Pan-Europeanism and the British Right: a post-war history
Britain and its European future, part 1
Given that half a decade has elapsed since Britain’s final withdrawal from the European Union, it now seems fitting to reconsider the entire project in light of the political changes that have occurred in the West since then.
That Britain’s post-Brexit experience has been one of immense decline is hardly worth stating, though it would be unfair in the extreme to place the responsibility for this squarely on Brexit; indeed, despite endless claims to the contrary, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU has proved neither disastrous nor wonderful, and we believe that with the appropriate government, Brexit could be made successful. Yet, we also firmly maintain that the greater project of European unification — whether under the auspices of the EU or not — is both desirable and fundamentally necessary for Europe to return to its status as a great power.
This series of articles is thus intended to show that we, on the British Right, have strong historical, geopolitical, and civilisational reasons for desiring Britain’s participation in — and leadership of — a united Europe. We will therefore eschew any desire to relitigate the Brexit debates and instead soberly reflect on the more distant past and (perhaps) the somewhat nearer future.
In this first article, we will chart the history of Britain’s relationship with European unification, showing that not only has the British Right maintained an affinity for pan-Europeanism, but also that Britain’s own lineage and existence prevail upon it to be the guiding force in these efforts.
Many right-wingers have become aficionados of ‘Straussian’ readings of the world, and history is no exception. For all the talk of a paradigm shift and its parameters, there is no denying that immigration has now, rightly, come to be regarded as the foremost issue of our time, just as Marxism was in Strauss’s time. Whilst this reading is valuable, and readers will be able to list numerous examples of issues — both real and imagined — where the root cause remains mass migration, it does serve to obscure other interpretations. This is especially true of recent history, and even more so recent history from the perspective of those whom present friendly actors viewed as their adversaries.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the question of Britain and pan-Europeanism: both as a concept, and in its present form in the European Union.
Because of the final outcome, the lineage and, in some ways, the toxicity of this debate, attempting to unravel concepts of British pan-European identity is often a non sequitur and either ends with a misrepresentation of the entire issue or, more likely, someone shouting about ‘the bloody Boriswave’. Therefore, let us preface the following thesis with this: there is no denying that immigration is a core aspect of Britain’s relations with the EEC/EU and was central in why the country voted to leave the bloc in 2016. Powell’s dockworkers, Jack Straw’s attempt to crack down on those lorries, and Cameron’s ‘emergency brake’ are well-known, as is Merkel’s rigid adherence to the ‘four freedoms’, as are the plucky underdogs who took on the British and European establishment and sought to restore our sovereignty in order to close the borders.
These events, and the subsequent period of parliamentary frustration after the Brexit vote, are (rightly) important milestones for many of us who subscribe to a certain political view of the world and came of age in this time, as are, no less, the subsequent betrayals on immigration that led to our present situation and the ascent of Reform. They are probably even more important milestones for those five or more (and sometimes many more) years older than us. Older readers, in the editor-in-chief’s experience, usually show considerably rigidity of thought on all matters European. This is completely understandable: they, unlike the authors of this article, were directly involved in the ideological and political battles we are trying to describe dispassionately. But this should not obstruct us from soberly considering our position to better glimpse the best path forwards.
Somewhat strangely, we stand at a good vantage point to do so in 2025. The issue, broadly speaking, seems settled, except perhaps on the edges. Even while every metric points towards a Farage premiership in 2029, the topic of discussion once so closely tied to his name is now barely an afterthought in contemporary discourse. Many Liberal Democrat politicians, and some Labour politicians also, will still pay lip-service to ‘Rejoiner’ sentiments now and again; however, as a general rule, most people, and especially the Labour Party, just hope that the old dog will lie dead. Starmer’s much-vaunted reset of relations with the European Union has thus far come to almost nothing. The only recent contribution in attempting to expand the topic beyond the accepted narrative of ‘Europe’ being little more than a veneer for disquiet over migration comes from Tom McTague, whose 2025 book Between the Waves oozes with the desperation of a movement that wishes that the zealotry of the past could be transplanted into the present moribund trajectory of social-democratic politics.
This article attempts to explore a different dimension to these questions and how, specifically, visions of Britain as a leading — if not the leading — power in a European bloc were a key aspect of many strains of British centre-right, radical-right, and far-right thinking in the post-war years. Rather than the Brexiteer conception of pro-European politicians conceiving of Britain’s future as being little more than a province of the continent, or as something downstream of a prejudice that anything that was not related to Europe could not possibly thrive, there was a consistent belief that Britain was not just capable of taking a place in any wider European confederation as a main player, but that it could, and should, become the dominant force in this bloc and that taking up this role was a necessity to both the nation and the continent’s survival.
We must begin with a disclaimer: this is not a comprehensive history, nor an analysis of the feasibility of these plans, let alone their actual desirability. Even less it is a defence of those who believed in them: in particular, Pimlico Journal has previously denounced Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath, and John Major as people who, even before we consider the matter of Europe, must unambiguously be considered villains of our recent history. Rather, it is an attempt to show how different conceptions of Britain and Europe percolated, almost exclusively within the political elite, and what they meant for their conception of Britain’s ultimate geopolitical and civilisational destiny.
Therefore, we will begin with the only prominent British politician to articulate an expansive and rival vision of pan-Europeanism to what was eventually pursued. He also happens to be one of the most controversial figures of the last century: Oswald Mosley.
‘It comes back to Britain, we must bring Britain, with all our knowledge, with our character, with our gifts, with our territories, into this immense concern which is going to be Europe and is going to save mankind.’
—Oswald Mosley, 1963
Oswald Mosley is most well-known as the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the interwar years. His numerous campaigns both as a man and as a politician all failed: from his economic memorandum, to his pro-Edward VIII stance, to his ill-fated attempt to avoid the country entering another world war. His pan-Europeanist turn after 1945 was no different, but it is worth examining all the same.
As a result of his pro-German activities, he would be interned without charge shortly after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. The BUF was proscribed and disbanded. Mosley would be released from prison in November 1943, but remained under house arrest until the end of the war. It was while he was confined that he began to formulate the supranational, pan-Europeanist ideas which would define his successor party, the far-right Union Movement (UM), and his doctrine of ‘Europe, A Nation’.
Emerging from his internment to find the old continent decimated and being picked over by the Americans and the Soviets, he reorganised the remnants of his interwar movement and began to advocate for rapid and comprehensive European integration in order for the continent to meet the challenge of an age of superpower rivalry. For Mosley, this union was to be so complete that one would be able to speak of Europe as a true nation, in the sense of petty nationalism playing no coherent factor on the instrumentation and reality of politics; or, as Mosley put it, ‘…the struggle of Britain and Germany, either in terms of trade or culture, will then be no more acute than the contest between Yorkshire and Lancashire within present Britain, or between Prussia and Bavaria within present Germany.’
Financial independence was also a core theme, with Mosley blaming trade competition for both the wars of the past and the present exploitation of Europe by foreign powers. Yet Mosley had not abandoned his former support for imperialism: far from it. A key component of European political and economic liberation was a United Europe retaining its then large-scale holdings in Africa, not simply just for the abundant natural resources and development that had been sunk into the continent — thus allowing for it to escape thraldom to the dollar on world markets — but also because of the European settlers residing in the colonies. In this, Mosley was closest to the forefathers of the present EU: the 1950 Schuman Declaration, which laid the foundations for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), explicitly stated that the development of Africa was a core European task.
French Imperial Unionists, German proponents of ‘Eurafrica’, and even British socialists who saw Africa as fertile ground for developmental agriculture (consider the ill-fated Tanganyika groundnut scheme) would all find common cause in the establishment of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC, the predecessor of the OECD), which stated that ‘…it is in the interest of the whole free world that the [colonial] territories, which form part of it, should endeavour to speed up and increase the production of scarce material.’ Mosley’s model was therefore not only imperial in vision and detail, but was generally in line with British late-stage imperialism and indeed with other, more mainstream, ideas of pan-Europeanism at this time.
Whilst these ideas were nothing new, and on the continent the ’20s — the era of shattered empires and unconsolidated nation-states — had been seen as the premier decade of European cosmopolitanism (albeit not a form of cosmopolitanism that would fit today’s definition), it is unsurprising that political visions of a United Europe were advocated for by the veterans of the interwar fascist movements. Fascism had put forward a creed of identity based on European race and nationhood; arrayed against this creed was a common foe in Soviet Communism. These fascist movements, as all serious modern scholars of fascism would concur (albeit, predictably, with some caveats), conceived of themselves not as conservative or reactionary but as fundamentally progressive and expansive, championing modernisation and the creation of a ‘new man’. These beliefs could be easily adapted into an even more expansive form — this time explicitly civilisational. Naturally, this new approach was given considerable momentum by the fact that Europe was on its knees after years of conflict and at the mercy of the two surviving ideological superpowers.
Oswald Mosley was instrumental in the formation of the European Social Movement (ESM), founded in 1951 in Malmö, which brought together far-right figures across Western Europe. The ESM was explicitly dedicated to the role of advancing Europe as a nation, and viewed what eventually became the European Union as a retarding force on real integration and, accordingly, as merely a tool of foreign powers. It represented the most prominent rival pan-European grouping to the establishment Christian Democrat-Social Democrat forces behind the Schuman Plan, and Britain — or, at the very least, Mosley’s delegation — was a key participant in its structure and organisation.
But just because this was a natural direction for post-war fascist movements to take did not mean that such a path was not fraught with difficulties for Mosley and his fellow pan-Europeanists. In their attempts to establish a rival form of unification, Britain’s UM and their European partners established the National Party of Europe (NPE) in Venice in 1962, which had explicitly political (rather than vaguely civilisational) aims. It quickly found, however, that beyond a shared interest in grappling explicitly with questions of civilisational identity and common struggle, there was little else to unite its components. The French and Swedish delegations soon split to form a rival Yockeyite grouping in protest at the lack of a coherent racial policy. There was also discord within many sympathetic national parties over NPE’s perceived ambivalence on communism, as its leaders argued that a fratricidal war was not practical for European unity.
Mosley ultimately retreated from these appearances and became more and more obsessed with the conception of Britain as a unified bloc of nations; the oldest still-existing European country which was fundamentally composite, naturally lending itself to a belief in Britain’s destiny to be uniquely positioned in guiding Europe towards a higher synthesis. As Britain is, Europe shall be.
Despite the rhetoric of a ‘Europe of Nations’ resembling the ancient Hellenic city states, there was no escaping the fact that the Union Movement was a one-man show, which led to discord not just with Mosley’s European partner parties, but at home as well. It was probably always impossible for a cause championed by a man who most Britons thought of as the worst kind of traitor to succeed electorally. Whilst Mosley would continue canvassing in the early ’60s, steering UM away from Africa as a central plank as decolonisation irreversibly took hold and attempting to recapture the zeitgeist by standing against mass commonwealth immigration — an issue that obviously attracted far more grassroots enthusiasm than pan-Europeanist, ‘civilisational’, concerns — his final fate was to be far more influential outside of his own home country. ‘Europe, A Nation’ would find its most receptive audience amongst intellectuals of the French Nouvelle Droite and the German journal Nation Europa.
Back in Britain, Mosley’s new doctrine was deemed too radical and, regardless of whatever virtues it may or may not have had, in practice resulted in Mosley’s main impact on the radical-right and far-right British scene after 1945 being to split the movement into a bunch of squabbling factions. UM was effectively defunct from 1966, and it was formally dissolved in 1973 (although an affiliated publishing house survived for some time longer). Nowadays, the biggest association of the name ‘Mosley’ in a pan-European context is that of his Formula 1 pioneer son Max, who canvassed with Oswald towards the end of his life and never completely forswore elements of his father’s vision.
Virtually all of Mosley’s contemporaries in the British far-right were arrayed against UM, with most of UM’s support being contained to the older generation of interwar activists. This meant that the development of far-right politics in Britain was to follow an almost exclusively nationalistic, anti-European line for the next fifty or so years, and this trend became more and more exaggerated over time. Organisations such as the League of Empire Loyalists (1954-67) and the original, short-lived, British National Party (1960-67) — along with individuals who had previously broken with Mosley, such as AK Chesterton and Colin Jordan — would eventually form the conglomerate of the National Front (NF), founded in 1967. NF, to which UM haemorrhaged members, reached its zenith in the ’70s as the question of Europe became more central to mainstream politics.
Radical-right and far-right issues were initially framed around the imperial legacy, both the dismantling of the Empire and the subsequent waves of Commonwealth migration to Britain, and then became much more ‘anti-European’ with the emergence of the Conservative (later UUP) MP Enoch Powell as both the leading anti-immigration and the leading (right-wing) anti-EEC politician in the country in the late ’60s. Almost all dissident thinking thus coalesced around the ‘anti-European’ camp: partly due to (genuine, rather than imagined) imperial nostalgia that had still faced no substantial reckoning; and partly due to the (not wholly unjustified) association of pro-marketeer policies and, more specifically, pro-EEC politicians with extremely liberal attitudes towards immigration.
Therefore, it was not until the ’90s and, ironically, with the future BNP (founded 1982) leader Nick Griffin — a man most people will associate with the most parochial of ‘Little Englander’, ‘white van man’ sentiments — that any substantial element of pan-European thinking was to germinate again on the British far-right. Griffin’s relationship with the question of Europe was, of course, inexorably linked with that of mass immigration; and, unlike Mosley, he was active in an age where this was becoming a problem that quite obviously spanned, or at least would eventually span, all of European civilisation. Griffin’s ideological and career path can therefore be seen through the lens of grappling with potential solutions to this issue, beginning with his time as a young man in the NF, during which he was a leading proponent of the ‘Political Soldier’ contingent who flirted with broader third-positionist ideals, especially those of spiritual and racial conceptions of man and philosophy.
Griffin changed tack once this strand of thinking lost out to what was dubbed ‘The Flag Group’, and fell in behind the strategy of nationalistic populism. This strategy would contribute to his later successes as the BNP leader in the ’00s, which featured Griffin quoting Churchill, chuntering about local politics à la the Homeland Party, producing low-budget films about Admiral Nelson and, perhaps most bizarrely, hosting a British-themed cooking show. But regardless of the effectiveness of all these enterprises, Griffin won himself and his party two seats in the European Parliament in 2009. He even appeared on Question Time in that same year (but found himself in trouble as his fellow guests asked him about his views on the Holocaust, to which he failed to give a clear answer).
This would prove to be the party’s zenith. Through a mixture of infighting, state suppression (including leaks of the membership rolls in 2008 and 2009), and Griffin’s enduring tendency to self-implode, the party was nearly extinct by the time of the next European elections in 2014. By this time, Griffin had returned to the spirit of his youth and was giving speeches as an MEP decrying that ‘an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our homelands’, before fading into irrelevance. Griffin, of course, had no wider conception of pan-Europeanism outside of the existential threat Europe faced (and continues to face) from immigration, and was merely one of many across the continent to grapple with the best way to confront it. This initially took a broader, tepidly pan-Europeanist line, before finding some degree of electoral success with the conclusion that the EU was completely ill-suited to dealing with the issue of immigration, thus advocating British withdrawal, and then finally abandoning this and returning to a broader racial rhetoric that resulted in his (entirely ignored) millenarian Benedictine harpings today.
Outside of Mosley, then, the history of the British far-right relating to Europe is one of little to no serious impact and, compared to its closest neighbours, an almost total aversion to anything that grapples with Britain’s destiny within Europe. It was therefore left to mainstream post-war politicians to elucidate what this relationship should be. Ironically, in their manoeuvrings, they fell far closer to Mosley’s vision than that of their continental rivals.
‘We are not entering Europe to be swallowed up by it. We are entering Europe to lead it.’
—Edward Heath, 1971
Britain finally entered the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973 under Edward Heath’s ill-fated Tory government. That Heath was a fervent pro-European, both in the sense of being pro-EEC and in the sense of being in favour of European unity in general, is well-known. What is rather less well-known is that at the heart of Heath’s geopolitical strategy was the desire to dilute the bilateral dominance of Europe by France and West Germany.
Since the ’50s, the Franco-German partnership had been the engine of European integration, driving initiatives like the Coal and Steel Community and the Common Agricultural Policy. The previous abortive attempts to enter by Macmillan and Wilson clashed with French President Charles de Gaulle’s conception of what Europe was and should become. De Gaulle viewed the EEC as a vehicle for French grandeur, with Europe being most easily categorised in his own terms as an extension of French civilisation. This naturally made him deeply sceptical of British intentions, and he feared that Britain’s entry would diminish French power, as well as operate as a backdoor for American influence. In 1963, he vetoed Britain’s application, citing these economic and political incompatibilities, and then vetoed it again in 1967, raising concerns about Britain’s economic readiness and its commitment to integration.
De Gaulle’s vision of a ‘Europe of Nations’ did not include Britain as a leading architect and, in its rejection of deeper cultural confederation, it explicitly rejected Mosley’s desire to make Europe one. Heath, of course, never subscribed to Mosley’s doctrine. But scarred by Britain’s previous rejections and believing that missing the opportunity to shape the direction of the community was tantamount to world-historic decline, he concluded that British national power would have to therefore be elevated to competitor status within a European state structure in order to enact any continent-wide interest, given that France and Germany were concerned chiefly with their own placement.
This chimed with the history of British involvement for most of the modern age in the affairs of its neighbours, supplying the continental bloc with financial and mostly naval backing in order to enact its will. From the Napoleonic Wars to the Concert of Europe, British foreign policy was defined by its ability to shape continental events without being subsumed by them and minimising their most damaging effects. Heath and subsequent Conservative Prime Ministers therefore followed a conception that attempted to marry Britain’s history of foreign affairs on an imperial model within a European grouping. The balance of power would have to be revived for Britain to have any say in the future trajectory of Europe, and at the heart of Heath’s European strategy to achieve this was the desire to dilute Franco-German bilateral dominance.
Britain’s entry was one mechanism to triangulate this relationship and, following this theme, Heath advocated for measures that would lead to strategic parity. He pushed for reforms that would make the Council of Ministers more central to decision-making, thereby ensuring that national governments retained control over key policies and, in many ways, is credited with the democratisation of the veto held by constituent members. His government argued that Britain’s economy, with its smaller agricultural sector and larger industrial base, was structurally disadvantaged by the then design of the Common Agricultural Policy. In order to break the back of the duopoly proposed greater British control over European decision making, going so far as to override joint nuclear cooperation with France and even proposing a European nuclear force held in trusteeship which would cement Britain’s place as an inseparable part in the community.
The Thatcher years can be regarded as a stopgap between two enthusiastic British attempts to shape Europe’s future. It also marks a growing hostility with regard to the European question. The toleration of more Eurosceptic and right-wing figures in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party contributed to this, along with the economic situation driving her calls for a financial rebate from the community. Thatcher’s main contribution to the European debate before her premiership had amounted to little more than her famous knitted jumper in the 1975 referendum; now she was to play a crucial role in transforming the bloc. In 1986 she succeeded in framing and passing the Single European Act (SEA), liberalising trade across the bloc in an attempt to export Thatcherism continent-wide. This undoubtedly transformed Europe and can plausibly be cited as the biggest real British contribution to the project, allowing for the economic utilisation of a continent of 600 million people and for Britain, in Thatcher’s own words, ‘To create a single market with purchasing power bigger than Japan, bigger than the United States.’ But it also contained within the wording of the Act itself the seeds of the next three decades of Eurosceptic discontent: the SEA pledged its signatories to a future political European Union and subsequent monetary union.
Just two years later in 1988, by the time of her infamous Bruges Speech, these ripples had grown into a decisive faction within her own party and the outer cabinet. Her feelings on the matter reflected her perception that Britain had clearly lost dominance in Europe and that integration had been adopted through nefarious means, namely that of state bureaucracy or her barb of ‘creeping federalism’. Rather than Britain leading in Europe — a position she held downstream of her view of Churchill as the greatest man who ever lived — she began to see Europe as a blocker of British power and influence, as well as economically backwards.
She was ousted for unrelated reasons before these feelings could metastasise into a core tenet of Thatcherism, leading her acolytes to initially overlook her successor’s more ardent Europhilic tendencies.
‘We must not allow ourselves to be pushed to the margins of Europe. We must be in the mainstream, shaping the future.’
—John Major, 1992
Major has a good claim to be Britain’s most Europhilic Prime Minister, perhaps surpassing even Heath by virtue of his genuine passion for elucidating the cause. Major was the most vigorous champion of the view that not only Britain’s future lay in Europe, but Europe’s future in turn lay with Britain. He was committed to British dominance of Europe at the expense of all other national capacities — and even, on several occasions, basic political and economic reality.
This aspect of his time in office is often overlooked by the terms of the contemporary debate on Europe and the overshadowing of Brexit, whereby all anti-Brexit politicians wish — and still do wish — to see is Britain subsumed into a European superstate, with the implicit (but highly-emphasised) point that this would involve a large negation of Britain’s sovereignty, global power, and independence. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that membership of the present European Union does indeed require a serious diminution in the power of the nation-state, the focus on the issue of sovereignty has the potential to mislead; crucial historical motivations and trajectories can be missed, however fruitless these motivations and trajectories may ultimately have been.
A central tenet of support for British membership amongst a faction of its national elite was always the potential to mould a broader European grouping to Britain’s will. For Major, this extended to the view that Britain, not Germany, should be the dominant power in the EU. The economic advantage Britain seemed to have built up under Margaret Thatcher would allow Britain to leverage its now-preeminent economic position to create a new European Union in its own image. Going even further, perhaps it was also the case that the bloc itself was now reliant upon Britain’s continued membership and could not survive without it. Andrew Neil records Major once turning up to a dinner in the early ’90s and exclaiming his sincere wish, without any apparent irony, that Sterling should supplant the Deutschmark within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Regardless of the plausibility of these aims — Black Wednesday and the UK’s subsequent expulsion from the ERM would follow but months later — one cannot say that Major’s desire to position Britain as the financial anchor of Europe was somehow ‘unambitious’.
Unlike the post-war idealists who saw European unity as a moral imperative to prevent future conflict, Major’s conception was also far more geopolitically realist in orientation. His support for enlargement to Eastern Europe was both a gesture of solidarity and a calculated move to dilute Franco-German dominance and expand Britain’s sphere of influence over the bloc. As Major told his cabinet in 1992, ‘We have a unique opportunity to lead Europe in a direction that suits our national interest.’ To have British dominion over the Europe within his grasp, however, meant a blinkered focus on this vision over any other avenue or concern. By believing that Britain could reshape the institutional architecture of the EU through its financial leverage, taking tentative steps towards this by opting out of measures such as the social charter, everything was staked on the performance of the British economy and following through to what was perceived to be the logical endpoint of Thatcherism.
This, no matter how well-intentioned, would be a decisive factor in the development of a certain strand of Euroscepticism that saw anything European as a dead-end for Britain. A young Nigel Farage, who would leave the Conservative Party in the year of Maastricht, would protest Major’s closure of the surviving Nottinghamshire pits on the grounds that such a move was unnecessary. A surviving competitive industry had been sacrificed on the altar of a national development strategy that hedged all its bets on financial services. Black Wednesday finally smashed Major’s vision to smithereens as sheer German industrial size, along with an unusual alignment of the German national interest (namely, Helmut Kohl’s expensive interpretation of reunification) and supranational interest, resulted in the Bundesbank keeping German interest rates abnormally high at a time when the pound was acutely vulnerable. Herein is found the recurring systemic problem with the aims pursued by Europhile British politicians in this period: namely, that most European governments would undoubtedly pursue their own aims as Britain would try to, in a sphere for economic competition that the Single European Act of 1986 had initiated.
From this point onwards, the story follows the much more familiar route for most readers and would culminate in the Brexit vote of 2016. British influence was minimised through a combination of European shibboleths and Britain’s own ineptitude. Both strands of right-wing British Europeanism — Mosley’s grand conception of a singular nation of hundreds of millions and the various Conservative attempts to dominate this market through imperial mechanisms and ingratiation — did not come to pass.
Most strikingly, as a case study in the various conceptions of European Unity that eventually won out, returning to the 1962 National Party of Europe Conference, Italy’s delegation, mostly made up of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), was denounced as too domestic in its outlook. Yet MSI is the only surviving attendee to have enjoyed any mainstream electoral success, becoming Italy’s fourth-largest party in the ’60s. Indeed, the current Italian Prime Minister, FdI’s Giorgia Meloni, was a member of the MSI’s youth wing and leader of the AN (the MSI’s successor party) youth wing, before eventually leaving to help found FdI with other leading members of AN.
This is a pattern that would later be replicated in the mainstream European Union, with the concept of Europe becoming — at best — an addendum to national feeling, and at worst to a greater or lesser extent antithetical to it, and hence kept pan-Europeanist sentiments vague or subsumed into a national interest in continuing to be part of the existing European superstate structure. In this sense, despite denunciations today of his delusions, De Gaulle’s vision of a ‘Europe of Nations’ is closest to the Europe we see today.
But what of it? What did it all come to? The singular strand from Churchill’s desire for a United States of Europe, to Mosley’s ‘Europe, A Nation’, to Major’s conception of a European economic powerhouse, is that a truly united Europe must be accomplished through British action.
Europe is beset by crises of a civilisational — not a national — nature. Unless the future of our continent is to be ghettos of discontent, violence, and ethnic strife, these questions of immigration, geopolitical weight, and access to economic resources must be confronted by united forces. No single country can enact ‘remigration’. Nor can a single country achieve economic independence or recover geopolitical relevance in a vacuum.
As with all serious nations, Britain’s history is one of imperialism: from Henry III and Edward III’s holdings in France, to the globe-spanning dominion of the nineteenth century. In this vision, Europe potentially offers Britain a future to take up this standard once more; to lead the way for the politics of the future, composite, civilisational structures that operate as one, cohesive, nation-state. As with the greatest of past European empires our task is, as the Lord Protector once said, ‘…to render the English name as great and formidable as ever the Roman was.’
This article was written by William Denman, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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