Democracy & Peace

We are in 1945 and fascism is at an all-time low in Western Europe. Its enforcers are killed, judged or on the run. Its believers renounce it. People want to focus on reconstruction and are supported in this endeavor by the Marshall Plan, an American aid program, providing funds on the condition that they’re used to buy American products and equipment. It was a win-win agreement. Europeans were financing American companies, building trust and gratitude towards their country, while ensuring that democracy would be preserved against communist USSR.

Once most of the work done, Europeans wanted institutions able to stop fascism, war and destruction to ever happen on their soil, ultimately creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951. The idea was that pooling coal and steel production between France and Germany would make a new war “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible”[1].

It worked. War indeed became unthinkable, revealing that merging economic interests was the key that could unlock a lasting peace, starting the trend for supranational institutions aiming to pool resources. The Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community (EEC) merely six years later in 1957 and provided for the introduction of a Customs Union. The EEC would then evolve into the European Union in 1992 thanks to the Treaty of Maastricht, while the Customs Union would become the Single Market.

Since then, intentions stayed the same. Citizens were to be directly represented at Union level in the European Parliament and to have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union, with a focus on explaining decisions done at EU level as openly and as closely as possible. The enlargement process was retooled, with a focus on political criteria such as the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy and the rule of law[2].

The Treaty of Lisbon came in 2009 to keep enforcing it, right from its preamble[3], reaffirming their values of “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights”. Optimism was still on the menu. But the times were already changing.