Sources and methodology

The Pierre Werner family archives, opened for the first time for research purposes, represent an essential contribution to the project. They contain a wealth of documents gathered by Pierre Werner from the 1950s onwards, including manuscripts, handwritten notes and comments on official documents, exchanges of letters with various figures, diplomatic correspondence, institutional texts, graphs, diagrams and statistics, as well as a large number of press articles on the European integration process and economic and monetary questions.

One particularly interesting section contains reports, speeches and public addresses on a range of subjects that Pierre Werner gave and/or published during his career. The archives also include a large collection of images, with a host of photos and original snapshots, accompanied by a series of sound and video recordings.

Other sources and archives that serve as a basis for various aspects of historical analysis have also been consulted or will be consulted in the near future.

The material selected for publication will provide a useful addition to the corpus, placing the sources from the Pierre Werner family archives in perspective and increasing and diversifying the range of sources available for the research community. Archive sources from Luxembourg include the Luxembourg National Archives (Ministry of State, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Foreign Affairs), diplomatic archives, the archives of the Christian Social People's Party, the archives of the Banque Nationale du Luxembourg (particularly those of the Luxembourg Monetary Institute), archive material from the Government's Information and Press Service, the documentary collection of the National Library of Luxembourg, documents from the Luxembourg City Photo Library, archives from the Société Européenne des Satellites and the Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télédiffusion, and a range of press and audiovisual archives. Documents from the Ernest Michels private collection have also been consulted.

Diplomatic documents from the five other Member States of the European Communities at that time have been consulted, as have the archives of the National Bank of Belgium, the Bundesbank and the Banque de France, and various BLEU and Benelux documentary collections.

European documentary sources that will be exploited in the project include the Historical Archives of the European Commission in Brussels, the Historical Archives of the Council of the European Union in Brussels, the European Parliament Archive and Documentation Centre (CARDOC) in Luxembourg City, archives from the European Central Bank in Frankfurt and the archives of the European Commission Audiovisual Library.

All these multilingual resources will be published by the CVCE — with original language versions (particularly in French, English and German) always being used if possible — and will be accompanied by precise source details and an explanatory caption.