Motto of the European Union

"EU-15"): Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden & United Kingdom.

[4] In April 1998, French newspaper Ouest-France's Patrick La Prairie proposed the organisation of a European mottoes contest for the, then 15, EU members' secondary education students.

[4] Journalist La Prairie was in charge of Ouest-France's Press-School mission and found two sponsors, World War II French museum Memorial de Caen and France Telecom, then a state-owned company.

The website featured pedagogic files, created by the operation's general Office located at the Caen Memorial, and teachers oriented pitches and registration forms available in the eleven official European languages (plus Catalan).

[9] The main rule was that the motto had to consist of a sentence of no more than twelve words, with an accompanying explanation of no more than 1,500 characters written in the class's local language.

[12] A lexical analysis of this 400,000-word corpus was done by Taylor Nelson Sofres to reveal the most popular terms used by the young Europeans, which were: "Europe", "peace", "unity", "union", "together", "future", "difference", "hope", "solidarity", "egality", "liberty", "diversity", and "respect".

[4] On 11 and 12 April 2000, the European Media Jury based at the Memorial of Caen, chose 7 mottoes among the late February selection (one voice per country).

[4] On 4 May 2000 almost 500 schoolchildren from fifteen classes of the EU-15 (top class of each national selection) were gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels to assist the proclamation of the motto chosen that day by the 15-member Grand Jury including former Chancellor of Austria Franz Vranitzky, former Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Susanna Agnelli, former Belgian astronaut Dirk Frimout, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Denmark Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, Luxembourgian historian Gilbert Trausch, former German President of the Bundestag Rita Süssmuth, Irish Senator Mary Henry, former British President of the European Commission Roy Jenkins, and former French President of the European Commission Jacques Delors.

Unité dans la diversité, French for Unity in diversity was translated in the eleven official languages of the EU plus Latin, In varietate concordia, as read out by Fontaine.

[13] Probably by coincidence, the same motto had been used in the title of a Workshop held in the European Centre for Modern Languages (Graz) on 23–25 April 1998: "East meets West: Unity in Diversity".

The title was chosen by Dónall Ó Riagáin, on behalf of the organizers, the European Bureau for Lesser-Used languages (EBLUL).

He attributes the expression to John Hume, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland when he first used it, in about 1983, perhaps basing it on the text "E pluribus unum"’ on the Seal of the USA.

Europe day shall be celebrated on 9 May throughout the Union.The motto translations were slightly modified since 2000, including the English-language version becoming « United in Diversity ».