The Europe That Lost Its Home: Why Churchill Would Probably Laugh at Our Mess
Almost nobody reads that speech anymore. I’m talking about Zurich, September 1946. Winston Churchill exhausted, just ousted from power despite having won the war steps up to a university podium and says things that today sound either visionary or just hopelessly naive. Every time I go back to it, I feel a knot in my stomach. Not because Churchill was right about everything- he certainly wasn't -but because the gap between what he envisioned and what we actually became is cavernous. It’s a gap that the bureaucrats in Brussels stubbornly refuse to acknowledge, because if they did, they’d have to admit their entire edifice is made of cardboard. When Churchill spoke of a United States of Europe, he wasn't thinking about directives on the size of cucumbers. He was talking about a shared fate. He spoke of spirit and Christian ethics not necessarily in a religious sense, but as a moral code that holds us together. He understood something we seem to have lost today. Institutions wi...