1989
Paying a visit to the European Parliament on 4 April 1991, President of Poland Lech Wałęsa, just four months into the office, thanked the EP for 'a shared victory' in 1989. While those words might have had an element of a charm offensive by the former leader of Solidarity union, they reflected the strong support the Polish union received from the EP at the most important moments of the Polish political and economic crises in the 1980s. The presentation examines the rationale, scope, and key protagonists of the EP's outreach to Solidarity against the backdrop of the EP’s European identity discourse during the crucial decade for the Parliament's institutional development. It presents the EP’s outreach towards Solidarity union undertaken between the first direct election to the EP in June 1979 and the emergence of Solidarity in August 1980, and until the fall of communist party rule in Poland, marked by the confirmation of the Solidarity-led government in September 1989.
Wojciech Białożyt is a PhD Researcher at the EUI Department of History, working on a doctoral project entitled: Towards Europe – Solidarity union’s parallel diplomacy with European Economic Community’s institutions and key member states, 1980-1989 . He was a recipient of the 2024 Visegrad Fund Research Grant at the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). He also led the establishment of Professor Bronisław Geremek's archival collection at the HAEU.
The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
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