> "Countries that trade with each other don't make war with each other."
I'm pretty sure this was the prevailing thinking prior to World War 1. A large scale conflict would be so damaging on a human and economic level that most assumed the people in power would find away to stop a massive war from breaking out. Well, they were right about the first assumption, but very wrong about the second.
It's also why the EU was founded, and in that instance it worked great. European powers used to be constantly at war with each other, but in the last 70 years there was no large-scale war within Europe (except for Ukraine/Russia, both not in the EU), and war between EU states has become unthinkable.
This is surely a contributing factor, but being first-class citizens of Pax Americana US hegemony has been a larger one IMO (doubly so during the Cold War, when a common enemy on Western Europe's borders united them).
There's plenty of good things from a moral perspective about power being diffused away from a hyperpower hegemon, but stability and peace have never been among the side effects.
Foxconn's suicide rate is lower than China's, along with all 50 US states. They just employ a gargantuan amount of people (400k). I don't know much about the working conditions there, so I don't have a position, but it doesn't look like there's evidence to suggest that the working conditions have anything to do with the fact that some of their employees committed suicide.
To put it another way, there's roughly as much evidence of this as there is that working in a factory in Nigeria causes sickle cell anemia.
A car park in the UK closed off the top storey and it's common to see older MSCPs adding tall fences to the top floor, and for new buildings to have these designed in from the start.
You are interpreting a correlation as a causality. More likely (IMO) is a common cause, countries that consider themselves enemies for whatever reason are both unlikely to trade with eachother, and likely to go to war with eachother.
Europeans tend to credit the EU/EEC for the peace, but as an American, I find that totally implausible. The peace was because Europe was divided into two vassal regions and the actual superpowers decided not to go to war because of MAD. Now that the Cold War is over, we've already had a series of wars in the Balkans and various wars in the Russian periphery. True, France and Germany have taken a break from fighting each other for a long-ish stretch, but I think that trend would continue even with a Frexit because it's mostly built on memories of how bad the last two wars were.
MAD and the cold war prevented war between countries on either side of the iron curtain, sure.
But then you go on to claim that war among countries on the Western side was prevented by memories of war and not the EEC, without any reasoning as to why. I don't buy it. The first World War was already terrible, yet these countries were at each others' throats only a few decades later.
Russia and Ukraine are not EU/ECC members, and neither were the balkan states back when they balkanized. Wars outside the EU don't disprove that the EU plays a major role in bringing pace among its members. I would agree that it didn't necessarily bring peace to all of Europe, but that's a stronger statement than most people intend to make
"If soldiers are not to cross international boundaries, goods must do so. Unless the Shackles can be dropped from trade, bombs will be dropped from the sky."
At best, that has held in limited places and times since WWII.
At worst, it was an affirmation repeated, as with most affirmations, in the hopes that the repetition would make it true, which it doesn't, and for the usual reason, that it generally wasn't.
The United States and Germany during WWII, as evidenced by Ford, General Motors, IBM, Coca-Cola, Kodak, Chase Bank, Random House, Associated Press, Dow Chemical, Brown Brothers Harriman, Woolworths, Alcoa, AT&T, and others.
"Countries that trade with each other don't make war with each other."
As we isolate countries and disrupt trade we definitely are increasing the risk of conflict.