In the aftermath of the Second World War, and in the opening years of the Cold War, the bulk of intellectual thinking on international relations in Western Europe was based on the assumption that there was a recognisable group of states bound together by a common historical experience, common traditions and a common culture which could be loosely called ‘the West’. Most of its members were joined together by the common experience of being attacked by Nazi Germany. The revivified Germany (and Italy) of the post-war years, which by a desperate effort, not always given its proper value by its former enemies, had sloughed off and brought under control its authoritarian and aggressively nationalist past, joined them in an equally common anxiety about the military predominance in Central Europe of the Soviet Union. There was talk of ‘Atlantic Union’ – and indeed, with the exception of Austria and Switzerland, the only European states which lay outside the great advance of Russian power to lines of influence it had not enjoyed since the end of the Napoleonic era, were, in fact, riparian states of the Atlantic or of its Mediterranean extension.

Parallel with these developments, at least from the late 1940s onwards, one can trace the beginning of a common ‘European’ consciousness. In its internal aspects it took various forms ranging from outright federalism through the administrative federalism of the Action Group for Europe to a reviving nationalism expressed within a European framework, ‘l'Europe des patries’.