The EU celebrates its 50th anniversary

"Fifty years of Europe have brought the free market, not peace", considers the editorialist Syp Wynia. "Yes, Europe is in need of good news, but the revision of History will certainly not help it. As usual, anniversaries offer an opportunity to grant countless mythical rewards and suppress certain bad examples from History. Thus it has been suggested for a long time that attempts to create European unity were inspired by the idea that no world war based on Franco-German opposition should ever happen again. And it is the EU who we have to thank for the absence of miltary conflict since then. This, at best, is a partial falsification of History. ... It is neither France, nor Germany, but the United States who launched the Marshall Plan in 1947, as the basis of a European economic cooperation directed towards the Atlantic and against the Soviet block. ... Peace, in so much as it exists, was above all achieved with a strong American military presence that stopped the Soviet Union from imposing its ideas on Western Europe."

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