Calls for a closer, more integrated Europe have not merely been made by late-20th century cosmopolitan liberals. It was that great hero of Britain’s most proudly patriotic, Sir Winston Churchill, who argued for European integration in response to the threat from Nazi Germany, proposing an idea dubbed the Declaration of Union between Great Britain and France.
“The Franco-British Union” was his vision. He said: “Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain; every British subject will become a citizen of France.” Despite what the Eurosceptics say, Churchill was actually one of the founding pioneers of Europeanism. It was also Churchill who grew the United States of Europe notion in his famous 1946 Zurich speech.
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