War & Peace Quote by John Bruton

It’s a politician’s greatest magic trick: taking an absence of catastrophe and turning it into a positive program. Bruton’s line frames the European Union not as a bureaucracy of regulations and summits, but as a peace machine - a claim designed to feel morally unanswerable. If the E.U. equals “the longest period of peace,” then to weaken it is to flirt with war. That’s the intent: elevate the project above everyday grievance politics.

The subtext is quietly selective. “Peace” here means no major wars between member states, not an end to violence on the continent or in Europe’s orbit. It brackets off Yugoslavia’s collapse, Northern Ireland’s long conflict, and the post-Cold War reality that Europe often exported instability through arms, border policy, and economic shock therapy. The sentence also compresses history to sharpen the contrast: Europe’s previous centuries of rivalry become a cautionary tale; the E.U. becomes the antidote.

Context matters. Bruton, an Irish statesman and committed European, is speaking from a country whose own modernization is tightly intertwined with European integration and whose peace process unfolded alongside a broader European settlement. His phrasing (“since creation,” “half century ago”) leans on institutional continuity, suggesting causality: integration didn’t just coincide with peace; it engineered it through interdependence, shared law, and the slow domestication of nationalism.

What makes it work rhetorically is its pivot from economics to existential stakes. It asks listeners to judge the E.U. not by its paperwork, but by what they no longer have to fear.