Peace is not to be given for granted

The EU, pronounced Herman Van Rompuy, the nearest the body has to a president, is "the biggest peacemaking institution ever created in human history".

Talking about peace, it was the Americans who brought it and they also brought democracy, and stability to post-1945 (western) Europe, while the Russians brought enslavement to the east of the continent. 

But it's also true that, following three wars from 1870, the rapprochement between Germany and France that was engineered in the 1950s as the foundation of the EU has been deepened. In an EU of 27, the Franco-German relationship can often appear less central than it was. But crisis also exposes fundamentals and the current turbulence and depression will require Paris and Berlin, deeply divided over the future of the EU.

Another thing to know is that it's not the EU that fomented Poland's Solidarity revolution but that triumph belongs to the people of Poland and in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, European failures, botched policies, and divisions were widely seen as a huge moral disgrace. Yet the Oslo citation credits the EU with reconciliation successes in the Balkans.

And despite the long years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Basque insurgency, say, in Spain, or the continued partition of Cyprus, no two EU member states have ever gone to war against one another. It's a peace that may too often be taken for granted.