On the other hand, it's not like divided Europe has such a glorious and glamorous history filled with freedom and liberty. To what degree the EU improves on tha

On the other hand, it's not like divided Europe has such a glorious and glamorous history filled with freedom and liberty. To what degree the EU improves on that in the long term (i.e. the next 50-100 years, proper long-term) is an open question, but I'm cautiously hopeful. The EU is a fairly "weak" power and individual member states retain a high degree of autonomy; it would be significantly harder to truly "exploit" the EU in the same way a country's parliament can be corrupted: chances are a significant number of member states would put a halt to it, and/or the EU would simply break up or split. NATO doesn't really centralize power IMO; it's a very short and straight-forward treaty; the entire thing is 2 or 3 pages of text. NATO countries co-operate of course, but so do many non-NATO countries, and it's decided on a case-by-case basis by the countries themselves. There is no "NATO organisation" that can tell anyone to do anything. In practice, the US is the "leader" of NATO, but even their power is very limited in practice. You may recall that little kerfuffle in Iraq where half of NATO basically told the US to go fuck themselves and their stupid war (leading to hilarities such as "French fries" being rebranded as "freedom fries").