Commentary
Simultaneously with the arrival of important deadlines on tariffs and trade arrangements between the United States and Canada, comparably important and complicated decisions will soon have to be attempted between the United States and the European Union. These discussions take place against a background of genuine and rising concern about the stability and future of the brave European experiment.
It is easy, 80 years after the end of World War II, to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment it has been to establish and maintain such a broad collective unity of the objectives between almost all the European countries west of the innermost republics of the old Soviet Union and Turkey, a total of 27 countries. Except for Sweden, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, all of these countries were heavily engaged in World War II and many of them, including Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Hungary, had the red-hot rake of war dragged over them by the contending sides, often twice. Most were also pounded mercilessly from the air, and Spain, though not a combatant in the world war, in 1939 concluded a civil war in which Italy, Germany, and the USSR intervened, ravaging the entire country and killing more than a million people….