Six early-career researchers have been awarded International Visegrad Fund (IVF) research grants to undertake archival research at the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU). The grants are the fruit of a 2022 partnership agreement between the IVF and the European University Institute that supports scholars from the Visegrad countries, the Western Balkans, and Eastern Partnership countries in carrying out primary research on the history of European integration.
The six projects reflect both the diversity of the HAEU’s archival holdings and the breadth of current scholarship on European integration. Several examine the relationship between European institutions and Central and Eastern Europe during periods of political change, while others investigate questions that have shaped the European Union (EU) more broadly, including monetary governance, financial stability and the development of human rights jurisprudence.
The recipients, listed alphabetically below, will draw on the HAEU’s collections to explore these themes from a range of historical, legal and political perspectives.
Hristina Balkanov, PhD candidate in Economic Analysis of Law, Microeconomics and Macroeconomics in the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Law will focus on EU institutional and private fonds to explore “The evolution of economic and monetary union (EMU) and its legal-institutional impact on the Western Balkans”.
Economist Dr Hedvig Gál, teaching assistant at the Eötvös Lóránd University in Hungary will consult documents from the institutional fonds to deepen understanding of “Monetary policy, exchange rate volatility and financial stability: Archival evidence from European countries”.
Patrik Hajdu, PhD candidate in Public Administration at the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Slovakia plans to investigate the private archives of Graham Avery, the Ángel Viñas collection, and the papers of Commission President Jacques Delors and records from the Klepsch presidency of the European Parliament, among others, to inform on his proposed project “Brussels and the velvet divorce: European institutional responses to Czech and Slovak state-building, 1992–1994”.
Dr Karolina Koziura, Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto will make use of institutional fonds on enlargement as well as corporate and private fonds and collections at the HAEU to inform her project “Civic mobilization and memories of European integration in the Visegrad region”.
Dr Marcin Rdzak, historian in the Faculty of History and Cultural Heritage at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow will draw on institutional and private archives at the HAEU and in Poland, especially the recently opened Bronisław Geremek fonds at the HAEU, to develop his project on “Bronisław Geremek’s European thought and Poland’s integration into the European Union”.
Dr Janja Simentić Popović, Assistant Professor of International Law and EU Law in the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Belgrade will delve into archived procedural files from the Court of Justice of the European Union for her project “To tell a (different) story through archives: early human rights jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union revisited.”