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Comment by wombatmobile | Hacker News Reader

> Well, it's not like nobody has ever thought of that before.

Naturally. What we haven't done before is invested in tools. We've invested trillions to make tools for advertising, but almost nothing to make tools for achieving peace.

> The best we've been able to do is deterrence, which requires developing advanced weapons like aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and nukes.

I'm not suggesting war or deterrence can be obsoleted. Human nature is what it is.

What if for every $1 trillion of sticks, we had $1 trillion of carrots?

50 years from now, what if the 3rd generation carrots scaled better than the sticks, which don't scale at all?

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> We've invested trillions to make tools for advertising, but almost nothing to make tools for achieving peace.

I'd argue the European Union was an experiment in peace along these lines, to bind a war-torn continent so close together that war becomes unthinkable. And it's worked - war between France and Germany, or the UK and Ireland, or Denmark and Sweden is unthinkable.

Hang on, I think you forgot something...

OH YES!

The US has parked an army in Germany for 75 years!

I dunno, but could this have been a factor in the "no war between European powers" thing?

And when we say "war between the UK and Ireland... unthinkable" do we mean that no-one is going to bomb or shoot people in the UK or Ireland to attempt to achieve a political objective in the relationships between those two countries? That would be jolly nice if it were come to pass !

Pretty sure it wasn't NATO that kept France from invading Germany, and vice versa. Or kept Spain from attempting to annex Portugal. Or even just Gibraltar.

But please provide some citations if that's incorrect.

The problem with this theory is that people thought the same thing before WW1.

Know who was the biggest trading partner for France and Germany in 1914? It was each other.

This isn't the theory people used before WW1.

This is exactly why the EU is not just an economic union, it's a political and judicial one as well. No on before WW1 would have even considered the idea that a French judge in a common European court could tell the German government what they can or can't do with respect to their own internal laws. Today, this is routine.

>do we mean that no-one is going to bomb or shoot people in the UK or Ireland to attempt to achieve a political objective

No, that's not what we mean.

War between the UK and the RoI, the actual states involved, is in fact pretty unthinkable.

The RoI did make plans to invade the north in the 60s.

Firstly, that was 60 years ago.

Second, I think thats misleading. The Irish military did scenario analysis on this in case they were asked, and concluded it was hopeless, if that's what you mean.

This is not correct.

NATO has been the peacekeeping element in Europe. Not the EU, which is a far younger organisation than NATO.

They do different things. Metaphorically, NATO is a wall-building exercise while the EU is bridge-building.

NATO has an external focus, initially keeping Europe safe from the Warsaw Pact.

The EU is an economic bloc: while it does have a mutual defence article, that article is explicitly secondary to NATO obligations. More importantly it builds the peace, with the primary threat being economic/political, with loss of access to the decision making process (if they’re a member state) or much softer and less well defined big-fish-ness (for non-member-states) rather than violence.

The point I was making was in response to the claim that the EU have been responsible for helping keeping the peace in Europe, which is clearly an incorrect claim.

In fact technically speaking neither NATO nor the EU have prevented wars happening in /Europe/ over the last 60-odd years. And I mean Europe. The EU is not Europe.

You only have to search on wars in Europe in the last 60 years, the list is long.

The comment from @dukeyukey that you replied to says, as a reply to the suggestion we invest in peace rather than adverts:

> I'd argue the European Union was an experiment in peace along these lines, to bind a war-torn continent so close together that war becomes unthinkable.

I read that as more about bridge-building (and building the peace) than “peace keeping” in the “play nice or we shoot” sense that I get from NATO.

> In fact technically speaking neither NATO nor the EU have prevented wars happening in /Europe/ over the last 60-odd years. And I mean Europe. The EU is not Europe.

Okay, but why must the perfect be the enemy of the good? The context looks to me like “the EU is an attempt” not “the EU perfectly does this thing”.

It's difficult to know if it's been the reason. Chances are that there wouldn't have been any wars without the EC/EU anyway.

Not sure Ireland vs. UK is a great example BTW.

And your example with Denmark and Sweden is particularly off-base since war between these has been unthinkable for over 200 years[1] -- much longer than the EC/EU has existed. Also, Sweden joined the EU in 1995, more than 20 years after Denmark did.

[1]: and it could be argued it goes back longer than that because the last clash was forced by their respective allies in the Napoleonic Wars, but neither Denmark nor Sweden actually did want to fight each other at all.

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