The Yugoslav wars in the 90s lasted a decade and had more than 100,000 casualties. War crimes like genoside and ethnic cleansing were committed.

The news stories about civilians - including children - being shot from afar when trying to cross "Sniper Alley" in Sarajevo made a particularly big impression on me.

In my book this was not a small conflict but a bloody and grim civil war.

EU is just the current phase of a process that started in 1951 with the treaty of Paris (ECSC) and was followed by the treaty of Rome i. 1957 (ECC).

The point is the EEC worked very well, there was no need for further integration, such as the Lisbon treaty, which mainly benefits Germany when it comes to power.

What people don't get here ironically is that every bureaucracy's purpose is to get bigger and gain more power at the expense of the people they rule over. Nobody learned anything from the USSR fiasco. These kind of supra national governments never work on the long run. Europeans are too different.

In France, already governed by a fairly conservative and authoritarian government, the far right is at the doorstep of power and banking on the relatively successful brexit.

The EEC was a legal mess. It was the result of too many subsequent small changes that were adding up in a non coherent way.

The Lisbon treaty was long overdue and it did manage to improve how the EU works.

Now that the UK is gone, we should further perfect it. The UK has always been a detractor of any real initiative to improve peaceful coexistence of continental EU states. Acknowledging that without them we can better work together would be a huge step forward.

You are factually wrong. The treaty of Rome of 1957, which is currently still at the foundations of Europe, though with a different name, did in fact state from its very first version that the aim is to prevent war between Member States.

Europe is the first and main reason, if not THE reason, we have had the longest period of peace in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire.