recognisable as 'Fascist'". Mosley expanded upon his ideas for a single integrated European nation state and a European government in his book Europe: Faith and Plan published in 1958. Impact Within the UK, the notion of Europe a Nation largely failed to attract the younger far-right activists, most of whom deserted Mosley in favour of the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) and other more minor and more extreme groups. A.K. Chesterton, who went on to lead the LEL, was a strong critic of Europe a Nation from 1947 when The Alternative was first published, preferring to emphasise British nationalism. The policy also failed to capture the minds of the British electorate, with the Union Movement enjoying comparative success in voting terms only when they emphasised more basic anti-immigrant rhetoric. Even Alexander Raven Thomson, one of Mosley's closest lieutenants and noted for his sycophantic attitudes towards his leader, eventually told Mosley in 1950 that Europe a Nation held little attraction to British voters. As a consequence, the Union Movement briefly downplayed the idea, although Thomson's preferred alternative, neo-Nazism, was soon abandoned as well when it proved equally unpalatable to the electorate. Within the wider European far-right, however, Europe a Nation did gain some wider currency. Fritz Rössler, at the time going by the alias Dr. Franz Richter, became an enthusiastic supporter of the idea and attempted to make it Deutsche Reichspartei policy. He failed in this attempt and was expelled from the party, decamping to the Socialist Reich Party instead. For a time it also had the support of Adolf von Thadden, who helped Mosley to organise the National Party of Europe, a largely failed attempt to build a continental Europe a Nation political party. Ultimately however the plan's main supporter in Germany proved to be Arthur Erhardt, who established the journal Nation Europa to support far-right pan-European nationalist ideas, to which Mosley was a frequent contributor. Outside Germany it also gained some currency within the Italian Social Movement, although by the early 1950s that wing of the party lost influence, the Italian nationalist arm gaining supremacy. Similar ideas would later be developed by Jean-François Thiriart and others interested in Europeanism whilst Europe a Nation was also an important influence on the thinking of Alain de Benoist and in particular the work of the think tank Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne which he established in 1968. See