“Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war.”

— Martin Feldstein

"EMU and international conflict", 1997

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Martin Feldstein 9

American economist 1939–2019

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“The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

"In the Storm" in Le Socialiste http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/05/01.htm as translated by Mitch Abidor (1 - 8 May 1904)
Context: The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.
And its in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm.
The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world – this world of economic, political and social fetishism – constantly wraps us in.
The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these “statesmen” or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence.
War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.

“Almost 3 years have elapsed since the end of the greatest of all wars, but peace and stability have not returned to the world. We were well aware that the end of the fighting would not automatically settle the problems arising out of the war. The establishment of peace after the fighting is over has always been a difficult task. And even if all the Allies of World War II were united in their desire to establish a just and honorable peace, there would still be great difficulties in the way of achieving that peace.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe (1948)

“Instead of increasing intra-European harmony and global peace, the shift to EMU and the political integration that would follow it would be more likely to lead to increased conflicts within Europe.”

Martin Feldstein (1939–2019) American economist

"EMU and international conflict", 1997

“Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

England and the Need for Nations (2006)

“As for me, I cease not to advocate peace. It may be on unjust terms, but even so it is more expedient than the justest of civil wars.”
Equidem ad pacem hortari non desino; quae vel iniusta utilior est quam iustissimum bellum cum civibus.

Marcus Tullius Cicero Epistulae ad Atticum

Epistulae ad Atticum (Letters to Atticus) Book VII, Letter 14, section 3; as translated by E.O. Winstedt in the Loeb Classical Library http://archive.org/stream/letterstoatticus02ciceuoft#page/68/mode/2up

“The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the beginning. Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war.”

Stanisław Lem book Peace on Earth

Peace on Earth (1987), tr. Elinor Ford (1994) from Pokój na Ziemi, Ch. 2

“The possibility of peace, on whose behalf many are working, might perhaps become actual because the technical advances in offensive weapons make the prospect of a European war so disastrous, and because, if the nations were at grips again, even the victorious aggressor would be ruined. But there still remains open the possibility of a new war which, more dreadful than any that have preceded it would make an end of contemporary Europeans.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Man in the Modern Age (1933)

“I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans, don't push us towards military action. Otherwise there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Speaking on television about the NATO intervention in Kosovo https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/apr/09/balkans12, as quoted by The Guardian (April 1999)
1990s

“Instead of it (World War I) having been a war to end wars - it (the Paris Peace Conference) is a Peace to end Peace.”

Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner (1854–1925) British statesman and colonial administrator

A remark to his private secretary, Lord Sandon, in May 1919. From Terence H. O'Brien, Milner, Viscount Milner of St James and Cape Town 1954-1925, 1979, Constable, p. 335.

“It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Chap. 1 : The Legacy of War
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

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Martin Feldstein 9

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