Nuclear Europe: Technoscientific Modernity and European Integration in Euratom’s Early Discourse

The chapter analyses the discourse surrounding the launch of European techno-scientific integration through Euratom, the Community created in 1957 to develop a new European atomic energy capacity. Little investigated by historiography, the Euratom experience raises a series of questions on the ways atomic technology – the epitome of postwar modernization – contributed to a language of Europe and of European integration in an advanced industrial sector. The rhetorical construct at the origins of ‘nuclear regionalism’ in the early phase of Euratom sheds light on how the development of civilian nuclear power promoted discourses on Europe, both as a new regional institutional framework and as a project of modernity, albeit one embedded in a language that took up ideas dating from nineteenth-century scientific internationalism yet revisited in the light of Cold War confrontation.