European empire

"The world is developing into one not of nation states, but of empires. China is an empire. India is an empire. The US is an empire. We need to create a European Union that is capable of defending our interests."

Guy Verhofstadt talking to CNN yesterday.

“We got rid of them...We finally turned them [the UK] into a colony! And that was our plan from the first moment.”

One of Verhofstadt’s staffers recorded in a recent BBC Four documentary about the Brexit negotiations.

"Austria Hungary was a European Union that worked."

Helen Szamuely

“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” 

Joseph Chamberlain in 1904, quoted today in the Daily Telegraph by Robert Tombs.

"Having wilfully abandoned the British Empire, we are to enter the German Empire instead."

A.J.P. Taylor, Daily Express, May 1969

"The whole thing began with the Roman Empire. I wrote a book on this subject, and I think it’s probably right. The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions—in a Freudian way—to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it. Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically.
"The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. But fundamentally what it is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void."

Boris Johnson, who was criticised very hard in England and in Europe for comparing the EU to Hitler. 

"I used to think that England might become just a place that liked to be visited — like that island in J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose — but now I see that so many of the things worth seeing — old things — are disappearing so that England can become a huge Los Angeles, all motorways, getting about more important than actually getting anywhere. England is now going into Europe, not — as I had once expected and even hoped — America, and I think it will now have Europe’s faults without its virtues. The decimal coinage is a monstrosity, and soon there’ll be liters of beer, as in Nineteen Eighty–Four, and no cheap wine or caporal tobacco. Absorption, anyway, since England either has to absorb or be absorbed. Napoleon has won."

Anthony Burgess in an interview with John Cullinan in 1972.

"Now, it has become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis's words, 'Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.'"

Daniel Pipes, "The Islamic States of America?", FrontPageMagazine.com, September 23, 2004.