Churchill's United States of Europe outlived the speech
European integration stitches political, legal, social, and economic ties among states in and near Europe. Rome offered an ancient template; after World War II, Winston Churchill's 1946 call for a United States of Europe and citizen groups like the federalists pushed institutions that became today's union architecture.
Advocates of a united continent have often looked back to Rome, whose empire bound together much of Europe and the Mediterranean, and to later unifying projects, from the medieval German-led empire and the Baltic trading league of the Hansa to Napoleon's conquests. Today the process runs mainly, though not only, through the European Union, and it spans law, politics, economics and regional policy, sometimes extending to cultural assimilation and centralisation.
The carnage of 1914 to 1918 revived the dream. In 1923 Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi published his Pan-Europa manifesto, imagining a Christian and implicitly Catholic union; its first congress met in Vienna in 1926, and the movement had 8,000 members when Wall Street crashed in 1929. That same year of 1923 Leon Trotsky called for a Soviet United States of Europe. The French mathematician Emile Borel, a Radical Party leader, set up a French committee for European cooperation in 1927, and twenty other countries copied it, winning backing from economists including John Maynard Keynes. In Poland, Jozef Pilsudski sketched a federation called Intermarium.
Depression, fascism and communism stalled these efforts; between 1933 and 1936 most surviving European democracies fell to dictatorship. Nazi schemes for a German-run continent, from the New Order to Generalplan Ost, died with the Reich. Afterwards many saw unity as the escape from ruinous nationalism, and on 19 September 1946 at the University of Zurich, Winston Churchill urged a kind of United States of Europe, comparing it with Britain's own Commonwealth. Civic lobbies such as the European Movement International and the federalists' union kept up the pressure, and Altiero Spinelli campaigned for a federation.
Scholars later tried to explain what was happening. Thomas Diez and Antje Wiener divide the theory into three phases after an early normative period. Ernst Haas's neofunctionalism of 1958, extended by Leon Lindberg in 1963, argued that integration in one sector spills over into others. Stanley Hoffmann's intergovernmentalism, prompted by Charles de Gaulle's empty chair crisis in the 1960s, stressed national governments instead, an approach Andrew Moravcsik refined in the 1980s.
Source: European integration
