Retaining the "piece"... WW2 ended in 1945. The EU came into being in 1993. Was it retaining it in previous guises as a trade federation - the EEC, and before that the European Coal and Steel Community?
Or are you thinking of NATO?
> The concept of open borders in (most of) Europe is something I would never want to miss.
In what context?
"I don't have to show my passport on holidays - yay!"
or
"people can drive from a ghetto on the outskirts of Brussels with a trunkload of Kalashnikov's, spray bullets at Paris cafe society, and immediately afterwards they can be traced to.....er dunno..."
The European Coal and Steel Community was explicitly started to stop war in Europe. As the original proposal of the community said directly: "The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible" [0].
Steel and coal (or more generally energy) are necessary in order to to wage war. Pooling these things in a super national organization makes war between the member states impossible.
This claim that the EU/predecessor organisations have secured the peace since WW2 is often made but I think is impossible to verify, since we have no way of rerunning history without the EU in place. Some point to NATO as far more significant a guarantor of peace than the EU.
The biggest guarantor of Germany not invading France again is that France has nuclear bombs and no one ever invaded a country that has the nuclear bomb, which is why people are panicking at the idea of NK having it because it would be impossible to topple their dictatorship and interfere if they had the threat of the bomb.
> Some point to NATO as far more significant a guarantor of peace than the EU
NATO has never been a deterrent but was used after the fact when conflicts just had to come about. Like the Kosovo War which involved factions that didn't have the mushroom assured mutual destruction.
>no one ever invaded a country that has the nuclear bomb, which is why people are panicking at the idea of NK having it because it would be impossible to topple their dictatorship and interfere if they had the threat of the bomb.
It's not impossible, you just can't do it with an invasion, which is likely to have bad side-effects anyways. Just look at the USSR: they had tons of bombs, and their government was toppled, from within. Things are probably better there, overall, today than they were in the Soviet times, even if they aren't that great compared to richer nations. Even more so if you consider all the nations that used to be behind the Iron Curtain; many of those are thriving now, like Czechia.
Perhaps the answer to NK is to let their government evolve to something better on its own, instead of sending in an invasion force. As long as they don't invade SK, it just doesn't seem worth it.
>Just look at the USSR: they had tons of bombs, and their government was toppled, from within.
I wouldn't use the word "toppled" in the case of the fall of the USSR. Nobody actively contributed to its fall with the desire of making it fall. The factors that caused its fall aren't even comparable to anything that would affect dictatorships like NK.
In fact it is far more comparable to empires of old. Like Napoleon's empire, the roman empire and so on.
The USSR held territories which hated the guts of the people and culture that governed them, Russia.
When Gorbachev led reforms to give more freedoms to the people, that allowed the expression of nationalism throughout the occupied territories of the USSR "empire". Once all those territories started using their freedom of speech to rally around ideas like being different from Russians and needing to form their own nation, the USSR was bound to cease to exist. Russia, the main core of the USSR, is still more of a dictatorship than a democracy, by the way. It is arguable that the idea of a dictatorship was never really toppled in the mainland of the USSR. The fall of the USSR as a system of governance was merely the loss of colonized land.
North Korea doesn't have any factor of the kind. The government will only change if its rulers want it to change. It's doubtful a starving peasant revolt could do anything.
The coal and steel union was set up to prevent another WW2 as it's main purpose. And I think that part is still important since when you trade you don't fight.. Usually :)
>"I don't have to show my passport on holidays - yay!"
>or
>"people can drive from a ghetto on the outskirts of Brussels with a trunkload of Kalashnikov's, spray bullets at Paris cafe society, and immediately afterwards they can be traced to.....er dunno..."
Must be the second, automatic border control has rendered the reckless Schengen agreement obsolete for legitimate travellers. Last time I was in the UK passing in and out was a piece of piss, no standing in line or anything.
Or are you thinking of NATO?
> The concept of open borders in (most of) Europe is something I would never want to miss.
In what context?
"I don't have to show my passport on holidays - yay!"
or
"people can drive from a ghetto on the outskirts of Brussels with a trunkload of Kalashnikov's, spray bullets at Paris cafe society, and immediately afterwards they can be traced to.....er dunno..."