Abstract

This article examines recent developments in the historiography on European cooperation, focusing especially on the years between the «shock of the global» in the 1970s and the birth of the European Union in 1992. After examining methodological and interpretative innovations in the field of European integration history at large, the article takes a closer look at the construction of the European Union along with two issues: the transformation of socio-political equilibria in the context of late twentieth-century globalisation; and its interaction with the end of the Cold War and German reunification.