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:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“To summarize the contentions of this paper then. Firstly, the phrase ‘the meaning of a word’ is a spurious phrase. Secondly and consequently, a re-examination is needed of phrases like the two which I discuss, ‘being a part of the meaning of’ and ‘having the same meaning.’ On these matters, dogmatists require prodding: although history indeed suggests that it may sometimes be better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)