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hear the excuse “there's not enough money.” In actuality, there
is
enough money…
just dif erent priorities. New stadium, healthcare for all, faster trains, extrava-
gant cathedral, subsidized education, tax cuts, next-generation bomber…each
society makes dif erent choices according to its priorities.
Europe Wants Peace
So far I've focused on the economy of the European Union. But for the EU's
founders, money took a backseat to their primary motivation: peace. Even
the biggest Euroskeptic recognizes that, in weaving together the economies
of former enemies like France and Germany, everyone has become so inter-
connected that Europe will never again suf er devastation from a major war
as they did twice in the last century. h e French and the Germans still don't
agree on most things. But now they've become too i nancially interdepen-
dent to take up arms over their dif erences. Minimizing the possibility of an
intra-European war is
the
triumph of the EU.
When boots do hit the ground in a war, Europeans believe it's because
they have failed to prevent it. h ey prefer endless diplomacy to once-in-a-while
war. Europe's reluctance to go to war frustrates some Americans. I believe
their relative pacii sm is because Europeans know the reality of war, while
most Americans do not. Of course, if you have a loved one who has fought
or died in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam, you know what a war is. But as a
society, the US can't remember actually hosting a war. Europeans have told
me that they believe Americans were more willing to use cluster bombs and
napalm to pacify Fallujah because in the age of modern warfare, no American
city has ever been wiped from existence like Coventry, Dresden, Rotterdam,
or Warsaw. It's easier to feel detached when a war is something you watch
on the nightly news, rather than something that killed your grandfather or
destroyed your hometown.
Europe knows what a war is. It ripped itself to shreds twice within my
grandparents' lifetime. Consider France in World War I. France (with one-
quarter as many people as we have) lost as many people as we've lost in the
entire Iraq War—over 4,000 people—in one day…many times. h ey lost as
many people as we lost in Vietnam (60,000) in one month. And then it hap-
pened again and again until, by the end of World War I, an estimated half of all
the men in France between the ages of 15 and 30 were casualties. When some
Americans, frustrated at France's reluctance to follow us into a war, call the
French “surrender monkeys,” I believe it shows their ignorance of history.
