Project(ing) Europe: How filmstrips depicted the story of European integration to Dutch schoolchildren in the early post-war years: a perspective on concepts of Europe between 1950 and 1967

Abstract

In this thesis, I analyze narratives of Europe from the early years of post-war European integration. On the basis of filmstrips used in Dutch primary schools, I reconstruct the story of Europe’s rise from the ashes of war, its ambivalent rescue by America, the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and the road towards further economic integration. Through the lens of the filmstrip projector, the federalist belief in an almost mythical Europe will come to the fore. However, we will also see how in the 1960s this belief gradually disappeared from view. What remained was the narrative of a successful institutionalized ‘Europe of the Six’, a Europe that was both more united and more divided than ever before.

Commissioned by different institutions, the filmstrips under review speak for the zealous Marshall planners and their Europe-wide propaganda campaign, for the federalist European Movement and its support from the CIA. They are also a mouthpiece of the European Community, whose Information Service wanted to instill ‘European thinking’ among its nation-bound citizenry. Each filmstrip results in a different account of what came to be known as ‘Europe’. Thus, the analysis of this unique set of sources is underpinned by the following research question: Which stories of European integration come to the fore in filmstrips used in Dutch primary schools between 1950 and 1967 and how do they relate to concepts of Europe extant at that time?