The National Party of Europe (NPE) was an initiative undertaken by a number of political parties in Europe during the 1960s to help increase cross-border co-operation and work towards European unity.
The idea of an NPE began when Oswald Mosley launched his Europe a Nation campaign after World War II at a time when contemporaries such as Jean-François Thiriart were also becoming interested in Europeanism.[1] Attempts soon followed to co-ordinate this growth in pan-European nationalism, although the European Social Movement and the New European Order were loose networks and a more concrete alliance was called for.[2] The idea came to fruition at the Conference of Venice in 1962 when the leaders of the Union Movement, the Deutsche Reichspartei, the Italian Social Movement, Jeune Europe and the Mouvement d'Action Civique came together to form this group.[3] The European Declaration at Venice was released on March 1, 1962 and contained the following ten aims:
The Conference also decided that each member party should seek to change their name to NPE or the local equivalent, that the motto of the new group should be 'Progress - Solidarity - Unity' and that the Flash and Circle should serve as the emblem of the movement.[5]
Despite the high ambitions the idea did not come to much. Both the Italian Social Movement and the National Democratic Party of Germany, successor to the Deutsche Reichspartei, refused to change their name and only set up a permanent liaison office.[6] Meanwhile Thiriart moved increasingly away from the NPE and towards national communism.[7] As well as this many of the leading neo-fascist groups in Europe took no part in the NPE.[6] Mosley meanwhile had little day to day contect with the Union Movement from his base in France and he retired from politics altogether after his poor showing in Shoreditch and Finsbury at the 1966 general election, effectively drawing the curtain on the NPE.[8]
A group by the name of European Action continues to agitate for the aims of the NPE through its newspaper of the same name, edited by Robert Edwards, although it is an almostly exclusively British movement.[9]