On the Rhein River just north of Strasbourg but on the German side is one of those picturesque, tourist trap little towns. This one holds a secret that has shaped the lives of Europeans for decades.
It was here two economists met after the Second World War to address the key conundrum that had baffled Europeans it seemed since time immemorial - how do we stop the countries of Europe fighting each other?
Looking back it may appear as if they were wasting their time as the traditional foes have coexisted in harmony since 1945 but it was not a given at that time. There was no guarantee Europe would not slip into its third major conflagration without half a century. Although wars are good for settling grievances they do have the habit of giving birth to new ones; something Hitler knew all about. Apart from two world wars in thirty years there had been three Franco-German wars within 60 years.
For centuries the armies and navies of Italy, Britain, France, Prussia, Spain, Austria etc had trampled the plains of Europe, had walked through its mountain passes, sailed its seas looking for a fight. Sometimes these countries fought together only to find themselves on opposing sides a few decades later. These battles spilt over on to other continents - the British navy fought their French counterparts at Cairo and the two armies clashed on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec. Many of the battles have entered folklore - Waterloo, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Blenheim - but there were many, many others spread over the centuries.
It is difficult to put a date on when hostilities began but there were three determined efforts to achieve continent wide control - by the Romans, Napoleon and Hitler.
For centuries the dominating political philosophy was nationalism - the belief that I am better than you simply because of who I am - supported by identity politics with its simple choice of being with me or against me. As a result countless millions of Europeans died and each war was accompanied by the horrors of starvation and displaced people.
So our two economists set out to discover what needed to be done to stop the confrontations once and for all.
They came up with a two point plan. First, they believed Europeans would be less likely to fight each if they understood each other better. They recommended cultural exchanges, reading each other’s novels, watching each other’s plays, playing each other’s music, dancing to each other’s tunes, eating each other’s food. This was to be achieved by positive action, encouraging international travel, building travel links between countries and not just within them and getting rid of petty fogging border controls and visa restrictions. As a result it is now possible to travel from Constanta on the Black Sea to Dublin in Ireland with hardly a hindrance as long, of course, as you travel to Ireland via France! Every major European city has restaurants from across the continent and musicians and actors travel freely unable to imagine a time when that would not have been possible.
Secondly, they proposed making the countries of Europe more economically dependent on each other. The simple notion being you were more unlikely to shoot your neighbour if you had a joint investment in manufacturing, say, a car with one country manufacturing the chassis and the other the batteries. They envisaged Europe becoming one large market, working to common standards with reduced customs and border controls. They aimed to give every citizen a stake in the continent’s future.
However Brits May have voted in the Referendum what cannot be denied is the ideas of two economists all those years ago morphed into the world’s biggest and most successful free trade area that to this day has countries queuing up to join. Those countries behind the Iron Curtain joined as soon as the Soviet Empire collapsed and many of the countries of the former Yugoslavia have also joined with others still applying. The vision of the economists has endured and still enjoys widespread support across continental Europe.
So on D-Day and VE-Day we remembered the end of fighting in Europe and the role the Allies played in delivering that let’s also raise a glass to our now mostly forgotten economists who turned their minds to the never again question and found an answer.
Each and every day since May 1945 has been Peace in Central Europe Day and that is something no European including the British have been able to celebrate since before the Vikings use to pay us a visit. This achievement alone makes it is worth resisting the lure of narrow nationalism and the populists who promote it.
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