Einleitung: Die belgische Militärpräsenz in Deutschland (1945-2005). Umrisse eines Forschungsfelds

his volume analyses Belgian garrisons in the Rhineland and Westphalia after the Second World War. They are analysed as contact zones that clearly indicate the political, economic, societal and military consequences of European integration for daily coexistence. The book’s contributions focus on mechanisms and catalysts of entanglement, dissolution and coexistence in local spaces, which did not relocate transnational contacts within Europe to national borderlines, but permanently (re-) configured them in a confined space. How do transnational contacts take place? How have they changed in the face of different geopolitical and geostrategic circumstances? This volume intends to give European integration history new impetus by rediscovering European regional history.