Why hasn’t Europe fought World War III? Could it be because the Soviet Union eventually collapsed? Could it be that the NATO, the western military alliance, was effective? Could it be the mutually assured destruction kept the peace? Could it be that America’s commitment to defend Europe was a deterrent?
But all those reasons focus on the role of the Soviet Union. Let’s cast the net wider and ask why World War III, or even smaller wars, didn’t begin with fights among Western European nations. How did long-time rivals France and England avoid war? Why did the Germans not launch another war on the continent? Did these things not happen because civilization finally triumphed? Because the peoples of Europe finally got sick of fighting? Because Western European nations were focused on the danger from the Soviet Union? Because the large U.S. military presence as part of NATO helped keep the peace?
I’m not a foreign policy expert, so I’m sure this is not even close to being a comprehensive list of potential explanations. But it turns out that all of my guesses are wrong. Or they’re wrong if we choose to believe French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who says the creation of a pan-European bureaucracy in Brussels has been the key to peace. Moreover, we are supposed to believe that the only way to keep the peace is to impose more harmonization, more centralization, and more bureaucratization on the unwilling peoples of Europe.
You may think I’m being satirical, but this is not a joke. Ms. Lagarde was being interviewed on BBC. She was asked about plans to further erode national sovereignty and transfer more power to Brussels, and whether the people of Europe (rather than just the political elite) should get to choose whether this happens. Here’s a summary of her mind-blowing statement from Open Europe.
…when asked whether people had ever voted for this convergence she replied, “The European project has been around for over fifty years and it was built on the back of a situation where people were at war…The European project is something we all believe in because we want peace to be maintained.”
To be fair, I don’t actually think Ms. Lagarde is stupid. There’s no way she thinks the so-called European Project, or any of its bureaucratic creations (European Commission, European Parliament, European Court of Justice, etc), deserves credit for keeping the peace. But she obviously thinks the people of Europe are a bunch of stupid peasants and serfs. Or she thinks they are so powerless, thanks to the anti-democratic structure of the European Union and the housebroken European media, that she can say something utterly absurd and be confident that there will be no adverse consequences.
