19 Sep Sixty Years Ago Today: “Let Europe Arise!”
It was sixty years ago on this day that Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Let Europe Arise” speech in Zurich, Switzerland. His hope was that a “United States of Europe” would return Europe from the Dark Ages. There are numerous ways to judge the success or failure of the European Union. But in terms of Churchill’s original vision, I find it hard to resist the conclusion that it has been a great and noble success. Europe is peaceful, prosperous, influential, and democratic. Here is an excerpt from Churchill’s great speech:
What is this plight to which Europe has been reduced? Some of the smaller states have indeed made a good recovery, but over wide areas are a vast, quivering mass of tormented, hungry, careworn and bewildered human beings, who wait in the ruins of their cities and homes and scan the dark horizons for the approach of some new form of tyranny or terror. Among the victors there is a Babel of voices, among the vanquished the sullen silence of despair. That is all that Europeans, grouped in so many ancient states and nations, and that is all that the Germanic races have got by tearing each other to pieces and spreading havoc far and wide. Indeed, but for the fact that the great republic across the Atlantic realised that the ruin or enslavement of Europe would involve her own fate as well, and stretched out hands of succour and guidance, the Dark Ages would have returned in all their cruelty and squalor. They may still return.
Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as by a miracle transform the whole scene and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and happy as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to recreate the European fabric, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, safety and freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living. The process is simple. All that is needed is the resolve of hundreds of millions of men and women to do right instead of wrong and to gain as their reward blessing instead of cursing.
Much work has been done upon this task by the exertions of the Pan-European Union, which owes so much to the famous French patriot and statesman Aristide Briand. There is also that immense body which was brought into being amidst high hopes after the First World War – the League of Nations. The League did not fail because of its principles or conceptions. It failed because those principles were deserted by those states which brought it into being, because the governments of those states feared to face the facts and act while time remained. This disaster must not be repeated. There is, therefore, much knowledge and material with which to build and also bitter, dearly bought experience to spur….
I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany. The structure of the United States of Europe will be such as to make the material strength of a single State less important. Small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honour by a contribution to the common cause. The ancient States and principalities of Germany, freely joined for mutual convenience in a federal system, might take their individual places among the United States of Europe…. Therefore I say to you “Let Europe arise!”
Bitacle Blog Search Archive – Sixty Years Ago Today: “Let Europe Arise!”
It was sixty years ago on this day that Winston Churchill delivered his famous “<a.
I remember something an American professor once said in one of my classes: “In the span of a single generation, approximately 95 million Europeans died in various forms of political violence. Just think about that number, and its toll on the European psyche. Think of it this way; take everyone west of the Mississippi River –and kill them.”
I have my gripes with the EU (especially its agricultural subsidies), but this is a trivial and petty thing compared to the awesome fact that Europe, the bloodiest and cruelest place in human history, is at peace –and not just at peace– at peace with the world’s strongest regional human rights regime! When one views the Europe that exists today in a historical context, it is fantastically, astonishingly, mind-bogglingly hopeful.
We’ve come a LONG way, baby.
Una,
I heartily second your comments here. Of course much would appear to depend on economic growth and prosperity:
‘…hard times in Western Europe have fueled Le Pen’s National Front in France, Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, the Flemish Bloc in Belgium, Alessandra Mussolini and the neo-fascists in Italy, the Republikaners and German People’s Union in Germany, and overt Nazi revivals in the German Democratic Republic. All of these movements have anit-immigrant, nationalistic, and racial purity themes; and for all, the [European] federation is a convenient whipping boy. [….] These movements are largely creatures of the un- and underemployed; race-baiting and hypernationalism are entertainments chiefly of people with nothing better to do. Prosperity will weaken them politically and, if not silence them, reduce them to the most ignoble status imaginable–namely, like the Aryan Nation in the United States, they will become lifestyle enclaves. Ugly ones, to be sure, minority voices to be sure, but voices we are unlikely to hear in all their authentic richness; for if all goes well, they will be drowned out by other voices–just as Federalist 10 predicted.’—Charles Arthur Willard, Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy (1996): 65-66.