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.
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.
NATO has been the peacekeeping element in Europe. Not the EU, which is a far younger organisation than NATO.
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.
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.
> 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”.
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 !
But please provide some citations if that's incorrect.
Know who was the biggest trading partner for France and Germany in 1914? It was each other.
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.
No, that's not what we mean.
War between the UK and the RoI, the actual states involved, is in fact pretty unthinkable.
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.