Separating EU Myth From Reality: New at Reason

Voters in the United Kingdom will decide on Thursday whether the UK should leave the European Union. What has the European Union done?

Marian Tupy writes:

So, in preparation for the British referendum on the EU membership, let us take a closer look at the EU: what is it and what has it accomplished?

This is how the EU answers those questions: “The EU is unlike anything else—it isn’t a government, an association of states, or an international organization. Rather, the 28 Member States have relinquished part of their sovereignty to EU institutions, with many decisions made at the European level. The European Union has delivered more than 60 years of peace, stability, and prosperity in Europe, helped raise our citizens’ living standards, launched a single European currency (the euro) , and is progressively building a single Europe-wide free market for goods, services, people, and capital” (my emphasis).

This self-congratulatory assessment of the EU’s achievements is deeply problematic. Consider peace and stability. The EU’s narrative ignores, for example, the roles played by Germany’s unconditional surrender, Anglo-American occupation of West Germany, the rise of the communist threat in the East, and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—all of which preceded the creation of the first and extremely tentative pan-European institutions. It also ignores the EU’s failure to deal with the Yugoslav crisis in the early 1990s, which was eventually “resolved” by the application of American military strength.

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