A claim frequently made by supporters of the European Union is that the EU and membership of the EU is a force for stability that has prevented war in Europe and one that will reduce the chance of wars occurring. This ignores two facts.

NATO: Firstly it has been NATO, an alliance of independent nations, that has kept the peace since the Second World war. The EU has had no positive effects on European peace since it was created. In fact its few attempts at getting involved have had negative effects. Its unashamed support for Greece and isolation of Turkey has caused much friction in Cyprus. This was demonstrated by the attempts of the Greeks to deploy anti-aircraft missiles in Cyprus, a move that prompted threats of military action from the Turkish side. Similarly its early attempts to get involved in Yugoslavia were disastrous and mitigated against a peaceful outcome by encouraging the Serb led communist dictatorship to take tough action to hold the country together. In 1991 Signor de Michelis, the Italian Foreign Minister and member of the EU delegation to Belgrade, told them that the EU 'could not accept the disintegration of Yugoslavia'. Three months after the EU delegation visited, the Yugoslav Army was shelling towns in Croatia.

Nationalism: Secondly the EU is all about defining a new nation and a new national identity for Europe. This aim was repeated by the German government on the back of the launch of the Euro. If you look around the world at the wars underway, most of them are as a result of disputes about national identity (Yugoslavia is a classic case in point). For EU politicians to meddle with what are in the main free, happy and stable western democracies in the name of the dream of 'European Union' is insanity.

Most people in Europe are happy with their national identity and are also happy for their nation's boundaries to be softened and blurred my cheap travel, modern communications and global trade. The outlook of your average European 'citizen' is in reality becoming more internationalist. Creating a new nation is a movement in the wrong direction. This movement is doubly fraught because the politicians will probably make a mess of it, which will cause all sorts of economic and domestic chaos. Stable nations do not appear over-night, out of a vacuum, through acts of government. Nations 'grow' over long periods of time out of a people's shared values and aspirations. In fact it is true to say that the majority of nations that have been artificially created have been unstable and frequently violently so.

In Summary. The efforts to unify Europe that have been attempted so far do not augur well for the future. The European Exchange Rate Mechanism (the ERM) was an experiment that cost the UK about £70-£75 billion, that is more money than the UK spends on the NHS each year. When the ERM collapsed it caused a recession that the UK economy took years to recover from. The grander experiment under way now, the Euro, has the capability of being a much greater disaster. It is a political move that economically makes little sense. When a common European interest rate means that German coal miners are being thrown out of business as a consequence of stimulating high technology industries in Ireland, then we shall really rue the day we let the politicians play with our sovereignty.