The Crocodile Club was an informal group of

members of the European Parliament A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) is a person who has been elected to serve as a popular representative in the European Parliament. When the European Parliament (then known as the Common Assembly of the ECSC) first met in 1952, its ...

(MEP) that favoured greater European integration, to the extent of a

European federation The United States of Europe (USE), the European State, the European Federation and Federal Europe, is the hypothetical scenario of the European integration leading to formation of a sovereign superstate (similar to the United States of Amer ...

, and greater powers to the

European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts ...

. 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 Altiero Spinelli (31 August 1907 – 23 May 1986) was an Italian politician, political theorist and European federalist, referred to as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. A communist and militant anti-fascist in his youth, he spe ...

. The meeting was held at the "

Au Crocodile is a restaurant in Strasbourg, France, serving French cuisine, holding a Michelin star in 2023. History The restaurant was named after a stuffed crocodile that a local general brought back from overseas whilst on Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in ...

" 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.The myth of Europa - The Ventotene manifesto
europaallalavagna.it It was on the initiative of the club that Parliament established a new committee to deal with institutional reform of the then European Economic Community. This committee, led by Spinelli, prepared a "Draft Treaty Establishing a European Union", a proposal to transform the then European Community into a partially federal European Union. The draft treaty was approved by the Parliament on 14 February 1984, by 237 votes against 31. While that text was not adopted by the member states, it triggered the negotiations and provided the impetus for the

Single European Act The Single European Act (SEA) was the first major revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The Act set the European Community an objective of establishing a single market by 31 December 1992, and a forerunner of the European Union's Common Forei ...

and the

Maastricht Treaty The Treaty on European Union, commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty, is the foundation treaty of the European Union (EU). Concluded in 1992 between the then-twelve Member state of the European Union, member states of the European Communities, ...

(which established the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

).From Ventotene to the European Constitution
edited by Agustín José Menéndez 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.

References

External links

The Crocodile Club Resolution
speech to the Parliament by Spinelli

Restaurant website
{{Europarl Politics of the European Union History of the European Union

See also

References

External links