Crocodile Club

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Crocodile Club was an informal group of

European federation, and greater powers to the European Parliament
.

The group was founded on 9 July 1980, a year after the Parliament's first direct elections, by nine cross-party MEPs including Altiero Spinelli. The meeting was held at the "Au Crocodile" restaurant (10 rue de l'Outre, Strasbourg) giving the club its name. The club was formally constituted in September of that year, and in those two months the membership of the club had grown to sixty. Within a year it grew to one hundred and eighty, almost half the members of the Parliament.[1]

It was on the initiative of the club that Parliament established a new committee to deal with institutional reform of the then

member states, it triggered the negotiations and provided the impetus for the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty (which established the European Union).[1][2]

Following the death of Spinelli in 1986, a group of MEPs established the "Altiero Spinelli action Committee for European Union", a federalist intergroup intended to take on the work started in 1980 by the Crocodile Club.[2]

See also

  • The Spinelli Group

References

  1. ^ a b The myth of Europa - The Ventotene manifesto europaallalavagna.it
  2. ^ a b From Ventotene to the European Constitution Archived 2015-09-24 at the Wayback Machine, edited by Agustín José Menéndez

External links