Over the coming days millions of Europeans will vote for anti-EU parties. Not the parties that oppose further integration, but those wanting to scrap the whole thing. This aside, European Parliamentary elections are unlikely to be a great advert for the whole project. They never are. Turnout is shockingly low in many member countries, and most who get to the polls steadfastly refuse to cast their ballots based on the issues at hand, instead casting judgement on their national incumbents.
There are plenty of reasons to be cynical about the EU. It is costly, frequently corrupt, often incompetent and always mind-numbingly bureaucratic and slow. Its largest budget item, the Common Agricultural Policy, is responsible for the deaths of millions overseas, and drastically reduces the wealth of the people who actually pay for it. Despite this, there is a fair case to make that when it comes to inventions improving human happiness European integration outranks such obvious candidates as antibiotics, anaesthetic and really fast broadband.
One could of course point out the various benefits the EU does provide on a daily basis in its defence; ease of movement, free internal trade, a currency less prey to the whims of the trading market. But this is to miss the Amazon for a couple of scraggly rubber plants, although many people do.
The EU stops people being blown up in their beds. It prevents them from cowering in fear as foreign armies roll across their country, averts human rights abuses on a scale our minds simply can’t contemplate. It thwarts, in a word, war.
It’s easy for to think that the First and Second World Wars were appalling exceptions, that Europe needed no special effort to be at peace. This is simply wrong. Those wars were special, not only because they consumed so much of the continent at once, but because the industrialisation of society and weaponry made them more bloody than their predecessors. Historically for Europe, war is the norm, peace the exception.
Decades of peace across Western Europe are rare. An absence of war lasting 30 years a miracle. Individual nations might have avoided war for much longer periods of time, but they were usually affected by the battles raging outside their borders. Now we’ve 64 years with nothing worse than the Northern Island and Basque conflicts, combined adding to less misery than a single hour on the Somme, and possibly now over. European states have often been at war outside the continent, but even this death toll for Europeans is trending down.
Astonishingly, opponents of the EU sometimes offer the Balkan Wars of the 1990s as evidence the Union doesn’t stop war. Actually, it is the very fact that European Union hadn’t spread to the Balkans at the time that allowed those tragedies to occur. Srebrenica is a perfect example of what would be happening far more widely were it not for the EU.
The correlation between the establishment and spread of the European Union and six decades of peace does not prove causation. Other theories offered include: fear of Russian, Nuclear weapons, the spread of democracy, free trade and rising educational and living standards. Some have been disproved by recent events. Others are part of a positive feedback loop with European integration.
The reason this point is worth making, and repeating, is not simply the hope some Crikey-reading dual citizen won’t vote for a party that wants to bring the whole structure crashing down around everyone’s ears. Its that the job is not yet done.
Eventually the other Balkan states, and perhaps even Turkey and the Caucuses, will follow Slovenia inside, and relax in the knowledge they’re safe from the ancient horror, before the population slowly forgets and becomes free to vote for parties with no idea what they’ve got. Africa and South America are both trying to imitate the model. Progress is slow, but it may come. The more people recognise what has been achieved however, the quicker it may come.
While the EU has played a role in removing some aspects of economic competion in Europe, and therefore some of the drivers of past conflicts, the EU is not the most signifigant factor in the long post WWII peace in Europe.
The real reason for the peace is the removal of the security comeption that has plagued Europe since the collapse of the Roman empire, due to the United States taking on the role of the gaurantor of security in Western Europe. When the US eventually exits this role old geostrategic factors will reassert themselves and security competition amongst European states will return. The true test of the EU will be in its ability to manage these issues to prevent conflict.
You seem to be confusing the EU with NATO.
I disagree (obviously). While the US security guarantee may have been a factor, its hardly ended wars elsewhere. The fact that the citizens of every member nation in the EU effectively share citizenship with every other nation is a much more significant factor.
Take Northern Ireland for example. Crucial to ending the troubles is that there’s not a lot of point killing people over whether you will be ruled from London or Dublin if a good portion of your government will come from Brussels either way. If all the governing was coming from Brussels people would be taking up arms to secede, but by offering a balance the incentives to violence are reduced.
Furthermore, the economic integration and ease of movement the Union provides means that the nations are so bound together that even the winner of a war will obviously suffer – you’d be bombing your own relatives half the time. Of course people do that in civil wars, but not when they like those relatives, who happen to be spending a year or two working in a different country.
There is also the creation of supranational courts and parliament, offering a chance to settle differences in ways that don’t involve violence.
And the reduction in economic competition you mention matters as well. Put these together and internal wars within the EU members are almost out of the question. On the other hand, the EU together is too big for anyone except the largest powers to take on, so invasion is unlikely.
Recently Russia dropped cluster bombs over Georgia. For countries like Finland, a keen proponent of the EU and one who shares a border and a long history with Russia, such actions are a strong reminder of times past (the Winter War and the Continuation War in 1939-44) and a strong EU goes a long way towards reducing nervousness.
Would Georgia have been invaded if they were part of the EU? Probably not. Would Georgia like to be part of the EU? I think so, for just such a reason.