Flags outside European Union parliament. Photo: wiki commons.

Financial Times – The European Union, a project joining 27 countries that spent much of the 20th century fighting two world wars and one cold war, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its role in bringing reconciliation and democracy to a once-turbulent continent.

In its citation, the Nobel committee recounted the contribution of the EU and its predecessor organisations to post-war Franco-German reconciliation; securing young democracies in Portugal, Spain and Greece in the 1970s and the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s; and bringing stability to the Balkans.

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