Europe rebuilt itself with difficulty and with help was given back its sovereignty by the actions of others. Out of this shambles came a single phrase: “Never Again.” This phrase represents the Jewish commitment to ensuring that their slaughter would never be permitted to happen again. The Europeans as a whole don’t use this phrase, but its sentiment shapes everything they do. Those who lived through the thirty-one years then had to live through the Cold War, where the decision of war and peace, the decision that would determine if they lived or died, would be made in Moscow and Washington. That there was no war in Europe is worth considering later, but as the threat receded the European commitment was that the thirty-on years never be repeated. Europeans cded their empire, their power, even in some ways their significance, to the principle that they should never again experience the horror of those years nor live on its precipice as they did in the Cold War.
The institution created to ban their nightmare was the EU. Its intention was to bond European nations so closely together in such a prosperous enterprise that no nation would have any reason to break the peace or fear another. Ironically, Europe had struggled for centuries to free nations from oppression by other nations and make national sovereignty and national self-determination possible. They would not abandon this moral imperative, even though they had seen where its reductio ad absurdum might take them. Their goal was for the sovereignty of all to be retained, but constrained in such a way that no one could take it away. The anthem for the EU is Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” cleansed of its irony.