Communications and the History of European Integration

This paper argues that historians miss something fundamental by not framing European integration within an understanding of communications. We can think of the geopolitics and the national political frame, but integration as a process in relation to peoples and populations was only thinkable in terms of a sense of cohesion enabled by modes of communication. It is important too that this cohesion was expressed in a succession of technologies; we can ask if the dominant technologies of a given decade didn't in fact produce a certain Europe, one that continued to evolve as media evolved.