A short background article on the formation of the EU and the differences between the UK and the European states.....
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-referendum-european-union-brexit-a7049146.html
Before we can decide whether to remain in the European Union or to leave it, it is important to understand what sort of thing it is. In doing this exercise, inevitably I find aspects that I don’t like, and perhaps many others will share my opinion. This means that in answering the referendum question, there is quite a difficult calculation to be made. We must think in terms of a bargain. On one side there is the price; on the other side, the benefit. We shall have to strike the balance.
Remembering that the characters of institutions, as well as of people, are generally set in their early years, I believe we should start at the very beginning. The EU in its original form was created by six nations (“the Six”) that had been at war with each other, the victors as well as the vanquished. These were France, which was overrun by the Germans in 1940 without putting up much of a fight; the Netherlands, Belgium and tiny Luxembourg – which were too small to resist the might of the German forces – and the aggressors themselves, Germany with Italy tagging along, both in their turn overwhelmed by British and American forces.
It is worth picturing in one’s mind what this meant. When the war ended in 1945, the destruction was as bad as anything we see today in television reports from Syria or Iraq. Günter Grass, the German novelist, who was 18 years old in 1945, has described the city of Cologne as a “pile of debris with an occasional miraculously surviving street sign stuck to what was left of a façade, or hung on a pole sticking out of the rubble, which was also sprouting lush patches of dandelions about to blossom”.
Britain also suffered devastating war damage but not the dispersal of families that Grass also recounts. He has written of the heart breaking efforts of families trying to find their missing children, or parents or other family members. “In towns and villages … the corridors of municipal buildings were hung with the names and dates of the missing and, often enough, of the dead … I, too, scoured the lists, posted weekly, for signs of my parents and my three-year old younger sister.”
Out of this experience there arose a widespread and understandable hatred for the governments that had led the countries of western Europe into such misery and chaos. Even worse, after the Nazi invasions, the governments in France, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium had sometimes enthusiastically done the Germans’ bidding. A senior French lawyer, who remained in Paris throughout the war, recounted in his recently published diary, that in the Paris police headquarters, the equivalent of Scotland Yard, the French police constantly flattered their new masters and even gave them Nazi salutes.......article continues
