Jaci Eisenberg: How did you choose history as a field?
Brigitte Leucht: I’ve always been interested in history, even at school… but as I found out later, history was my way of understanding the world; history and politics, I would say, in combination. For my undergraduate studies, I did study History and English - you had to combine two subjects. For me, literature was interesting, but it was not what I wanted to make my job. If you look at subjects like lenses, through which you can understand what is happening around you, history was a better track. And I’ve always liked reading, I’ve liked to do things in depth, and I’ve remained curious in a way this is why I kept doing it…
Jaci Eisenberg: Specifically you have focused as of late on European Integration. How did you come to that area of research?
Brigitte Leucht: Actually, by accident, I would say. I started out doing American history, Constitutional history, and also the history of political ideas, that was more tangible at that point. When I was between my Master’s and my Ph.D., I went to the archives, and I wanted to do something that includes the US, but also Europe in some way. I had a look at the papers of George Ball because I was interested at that point in the Rome Treaties, the treaties that established the EEC. And then I found materials that related to an earlier period, the Schumann Plan negotiations, and that is basically how I started working on European integration. I did not have a background in studying European integration when I started my Ph.D. My background really was more in American history, legal history, Constitutional history, and to some degree, international politics in the 20th century. I would say I always knew what interested me in terms of discipline but the actual topic, to some degree was coincidence.
Jaci Eisenberg: What has your academic path been?
Brigitte Leucht: I did my undergraduate work at the University of Vienna, in History and English. I would also like to add that if you are interested in understanding the how and why of these choices, I’ve to some extent always been shaped by teachers. I think you can be as rational as you like; people do have an impact. The person who supervised my Master’s thesis in Vienna, was a well-known Austrian historian, Gerald Stourzh, and the way he did history, I found it fascinating. He spoke different languages, his lectures were, some people found them dry in the sense of too ‘legal’, but I found them really intellectually stimulating. It made me go to the library afterwards and ask more questions. So in a way, I wanted to continue doing that. That’s why I did the Master’s, and my Master’s was actually at New York University under the auspices of the Fulbright program, which was a good label to have. I focused mainly on American Constitutional history - that was the idea, to go to the States, to understand how people there do American history. But then this thing happened with my archival visit, and I ended up doing a transatlantic/European integration topic. After I completed my Masters, I went back to Vienna, I worked for a couple of years for the Austrian Fulbright Commission, because at that point I just wanted to try something else. I liked academia, but I was not entirely certain – I was 27 when I came back – if I should not try something else as well. And I must say I really liked working outside of academia, too. But I missed in-depth research, and I missed the time to really read. I continued work on the weekends, but intellectual progress was not possible, not in the same way as when you do it full time. And then I decided basically to go for a Ph.D. program; I applied for a fellowship - I actually applied for a couple of fellowships, which I did not get - and then the one I got was at the University of Portsmouth in England, so that’s why I did my Ph.D. there.
Jaci Eisenberg: From England, how did you end up at HEID?
Brigitte Leucht: Again, coincidence. Of course, you have to be qualified. But basically I was contacted and asked if I would like to teach here for a year. And that was about a year ago, I had just written the last word of my thesis after many, many years, so that was a very welcome invitation. And I came here for an interview and was offered a one-year visiting lectureship.
Jaci Eisenberg: Could you tell us about specific pieces of research you’ve completed in the past?
Brigitte Leucht: My Master’s thesis in Vienna was on the equal protection clause of the American Constitution: the idea of equality before the law, how that came into the Federal Constitution. What I looked at was basically a lot of the State Constitutions, some of them going back to the early 19th century, including provisions that contain the idea of equality before the law, even though they don’t call it that. It was a history of ideas. Later, I also got involved in a project that looked at the impact that new media had on how we tell history. That was actually very, very interesting for me because up to that point, I was very positivist: the sources tell you what happened and as a historian, you construct your story from the sources. The media project was also with a different bunch of people, more ‘alternative’ people, different from diplomatic historians, less conventional perhaps, and we presented our findings as a website where we compared how history is presented in different media. And just by thinking through how you present history on film, on CD-ROM, on a website, you reflect on what you do when you actually write a book or write a paper. I learned a lot through that. And then the Ph.D. was basically on how European integration really started, and what I did is that I looked at the formal and informal cooperation between American and European actors at the Schumann Plan negotiations, trying at the same time to become more interdisciplinary and learn from politics -not just to do it, but because you get more interesting and better results in the end, I think. I utilized the network concept, and tried to really understand what happened at the negotiations.
Jaci Eisenberg: Could you talk about some of the publications you’ve worked on?
Brigitte Leucht: I still have to publish my monograph. But I have published articles and book chapters that draw on the Ph.D. I also had a very active supervisor at Portsmouth University, Wolfram Kaiser, who encouraged his Ph.D. students to go to conferences, publish etc. If you worked hard, and you were committed, you didn’t have to have the Ph.D. completed; you could work as an academic. It helped me learn the different skills that are part of academic life, publishing, editing, and I became involved in two edited volumes. Both of them, very, very time consuming; I would have never thought how much time goes into editing a book. And in both cases we organized a conference, with a very clear framework, with invited speakers, who all had to address certain research questions. The idea was to produce an edited volume, but coherent nevertheless. This procedure also highlights what is one of the problems in European Integration History namely that there are so many national and private archives you could go to. There are so many research questions that need to be answered by more than just one person. The whole research area invites cooperation, hence the idea to do edited volumes and draw on the expertise of a group of researchers that each have done in-depth archival research. One of the books dealt with the use of social science concepts for European Integration History. The other one is more specifically on networks in the history of European Integration from its beginnings in post-war Europe up to the present tense.
Jaci Eisenberg: What sort of projects do you currently have on tap?
Brigitte Leucht: I’m still utilizing material from the Ph.D. Intellectually I would like to move on. The nice thing is that to write the monograph, after my year at the IHEID, I have a Post-Doc in Oxford to turn what was the more interesting story of my Ph.D. into a book. For my Ph.D. the problem was that the actual research question applied to just a very brief time period, so to turn it into a book with a major publisher wasn’t very likely. As it is so much work, I didn’t want to just publish it with any publisher, but wanted to use this to make a statement. What I can do in the next two years is to basically take my research a little bit further in time – from 1952 to the early 1960s - and tell the history of how the beginnings of European Competition Policy were influenced by transnational networks. Apart from that, I would like to do many other things. At some point, I would like to apply the research framework of the PhD to explain how the internal market program started in the 1970s. I’ve done a lot about the 1940s and 50s and would really like to move on in time. And, as a result of teaching, my interests are starting to become somewhat more global, especially as a result of what I’m teaching this semester, the EU external relations, where you get a completely different perspective on European integration history.
Jaci Eisenberg: Could you speak about the course you are currently teaching?
Brigitte Leucht: The idea is to understand the emergence of the European Union as an international actor. There are competing theories and conceptualizations of the EU as an actor: a trade actor, an economic actor, and/or, a normative actor, a humanitarian actor, less so a military actor. In the seminar, we have taken these theoretical questions as a starting point to explore the history of the EU’s external relations. What was European foreign policy like before there was an official foreign policy in the narrow sense, which only started in the 1970s? The EEC started in 1958, and it did have an external dimension: there was trade policy, development policy, so looking at the broad spectrum of foreign relations, not just foreign policy. And I find at the moment that I am really interested in that.
Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice for the IHP Section students, or thoughts about HEID in general?
Brigitte Leucht: An academic career is great if you’re curious. I like the freedom that comes with it as well, I’m not a 9 to 5 person, I probably work more than 40 hours but I mostly work when I like to work. So there are a lot of things to be said for a life in academia. But it’s probably also worth trying something different. Teaching here at the IHEID has been a very, very good experience for me, especially, the student questions you’re not prepared for - they are what takes me further. Also, there’s an intimate relationship between teaching and research, which is encouraged here, but that is not the case in every institution.
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