'Europe's nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.'
Jean Monnet was open about the way a European superstate would be created, by stealth and through lies, but the pro EU side continue to pretend/lie that this is not the aim. Whenever a Remoaner denies that the aim is a European superstate, they should be asked to explain Jean Monnet's comments.
This Jean Monnet quote is almost certainly made up. There’s no mention of it on any of the reputable online quotation sites, nor (apparently) in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotation. I’d also be slightly wary of any quote that doesn’t give full attribution – who said it, to whom, where/how was it recorded. Jean Monett seems to have made plenty of very pro-European Federation/Unity quotes – hardly surprising since he lived through 2 world wars, worked for the French government in exile in the UK/USA and saw the EC/EU as a way of avoiding future European conflict. Any of his genuine quotes would have done, but he never said anything about misleading the people and disguising the intent. There’s plenty of debate about it online, but it seems that “it is a paraphrase of a characterization of Monnet's intentions by British Conservative Adrian Hilton”, which has been taken by someone else and made into a definitive quote (from the US academic site WAISworld.org “Is the Jean Monnet Quote Apocryphal?” 23/05/2016).
ReplyDeleteNote that anybody registered on GoodReads can post a quote, so it’s fairly meaningless that it appears there.