Dear Editor, John Bruton’s article (‘Brexit and the future of the European project’ IC 30/06/2016) made an impressive case of explaining popular disenchantment with the European project, and effectively refuted the common line that, for instance, the EU is torturing and impoverishing Greece, persuasively arguing that if anything the EU is helping that struggling country.
However, if the article had a failing it was in not explaining why the EU is a good thing in the first place: it countered negative arguments about the EU, without mapping out a positive vision for the European project. To be fair, Mr Bruton has made such arguments elsewhere, and perhaps he felt there was neither need nor space to make them on this occasion, but their absence was disappointing nonetheless.
Granted, Mr Bruton began his article by quoting Bishop Noel Treanor quoting Pope Francis’ claim that the European project has forged a new “pathway of peace”, but for many this is pie-in-the-sky stuff. Throughout the Brexit referendum campaign, any claim that the EU had brought peace to Europe was shouted down with cries that the EU hadn’t brought peace, NATO had.
It’s never clear to me how NATO can be said to have brought peace to Europe, unless by saying that people mean that the countries of Western Europe stopped fighting with each other because they had a common enemy in the USSR.
The EU, on the other hand, often seems most treasured in countries that have known wars and along borders that have historically been volatile, most especially that between Germany and France, and it seems that a similar factor must be at work in how pre-referendum polls showed huge support for the EU in Northern Ireland’s Catholic population.
I am willing to believe that the EU offers a pathway to peace in these areas, but I doubt I am alone in wondering how.
Lorraine Rafferty,
Birmingham, UK.