To this day, the European Commission website deliberately confuses two quite incompatible models for a future “United States of Europe” put forward after the Second World War. Its account starts with Winston Churchill’s call for a “United States of Europe” in 1946, which led two years later to the “intergovernmental” Council of Europe. But no one was more scornful of this than the Frenchman Jean Monnet, who had a wholly different model in mind, first conceived back in the Twenties. His “United States of Europe” would be centred on an entirely new kind of “supranational” government, able to overrule the vetoes of any of its individual member states. It was Monnet’s vision that won, through the “Schuman Declaration” he drafted in 1950. This led to the European Coal and Steel Community, with Monnet at its head, which even then he explicitly hailed as the “government of Europe”.