Europe: constantly at war 500bc-1945ad
EU: Never had a war in 50 years and no real chance of one.
That's reason enough, I'd say.
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Zuowan, Tue 2 Jun 2009, 18:23,
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Fair point
although the region has had plenty of violence, usually Nationalistic based.
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TheSundaeLunch I'm a fucking shrub, alright?, Tue 2 Jun 2009, 18:28,
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(Not that anyone will read this now anyway) but that's exactly why the EU was set up!
My mum started to do a PhD on the EU in the 70s when the people who'd originally set it up were still around and she recorded hours of interviews with the surviving ones. They'd set the wheels in motion immediately after the second world war because they realised that normal 'treaties' between countries were useless and easily broken, and we'd got into two devastating wars despite the political system being set up to prevent such things happening.
The unstated aim of the creation of the EU was to link all the countries of Europe in fairly mundane, petty, economic ways to do with trade and regulation so that in the future it would not be economically viable to go to war with each other, because we'd rely on each other for so many different things. In many ways it was a surreptitious bypassing of normal politics which is messy and quite often ineffective.
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Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Tue 2 Jun 2009, 21:16,
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