Re:The Great Cannon has been deployed again
by wongarsu on Friday December 06, 2019 @12:45PM
(#21724167)
It's also why the EU was founded, and in that instance it worked great. European powers used to be constantly at war with each other, but in the last 70 years there was no large-scale war within Europe (except for Ukraine/Russia, both not in the EU), and war between EU states has become unthinkable.
Re:The Great Cannon has been deployed again
by wutbrodo on Friday December 06, 2019 @01:10PM
(#21724441)
This is surely a contributing factor, but being first-class citizens of Pax Americana US hegemony has been a larger one IMO (doubly so during the Cold War, when a common enemy on Western Europe's borders united them).
There's plenty of good things from a moral perspective about power being diffused away from a hyperpower hegemon, but stability and peace have never been among the side effects.
Re:The Great Cannon has been deployed again
by smacktoward on Friday December 06, 2019 @12:43PM
(#21724140)
Yes, most famously put forward in Norman Angell's 1909 book The Great Illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion).
I'm pretty sure this was the prevailing thinking prior to World War 1. A large scale conflict would be so damaging on a human and economic level that most assumed the people in power would find away to stop a massive war from breaking out. Well, they were right about the first assumption, but very wrong about the second.