Europe in words: some famous quotes
From the dream of a United States of Europe to recent crises, the history of the European project has inspired landmark declarations by European leaders.
- 1946: Winston Churchill -
"If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and glory which its three or four hundred million people would enjoy... We must build a kind of United States of Europe," the two-time British prime minister said on September 19, 1946, in a speech at the University of Zurich.
- 1950: The Schuman Declaration -
"The contribution which an organised and living Europe can bring to civilisation is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations... Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity," Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, said on May 9, 1950, proposing the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community.
- 1988: Margaret Thatcher -
"We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels," the Conservative prime minister told the College of Europe in Bruges on September 20, 1988.
- 1995: Francois Mitterrand -
"Nationalism is war, and war is the past. But it is not only the past. It could be our future. You are the guarantors of our peace and of our security," the French president told the European Parliament on January 17, 1995.
- 1995: Jaques Delors -
"Despite the many difficulties we've had -- the Yugoslav tragedy, the attacks on the European monetary system -- the foundations for the house of Europe are there," the former European Commission president observed after leaving his post in 1995.
His stewardship of the EU executive gave rise to some famous quotes, with Britain's biggest selling daily, the Sun, writing "Up Yours, Delors!" in a front-page headline in 1990.
Thatcher also punned that he was trying to impose socialism on Europe "by the back Delors."
- 2016: Angela Merkel -
"Do you seriously believe that all the euro states that last year fought all the way to keep Greece in the eurozone -- and we were the strictest -- can one year later allow Greece to, in a way, plunge into chaos?" the German chancellor asked in a television interview on February 29, 2016, regarding Europe's refugee crisis.
She went on to vow: "It's my damn duty and obligation to do everything possible for Europe to find a united path."
- 2020: Boris Johnson -
Britain would leave the EU “do or die, come what may” by an October 2019 deadline, the Brexit figurehead said in a radio interview on June 25, 2019, a month before he replaced Theresa May as British prime minister.
In the end the deadline was pushed back by political tussles. When the country eventually left on January 31, 2020, Johnson said it was "not an end but a beginning".
"For many people this is an astonishing moment of hope, a moment they thought would never come,” the prime minister said. "And there are many of course who feel a sense of anxiety and loss. And then there's a third group, perhaps the biggest, who had started to worry that the whole political wrangle would never come to an end.”