I have writtenbefore (often) about the way the EU’s defenders play the ‘Verdun card’ whenever the debate or the polling is turning too strongly against them. The EU, so the argument runs, is all that stands between Europe and a return to the horrors of the past, a habit that may (as I noted here) have reached some sort of nadir in 2005 when:
Margot Wallström, then the EU commissioner charged with selling the proposed EU constitution to a somewhat doubtful continent, took the opportunity presented by a visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) to observe that “there are those today who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely intergovernmental way of doing things. . . . Those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads.”
Ms. Wallström is now Sweden’s foreign minister. As it happens, she’s in the news today complaining about the way that “horrible lies” about the EU have “gone unchallenged” in the UK, a reminder that her acquaintance with the truth is not as close as it could be.
But back to Cameron. To be fair, he was subtler than some of the Verdun brigade. Contrary to what some of my fellow Brexiteers are suggesting he was not predicting that Brexit will lead to World War III. His speech (you can find it here) is well-crafted, and subtler than that.
Here’s the critical passage
Isolationism has never served this country well. Whenever we turn our back on Europe, sooner or later we come to regret it. We have always had to go back in, and always at a much higher cost. The serried rows of white headstones in lovingly-tended Commonwealth war cemeteries stand as silent testament to the price that this country has paid to help restore peace and order in Europe.
Well, we can argue about whether Britain should have intervened in 1914 (on balance, I don’t think so), but that’s a debate for another time.
Cameron:
Can we be so sure that peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash as to make that assumption. It’s barely been 20 years since war in the Balkans and genocide on our continent in Srebrenica.
Cameron appears to have forgotten that the Balkan crisis, a crisis caused, incidentally, by the break-up of a supranational federation, was meant to be the “hour of Europe”.
Here’s the New York Times from June 20, 1991:
The mission formed by the foreign ministers of Luxembourg, Italy and the Netherlands was sent by a summit meeting of Community leaders, who postponed a debate on European integration to take up the Yugoslav crisis. ‘The Hour of Europe’
Shortly before leaving here Friday, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister, Jacques Poos, said European governments had a special responsibility to act in a crisis that threatened European stability. “This is the hour of Europe,” he said. “It is not the hour of the Americans.”
Mr. Poos also disclosed that the mission, which is expected to report back to European leaders here late today, would offer community assistance in redrafting the Yugoslav Constitution in such a way as to preserve a single federation and to grant ample autonomy to Slovenia and Croatia.
Well, the ‘hour of Europe’ turned into years of bloodshed, made worse, quite possibly, by the attempt to preserve a federation whose time had clearly passed. There’s a lesson there. And as for those despised Americans, well, it was NATO not the EU that finally brought the Balkan wars to an end.
Cameron, again:
In the last few years, we have seen tanks rolling into Georgia and Ukraine. And of this I am completely sure.The European Union has helped reconcile countries which were once at each others’ throats for decades. Britain has a fundamental national interest in maintaining common purpose in Europe to avoid future conflict between European countries.
Well, I am not so sure, Prime Minister. The EU did play a vital part—of which it should be proud—in anchoring parts of the former Soviet empire into the West, something that has undeniably contributed to the peace and stability enjoyed on (most of) the continent. But the real keys to European peace in the years after 1945 were the discipline imposed by the Cold War, American generosity, Soviet brutality (not least the ‘ethnic cleansing’, to use that disgusting phrase, of Eastern Europe’s German population) and, of course, NATO. The EU was a consequence of peace, not a cause of it.
The idea that Brexit would, say, send Germany’s panzers (all five of them) rolling west (or east) again is nonsense.
And, yes, as Mr. Cameron rightly notes, Russia is again on the prowl, but the answer (primarily) to that is NATO, an organization threatened by the EU’s own military ambitions. Here’s Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, writing today in today’s Daily Telegraph:
A German defence white paper, leaked last week but supposed to be kept under wraps until after the referendum, leaves no doubt of Germany’s intention to drive through the merger of Europe’s armed forces “and embark on permanent cooperation under common structures”. Germany has begun to combine substantial elements of the Dutch forces with their own.
A centralised army is an indispensable component of the superstate to which the EU is openly committed. It would also provide an excuse for struggling economies to slash defence budgets. Few nations take defence seriously enough to spend even the 2 per cent of GDP required by Nato, a shortcoming criticised by President Obama in Germany last month. An EU army will see these nations cut back even further, cynically pretending that defences are strengthened even as forces and capabilities are merged and downsized.
Funds will be diverted from Nato combat forces as the EU army lavishes cash on costly new command structures, including a surfeit of generals with expensive headquarters. Indeed, reducing the influence of Nato and the US is the aim for several EU members, especially France and Germany. And if we undercut Nato, that aim will succeed, leading to US retrenchment.
And there’s something else. The eurofundamentalist insistence—in the name of ‘ever closer union’— on dangerous experiments whether with Europe’s currencies or its borders, has had a profoundly destabilizing effect, something that has benefited no one more than Mr. Putin.
If anything is a danger to the peace, it is ‘ever closer union’, not Brexit.
Playing The Verdun Card: Cameron’s turn