zompist wrote: ↑Sat Oct 04, 2025 3:53 pm
Of course I haven't read that preface, so I'm not defending their analysis. I think you're not giving the EU+NATO enough credit though. (I don't know if they're talking about both at once, but I think we have to.
They don't mention NATO at all. I might have reacted less strongly if they had.
Until Trump, Europe was both covered by a powerful security umbrella, and felt it didn't need one of its own.
Europe had to deal with two major threats: revanchism from Germany, and invasion from the USSR. If your feeling is "well of course Germany wasn't going to go Nazi again", I'd say you're taking a lot of difficult and contingent events for granted. The idea that Germany losing a war would only create grievances for the next one was hardly far-fetched; it was what happened between WWI and WWII. A lot of things had to go right to eliminate that possibility: American aid, an alliance vs. the USSR, credible denazification, a credible commitment to democracy on the part of Germany. The conventional wisdom is that early economic integration (e.g. the European Coal and Steel Community) was an important part of this constellation of events, though certainly not the whole of it.
As for invasion, the key period is not the end of WWII but the end of the Cold War. The EU and NATO absorbed not only most of the former Soviet satellites, but actual former Soviet republics. A future historian is probably going to comment that this was a bold move, and that it's astonishing that it was done without violence. Again, there is a constellation of factors which allowed it, but a part of it is surely that the EU existed as a now economic/political bloc that could take them in.
Well, I think that NATO had more to do with all of that than the EU. As people sometimes say, the initial purpose of it was to "keep the Russians out, keep the Americans in, and keep the Germans down". I think a lot of the praise for the EU might be coming from people who like to think of themselves as the kind of people who think a lot of well-meaning thoughts about peace and friendship and anti-militarism, and who, therefore, really don't like the idea that one specific military alliance might actually have been good for peace. So they give the EU credit for things that are really NATO's achievement.
Minor conflicts aren't as dramatic, but e.g. the end of the Irish "troubles" is in part due to the fact that Ireland and the UK were now in the same supernational bloc.
Fair enough.
I do think without the nuclear factor, the First Cold War would have been a lot more likely to turn hot.
And as for people getting "used to living together peacefully"... you know more history than that. By 1914, Europe had been quite stable for a couple generations, and without a world war for a century. Economies were highly interconnected. Yet it started a World War anyway. Modern times offers plenty of other examples of conflicts starting up after decades of peace.
I'd say, there, the continued existence of NATO plays a role, too.
