The role of Jean Monnet

The future historian of European integration is likely to suffer from a surplus of documentation and a shortage of facts. If a certain kind of ignorance, as Lytton Strachey once remarked, is essential to the writing of intelligible history, it has little hope of survival amid the vast accumulation of newspaper cuttings, official statistics, policy speeches, annual reports and statesmen's memoirs with which the present-day scholar must contend. One expert has calculated that ‘the volume of official documents produced by the United Kingdom Government and its agencies during the six war years 1939–45 equalled, in cubic content, the volume of all previous archives of the United Kingdom and of its constituent kingdoms England and Scotland that had survived down to the date of the outbreak of war.’