EU: A Nobel Prize for keeping Europe at peace

The European Union has earned the award “a hundred times over,” though it comes at an inapt time.

Let the mockers mock, said Nikolaus Blome in Bild (Germany). The European Union has earned its Nobel Peace Prize “a hundred times over.” By unifying Europe, it has “freed and pacified a continent that over the centuries repeatedly drowned in its own blood.” It has stilled the ancient enmity between France and Germany to the point where they will never again go to war with each other. It has helped formerly communist states in Eastern Europe move from dictatorship to democracy. Sure, there’s plenty to criticize about the bureaucracy. But no quibbles can change the fact that now “diplomats and politicians negotiate in courtrooms over disputes which once sent armies to the battlefields.”

You’d actually have to go back centuries “to find an equivalent period without major conflict on European soil,” said Dominique Seux in Les Echos (France). Yet the EU has brought more than just peace. Twenty-seven sovereign states now share the same human rights protections and trade agreements. Many of them share a common currency. The EU is “an astonishing and unprecedented mechanism for forging consensus between countries with different histories, languages, and traditions.”

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