Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill famously called for a "United States of Europe" in a 1946 speech to the University of Zürich, inspiring future generations to create the economic alliance that led to the European Union.
After Churchill's dream of postwar integration came to fruition, initially with the creation of the European Economic Community in 1957, the United Kingdom became a pillar of the continent's growing economic and political alliance starting in 1973, and stayed on for almost a half-century.
