After initially trying to delay reunification, France embraced it, in exchange for Germany's reaffirming its commitment to
European unity and Franco-German leadership of the European community.
One of the more engaging sections of Reflections shows Conquest lashing out at the aberration of
European unity. Europe, he reminds us, is just another Idea, one that has spawned a tentacular bureaucracy and that seeks to impose on the divergent European states a counterfeit uniformity.
A concluding chapter briefly surveys how ecumenical thought has progressed on the subject of
European unity since 1945.
Dawson asserted that a European order could only be reached through a return to a Christian Europe, an idea that constituted a governing theme of The Making of Europe, in which he wrote: "The ultimate foundation of our culture is not the national state, but
European unity. It is true that this unity has not hitherto achieved political form .
In so doing fundamental questions are raised about sovereignty, subsidiarity, nationalism, federalism, cultural and linguistic diversity within
European unity, in a word a debate which searches for the soul of Europe.
And there was, yesterday, a real
European unity to recall our commitment and our will to preserve a strategic and economic sovereignty of Europe," he stated.
The island is known as the birthplace of the European Union because a manifesto for
European unity was written there during World War II, by exiled anti-Fascists.
Over his 16 years at the country's helm from 1982 until 1998 - first for West Germany and then for a united Germany - Mr Kohl combined a dogged pursuit of
European unity with a keen instinct for history.
Victory for Mr Macron, who had championed
European unity, could also strengthen the EU's hand in its complex divorce proceedings with Britain.
Rutte has said rejection of the association agreement would be a mistake and would weaken
European unity, but that if efforts to find a compromise failed at the weekend, he would have no choice.
While conservative David Maxwell Fyfe, aka Viscount Kilmuir, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain from 1954 to 1962, made some poor and unpopular decisions in his career, he was also a successful prosecutor at Nuremberg, promoted
European unity, and was one of the principal architects of the European Convention on Human Rights.