Ideas of European unity before 1945

The idea of European unity is a historically recent concept.

The name Europe originally referred to only the south-eastern part of the continent, in the same way that Asia originally referred to western Anatolia, and Africa referred to the northern portion of the African continent. It was the Greek civilisation that first used these names in their modern senses.

The first proposal for peacefully unifying Europe against a common enemy emerged after the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. George of Podebrady, a Hussite king of Bohemia, proposed in 1464 a union of European, Christian nations against the Turks. However, his proposal was based on the nations' shared religious ideology, and there is no evidence that he viewed their common geographic location as particularly significant.

The Frankish Empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire united large areas of Germany, Italy, and France under a loose administration for hundreds of years without articulating an idea of European unity. However, the concept of a Europe made up of those parts of the continent occupied by Germanic peoples had become common by the 19th century, as is evidenced in Russian philosopher Danilevsky's Russia and Europe. The idea of Germany and Europe being coterminous was taken to its fateful conclusion by Adolf Hitler.

Kikuchi Yoshio (菊池良生) of Meiji University suggested that the notion of Holy Roman Empire as a federal political entity influenced the later structural ideas of the European Union.

In 1693, William Penn looked at the devastation of war in Europe and wrote of a "European dyet, or parliament", to prevent further war, without further defining how such an institution would fit into the political reality of Europe at the time.

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