What do you think of Victor Hugo's speech on the United States of Europe?

[Julie4]

"A day will come when you, France, you, Russia, you, Italy, you, England, you, Germany, all you nations of the continent, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious individuality, will merge closely into a higher unity and constitute the European fraternity, just as Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Lorraine, Alsace, all our provinces, have merged into France. A day will come when there will be no more battlefields other than markets open to commerce and minds open to ideas. A day will come when bullets and bombs will be replaced by votes, by the universal suffrage of peoples, by the venerable arbitration of a great sovereign Senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, what the Diet is to Germany, what the Legislative Assembly is to France! A day will come when a cannon will be displayed in museums just as an instrument of torture is shown today, with astonishment that such a thing could have existed! A day will come when we will see these two immense groups, the United States of America and the United States of Europe, facing each other, reaching out over the seas, exchanging their products, their commerce, their industry, their arts, their geniuses.

And that day will not take four hundred years to arrive, for we live in rapid times, we live in the most impetuous flow of events and ideas that has ever swept the peoples along, and in the era we are in, a year sometimes accomplishes the work of a century.

In our old Europe, England has taken the first step, and by its age-old example, it has told the peoples: You are free. France has taken the second step and it has told the peoples: You are sovereign. Now let us take the third step, and all together, France, England, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Europe, America, let us say to the peoples: You are brothers!"

[RavVid]

Prescient to a degree. I don't when he wrote that but it din't really look likely in the 1800's when he lived.

[Julie4]

This was in 1849

[RavVid]

Well after Napoleon and just after the Communist Manifesto and the French Revolution II and the Second Republic. Gotta give him creds :).

[Julie4]

It's practically the European Union that Victor Hugo describes here lol

[RavVid]

Yes and on steroids as well. It is something that could have been written late 1940's.

[RyanEC]

Well I believe Europe should be unified but I don’t think the individual nations should lose their individuality or sovereignty.


I half agree.

[Julie4]

" all you nations of the continent, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious individuality, will merge closely into a higher unity and constitute the European fraternity... "

It doesn't really talk about European unification.

It sounds more like Eu lol

[RyanEC]

There were actually a lot of people talking about concepts of a European Union around this time as I understand.

[DarkLegacy]

That clearly failed when we voted to leave the EU and we may not be the last.

[Astarlessnightsky]

Most of it became true

[handsomelad70]

What about us POC?