European Parliamentarians Union

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The European Parliamentarians Union (l'Union parlementaire européenne) was from 1947 to 1952 an amalgamation of parliamentarians from various Western European states with the aim of unifying Europe. In 1952 it joined forces with the European Movement .

The initiative to found the European Parliamentarians Union (EPU) came from Count Coudenhove-Kalergi , who founded the Paneuropean Union in the early 1920s and played a key role in the Paneuropean movement in the interwar period. In exile in the United States during World War II , von Coudenhove had developed the idea of ​​a “European Constituent Assembly” for the time after the war. When he returned to Europe in 1946, he wanted to promote a pan-European new beginning after the two world wars. He advised the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and had written his famous speech in Zurich . However, his attempts to create a joint organization with Churchill and his son-in-law Duncan Sandys initially failed. Von Coudenhove then convened the founding congress of the European Parliamentarians' Union in Gstaad, Switzerland in 1947 and became its General Secretary. The aim of the participating parliamentarians from many European countries was to form a European assembly from delegates from the national European parliaments . In 1952, the EPU merged with the European Movement , founded in 1948, and formed the Parliamentary Council of the European Movement with its parliamentary group . Count von Coudenhove-Kalergi was appointed Honorary President of the European Movement.

The EPU reached that founded in 1949, Council of Europe (Council of Europe) unless the Council of Ministers a second body as a consultative parliamentary assembly got and the Statute of the Council of Europe as " Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe " was anchored. With that began the history of European parliamentarism. In the Parliamentary Assembly the representatives of the national parliaments from Europe worked together. In addition to politicians such as Konrad Adenauer , Winston Churchill , Alcide de Gasperi , Robert Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak , von Coudenhove also participated in the work of the Parliamentary Assembly, although he himself did not have a national parliamentary mandate.

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