At the outset, I used to ask some of our friends if they knew who Herman Van Rompuy was. They has no clue, illustrating the "marketing" trumped civic knowledge. By a lot.
And few knew of the old Italian Communist, Altiero Spinelli, whose quote adorns one of the EU buildings.
The EU was never a true friend of the US, but mimicked one for a long time.
WIKI
Altiero Spinelli (31 August 1907 – 23 May 1986) was an Italian politician, political theorist and European federalist, referred to as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. A communist and militant anti-fascist in his youth, Spinelli spent 10 years imprisoned by the Italian fascist regime. Having grown disillusioned with Stalinism, he broke with the Communist Party of Italy in 1937. Interned in Ventotene during World War II, he, along with fellow democratic socialists, drafted the manifesto For a Free and United Europe (most commonly known as the Ventotene Manifesto) in 1941, considered a precursor of the European integration process.
Spinelli had a leading role in the foundation of the European Federalist Movement, and had a strong influence on the first few decades of post-World War II European integration. Later, he helped to re-launch the integration process in the 1980s. By the time of his death, he had been a member of the European Commission for six years, and a member of the European Parliament for ten years right up until his death. The main building of the European Parliament in Brussels is named after him.
Spinelli was born in Rome, the son of a socialist father. He joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) at age 17 in 1924. Following his entry into radical journalism, he was arrested in 1927 and spent ten years in prison and a further six in confinement. In June 1939 he was interned on the island of Ventotene (in Lazio) along with some eight hundred other political opponents of the regime. Here he became involved in the PCI underground. In 1937, he was expelled from the PCd’I for opposing Stalinism, undermining the Bolshevik ideology and supporting Trotskyism.
In June 1941, well before the outcome of the war was safely predictable, Spinelli and fellow prisoner Ernesto Rossi completed the Ventotene Manifesto, eventually entitled Per un’Europa libera e unita (”For a Free and United Europe. A Draft Manifesto”), which argued that, if the fight against the fascist powers were successful, it would be in vain if it merely led to the re-establishment of the old European system of sovereign nation-states in shifting alliances. This would inevitably lead to war again. The document called for the establishment of a European federation by the democratic powers after the war. Because of a need for secrecy and a lack of proper materials at the time, the Manifesto was written on cigarette papers, concealed in the false bottom of a tin box and smuggled to the mainland by Ursula Hirschmann. It was then circulated through the Italian Resistance, and was later adopted as the programme of the European Federalist Movement (MFE), which Spinelli, Colorni and some 20 others established, as soon as they were able to leave their internment camp. The founding meeting was held in clandestinity in Milan on the 27/28 of August 1943.[citation needed]
The Manifesto was widely circulated in other resistance movements towards the end of the war. Resistance leaders from several countries met clandestinely in Geneva in 1944, a meeting attended by Spinelli. The Manifesto put forward proposals for creating a European federation of states, the primary aim of which was to tie European countries so closely together that they would no longer be able to go to war with one another. As in many European left-wing political circles, this sort of move towards federalist ideas was argued as a reaction to the destructive excesses of nationalism. The ideological underpinnings for a united Europe can thus be traced to hostility to nationalism. In the founding meeting of the MFE, he said: “If a post-war order is established in which each State retains its complete national sovereignty, the basis for a Third World War would still exist even after the Nazi attempt to establish the domination of the German race in Europe has been frustrated.
A critic of the USSR, Spinelli argued that “only when it is faced by a united federal Europe will the USSR be brought to a halt”
....
On 14 February 1984, the European Parliament adopted his report and approved the Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union.
Spinelli’s project was soon buried by the governments of the member states. However, it provided an impetus for the negotiations which led to the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. This happened with the help of several national parliaments, which adopted resolutions approving the draft Treaty, and of French President François Mitterrand who, following a meeting with Spinelli, came to the European Parliament to speak in favour of its approach, thereby reversing France’s policy (since Charles De Gaulle) of hostility to anything but an intergovernmental approach to Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiero_Spinelli