The news that the EU has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace has been greeted with derision everywhere except perhaps amongst the European elites themselves, although surely even they must feel embarrassed, rather in the way that senior Democrats must have felt embarrassed when Obama was given the prize before he'd even been sworn into office.

If a prize should go to anybody for European peace-keeping, it should be NATO.

Daniel Hannan, writing in the Telegraph today, puts in best:

'...In brief, the EU is not a cause, but a symptom of a European peace born out of the defeat of fascism, the spread of democracy and the security of the Nato alliance. Its ruling dogma – the idea that nationalism causes war – is false. The most lethal wars in Europe's history were caused, first by religious differences, then by ideological ones. The nation-state has, over the years, proved itself a remarkably stable vessel for justice and democracy. A Europe of nations, each at ease within more or less ethnographic borders, will be more tranquil than a patchwork of misaligned frontiers, irredenti communities and discontented minorities. Jamming peoples into a single state against their will is rarely conducive to either democracy or goodwill. It didn't work for the Habsburgs, the Ottomans or the Soviets. Those polities survived only when they were police states. The moment their constituent peoples were free to choose, they opted for independence...'

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