Hindsight Shows that Monet was Wrong Even in His Premis

We hear a lot now about how the attempt to achieve European Union has ended up being more likely to cause another European war rather than prevent one as it was designed to do, but surely the very idea that the nations of Europe are intrinsically likely to go to war unless they unite is itself completely without foundation.  It might have looked that way to Jean Monet and co in the immediate aftermath of WWII, but what they failed to take account of was the fact that WWI and WWII were basically the result of imperialism: of European nations each determined to have their share of the global imperial cake.  European imperialism is now stone dead, and nothing is going to bring it back.  The Cold War could of course have become another hot European war, but Soviet communism is also now stone dead and it was NATO, not European Union, that killed it (indeed, given that the Cold War was always at its heart Russian imperialist ambition with a communist mask, its end too was the spluttering out of the last ember of European imperialism).

The threat in Europe now is not of general war but of localised ethnic conflict caused by cross-boarder racial and cultural admixtures resulting from earlier imperial episodes going all the way back to ancient times, the Balkan wars being the latest and nastiest examples.  European Union does nothing at all to reduce that threat - indeed, by opening boarders and making the admixtures even more widespread, it ramps it up considerably.  Yes, it can be argued that ambition to board the EU gravy train might persuade some states with ethnic-bashing tendencies to behave themselves and improve their democratic and human rights credentials to gain admission, but events in Greece suggest that in the absence of German willingness to keep pouring them vast amounts of free gravy for eternity the lid is likely to be blown off the pot with even greater violence and should never have been put on in the first place.

In short, the very idea of an intrinsic European tendency to war requiring elaborate supra-national structures to suppress it is itself surely plain wrong.  Had Monet lived to see the end of the Cold War he might well have come to recognise that himself and abandon his crazy idea of European Union.