According to a recent report, "The European Union could be renamed the United States of Europe...Without suggesting a preference, M. Giscard d'Estaing's report said the union could be called the European Community, the European Union, United Europe or the United States of Europe" (The Daily Telegraph, Oct. 29, 2002). Apparently this suggestion was part of the first draft of a new constitution for the EU.

"Christopher Booker's Notebook," a regular column in The Daily Telegraph, headlined a recent article with the provocative title—"A Superstate Half a Century in the Making."

Mr. Booker pointed out that "this constitution was planned more than 50 years ago, as the concluding move in a secretive process intended to take decades. Only now is it emerging just how carefully planned this project has been; and how deliberately its instigators decided to pretend that it was concerned only with economic co-operation, until their political agenda could be brought into the open. Drawing on thousands of published and unpublished documentary sources, Dr. Richard North, a research director with the European Parliament, has been assembling evidence for a 'secret history' of the European Union" (Nov. 3, 2002).

The need for such a constitution was first mentioned by a young Italian Communist in 1944. He believed that "the project would have to be put into place gradually, without the peoples of Europe realising what was afoot until they were presented with a constitution as the end of the process." Christopher Booker concluded his column with the simple statement that "everything is unfolding according to plan."

—Sources: The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph.