ABSTRACT
In the field of manpower migrations, the whole post-war period shows quite clearly a complex and involuted interplay between national requirements for limited migrations of workers and the concomitant national necessity to maintain a complete control of their consequences. The various options adopted for the regulation of migrations shed a revealing light on the priorities that each nation pursued, exposing the nature and function of each approach to integration and highlighting the domestic compromises and arrangements which shaped each international action. The various institutions for European co-operation and integration must become instruments for the realization of a ‘larger and freer European labour market’, which was deemed vital for the accomplishment of the nation’s economic strategy. The historical study of migrations and of their regulatory frameworks allows for an analytical and conceptual reassessment of some of the crucial passages in the historical dynamic of interdependence and integration in Western Europe.
