Main Focus
Philip Bajon’s main research interests lie in the fields of contemporary history and the history of Europeanisation. His previous work concentrated on moves towards Europeanisation in the interwar period and on French-German relations after the Second World War, particularly on French foreign policy in the Gaullist era. His current research focuses on the legal history of the European Union, with a particular emphasis on constitutional debates within the European Communities concerning their decision-making processes, ultimate political purpose and democratic quality. His project The Legacy of the Luxembourg Compromise, 1966-93 will help to explore the role of state power in the process of European integration from the Treaties of Rome of 1957 to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. It will scrutinise the rise of the Communities’ intergovernmental Council pillar, and it will help explain how member states responded to the constitutional practice in European law and to the emergence of a proto-federal European legal order.
Projects
Curriculum Vitae
Philip Bajon read medieval and modern history, art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne Université Paris (Maîtrise, 2003) and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Magister Artium, 2004). He subsequently obtained his joint French-German PhD in 2010 (summa cum laude) from the Sorbonne Université and the Universität Duisburg-Essen. The resulting research monograph deals with the European constitutional crisis of 1965-6, widely known as the ‘Common Market crisis’ or the ‘empty chair crisis’.
Philip Bajon was a Jean Monnet Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute Florence from 2010 to 2012. He held a Visiting Lectureship and Fellowship at the Institute for European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 2012 and 2013. Subsequently, he taught graduate courses on the history of European integration and the history of the Cold War at the University of Cologne before moving as a Researcher to the mpilhlt in October 2015. He was a guest lecturer at 東京大学 (University of Tokyo) in 2014, a Karl-Ferdinand-Werner-Fellow of the Institut Historique Allemand in Paris and a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the German Historical Institute London (both in 2017).
Philip Bajon’s research is situated at the intersection of history, political science and law. At the mpilhlt, he is currently pursuing a research project on the institutional and constitutional history of the European Communities, focusing on informal decision-making processes between the 1960s and the 1990s. At the same time, he is scrutinising legal biographies and autobiographical accounts on the history of the European Union. He also conducts interviews with former members of the European Court of Justice for the mpilhlt’s project An Oral History of the European Court of Justice.
Research Communication
Yearbook 2017 Decision-making cultures in the legal history of the European Union