How The EU Advances
This post is kind of an update to earlier posts on Barroso's failure to steamroll through the European Parliament with unfit candidates, which strenghtened the stature of the EU's only democratic institution, even before the new EU Constitution gives it more power relative to the European Council (which is essentially the private club of national governments).
Progress Of The EU
Nothing captures the essence of what is the EU better in my eyes than the above caricature. (I downloaded it some years ago, and completely forgot the source - propably a Hungarian paper.) The EU is the institutionalised form of the relationship of European countries - one that binds together political leaders not in some idealistic collective march to progress, but a constant tussle - but thus preventing violent collisions and open battle - and amazingly, this constant tussle leads to rather slow but steady progress.
European Eurosceptics should contrast this with business as usual in the previous three thousand years - no period without a major European war longer than forty years. American Eurosceptics might consider whether bureaucratic complicatedness, ineffectivity and inertia are really that big a disadvantage relative to laissez-faire competition (if bureaucratic monster Airbus's success against Boeing wasn't convincing enough).
5 Comments:
Were there a lot of wars between the Congress of Vienna and the first World War?
Three wars of Italian Unification could be called Civil Wars.
The three Schlesewig-Holstein wars were border disputes that didn't spread.
The Crimean War was, well, out in the Crimea.
I suppose if I throw in the War of Spanish Succession and the Franco-Prussian (seven weeks) War, it does come to a turbulent time... but it wasn't all that bad compared to 1500-1800
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Josh,
First there were the 1848 revolutions that inflamed all of Europe. Revolutionary armies had foreign volunteers up to generals, and some revolutions were put down with the help of another kingdom (f.e. Russia intervened on behalf of the Habsburg Emire against the Hungarian revolutionaries.) (BTW, many 1848 revolutionaries ended up in the USA, and fought on the Union side in the Civil War.)
Then there was the 1854-56 Crimean War. Crimea is in Europe, and the war didn't cover just that place: it started with chasing Russia out of Wallachia and Moldavia (later unified as Romania; Stalin carved off only a part of the latter to create what is now independent Moldavia). Also, it included on some level all major European powers except Prussia (that is: Britain, France, Austria, Russia, Turkey, and the core of future unified Italy: Sardinia-Savoy) - and half a million dead in total.
The first Italian war of Unification, in 1859, also pitted France and Austria against each other.
The next major war was the Austro-Prussian one, in 1866, which included all German states and Italy as allies of one or the other, and was won by Prussia at Königgrätz. This war decided which Germanic empire will unite the rest of Germany. It was this war that was called "Seven Weeks War"; and this war can be called a 'spreading' of the Second Schleswig War - Bismarck provoked it by not keeping to promises over the joint control of conquered territory; and the Austrian-Italian part of this war was part of the wars for Unification of Italy.
The Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71 (which lasted for six to ten months, depending on the inclusion of the Paris Commune), saw the largest troops confronting each other in battle on European soil thus far: 500,000 vs. 370,000 [Napoleon I's army against Russia started out bigger but the Russian main army pursued scorched earth policy instead of battle]; of which 188,000 died, plus 600,000 civilians to various causes. This war was a direct consequence of the Spanish crown succession tussle after the 1868 Revolution, while the last Italian War of Unification was a sideshow to this war (Italy took its chance in September 1870 while France was unable to send troops).
It was the 41 years from the 1870/71 War to the First Balkan War of 1912 which I meant as longest peaceful period before. (Its optimistic second half was called 'Belle Epoque'.) However, as is well known, major powers spent this time arming to the teeth in preparation for the next big war - which came in 1914.
Just for the record;since I wrote the above, I read more on troop levels in past wars - hence I have to relativise the above claim on the Franco-Prussian War.
In the Napoleonic battles, the final campaigns leading up to the Battle at Leipzig started out with 440,000 troops on Napoleon's side and 510,000 troops on the opposing coalition's side - however, distributed on multiple fronts, and troops shrunk to less than half when they met at Leipzig.
In the Zeroeth World War, that is the Seven Years' War in 1756-63, the troops against Prussia (again on at least four fronts, which never united) numbered between 280,000 [final year] and 390,000 [the year before] - while the Prussian and allied troops numbered between 150,000 and 210,000. Less, but not by a magnitude.
In the 1870/71 Franco-Prussian War itself, troops that met upon each other in the first months were 460,000-510,000 men on the German side and 345,000 men in two large army groups on the French side, and troops actually engaging in battle weren't more any later either; on the other hand, troops subsequently sent into battle or deployed for defense add up to over a million on the German side and more than 700,000 on the French side. (For Paris's defense alone, more than 350,000 men were assembled at one time.)
A
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