Exactly 70 years ago, on September 19, 1946, Sir Winston Churchill delivered his famous speech in Zurich calling for the creation of “a United States of Europe”.
Britain’s wartime leader was revered across the continent for his role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, despite the fact that he had lost office as UK prime minister after the general election of 1945. His ringing call for reconciliation between France and Germany, and “the re-creation of the European family”, struck a chord for both the victors and the vanquished emerging from the devastation of two world wars. It inspired a European movement that led to the creation of the Common Market, and, ultimately, to today’s European Union.
“Churchill was called the father of ‘Europe’, and he said much to justify that label,” the British journalist and political commentator Hugo Young wrote in his seminal history of Britain and Europe. “But he was also the father of misunderstandings about Britain’s part in this Europe. He encouraged Europe to misunderstand Britain, and Britain to misunderstand herself.”