European Integration in Historical Perspective
hosted by Professor
Michael Leigh
Tommaso Milani
Historian
What are the advantages, if any, of approaching the study of European integration from a historical perspective? In light of the haphazard, largely unplanned developments in EU politics over recent decades, the once widely held assumption that investigating the EU's past may help us better understand its present and future appears dubious. What if the EU's current ability to ‘muddle through' has made the scrutiny of its origins and subsequent stages obsolete? Is there anything historians can do about it? The talk provides some tentative answers to these questions.
TOMMASO MILANITommaso Milani is a historian of Modern and Contemporary Europe.
Having pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in Italy, Australia, Belgium, and Britain, Milani earned a PhD in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in late 2017, under the supervision of N. Piers Ludlow and Heather Jones. He taught at the LSE, Balliol College University of Oxford, and Sciences Po Paris before joining the European University Institute (EUI) as a Max Weber Fellow. Milani subsequently moved to Germany, where he held research fellowships at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) within Professor Kiran Patel's Project House Europe programme, and at the Institute for Social Movements [Institut für soziale Bewegungen] at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). In 2020-21, he was an Associate Fellow at Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe.
His research has focused first and foremost on competing models of national and supranational control over the economy that were theorised and implemented in different European countries during the Twentieth Century. In his first monograph,
Hendrik de Man and Social Democracy: The Idea of Planning in Western Europe, 1914–1940, he drew on more than forty archival collections located in Belgium, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy, to evaluate the transnational impact of the Belgian intellectual and politician Hendrik de Man's ideas and endeavours, paying particular attention to the Belgian, French, and British context.
Milani's interest in planning has led him to approach European integration from an unusual angle, investigating how several British intellectuals came to advocate supranational economic governance during the 1930s and support federalist schemes for European unity until the 1940s. His findings have appeared in several articles and book chapters, including "From Laissez-Faire to Supranational Planning: The Economic Debate within Federal Union (1938-1945)" (European Review of History), "Retreat from the Global? European Unity and British Progressive Intellectuals, 1930-1945" (
International History Review) and the biographical essay on R. W. G. Mackay within the recently published edited volume
The Labour Party and European Integration: A Biographical Approach.
More recently, Milani has been exploring the history of the co-operative movement and the conceptualisation of economic democracy after the Second World War, co-editing with Professor and Historian Mark Gilbert a special issue of the
Journal of Modern Italian Studies devoted to "Italy's Democratic Turn, 1943-1963".
