History
The French Gaullists split from the Liberal Group on 21 January 1965 and created a new Group called the "European Democratic Union". The Group was renamed on 16 January 1973 to the "Group of European Progressive Democrats" when the Gaullists were joined by the Irish Fianna Fáil, and renamed itself again on 24 July 1984 to the "Group of the European Democratic Alliance".
The group was never a close alliance. In 1973, the only common platform was on the issues of regionalism, social policy and the Common Agricultural Policy. Fianna Fáil, an Irish nationalist party, was reluctant to identify too closely with the Gaullists, who also had an alliance with the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom at the time.
Read more about this topic: European Progressive Democrats
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)