Western Europe and Germany: The Beginnings of European Integration, 1945-1960

Abstract

This collection of essays by leading German scholars demonstrates that monocausal explanations cannot do justice to the Federal Republic of Germany's role in European integration during the 1940s and 1950s.These decades saw the start of the long economic boom that was vital for postwar stabilization in Western Europe.Moreover, by 1957 the basic institutional framework for integration existed as we now know it.At first glance