Getting the Wrong End of the Stick

Amazing what you can do when you really, really want to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. In a posting on German attitudes towards Britain and the EU , I noted: ’ I believe it [EU membership]was largely forced upon us by the USA, which has had, since 1916, a strong interest in creating a unified Europe in which war has been made highly unlikely.

 

 

My vigilant nitpickers pounced. Was I then accepting the EU’s claim to have prevented war in Europe, which I have often derided? So! etc etc.

 

Please do pay attention. The EU played no part in preventing the Cold War from turning hot. That was achieved by NATO and the successful bluff that a conventional Warsaw Pact attack on Western Europe would lead inevitably to a nuclear war.

 

But, as I have often said, the EU institutionalised the conflict between Germany and France, and the overbearing dominance by Germany of the rest of the continent, which rests ultimately on an implicit threat that, unindulged by EU dominance, Germany will once again go wild. I did so as recently as June this year:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/some-thoughts-on-german-domination-of-the-european-union.html

 

 

As for the USA, I cannot recommend too strongly Adam Tooze’s new book ‘The Deluge’ , by a mile the most illuminating book about the First World War published in recent times, and reviewed by me here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/british-empire/

 

The fact that the USA desires a stabilized Europe, and that it believes an expanding German-dominated EU is the best route to this goal, is one thing, Whether this is a wise policy, and whether it will have the results the USA hopes for, is another. I was stating a fact about what Washington wants, not offering an opinion on whether it was wise to do so. I tend to think the evidence so far suggests that Washington, like so many Anglocentric students of European conflict,  may have missed the point. The fundamental conflict in Europe is not between France and Germany, let alone between Britain and Germany, It is between Germany and Russia.

 

Now the EU has become the modern expression of Germany, and Russia cannot conceivably join the EU as a single nation without challenging Germany’s dominance of that EU (and so cannot join, full stop).

 

So the Russo-German conflict cannot be institutionalised and tame within the EU. Worse, the EU, as the continuation of Germany by other mean, is now through eastward expansion reviving the  perennial quarrel. I am extremely gloomy about the likely outcome of this. The stakes, especially control of the vital Caspian basin, are very high. The cancellation this week of Russia’s planned South Stream pipeline is a development of enormous significance which few have even noticed.  So is France’s refusal to hand over a new warship she has been building for the Russian Navy, an astonishing surrender of national sovereignty by France, whose arms exporting firms have always been immensely powerful in the French state.  There are bad times just around the corner.