Whatever the stated reasons, it’s clear that the real motivation for the establishment of the European Union is the desire of European bureaucrats for power. They claim to be motivated by a desire to avoid further conflict on the continent, but as Dalrymple says in a new piece for the Australian (available for free at Real Clear World), the union, if anything, promotes and encourages conflict:

Actually, a forced European unity, conjured from no popular sentiment by a strange combination of bureaucratic mediocrity and gaseous utopianism, is more likely to lead to conflict than to prevent it; and the increasingly wide divergence of the interests of France and Germany is fast recalling the ghosts of the past. The French fear to be dominated; the Germans don’t want to be condescended to.