NATO, the EU and peace in Europe: missed point error

In the i last week, Chloe Westley, campaign manager at the TaxPayers' Alliance, took issue with Guy Verhofstadt's declaration that "It is through the European Union that we can live in peace and democracy". She wrote that this is:

gravely insulting to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers from across the world who fought to liberate Europe in the Second World War [and] it was the US-led transatlantic alliance - Nato - that secured the peace during the lifetime of the EU.

NATO was primarily a bulwark against Russian-dominated Communist expansion in Europe. It was needed, and is still needed, as a military deterrent. (I trust the TaxPayers would put aside their objection to paying tax in this particular instance and agree with me that we need to provide the funds to maintain NATO'S credibility.) However, the anti-Communist stance has gone too far in the past. The powers-that-were in NATO supported the Greek colonels in their far from peaceful, and certainly undemocratic, coup against a democratically-elected government. Greece was not in the European Community at the time. Nor did NATO prevent the military invasion of Cyprus (an independent nation under a power-sharing constitution) by Turkey (a NATO member).

The implication of Verhofstadt's message is that, if, in the early twentieth century, we had in Europe enjoyed tight economic and cultural bonds including a shared ethos of democracy and human rights, instead of the loose system of alliances which prevailed, the destructive Second War in Europe need not have occurred. The fascist and national socialist regimes of Italy, Hungary and Germany would not have arisen. (Maybe, without the support of Germany, Japan might not have embarked on her own military expansion, so no Pearl Harbor.)

The thousands of soldiers who slogged through Europe liberating our friends from tyranny and genocide, and who witnessed the destruction that war had brought, returned to the UK determined that "there must be a better way". They voted for great social reforms at home (no doubt contested by the ancestors of the TPA) and for greater cooperation between nations abroad. The most prominent advocates of our joining the Treaty of Rome were Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Heath, Major Denis Healey, and Captain Roy Jenkins who had all served in World War II, together with Harold Macmillan who distinguished himself in the Great War. The majority of those thousands would have swelled the two-thirds vote in favour of staying in the European Community when the first referendum was called in 1975.

Farage, Fox, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and their ilk are the heirs to the appeasers of the 1930s who wanted to dissociate the UK from events on the mainland. Their allies are ultra-nationalist minority parties like the Allianz für Deutschland and the Front National, who also want to break up the European Union and whose roots are probably (certainly in the case of the FN) fascistic. The Daily Mail had it wrong. The real traitors, those who betrayed the hopes and expectations of my parents' generation, are those who would use a narrow majority in a flawed second referendum in order to bring disruption and chaos to Britain and the wider world.