>> No. Check your history.
Good idea. I did. Between 1945 and 1957 European nations were not fighting each other. What kept the peace during those years? It can't have been the EEC/EU - it didn't come into existence until the Treaty of Rome of 1957! Even then, the new organisation only consisted of six members. All the non-member countries weren't fighting each other either.
For the EU to claim credit for peace in Europe is typical spin. It attempts to airbrush out of history the division of Europe into two armed camps, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which maintained a balance of power. Once the Soviet threat disappeared, you will notice how war broke out again in Europe in the form of the wars in Yugoslavia.
Don't just take my word for it - take the word of Timothy Garton Ash, journalist and Professor of European Studies at Oxford University... and a passionate pro-European.
QUOTE
We cannot prove it was European integration that kept the peace in western Europe after 1945. Others would claim it was Nato and the hegemonic system of the cold war, with the US functioning as "Europe's pacifier"; others again would cite the fact that western Europe became a zone of liberal democracies, and liberal democracies don't go to war with each other. Several things happened at once and historians can argue about their relative weight. Anyway, central and eastern Europe did not live at peace after 1945: witness the Soviet tanks rolling into East Berlin, Budapest and Prague, and the "state
of war" declared in Poland in 1981. Moreover, Europe--in the sense of the EU and, more broadly, the established democracies of Europe--failed to prevent war returning to the continent after the end of the cold war. Twice it took US intervention to stop war in the Balkans. So what are we so proud of?
END_QUOTE
Source: Prospect Magazine, Febuary 2007.
Last edited by: Londoner on Sun 19 May 13 at 17:34
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