by Oui
Wed Apr 13th, 2022 at 12:39:15 PM EST
"From war to peace: a European tale"
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is with humility and gratitude that we stand here together, to receive this award on behalf of the European Union.
At a time of uncertainty, this day reminds people across Europe and the world of the Union's fundamental purpose: to further the fraternity between European nations, now and in the future.
It is our work today.
It has been the work of generations before us.
And it will be the work of generations after us.
Here in Oslo, I want to pay homage to all the Europeans who dreamt of a continent at peace with itself, and to all those who day by day make this dream a reality.
This award belongs to them.
***
War is as old as Europe. Our continent bears the scars of spears and swords, canons and guns, trenches and tanks, and more.
The tragedy of it all resonates in the words of Herodotus, 25 centuries ago: "In Peace, Sons bury their Fathers. In War, Fathers bury their Sons."
Yet, ... after two terrible wars engulfed the continent and the world with it, ... finally lasting peace came to Europe.
But symbolic gestures alone cannot cement peace.
This is where the European Union's "secret weapon" comes into play: an unrivalled way of binding our interests so tightly that war becomes materially impossible.
Through constant negotiations, on ever more topics, between ever more countries. It's the golden rule of Jean Monnet: "Mieux vaut se disputer autour d'une table que sur un champ de bataille." ("Better fight around a table than on a battle-field.")
A nation build on hate cannot survive, it loses its soul and moral authority.
Europe's Four Freedoms | Sep 13th, 2018 |
Big update with Opinion piece in The Guardian by Bernie Sanders - a man speaking his mind and from the heart!
The political urgency to "conquer" the former satellite states of the Soviet bloc of nations is coming home to bite the EU in its behind. The corruption in these states prevents real steps to close the gap to democracy, human rights and Europe's Four Freedoms principle. No leadership but ordinary politicians who belief in winning the next election as a priority above a vision for a future of the next generation. Just take a view on thousand years of "belonging" to the Christian European family [?] and where there is abuse of LGBT citizens.
- Visionaries from the history of European integration
"In all our future efforts we shall have to keep in mind that mankind cannot give concrete shape to all the potentialities with which Nature and History have endowed it, if it does not live in harmony with its time. The single market which we will institute for the first time represents one of the essential elements for achieving great developments in production. These developments are necessary and are possible, but only if we unite ... In these days when the first supranational institutions of Europe are being established, we are conscious of the beginning of the great European revolution of our time: the revolution which, on our Continent, aims in substituting unity in freedom and in diversity for tragic national rivalries, the revolution which tends to stop the decay of our civilization and to initiate a new Renaissance."
[Jean Monnet - 1957]
Today Europe is united in war, not in peace ... a continent divided by foreign influence, not our allies.
East-West Schism: Destruction Process Inside Europe
Trust In Government Big Loser By Disinformation
EU rebuffs critics as it accepts Nobel peace prize
The financial pain has provoked social unrest in a number of member states, notably near-bankrupt Greece, and in many countries the European Union has become a byword for disorder and mismanagement, not democracy and human rights.
However, in its citation, the Nobel committee focused on the EU's role in reconciling old hatreds, with the emphasis on how Germany and France had overcome their past to stand together.
From just six countries which agreed to pool their coal and steel production in the 1950s, the EU now stretches from Portugal to Romania, Finland to Malta and sets rules and regulations that have a bearing on more than 500 million people.
London, UKIP and the Tories drove a stake through the heart of the European project ... Brussels failed to realize it was the EU in added time. However, the EU has put all effort in expansion and failed to consolidate a disfunctional 27 nations to its core principles. Even today in all emotions after failure to maintain peace in the Donbas, VDL and Borrell go beyond themselves to promise a failed state of the Ukraine a rapid transition to membership. Increasing the mess while doing patchwork to cover tracks of diplomatic failure.
Nobel Peace Prize for the EU | by Frank Schnittger - Dec 10th, 2012 |
The Nobel Peace Prize committee has a curious sense of timing: awarding President Obama the Peace Prize before he had accomplished anything much in office, and now awarding the EU the Peace Prize at a time when it seems intent on unraveling much of what has been achieved in European Solidarity in the past 60 years. Perhaps both awards can be described as a form of preemptive peace making: Instead of the more usual approach of rewarding a peacemaker for a life-times achievement of making peace long after it can do any good to help their efforts, it chose instead to reward Obama early in order to make it more possible for him to unwind the warmongering of President Bush. And now it is rewarding current EU leaders for NOT YET having unraveled most of what has been achieved in terms of EU solidarity in order to remind them of the rich peace making heritage bequeathed to them by the EU's founders, and thus make it more possible for them to reverse current negative trends.
A Peacemaker Remembered
One of the few people to come through the Troubles with their hands unsullied by sectarian politics of one kind or another. There would have been no peace process without him, or Good Friday Agreement, or a relatively un-damaging Brexit agreement now. Unfortunately there have been too few like him.
Poland's Hunt for Red Octogenarians | by r------ Fri Apr 6th, 2007 |
Goose. Gander | by r------ - Mar 14th, 2012 |
We've been on and on lately about the economic orthodoxy emanating from Germany, and supported by its allies the Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg and Finland, the jist of which is that there is no macro-economic problem in the Eurozone which cannot be solved by austerity. Eurozone-wide budget rules pushed forward by the German Bundesbank as the price of Germany's entry into the single currency, and first enshrined in what Romano Prodi rightfully described as the Growth and Stupidity Act, were meant to be respected!
Mark Rutte's "pro-business" government in the Netherlands has been out front, if this were possible, of Germany in efforts to force the laggards in the south and in Ireland to heel, being behind a sovereinty-stripping proposal to create a Eurozone czar to control member-state fiscal policy.
[Links added are mine - Oui]
Not much has changed over a decade … similar headaches, financial crisis looming much greater.
Related reading …
The World According to Dutch FM Halbe Zijlstra
Peace is not the absence of war, neither is love the absence of hate ...
How valid is the claim that the EU has delivered peace in Europe? | New Statesman - May 2016 |
But then, some years ago, when I was writing about the EU's values, it occurred to me that it was too simplistic to think of `peace' as only meaning the absence of war. Just as I wouldn't define `love' as the absence of `hatred', I thought `peace' had to imply more than just an end to military conflict between European states. And now, as the Remain camp keeps referring to `peace' as the fundamental achievement of the EU, it's apt that we look a little more closely at the claim. How instrumental has the Union been in keeping the peace as well as stopping war for its members? How good has it been in developing a continent at peace and contributing to a world without war? What influence has it had in reducing and resolving conflict?
An internal peace?
When in 1984 the then Presidents of Germany and France, Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, held manly hands outside the First World War cemetery in Verdun, many remarked on the gesture's historical significance. Age old animosity replaced with intimacy, they said. Past hatreds buried. No one believed anymore that war would ever be possible between the two countries again.
Great credit for this was (and still is) given to the EU's method. In binding key western European nations together in a mutually beneficial free market, blurring economic if not geographical borders, the incentive for using war as a shortcut to power and wealth has diminished to the point of becoming unthinkable. That was the inspired idea behind the European Economic Community, now the EU, in 1957. A rapprochement.
But if peace means the resolution of hatreds, the righting of wrongs, then the original EU/EEC buried much. In tying age-old enemies together, a lot of forgetting had to be done. It was no coincidence that Mitterrand and Kohl chose a memorial of a particularly bloody First World War battlefield (where the men of both sides fell in their tens of thousands) to show their friendship. There was no posing outside Second World War sites: Natzweiler concentration camp in the Alsace Mountains, where the Germans had overseen the slaughter of tens of thousands of French citizens only a little more than a decade before the EEC was constructed. Mont Valérien fort near Paris, where the SS executed the largest number of French Resistance fighters during the German occupation of France. Compiègne from where the Vichy French and German authorities conspired to deport 50,000 Jews for extermination in the camps of Eastern Europe. It suited both countries, and those four others who formed the first members of the EEC, to forget the evils of Nazism and collaboration in its genocidal programmes. In comparison, WW1 held far fewer ambiguities.
Verdun & Verdun | by Alex in Toulouse - Feb 27th, 2006 |
Where hatred over past decades, even centuries prevails, another war will become inevitable. EU rapid expansion to the request of the US, UK and NATO was a lose-lose proposition ... a trap laid out to embarrass and may even destroy the project of the European Union.
At this moment, the hatred within New Europe spreads across the continent in an attempt to demonize Germany and its leaders ... in search for peacemakers, the warmongers accuse leaders of collaboration. It stinks a mile in the wind. Cut this crap of mass hysteria.
Opinion: Ukraine's snub to the German president is wrong | DW News |
Complete bullshit!!
Warmongers become heroes, and peacemakers are turned villain.
