The case for the Nobel Peace Prize going to the EU

The people in the Nobel committee are mostly international policy / political science wonks. And one of the main things you learn about the European Union in that field is not it's economic role. In fact it has been underlined by members of the committee that the prize has nothing to do with economy. Members of the committe as also previously said that there has been two major overlooked candidates for the prize: Ghandi and the EU. They decided to rectify one of them, despite probably understanding that many people would'nt get it at a time that the EU is in economic trouble. That British right wingers and angry Greeks criticise it is expected, as well as people on the right in the US, who see the EU as an annoying power block which makes American dominance over Europe diminish.

In order to keep peace and democracy in unstable regions (which Europe has been throughout the history of mankind), you need to put in place mechanisms and institutions that stablize and make it difficult for people to fight.

The Marshall Aid did it's part. although the Marshall plan had alterior motives. Think it was a free give away from the US to be nice? No, the point was to give the working classes of europe money and jobs so that they could buy American imports. The Marshall Aid had a huge influence on the creation of the European consumer society that got going after World War Two, and it's not a coincidence that American culture followed American goods over here. It was to basically Americanize Europe so western Europe would function as an ideological bulwark against the spread of communism. If Europeans were kept poor, they would turn communist for sure. In that sense the Marshall Aid was a phenomenal success story of US foreign policy, and a way better tactic than spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun like nowadays..

NATO also played a role in ensuring that western Europe held a united front against the Soviet Union, but it did very little for the economy.

Neither of them has done what the EU did. Create economic interdependence. This started with the coal and steel union purposely set up in 1950 to make war between France and Germany impossible. Basically to stop the fighting over the rich Alsache-Lorraine region which has switched back and forth between France and Germany a number of times.
The city of Strasbourg is in Alsace but even today many people there speak German in their everyday lives. It is not a coincidence that Strasbourg is the official seat of the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, The European Ombudsman, the European Court of Human Rights, and the EuroCorps as well as other institutions. Strasbourg is also the second largest port on the Rhine.
This region is just as important to Germany as to France. Rich in resources, it was/is a very important manufacturing area.

It is not inconcievable that especially now with the cold war over, that France and Germany might have been eyeballing each other again if it were not for European integration. They are the two big war powers in Europe traditionally, not Germany and England and their proximity and shifting borders have always caused problems for everyone.

I know that many Americans on the right and even some on the left has this kind of "white mans burden" attitude towards Europe, that we are hopeless crazies that need a firm hand to guide us. But the EU is a European creation and it really has worked as a piece keeper, even if it was pretty stupid to put all the eggs in one economic basket (especially with the US housing bubble bursting).

And i say this as an EU skeptic. I don't like the EU economic policies of expanding east to get cheap labour to undercut the working class of western Europe. And i don't like the austerity measures imposed on the working classes of the peripheral countries, creating a kind of new colonialist relationship of central powers and satellite dependencies.

But as a factor in not having another European war? Sure. Curbing extremism like we are seeing in Hungary and Greece at the moment? Absolutely.