Leslie Hannah (‘Europe – the impossible dream or past reality?', 30 April-7 May) offers a thought-provoking description of the economically integrated Europe of a century ago, which, she concludes, “had no need of a constitution” to ensure its prosperity.
But Hannah's article itself seems to point to the opposite conclusion when it refers (almost in passing) to “the storm that broke in 1914 over this...paradise”. In fact, Hannah's instructive comparison reminds us that it is much less the expansion of free trade on the Anglo-Saxon model than the creation and development of supranational institutions, with the mutual trust and sense of common purpose that they engender, that, in total contrast to the earlier “paradise”, has today made war in Europe not only absent in the present but inconceivable in the future.
