The European Union (EU) is not a peace project. The EU is not a "People's Europe". The EU is and has always been the Europe of the monopolies.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee continues unabated to scandalize the Nobel Peace Prize and the will of Alfred Nobel to a degree that evokes head-shaking and embarrassment abroad as well as at home. Under the leadership of former Norwegian Labour party leader and current Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, the committee is already guilty of handing the award to the belligerent U.S. President Obama. And now to the EU!
Supposedly, the reason for awarding the prize to the EU is that "the Union and its predecessors have spent more than six decades helping to promote peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe."
This is like spitting the peoples of Europe right in the face. What "human rights?" More than 25 million people across the European Union are struck by mass unemployment. Half of the young people are without work and countries such as Greece and Spain are being battered with welfare cuts and misery to an extreme extent, with the prospect of even worse attacks to come. The "national" governments in the most crisis-ridden member states have become administrative bodies. They are threatened and instructed by the troika – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF – to cut funding for schools, pensions, hospitals and wages down to the bone.
A war project
The EU is supposed to have created "peace" in the Balkans. Here we are speaking of the same EU, with Germany as a particularly active player, that encouraged and provoked civil war in Yugoslavia in the 90's! Since then we have witnessed how especially France and Britain, but also other European powers, have been the main aggressors in relation to the bombardment of Libya in 2011. At this moment they are using a similar threatening rhetoric against Syria.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee mocks the European workers and peoples. But it also mocks the people and workers of Norway, who by no means regard the Union as a peace project. That is one of the reasons that seventy percent of Norwegians say no to Norwegian EU membership.
We ask the peoples of Europe and the whole world for forgiveness and beg they understand that the political elite and the ruling class of Norway does not represent or respect the people of Norway; they only respect and obey big capital, the U.S. and the European Union bosses.
The Europe of monopolies is an imperialist structure with two possible outcomes. Either it could become a "successful" imperialist union under German leadership that exploits workers at home and abroad and wages war against other states and peoples. Alternatively, the contradictions between the Union's member states and capital groupings will lead to fractures, trade wars and perhaps open war between the great powers themselves.
Whatever the final outcome, the EU is anything but a project for peace.