European heads of state will gather in Berlin this weekend to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the document that gave birth to the project now known as the European Union. In many ways the EU has been a success. It is the largest trading bloc of nations and peoples in today's world. Its currency, the euro, trades today at a higher value than the US dollar, though the dollar remains the world's reserve currency. Member nations have created a largely functioning trading bloc where borders have gone down and trade passes easily among the nations. Travel to Europe today and you no longer show your passport as you speed between Germany and Holland, or any other country.

Perhaps the biggest success of the EU is the peace between the nations. Historically, Europe has torn itself apart through the centuries with political and religious wars. The last two major conflicts involved the whole world. That there has been a measure of peace for the past sixty two years is due to many factors. NATO is one. The US presence and nuclear shield during the Cold War which kept the Russian bear at bay. But there has also been a strong desire on the part of well meaning diplomats to bind the European nations together with trade and and economic agreements. And it has worked up to now.

A recent article in the Financial Times had this to say. " No comparable organisation has been such a success-there is still a big queue of countries rattling the gates to get in-but it is also hard to think of any particular reason why Europeans should be suffused with joy as they contemplate another half century of union.  The EU is a maddeningly difficult thing to admire and sell; you would not design  it this way if you were starting from scratch. Yet, even in arguably the worst crisis of its history, it still works."

This comment from The Brussels Journal I found to be interesting. The previous two attempts at unification he refers to are those of Napoleon and Hitler:
 

No matter how one interprets it, however, the Franco-German alliance is the engine of the European unification process. It is also true that most of the politicians driving this engine are deeply influenced by the mentality of the French revolutionaries. Their ideology is secularist, universalist and constructivist. They are rationalist technocrats who deeply believe that the state is the legitimate bestower of liberties to the people and is to take care of the citizens from the cradle to the grave. They also believe that they know better than the people what is good for the people. Most of them are genuinely convinced that they are leading the Europeans to a perfect democracy. And, paradoxically, because they genuinely believe this, they cannot tolerate that the people at this very moment decide democratically about their own future.

Further on he quotes a Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky on the nature of the European Commission:

Like the two previous attempts to politically unify Europe, the third attempt is utterly undemocratic. The former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has predicted that the Europeans will end up with an EU dictatorship, an "EUSSR." "It is no accident," he said, "that the European Parliament reminds me of the Supreme Soviet. It looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similary, when you look at the European Commission it looks like the Soviet Politburo. I mean it does so exactly, except for the fact that the Commission now has 25 members and the Politburo usually had 13 or 15 members. Apart from that they are exactly the same, unaccountable to anyone, not directly elected by anyone at all. When you look into all this bizarre activity of the European Union with its 80,000 pages of regulations it looks like Gosplan. We used to have an organisation which was planning everything in the economy, to the last nut and bolt, five years in advance. Exactly the same thing is happening in the EU."

Europe has replaced Christianity with a secular religion of the state. Both, when applied to the historic concept of Europe has not had good fruit. They are the age long result of a human system called Babylon which was set up in defiance of God and His eternal kingdom.

The time is coming when we will see one final manifestation of a religious/secular system that will impose its will upon the world. That is why we write and speak a great deal on Europe and what is taking place there. Do a search on "Europe" on our WNPonline website and you will find many articles to fill in the details.