History
UEN was formed on 20 July 1999, supplanting the earlier Union for Europe. Its member parties Fianna Fáil (FF) and National Alliance (AN) were the driving forces behind the group, despite their being alone in their support for the proposed European Constitution. Gianfranco Fini, leader of AN, was a member of the Convention which drafted the Constitution, while Bertie Ahern, leader of FF, negotiated the treaty as President of the European Council in 2004.
UEN was a heterogeneous group: broadly national conservative, it included some parties which were either uncomfortable with this characterization or eventually evolved into something different. More specifically, FF was a centre right "catch all" party and later joined the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party, AN was a moderate-conservative party and eventually joined the European People's Party through The People of Freedom, and Lega Nord was supportive of a "Europe of Regions".
After the 2009 European elections the group officially had 35 members but this figure included parties such as AN and FF, which had already committed to leave. UEN members migrated to other groups after the elections in June 2009 and before the Seventh European Parliament term started on 14 July 2009. FF had already left for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, TB/LNNK and Law and Justice MEPs went to the European Conservatives and Reformists, and Lega Nord, the Danish People's Party and Order and Justice MEPs went to Europe of Freedom and Democracy. With this loss of members, the group dissolved.
Read more about this topic: Union For Europe Of The Nations
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)