המאמר מהאקונומיסט:
FOR many centuries Europe was the world's most powerful, prosperous and technologically advanced continent. That period of European cultural and political dominance came to a definitive end with the second world war. In 1945 Germany was defeated and in ruins; France was half-starved and humiliated; Britain was bankrupt and on the point of losing its empire; Spain was a backward, isolated dictatorship; and the countries of central and eastern Europe had been absorbed into a Soviet empire. Nobody would have guessed that Europe was at the beginning of a new golden age. In 2004, a continent that had been wracked by war for centuries can look back on almost 60 years spent largely at peace. A continent that lay in economic ruins in 1945 is now prosperous as never before. A continent that in 1942 could list only four proper democracies is almost entirely democratic. A continent that was divided by the iron curtain until 1989 now enjoys free movement of people and common political institutions for 25 countries, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the borders of Russia. This new period of peace and prosperity has coincided with the rise of a new form of political and economic organisation. The founding fathers of what is now the European Union—Jean Monnet, a French civil servant, and Robert Schuman, a French foreign minister of the 1950s—were convinced that the origins of conflict in Europe lay in the continent's system of competing nation-states. As Schuman put it, “Because Europe was not united, we have had war.” Those founding fathers were determined to build a new union in Europe that would banish conflict for good. Their building-blocks were economic, but their goals were political. Starting with agreements between six countries on the pooling of coal and steel resources in 1951 and moving on to the creation of a common market in 1957, the EU has gradually spread into a plethora of activities. Today it is hard to think of a field of public policy in which it is not active. It is involved in everything from foreign policy to immigration, and is reckoned to be responsible for around half of all new laws passed in its member states.