A transcript of Catherine’s June 1, 2012 special interview of John Laughland on Europe is available to Subscribers!

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From the transcript:

Catherine: Well as I told you I want to revisit sort of the broad sweep of history on this thing, so maybe if we could quickly start with the idea behind the European Union, how it came to be and how the Euro came to be. I think it’s important when we look at current events to have a feel for the history of the thing.

John: Well obviously the coming into being of the European Union and of the Euro are two different things. Technically they are linked in the sense that it was the Maastricht Treaty ratified in 1992, which changed the name of the European community as it then was to the European Union and which also provided for the introduction of the Euro in 1999, but of course the European Union preexists its renaming in 1992 and dates from 1957 when the European economic community was set up. Even the European economic community has history or had history when it was created. It was largely based on the European Coal and Steel Community created in 1951.

Now you’ve asked me to say why it was set up and what were the motives. I think those motives were largely geopolitical and I think they were overwhelmingly connected with the perceived need by the United States to create a politically united western Europe during the Cold War, which started really in 1948-49. So it was with a view to uniting the countries of western Europe, those countries particularly of course Germany, which was on the front line in the Cold War, that first the Coal and Steel Community and then the European Economic Community and then the European Union were created.

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