Overview

The European Union is facing today the greatest crisis since its creation. Brexit could mean not only the reversal of its steady enlargement—from 6 to 28 member states—but also the beginning of an inexorable decline leading to its disintegration. However, few today seem to recollect that it was precisely the British who were the first to promulgate the political culture which inspired the European Union’s construction—democracy and federalism—and the first who tried to realise, in June 1940, a European federation on the basis of an Anglo-French union.This volume traces the fundamental stages of the European unification process, placing it in relation to the wider process of world economic and political integration. In particular, it analyses the historical significance of the European Revolution, which is identified in the overcoming of the nation state—namely the modern political formula which institutionalised the political division of mankind—and the birth of the first truly international state. The universal historical significance of the European Revolution lies in its exportability—as for the other great European revolutions—and, therefore, its potential as progressively extensible to all the states of the planet. Europe was indeed the first region of the world where the barriers between national states fell, and a post-national political identity emerged, complementary to national political identities. It is, in fact, in the context of the European Union that democracy beyond the borders of the nation state has first been realized, constituting a guiding principle for global governance.

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9781527547896

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Andrea Bosco is Director of the Lothian Foundation. He has been a Jean Monnet “ad personam” Chairholder on the History and Theory of European Integration at the University of Florence, Italy, and South Bank University, London. He has published extensively on the history and theory of federalism and European unification, and on British Imperial and foreign policy in the twentieth century, with a number of books to his credit, including The Federal Idea (1992-3); Chatham House and British Foreign Policy 1919-1945 (1996); Lord Lothian and the Creation of the Atlantic System (2012); Towards a Substantial European Union: The Euro and the Struggle for the Creation of a New Global Currency (2016); June 1940. Great Britain and the First Attempt to Create a European Union (2016); and The Round Table Movement and the Fall of the ‘Second’ British Empire (2017), among others.

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