Beguiled by "Europe" by Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal
The E.U.’s supporters seem blind to its dangers and likely dissolution.
5 March 2013
After speaking recently in Belgium, I declared, in response to an audience member’s suggestion that the European Union’s purpose was the preservation of peace, that “Europe”—in the peculiar, Soviet-style usage of the word now so common—does not mean peace, but conflict, if not outright war. We are building in Europe not a United States, I said, but a Yugoslavia. We shall be lucky to escape violence when it breaks apart.
I passed over the fact that Europe is, so far, the consequence of peace, and not its cause; that multilateral agreements between countries have always been possible without the erection of giant and corrupt bureaucratic apparatuses that weigh like a peine forte et dure on most Western European economies; that the maintenance of peace does not require or depend upon regulating the size of bananas sold in the marketplace; and that the notion that were it not for the European Union, there would be war, is inherently Germanophobic—because no one believes, for instance, that Estonia would otherwise attack Slovenia, or Portugal Slovakia.
It always seems strange to me that in Belgium, of all countries, people should be unable to see the European Union’s dangers. After all, the country is composed of only two main national communities—the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish—and the division between the two is now sharper than at any previous time, to such an extent that the country recently had no government for more than 500 days. ...
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