The EU has helped keep European and therefore world peace

OPINION:

One hundred years ago, having destroyed the world of the 19th century and set a course for more destruction, the Great War (World War I) came to an end. On Aug. 3, 1914, the eve of Great Britain’s entry into the war, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey told a friend that “[t]he lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” This famous observation encapsulates the whole point of the European project, launched after World War II. Yet discussions today of the European Union’s future and Brexit are oblivious of history.

Europe’s history has been a history of violence. European armed conflict has characterized every century since the fall of the Roman Empire. Each European-wide war involved increasing devastation, and, since the 18th century, Europe’s wars have been world wars, fought wherever Europeans found themselves. The charnel houses of the two World Wars reinforced the lesson that governments and invisible principles such as the balance of power had failed to maintain peace. The European project after World War II reflected the belief that European peace was essential, not only to Europe, but also to the world, and that European integration would strengthen that peace.

The EU’s founders thought economic union was a sensible way forward. They believed in democracy and that their Europe should be democratic. While some favored a “United States of Europe,” others preferred intergovernmental integration through voluntary, treaty-based association. The intergovernmental idea prevailed but without consensus about the final product: A new country? A common market with few supranational attributes? A common market with a single currency and single approach to fiscal and monetary policy? A pluralistic polity with central and polycentric aspects? European complexity meant that no single conception of a European structure would take hold.

The purpose of European integration was both strategic and political. The object was to address the problem created by German unification in 1871. After 1871, Germany was the most powerful European state. It remains the most powerful. Post-World War II European leaders wanted to enmesh a democratic Germany in a larger democratic whole. The 1952 European Coal and Steel Community and the 1957 European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community reflected that goal and proved to be steps toward the European Union and the Euro.

EU history has involved zig-zags. The first zag was defeat of a European Defense Community in 1954. It was too soon after World War II to accept German rearmament even within a larger, democratic whole. Another zag was the defeat by French and Dutch voters in 2005 of the European Constitution. A zig followed with the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, which repackaged parts of the rejected Constitution as amendments to the 1957 Rome Treaty that established the European Community. Brexitism is another zag.

Arguments about Brexit have ignored the points made here. Is Brexitism a yearning for something more fulfilling than European peace and prosperity? Is it a product of excessive optimism about the EU’s ability easily to integrate new members after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Is it resentment against Eurocratic bossiness? Is it a criticism of inflexibility? Amendments to EU treaties require consensus among 28 members, which is difficult to achieve. Yet all European institutions operate directly by the consent of the governed or indirectly by representatives of democratically elected governments.

It is impossible to overemphasize the EU’s democratic character point although commentators of all stripes frequently do so. Some go so far as to say there is an undemocratic conspiracy afoot. At the same time, the EU is not yet a government of the United States of Europe. Great and small European powers pursue their national interests within it. For this reason, the large number of European institutions seem to be more responsive to those interests than to “the people.” That is not a reason to destroy the EU or to leave it. For Europeans, and for everyone else, what is the alternative to working within it, to improving it, to increasing its visible democratic legitimacy? Turning the historical page backward to what? Old, blood-soaked historical patterns?

It is fitting to end this reminder about the EU’s central purpose on the centenary of 11/11/1918 by stating categorically that the European lamps that went out in 1914 are on once again and that the European Union is one of the reasons. However measured, the European Union constitutes an enormously powerful agglomeration that has helped keep European and therefore world peace defined as the absence of general war since 1945.

Don’t throw it away.

• Nicholas Rostow is a senior research scholar at the Yale Law School and has served in senior national security and foreign policy positions. A version of this article appeared in inFocus Quarterly.