Brexit, the recent migration crisis, and the 2007-8 financial crash have all served to reignite Europe-wide debate over the types and degree of integration pursued by European states. Such discussions have crystallised attention on historical experiments with alternative models of European integration that contrasts with the deeper political and economic union that is so stark a feature of the European Union (EU). The most notable of these is the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), a free trade area that now comprises Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. Although smaller now, EFTA emerged in the late 1950s as the predominant 'other' in European politics, a rival to the early EU whose ranks once included ten current EU members. Today, numerous practitioners harken to the flexible, 'simpler' ways of EFTA cooperation and envision limited reforms to the EU along such lines. Others, meanwhile, go further, with models pursued by countries such as Norway and Switzerland enjoying particular reverence among those sceptical of 'more Europe'.
Such arguments are more than political bluff. Indeed, the emergence in 2010 of the Northern Future Forum comprising Britain and eight Nordic and Baltic countries revealed that peripheral conceptualisations of integration based on a smaller, EFTA-type sub-regional intergovernmental basis does carry mainstream political support. This has become only truer in light of the 2016 Brexit referendum. However, we still know little about how and why EFTA developed, its institutional and policymaking structure, its contribution to the integration process, or the lessons these aspects could carry for the present-day EU.
What scholarship there is suffers three specific drawbacks. First, much of the literature fixates on a few key moments in EFTA's early history and tends to ignore developments in the 1970s and 1980s. Second, historians assume that EFTA was a fairly weak international organization (IO) with very little lasting impact on the world around it. And third, researchers tend to rely on the archives of EFTA's largest member states, ignoring the full range of actors involved in its decision-making process.
As such, this research project set out to:
- study EFTA over a much broader timeframe;
- trace historically EFTA's place in the integration process; and
- assess how all relevant actors - national governments/EFTA officials and institutions/non-state actors like national trade union centres and business lobby groups - shaped the Association's policies and priorities.
With multi-archival empirical research embedded in relevant interdisciplinary theoretical debates, the project adopted a political approach to reveal EFTA to be an increasingly complex organisation. Institutional and non-state actors developed progressively influential agenda-setting and policymaking roles. And, at times, EFTA's reach and influence strayed quite dramatically beyond its modest trade remit into the politico-strategic realm. In specific circumstances this allowed the Association to make a pointed, if understated, contribution to Western European politics, trade and security.
