Some of the hardest lessons of history and the considerable cultural elaborations and reflections which followed upon them, have now become the implied premises of the process of European integration, culminating in the European Union. Europeans have re-learned that war between nations, as well as civil war and other intolerably wasteful forms of strife, are not necessarily the result of a clash of ideologies or the byproduct of dictatorship. Frequently, they have been the result of a clash of economic interests as well as of the temptation to translate military might or cultural sway into economic advantage. The outbreak of World War I 1914-1918 cannot be explained by ideology or dictatorship. That war involved European Powers which were mostly constitutional monarchies proclaiming belief in ‘free trade’ albeit sometimes very jingoistically corrected and ‘progress’. In the decades preceding 1914, no dictator in the modern sense appeared on the continent and the mere suspicion of overweening ambition could spell the political demise of many a tribune of the people, as witnessed by the case of General Boulanger, in the France of 1885.