Yes, Jean Monnet was the father of the concept of a United States of Europe and his efforts more than those of any other single man helped change the thinking of European leaders.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.
Throughout his long career, Washington earned the adulation not merely of ordinary people but of the other luminaries whom we now hail as 'founding fathers.'
I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.
The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.
I think Captain Cousteau might be the father of the environmental movement.
It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.
I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong.
I think that economic patriotism is the very foundation of a European vision.
Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so.
Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.