EITHER THE EUROPEAN UNION OR WAR

If it were not for the European Union, the nations of Europe would once again be at war with one another. This is the Sword of Damocles hoist over our heads by the EU. Look, shriek the EU propagandists, we had two major wars in Europe during the past century. Among the states that have joined the EU, there have been none.

That is true. However, three remarks:

1. The first involves asking who declares war. Is it the people or is it their governments? We have never heard of a people declaring war. It is invariably governments that declare war. Governments whose members sit at home in luxurious offices while they send innocent squaddies abroad to die young and miserably. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. But that doesn’t mean us – or our children. It means you, the toiling masses. You and your children are the ones that are going to die. And why? Because I say so.

But how does Europe come into this? It comes into it because Eurocrats happily confess that if it were not for the EU, we, the governments of Europe, would declare war on each other. It is only the EU, they say, that is holding us back. By nature, we governments are self-righteous blood-thirsty warmongers.  Without the restraint of the EU, we should  have no hesitation in unleashing the dogs of war.

Now let us ask this question. Are we, the citizens of the states of Europe, obliged to accept that our age-old nations are to be cast into oblivion simply because the blood-thirsty elites that govern us will otherwise declare war? We think not.

Recourse to referenda in international disputes would render redundant the argument that the European Union is necessary because otherwise the countries of Europe would go to war.

2. The second point is that, even with conventional governments in power, it is by no means inevitable that war would break out in Europe in the absence of the EU. The century between the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was a period of relative  peace throughout Europe. And yet at that time there was no EU in existence to prevent a continent-wide war. So the fact is that, contrary to the mythology of the EU propagandists, it is not inevitable that war will occur if we do not have the EU.

3. It is quite possible to envisage peaceful relations between the nations of Europe outside the European Union. The EU is not the only kid on the block. There are other ways of managing interstate relations. Nations can conclude treaties with other nations or groups of nations on an ad hoc basis, as the need arises, without needing to be confined by the strait-jacket of the EU and  its “one-size-fits-all” policies. The Rhine Navigation Treaty, in place since 1815, has quietly managed the Rhine artery for nearly two centuries now, efficiently and to the satisfaction of the riverine states, but without the ballyhoo inevitably associated with the European Union. So it can be done.