I would say “the guarantor of peace” is not democracy but commerce, the freer the better. Nevertheless, this is well put, and I’m glad at least some Europeans are talking about it.
In an interview with the German Bundestag’s weekly paper, Das Parliament, former German President and former Chairman of Germany’s Constitutional Court, Roman Herzog, warned that the eurozone crisis could be a threat to democracy. He also argued that “the EU was not conceived as a super state. It will not work. We live in a world which depends on flexibility and the individual initiatives of states. Even today the EU is hamstrung by the masses of rules produced by Brussels…First of all around half of the 70,000 pages of EU regulations ought to be repealed.”
Separately, writing in yesterday’s Handelsblatt, former president of the Federation of German Industries, Professor Hans-Olaf Henkel, describes Chancellor Angela Merkel’s claim that “if the euro fails Europe fails” as a “fallacy”, arguing that “the guarantor of peace is democracy and not the euro…The increasingly undemocratic attempts at crisis management – the constant meddling of German politicians in the affairs of other countries, the limitation of the budgetary control of member states’ parliaments by un-democratically elected centralist supervisors – are leading to a dangerous erosion of democracy.”
(From a recent Open Europe sumary.)
Understand that this is what Obama wants for USA.
Ed K