Personal bio
Matthew Broad is an Assistant Professor in History and International Studies at the Institute for History, Leiden University, and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Prior to joining Leiden, he held posts as a Jean Monnet Scholar at the European Studies Centre, University of Pittsburgh, an EU-funded Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Contemporary History and Political Science, University of Turku, and a Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of History, University of Reading. His research interests centre on the history and politics of European integration from 1945 to the present, diplomacy, British foreign policy, and Anglo-Nordic relations. Publications include Britain, the Division of Western Europe and the Creation of EFTA 1955-1963 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022 - with Richard T. Griffiths), European Integration Beyond Brussels: Unity in East and West Europe since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020 - co-edited with Suvi Kansikas), and Harold Wilson, Denmark and the Making of Labour European Policy 1958-72 (Liverpool University Press, 2017). He was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2020.
Project description
Title: The Other Europe - The History and Evolution of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), 1959-92
Few international organisations are born out of failure. The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is one such example. Established in 1960, EFTA replaced the abortive Free Trade Area (FTA) under discussion between 1956 and 1958 and, thus, was devised by its architects as an alternative way of bridging the economic divide that had grown between the six countries of the European Economic Community (EEC) and those outside it. From its origins, EFTA was consequently regarded as ephemeral, merely a conduit through which to establish an FTA-type continent-wide trade bloc. Once it had become clear that such a nexus was impossible, so began the process by which countries like Britain and Denmark reversed their earlier positions and instead sought full membership of the EEC. For those left behind, the signing of bilateral free trade agreements with the EEC in 1972 in turn suggested that its member states had devised other means through which to realise EFTA’s founding task of establishing a trading structure covering the entirety of Western Europe. In part because of this, much of the European integration historiography tends to consign EFTA to a walk-on role compared to the EEC, given short shrift as an ineffectual and irrelevant body whose members sought actively to leave before its work had even begun or were highly conscious of its limitations and hence continually looked towards other extra-Association means through which to arrange their relations with the Community. And yet while over the subsequent decades EFTA’s membership did undoubtedly decline and its original raison d’être was to all intents and purposes complete by 1972, EFTA endured - and, indeed, continues to do so today. At a broad level, then, this research project examines how and why EFTA has remained a part of Europe’s institutional landscape for so long. How did the organisation cope with and respond to the process of member state secession? In what ways did it repurpose itself? And what was the impact of all this on its member states and on Europe more generally? Examining the period from EFTA’s founding to the signing of the European Economic Area (EEA) agreement in 1992, the project answers these questions by utilising EFTA’s own historical source material and the national archives of several current and former EFTA member states.