Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
Well, I have heard it said the the existence of the EU has prevented wars because it would be very difficult to declare war on an EU partner.
How true it is in reality, I don't know.
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In reality, it’s not true at all.
The military threat post 1945 was Soviet Russia. We made a Faustian deal with Stalin in order to defeat Germany that ended up with most of the nation states of Eastern Europe, and the east of partitioned Germany, becoming vassal states of the greater Russian empire. There was a very real threat that the Soviets would evangelise their communist way of life further westwards, at gunpoint, or at the very least that they would preemptively strike against the West if it looked like the Allied powers were planning to continue their own march of liberation eastwards.
For the first few years after world war 2 fatigue prevented any of this from happening. Afterwards, the existence of nuclear arms, and the NATO and Warsaw alliances that threatened reprisals for an attack on any individual member, prevented it.
The European Union is supposed to prevent another conventional conflict along the lines of the two world wars by making France and Germany co-dependent. Sadly, because that’s what the EU is for, and because there hasn’t been another world war, a great many euro-evangelists commit the
post hoc logical fallacy of assuming that the EU must have been responsible.