In this interview excerpt, Philippe de Schoutheete, Belgian Permanent Representative to the European Union from 1987 to 1997 and Special Adviser to European Commissioner Michel Barnier from 1999 to 2004, discusses the numerical composition of the European Commission, particularly focusing on the positions adopted by Belgium and the other Member States.

In this interview excerpt, Philippe de Schoutheete, Belgian Permanent Representative to the European Union from 1987 to 1997 and Special Adviser to European Commissioner Michel Barnier from 1999 to 2004, looks back at the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by the French and Dutch people and emphasises the major crisis that this represented for the European Union. He also discusses the treaty ratification procedure in general.

In this interview excerpt, Philippe de Schoutheete, Belgian Permanent Representative to the European Union from 1987 to 1997 and Special Adviser to European Commissioner Michel Barnier from 1999 to 2004, discusses the constitutional approach and its consequences on the development of public opinion in Europe.

In this interview excerpt, Philippe de Schoutheete, Belgian Permanent Representative to the European Union from 1987 to 1997 and Special Adviser to European Commissioner Michel Barnier from 1999 to 2004, discusses the compromise between the supranational and intergovernmental approaches to European integration.

In this interview, Georges Berthoin, Head of the Delegation of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), then of the Commission of the European Communities to the United Kingdom until 1973, comments on the political objectives of the United Kingdom during its first application for accession to the European Communities in 1961.

In this interview excerpt, Philippe de Schoutheete, Belgian Permanent Representative to the European Union from 1987 to 1997 and Special Adviser to European Commissioner Michel Barnier from 1999 to 2004, raises the question of the treaty revision procedure, particularly the idea of abandoning the ‘double unanimity’ principle.

In this interview excerpt, Philippe de Schoutheete, Belgian Permanent Representative to the European Union from 1987 to 1997 and Special Adviser to European Commissioner Michel Barnier from 1999 to 2004, suggests that the ultimate aim of European integration has not been clearly identified, and explains that he believes this to be one of the main reasons for the lack of understanding of European integration among the general public in Europe.

Marianne Backes, Director of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE), and René Leboutte, Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Luxembourg and holder of the ad personam Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration History, set out the aims of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?’.

In his address, Peter Haber (University of Basel) gives a brief historiography and definition of ‘data-driven history’. He then offers a case study and concludes by raising more general questions.

In the first panel of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?’, Paul Girard (Sciences Po Paris — Medialab) speaks on ‘The Hypertext Corpus Initiative: methods and tools for social sciences to build corpora from the Web’, a contribution that was also prepared by Mathieu Jacomy, Audrey Baneyx and Tommaso Venturini. Christine Blondel (CNRS, CRHST/Centre Alexandre-Koyré) then describes a specific example of archive publication on a website in the form of a corpus. To close, Thomas Nygren (Umeå University), in an address co-authored by Lotta Vikström (Umeå University), sets out the advantages and limitations of teaching history by using digital databases.