The Western European Union (WEU) is the first European security and mutual defence organisation. Established in 1954, WEU is the heir to Western Union, which came into being in 1948 with the signing of the Brussels Treaty. Since 30 June 2011, WEU as such has ceased to exist.

In October 2016, a new ePublication entitled ‘Franco-British games and issues within WEU (1954–1982)’ has recently been added to the ‘European integration studies’ collection. This publication is a key output of the WEU-DIPLO research project (‘Diplomacy within WEU’).

The ePublication is the result of a thorough exploration of the Western European Union archives, which were deposited at the National Archives of Luxembourg following the closure of WEU.

It looks at the diplomatic relations and interactions between France and the United Kingdom, particularly focusing on a series of topics linked to the changing geopolitical context in Europe and its immediate neighbourhood that were dealt with by WEU. Drawing on a selection of nearly 700 documents, it emphasises the interests and role of these two states in the development of a European security and defence policy. The ePublication demonstrates that the positions adopted by France and the United Kingdom within WEU very much reflected the ongoing vision of the two countries on the development of European defence.

This project made use of digital tools to analyse a corpus of sources, resulting in the pilot publication of an online edition based on XML-TEI encoding.

The publication, available in French and English, has been evaluated by an external steering committee.