He was swept along by a wave of enthusiasm. On June 16, Churchill was personally skeptical but presented the idea to the all-party British Cabinet. Churchill’s private secretary said, “We had before us the bridge to a new world, the first elements of European or even World Federation.”Įvents moved fast. The two parliaments would be united, presumably with French representatives sitting in the House of Commons in London. There would be joint control of defense, foreign policy, finance, and economic policy. The document stated: “At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world, the Governments of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union and unyielding resolution in their common defense of justice and freedom against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves.” This meant: “France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union.”Īt a stroke, hundreds of years of constitutional history would be swept away. The goal was to effectively create one country. During the next 48 hours, British and French civil servants drafted a proposal for a “Declaration on Franco-British Union.” This was no beefed-up wartime alliance, or a plan for partial integration similar to today’s European Union. Catastrophe was about to turn impossibility into official policy. The plan that emerged-to unify Britain and France into a single state-was not entirely new: The idea of integrating the European countries had floated around political circles for a few years, but always seemed fantastical. Defeatism was rife in France, and a dramatic step was needed to encourage the country to keep fighting from its colonies, and to stop the French fleet from falling into German hands. On May 10, 1940, Germany had begun a relentless Blitzkrieg assault on France, and within a month, French resistance had largely collapsed. But the drama of that near-fusion can help explain the origins of European integration-and the reasons why Britain ultimately pulled away from the European Union in the decision we know as Brexit. Although that battle story is fairly well known, the accompanying political drama that almost saw Britain and France merge is now largely forgotten. This was just two weeks after British and French troops were rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk, where they had become surrounded by German troops-a story captured in the new Christopher Nolan film Dunkirk. These two great symbols of patriotism and national independence made an incredible agreement: Britain and France should be united into a single country called the “Franco-British Union.” On June 16, 1940, with Nazi Germany on the brink of crushing France, British prime minister Winston Churchill and French undersecretary of defense Charles de Gaulle met for lunch at the Carlton Club in London.
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