D-DAY INVASION /June 6, 1944 : THE INVASION OF NORMANDY : REFLECTIONS ON EUROPE

Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British statesman and Prime Minister in a speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

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Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), West German Chancellor, in a speech delivered May, 1953:

“We must free ourselves from thinking in terms of nation states...The countries of western Europe are no longer in a position to protect themselves individually; not one of them is any longer in a position to salvage Europe’s culture.”

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Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), French General and President of the Fifth Republic, from War Memoirs, Vol. III, of the Potsdam Conference in 1945:

“(In 1945) I intended to safeguard the primacy of France in western Europe by preventing the rise of a new Reich which might again threaten its safety; to cooperate with East and West...to transform the French Union into a free association to avoid dangers of upheaval not yet perceived; to persuade the states along the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees to form a political, economic and strategic bloc; and to establish this association as one of the three world powers, acting if necessary as arbiter between the Soviet and Anglo-American camps. Since 1940 every word and every act of mine was dedicated to bringing about this possibility.”

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Jean Monnet (1888-1979), French politician and economist and former head of the European Community:

“New bonds between peoples and the realization of their mutual solidarity are already beginning to take hold. As the Community’s impact gradually increases, these bonds will be strengthened. Then it will become possible to find the way towards establishing a political union and reaching the Community’s objectives: the United States of Europe.”

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Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister, in an interview in 1993:

“What I am worried about is Europe becoming isolated...We’ve piled such high costs onto our industry--the prices are too high, we’re non-competitive. We have our agriculture at enormously high subsidized rates. But the (European) Commission are protectionists. And some countries in Europe are protectionist...It’s absolutely absurd. (Francois) Mitterrand has tried to have a rule to restrict American films to a percentage coming into Europe. I said, “What are you doing? I thought France made good films. What are you afraid of?”

Sources: Quotations in History, Los Angeles Times