Anti-Market
Sir: A rather angry correspondent in your issue of March 29 seeks to advance the case for uniting Europe on the grounds that Europe has already suffered two world wars in this century and that this will be one way of preventing a third. I wonder what makes him so sure that such a step will not have precisely the opposite effect, and that far from preventing a third world war will make it inevitable?
People today do not want war, but nearly all governments are arming and preparing for war. This at least suggests that people no longer have any really effective control over their governments, and if this is true is it not because governments have become too. large and too centralised? It was, afterl all, ,he big powers which started both world wars, not the small ones.
Would it be possible to suggest, without inviting a further torrent of abuse from your correspondent, that the real path to peace may be through decentralisation and the break-up of the big powers into smaller and more manageable ones? This at least is what a growing number of their peoples (Corsicans, Nagas, Welsh, Bretons, Catalonians, Scots and many others) are increasingly demanding, and look like demanding with increasing vehemence, and even violence, until their wishes are met.
Giantism inevitably leads to loss of control by the people of their social mechanisms: this is the real origin of modern wars which no sane person wants, and it is a lesson we dare not delay, much longer learning. The whole European project is a blunder of historic dimensions and as far as the British people are concerned remains, in Powell's apt words, " ... a prolonged epic of deception" and one which, I would add, will surely lead to more war and the destruction of liberty.
John Papworth
Box RW 549, Lusaka, The Republic or Zambia.
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