European University Institute

History

Origins

Proposals for a European university predate the European Communities. The idea was advocated at the Congress of Europe in 1948 (eventually leading to the College of Europe) and again at the European Cultural Conference held in Lausanne the following year, in both cases by the pro-European movements rather than by governments.

The project first acquired governmental backing at the Messina Conference of 1955, where the German secretary of state Walter Hallstein proposed a European training and research centre for the nuclear sciences, an idea subsequently reflected in the Euratom Treaty. The Italian government pressed for the institution to be sited in Florence. Giorgio La Pira, then mayor of the city, argued in a 1961 speech at the Palazzo Vecchio for a rather different institution: a 'world university' framed around decolonisation and the study of the contemporary world as a whole, rather than a specifically European body. This alternative conception did not prevail.

Progress was slow and negotiations conducted outside the Euratom framework by a working group chaired by Pierre Pescatore made little headway, the proposal meeting resistance from national universities in Germany, Italy and Belgium, which feared that a European university would divert public funds and struggle to attract the strongest students. Heads of state and government discussed the project at Bonn in July 1961, but the initiative stalled during the empty chair crisis. It was revived at the Hague summit of 1969, by which point the intended focus had shifted decisively from the nuclear sciences to the human and social sciences.

Establishment

Preparatory conferences in Florence in 1970 and Rome in 1971 settled the essential features of the new body: it would be reserved for postgraduate study, and it would stand outside the Community's own institutional structure. Education ministers meeting within the Council of the Communities recorded their agreement in principle in November 1971.

The Convention setting up a European University Institute was signed in Florence on 19 April 1972 by Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Annexed to it was a protocol on the privileges and immunities of the Institute, which forms an integral part of the Convention, and the Institute was required to conclude a headquarters agreement with the Italian government. A preparatory committee chaired by the Dutch historian and diplomat Max Kohnstamm was charged with establishing the Institute's administration, staffing and academic profile between 1972 and 1975.

Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom, which had joined the European Communities in 1973, acceded to the Convention during the preparatory phase; the United Kingdom became a contracting state on 24 February 1975. The Convention entered into force in 1975, and the Institute opened at the Badia Fiesolana in November 1976 with an initial intake of 70 researchers. Kohnstamm served as its first president.

Development

Membership widened in step with successive enlargements of the Communities, with Greece, Spain, Portugal and later Austria, Finland and Sweden acceding to the Convention; the accessions were given effect through decisions of the Institute's High Council amending the founding text. A revising Convention was signed by the then twelve Community member states in Florence in June 1992.

The Institute's remit broadened considerably from the 1980s onwards. Following decisions taken in 1983 to open the Community archives to the public, and a 1984 agreement between the Commission of the European Communities and the EUI, the Historical Archives of the European Union were established in Florence and opened to researchers in 1986. The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies was founded in 1993 to complement the four disciplinary departments with problem-driven, policy-oriented research. The Max Weber Programme for postdoctoral studies admitted its first cohort in September 2006, and the Florence School of Transnational Governance was launched in 2017.