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The EU’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize has occasioned much scornful laughter, some of it deserved. But it is worth reflecting for a moment on the underlying logic of this prize.

Tony Judt’s brilliant history of the continent, Postwar, quotes Hegel’s wistful aphorism that “world history is not the soil in which happiness grows. Periods of happiness are empty pages in it”. The European Union has won the Nobel Prize for a simple reason: its post-war chapters are mostly empty, happy years – relative to the bloody centuries that preceded them.