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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

What Europe can be quite proud of is how not only war was avoided during the last decades but also that war was made less likely over the decades. Suggesting that there could be war between Germany and France would be crazy today but certainly wasn’t always.

That’s not just some flimsy anti-war sentiment which can change as new generations take over, that actually has something to do with lasting change initiated by the war and post-war generation after the war. The EU is the most visible symbol of that change and for all the flack it gets, European integration made war less likely.

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Agreed, it's less likely. But idiots like Wilders are pushing the exact same buttons that a certain Austrian guy did and there is a real risk of him or someone like him rising to power.

There are more and louder voices for the break-up of the EU in the last 3 years than I've ever heard in my lifetime.

Well, yeah, money's on the line.

Money’s on the line and that’s just the reason why the EU won’t suddenly disappear.

One of the nice things about a common market (even if it is only partially reality) is that it leads to economic interdependence. Companies can invest wherever they want, companies can sell stuff to wherever they want, people can work wherever they want. There is money to be made and the economic shock waves of making that impossible by leaving the EU would probably be way too much for any EU economy to take.

Maybe the Euro was a bad idea and won’t survive. (My prediction would be that it will.) That won’t, however, be the end of European integration.

Except the casino part of the economy has vastly outsized the productive part. More money changes hands in a day in currency speculation markets alone than does in the productive economy in a year. Thus, what favors the short term gains of a few wealthy gamblers can take precedence over what benefits the people at large.

He's really a nutcase, and a significant portion of a population seem to be willing to vote for a nutcase. I think this applies to any country. It wouldn't be hard to give a recent US example (at least, from the perspective of a non-US citizen).

This group is attracted by populist parties. And research has shown that many Wilders voters favored Rita Verdonk (populist right-wing) and voted SP (fairly extreme left-wing) before.

The interesting question is how large this group is. 1/6 of the voters (Wilders has 24 out of 150 seats)? 1/4? 1/3?

> What Europe can be quite proud of is how not only war was avoided during the last decades but also that war was made less likely over the decades.

Umm, the credit goes to US occupation of Germany and tension with the USSR.

Europe has yet to handle a reasonable problem on its own.

Napoleon? :-)

Yes, Europe did solve Napoleon on its own. I should have qualified my statement.

The cold war is certainly a factor, as is the quick economic recovery of (West) Germany. I have rather big doubts, though, that US occupation caused West Germany (and France) to become a champion of European integration.

I also don’t think that Europe has yet to handle a serious problem. The fall of the Soviet Union is kind of the biggie here. And, sure, the cold war played a large role during the recovery of western Europe after WWII, but, looking back at the disastrous recovery of Europe after WWI and comparing it to the stellar recovery after WWII tells me that this is also quite a big problem which Europe sort of solved. With help, but help can only get you so far.

> I have rather big doubts, though, that US occupation caused West Germany (and France) to become a champion of European integration.

US occupation made war involving Germany unthinkable.

The US did, at various times, encourage European integration.

Well, sure, the Cold War made a European war (as in: a war between West European nations) unthinkable but it is my very strong suspicion that any European war became much less likely independently of the cold war.

There have been long periods of fragile peace in Europe (one example would be the more than forty years of peace between Germany and France between 1871 and 1914). I don’t think the current European peace is anything like that. The events which led up to WWI were by no means huge problems. A little will, a bit of diplomatic elbow grease, eminently solvable if you really wanted to.

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 90s did not cause huge conflicts in Western Europe. It even looked as though Western Europe didn’t care all that much for most of the time. A conflict between the relatively unimportant Austria and tiny Serbia – a century ago, also on the Balkans – could, however, start the chain reaction which resulted in WWI. The peace was so fragile that it couldn’t handle a local conflict.

The US did indeed encourage European integration but there is always the question as to whether it works. The US always wanted to bring Europe on a course which would lead it to a peaceful future – you know, so they don’t have to come over every other year and fix everything. That didn’t work so well after WWI and a disillusioned US left Europe.

I think Anamax is referring to war between the East and the West, not between the West and the West.

'What Europe can be quite proud of is how not only war was avoided during the last decades but also that war was made less likely over the decades.'

Whaaaaaaatt??? Does sound any bell to you the names Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia...?

Technically you are right, but most of Europe sees that as the des-integration of Yugoslavia, which would make it a civil war rather than a war between nation states. And I think you meant to write Serbia instead of Yugoslavia.

The other countries getting involved was to stop worse from happening.

From what I know about that war it was basically something that was bound to happen the moment Tito kicked the bucket. He was - like Saddam Hussain in many ways - the person that kept the spring-loaded component parts in an iron grip which some mistook for stability. Once the counter force was gone the various parts flew apart and started a war to try to gain the upper hand.

In Yugoslavia you could say that there never really was stability, only a temporary lack of opportunity to continue the fight.

Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening - the Yugoslav arms industry was nonexistent, and while they most definitely would have kept on killing one another with rocks, I think they would have been less efficient.

I agree with your larger point, though. The breakup of Yugoslavia was unfortunate - and inevitable - but it's kind of the exception that proves the rule. 1914, after all, was the last time a war was started in Yugoslavia, and it took down the rest of Europe and spread beyond the continent. This time, it was relatively self-contained, and the pieces of Yugoslavia are joining the Union, one by one. (After all, Yugoslavia was always a political fiction - Tito needed a platform big enough to fend off the Soviet Union, and by God if Slovenia didn't like it they could go suck an egg.)

Belgium may be next - and nobody's going to get killed over it. I just can't stress enough what incredible progress that really is.

> Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening

That's my impression from reading up on Srebrenica and a bunch of other places, it is very well possible that that is just an 'after the fact' impression, and since it happened the way it did we'll never know what would have happened had there been no intervention.

I know people on two sides in that story (Serbian and Croatian), and there is enough confusion even now that it's probably best they didn't meet. One thing this war did for me though was to open my eyes once and for all to the amount of propaganda in supposedly unbiased media.

Now that it has broken up though, it does seem more positive for most of the previous members. Slovenia in particular is flourishing, my father worked there for a couple of years as part of an EU consultancy program to help modernise their economy, and they're now (according to wikipedia) at a GDP pp of 91% of the EU average, equivalent to South Korea or New Zealand.

I don't mean to gloss over that the balkans war was a terrible tragedy and was dreadful, but in the end I think they're going to come out better than they were before.

Yeah, I just drove through Slovenia two months ago and was bowled over - my last time through had been in 1986; it's ... very, very different now.

It’s kind of astonishing, actually, that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact went as peaceful as it did in Europe. No bloody revolutions, no wars. Not a shot fired in Eastern Germany, Poland or Russia (and so on). Except for, you guessed it, Yugoslavia and Romania.

I don’t think anyone would have expected that.

And in Romania (I'm in Bucharest at the moment, coincidentially) it was very limited compared to what Yugoslavia went through.

Oh, yeah, that Balkans thingie. Right. Kinda sucks, for officially more than a century now. The more things change …

I wanted to write “(except for the Balkans)” but ultimately didn’t and probably should have. Just two things: When I say “Europe” I was pretty much talking about western Europe plus a bit of eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, …), also the situation on the Balkans is nowadays unlikely to cause a European or worldwide war (you know, like 100 years ago).

That's true, but ultimately what causes wars might have to do with the impulses of people as much as with the "international situation". While institutions can be put in place that seem to make war less likely, people today are not that different from people yesterday.

People almost never want war. They have to be spurred into it by a combination of heavy propaganda and desperate economic circumstances. The first is often enough if the war is one that most citizens will only see on TV, like all 'wars' America has waged since WWII (they are 'wars' in the sense bullfighting is 'fighting'.)

Real wars, on the other hand (e.g., an hypothetical Germany invading France), would require a big crisis.

Which, on the other hand, is almost guaranteed, cyclically, by the current money system, and otherwise easy to summon, by contracting the money supply.

Bismarck called these "cabinet wars".

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