European integration is the process of industrial, political, legal, economic (and in some cases social and cultural) integration of states wholly or partially in Europe. European integration has primarily come about through the European Union and the Council of Europe.

One of the first to conceive of a union of European nations was Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who wrote the Pan-Europa manifesto in 1923. His ideas influenced Aristide Briand, who gave a speech in favour of a European Union in the League of Nations on 8 September 1929, and who in 1930 wrote a "Memorandum on the Organization of a Regime of European Federal Union" for the Government of France, which became the first European government formally to adopt the principle.

We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only, will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living.

Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ mɔnɛ]; 9 November 1888 – 16 March 1979) was a French political economist and diplomat. He is regarded by many as a chief architect of European Unity and is regarded as one of its founding fathers. Never elected to public office, Monnet worked behind the scenes of American and European governments as a well-connected pragmatic internationalist.

Monnet was born in Cognac, Charente, into a family of cognac merchants. At the age of sixteen, he abandoned his university-entrance examinations part way through and moved to London where he spent some years in the City of London with Mr. Chaplin, the agent of his father's company. Subsequently, he traveled widely – to Scandinavia, Russia, Egypt, Canada, and the United States – for the family business.

Monnet believed that the only path that would lead to an Allied victory lay in the merging of France and Britain's war efforts and he reflected on a concept that would co-ordinate war resources. In 1914, young Monnet was allowed to meet French Premier René Viviani on this issue. The French government agreed in principle upon his plans. During the first years of the war Monnet had not much success, promoting and pressing internationally for a better organization of the allied economic cooperation. However, finally, stronger combines like the Wheat Executive (end of 1916) and the Allied Maritime Transport Council (end of 1917) were set into work and had a big share^{[citation needed]} in winning the war.

Roger Helmer (born 25 January 1944 in London) is a British business executive and politician and a United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands region. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1999 as a Conservative Party MEP, and re-elected in 2004 and 2009. In March 2012 he defected from the Conservatives to UKIP.

On 12 October 2011 Helmer announced that he would resign from the European Parliament at the end of the year, citing "increasing disillusion with the attitudes of the Conservative Party" as the main reason, although admitting that his "twelve-and-a-half years banging my head against the same brick wall in Brussels is perhaps long enough". Helmer expected to be replaced by Rupert Matthews who was next on the Conservative party list in the European Parliament election, 2009. However the Tory party was reported to be looking into golliwog dolls featuring on the front cover of a book published by a company of which Matthews is director and shareholder and would not confirm that Matthews would succeed him. Helmer delayed standing down before deciding to defect to UKIP with the intention to fulfil his term until 2014.

Jürgen Kocka (born 19 April 1941, in Haindorf) is a German historian.

A university professor and former president of the Social Science Research Center Berlin (2001–2007), Kocka is a major figure in the new Social History, especially as represented by the Bielefeld School. He has focused his research on the history of employees in large German and American businesses, and on the history of European bourgeoisie. He gained his PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1968.

From 1992 to 1996 Kocka was the founding director and is to date a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. Since 2008 he is vice president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Inspired by the methods of Ernest Labrousse, he attempts to analyze social processes of German society from the perspective of modernisation, industrialization, and the creation of modern Europe.

Kocka participated in the German Historikerstreit in the late 1980s, alongside Jürgen Habermas in opposition to Ernst Nolte, and supported the Sonderweg explanation of a unique path of German history. In an essay entitled "Hitler Should Not Be Repressed By Stalin and Pol Pot" first published in Die Zeit newspaper on 26 September 1986, Kocka contended against Nolte that the Holocaust was indeed a “singular” event because it had been committed by an advanced Western nation, and argued that Nolte’s comparisons of the Holocaust with similar mass killings in Pol Pot's Cambodia, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, and Idi Amin's Uganda were invalid because of the backward nature of those societies. Kocka went on to criticize Nolte's view of the Holocaust as "a not altogether incomprehensible reaction to the prior threat of annihilation, as whose potential or real victims Hitler and the National Socialists allegedly were justifed in seeing themselves". Kocka wrote that