After The First World War
Following the catastrophe of the First World War, some thinkers and visionaries again began to float the idea of a politically unified Europe. In 1923, the Austrian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-Europa movement and hosted the First Paneuropean Congress, held in Vienna in 1926. The aim was for a specifically Christian, and by implication Roman Catholic, Europe. In contrast Trotsky raised the slogan "For a Soviet United States of Europe" in 1923, for a non-Christian but communist Europe.
In 1929, Aristide Briand, French prime minister, gave a speech in the presence of the League of Nations Assembly in which he proposed the idea of a federation of European nations based on solidarity and in the pursuit of economic prosperity and political and social co-operation. Many eminent economists, among them John Maynard Keynes, supported this view. At the League's request Briand presented a Memorandum on the organisation of a system of European Federal Union in 1930.
In 1931 the French politician Édouard Herriot published the book The United States of Europe. The British civil servant Arthur Salter published a book of the same name in 1933.
Between the two world wars the Polish statesman Józef Piłsudski envisaged the idea of a United States of Central Europe (called Międzymorze translated as Intermarum, "Intersea" or "Between-seas"), a Polish-oriented version 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.
Read more about this topic: Ideas Of European Unity Before 1945
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”
—Bible: New Testament St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, 1:27.
“Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)