European Movement UK - History

History

The origins of the European Movement lie in the aftermath of the Second World War. More than eight hundred delegates from across Europe gathered in The Hague in May 1948, under the chairmanship of Sir Winston Churchill, to create a new international movement to promote European unity and prevent further wars between its members. The British section of the European Movement was founded a year later.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the European Movement put forward the arguments for the United Kingdom joining the European Economic Community, and campaigned in support of membership in the 1970s. During the UK's European Communities membership referendum in 1975, the organisation was involved within the 'Yes' campaign.

Other campaigns since then have included pressing for direct elections to the European Parliament in the 1970s and promoting the supposed benefits of the single market in the run-up to 1992.

Read more about this topic:  European Movement UK

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
    —Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

    “The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
    —Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    “The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
    —Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)