Why EU cannot claim credit for the lasting peace in Europe

MICHAEL Meadocroft’s assertion (The Yorkshire Post, July 1) that peace in Europe is a lasting legacy of the EU is an example of the type of sophistry that weakens the credibility of pro EU arguments.

Mr Meadowcroft studiously ignores the contribution to European peace made by the American and British forces which occupied Germany after World War Two to ensure that German militarism would not resurface and that the Russians would not invade Western Europe.

Over a million American service personnel have served in Europe since the end of the second World War, and helped to secure the peace that enable the EU to develop. Furthermore the pressure applied by Nato caused the collapse of Soviet Russia and the emergence of new democracies in Eastern Europe.

Mr Meadowcroft’s argument is an example of falsely claiming correlation as a cause and is at best shallow, but at worst a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts.

Mr Meadocroft makes a side swipe at the “artificiality of the nation state still provoking violence” in his comments about Ukraine. I would argue that the instability in the Ukraine was not helped by the interventions of a cohort of unelected EU Brussels bureaucrats meddling in a sensitive historic relationship on the border with Russia.

If Mr Meadowcroft wishes to use the lessons of history to predict the future of the EU he would do well to study how many Empires, without democratic legitimacy have ended in chaos. The peace and prosperity of the EU are not threatened by the nation states of Europe which have emerged as post-war democracies. The greatest threat to Europe comes from an insistence that national democracies must be subsidiary to the imposition of a common currency, and that European citizens must meekly comply with a centralised bureaucracy which re-invents history in a manner eerily reminiscent of Soviet propaganda.

From: Hugh Rogers, Messingham Road, Ashby.

THANK you Michael Meadowcroft (The Yorkshire Post, July 1). It’s ages since I heard the old chestnut about the European Union preventing war. The Liberals have always floated an inch or two above the ground and never more so than when propounding theories about the EU being a guarantor of everlasting peace.

Even if all national boundaries disappeared, wars of some kind would continue to happen.