United States of Europe


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Bell opposed easing rationing in Great Britain after the war so that sufficient food would be available for the Germans. He was against the removal of German industrial facilities as reparations since he considered Germany’s reconstruction to be indispensable to all of Europe. Logically, he also declared himself against the partitioning of Germany and propagated a “United States of Europe”.


He believed that, The future of Europe is inescapably bound up with Germany …If Germany is divided, Europe will be divided. … British foreign policy should be against the further division of Europe. So far as we can arrange or promote it, there must be no iron screen, either in imagination or reality … Let Europe be envisaged as a whole; let the old national disruptions and the old national barricades come to an end, so far as we can help it. Let the economic interdependence of all Europe, whether East or West, be one of our foreign policy aims, and, as a part of that, the economic interdependence of the east and west of Germany. (Speech in the House of Lords on June 11, 1947, quoted from Raina, Bell, 107ff.) He therefore propagated the … progressive establishment of a United States of Europe with a common foreign, military, and economic policy (Resolution for the Province of Canterbury, October 1947, quoted from Coupland, Bell, p. 319).


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