When, two centuries ago, Sweden was defeated by Russia enough people in Sweden said, “never again”. And Sweden, once one of the great powers of Europe, turned inward to concentrate on its own economic and political development. The Napoleonic wars were followed by almost two hundred years when peace was perceived as Swedish and wars as European. When Finland was torn away from Sweden by Russia in 1809 Sweden, albeit not without difficulty, decided discretion was the better part of valor. Norway in 1905 was also allowed to liberate itself peacefully from Swedish rule. Today, thanks to the European Union, peace has been de-Swedicized and Europeanized — Europe’s attitude nowadays, after hundreds of years of being the most war-prone part of the world, is that peace is more easily kept by peaceful integration and shared economic competetiveness.

After 50 years of success Europe can truly say, as Sweden did before it, that it has found a better way. Even the “off piste” wars in ex-Yugoslavian do not distract from that accomplishment, although in retrospect one wishes that the EU had used the lure of European membership before the wars began rather than after. The Yugoslavian crises could conceivably have then been defused.

Mark Leonard in his book, “Why Europe will run the 21st Century” has described the EU’s present power as “passive aggression”. “For countries such as Turkey, Serbia or Bosnia, the only thing worse than having the bureaucracy of Brussels insisting on changes, implementing regulations, instigating privatizations and generally seeping into every crack of everyday political life, is to have its doors closed to you.... Europe’s obsession with legal frameworks means it can completely transform the countries it comes into contact with, instead of just skimming the surface. The US may have changed the regime in Afghanistan but Europe is changing all of Polish society.”

The American political economist, Richard Rosecrance, has argued that this is the first time in history that a great power has arisen without provoking other countries to unite against it. Around the blue map of the EU’s 450 million citizens there is another almost 400 million people who share land and sea borders with the EU, and beyond them another 900 million umbilically linked to Europe because it is their largest trading partner and source of credit. Leonard calls this the “Eurosphere”, which is gradually being transformed by the European idea, adopting European ways of doing things.

Zbigniew Brzensinki in his new book, “Second Chance”, says that Washington, uneasy about a more confident Europe, consciously see out to encourage Britain to be more “Atlantist” and less “European” and that “London was only too eager to accommodate.”

But now that the US has been so badly defeated in Iraq, hard on the heels of its terrible defeat in Vietnam, is it not time that the US adopted the Swedish/European method? The US has sent troops into its neighbors more than fifteen times over the last 50 years but many of those countries have barely changed, lurching from crisis to crisis and often enough sucking American troops back into their problems. Washington tends to pursue short-term goals, such as defeating an anti-American insurgency, stabilizing a friendly government, destabilizing a hostile one or seeking to reduce drug trafficking. Unlike Europe it does not offer the lure of long-term integration. Europe increasingly seeks to deal with crises in its “near abroad” by working to pre-empt them, as it has in Macedonia with negotiations, peacekeepers and institution building. The US, under the presidency of George W. Bush, has gone in diametrically the opposite way, seeking to physically remove a threat before it can be deployed against the US. As a result of its misconceived venture in Iraq the US is spending more on its failed attempt at reconstruction there than the EU spent on bringing democracy to the entire former Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe.

The 19th century jurist Henry Maine wrote that “War appears to be as old as mankind but peace is a modern invention.” Seen from today’s perspective that is not quite true: Sweden pioneered it two hundred years ago. The European Union has developed the notion further over the last 50 years. It is now America’s turn to end its entrapment with the old fashioned ways of military might.