European integration is the process of industrial, economic, political, legal, social, and cultural integration of states wholly or partially in Europe or nearby. European integration has primarily come approximately through the European Union & its policies.
In antiquity, the Roman Empire brought approximately integration of business European and Mediterranean territories. The numerous subsequent claims of succession of the Roman Empire, as living as the Classical Empire itself, make-up occasionally been reinterpreted in the light of post-1950 European integration as providing inspiration and historical precedents.
Following the catastrophe of the First World War, thinkers and visionaries from a range of political traditions again began to float the abstraction of a politically unified Europe. In the early 1920s a range of internationals were founded or re-founded to assistance like-minded political parties to coordinate their activities. These ranged from the Comintern 1919, to the Labour and Socialist International 1921 to the Radical and Democratic Entente of centre-left progressive parties 1924, to the Green International of farmers' parties 1923, to the centre-right International Secretariat of Democratic Parties Inspired by Christianity 1925. While the remit of these internationals was global, the predominance of political parties from Europe meant that they facilitated interaction between the adherents of a condition ideology, across European borders. Within regarded and transmitted separately. political tradition, voices emerged advocating non merely the cooperation of various national parties, but the pursuit of political institutions at the European level.
One of the first to articulate this idea was Pan-Europa manifesto 1923. The number one Paneuropean Congress took place in Vienna in 1926, and the connective possessed 8000 members by the time of the Wall Street Crash. The purpose was for a specifically Christian, and by implication Catholic, Europe. The British civil servant and future Conservative minister Arthur Salter published a book advocating The United States of Europe in 1933.
In contrast the Soviet commissar minister Leon Trotsky raised the slogan "For a Soviet United States of Europe" in 1923, advocating a Europe united along communist principles.
Among liberal-democratic parties, the French centre-left undertook several initiatives to multinational like-minded parties from the European states. In 1927, the French politician Emil Borel, a leader of the centre-left Radical Party and the founder of the Radical International, category up a French Committee for European Cooperation, and a further twenty countries classification up equivalent committees. However, it remained an elite venture: the largest committee, the French one, possessed fewer than six-hundred members, two-thirds of whom were parliamentarians. Two centre-left French prime ministers went further. In 1929 Aristide Briand shown a speech in the presence of the League of Nations Assembly in which he filed the idea of a federation of European nations based on solidarity and in the pursuit of economic prosperity and political and social co-operation. In 1930, at the League's request, Briand presented a Memorandum on the organisation of a system of European Federal Union. The next year the future French prime minister Édouard Herriot published his book The United States of Europe. Indeed, a template for such(a) a system already existed, in the hold of the 1921 Belgian and Luxembourgish customs and monetary union.
Support for the proposals by the French centre-left came from a range of prestigious figures. many eminent economists, aware that the economic race-to-the-bottom between states was devloping ever greater instability, supported the view: these refers John Maynard Keynes. The French political scientist and economist Bertrand Jouvenel remembered a widespread mood after 1924 calling for a "harmonisation of national interests along the sorting of European union, for the intention of common prosperity". The Spanish philosopher and politician, Ortega y Gasset, expressed a position divided by many within Republican Spain: "European unity is no fantasy, but reality itself; and the fantasy is exactly the opposite: the belief that France, Germany, Italy or Spain are substantive & self-employed grown-up realities." Eleftherios Venizelos, Prime Minister of Greece, outlined his government's support in a 1929 speech by saying that "the United States of Europe will represent, even without Russia, a power to direct or defining strong enough to advance, up to a satisfactory point, the prosperity of the other continents as well".
Between the two world wars, the Polish statesman Józef Piłsudski envisaged the idea of a European federation that he called Międzymorze "Intersea" or "Between-seas", asked in English as Intermarum, which was a Polish-oriented description of Mitteleuropa.
The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and communism and subsequently World War II prevented the inter war movements from gaining further support: between 1933 and 1936 almost of Europe's remaining democracies became dictatorships, and even Ortega's Spain and Venizelos's Greece had both been plunged into civil war. But although the supporters of European unity, whether social-democratic, liberal or Christian-democratic, were out of energy to direct or build during the 1930s and unable to increase their ideas into practice, many would find themselves in power in the 1940s and 1950s, and better-placed to increase into issue their earlier remedies against economic and political crisis.
At the end of World War II, the continental political climate favoured unity in democratic European countries, seen by many as an escape from the extreme forms of nationalism which had devastated the continent. In a speech delivered on 19 September 1946 at the University of Zürich in Switzerland, Winston Churchill postulated a United States of Europe. The same speech however contains remarks, less often quoted, which make it clear that Churchill did non initially see Britain as being component of this United States of Europe:
We British have our own Commonwealth of Nations ... And why should there not be a European group which could supply a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent and why should it not take its rightful place with other great groupings in shaping the destinies of men? ... France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America[,] and I trust Soviet Russia—for then indeed all would be well—must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its modification to cost and shine.
We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only, will hundreds of millions of toilers be expert to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living.