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Nigel Farage, leader of UK Independence Party
"I think that the whole thing is a nonsense.
If anyone is suggesting that a democratic, stable, post-war Germany would have invaded France again with the intention of smashing it to smithereens, I would suggest they are misreading history.
I do not believe there was any prospect of war happening in Western Europe after 1945. Arguably, projects that take different nation states, force them together under a new identity, a new flag and a new anthem, doing so without the consent of the peoples - such projects can actually create war, as Yugoslavia has shown us.
This prize baffles me because only recently we saw Angela Merkel going to Athens and there we saw swastikas being flown and Europe now being dominated by grief, violence and division.
The Cold War was about Nato and the nuclear deterrent. The fact the Russians did not invade us had absolutely nothing to do with the EU which, after all, was not fully created until 1992.
The EU today is about the destruction of nation-state democracy. Far from making the peoples of Europe love each other, the eurozone has divided Europe north to south and there are increasing enmities, violence in the streets.
We are headed, I think, in a very dangerous direction. Just look at the lessons of the Balkans. Look at this crackpot idea that we had in 1920 of abolishing individual nations and putting them together under a Yugoslav flag. It led to disaster and the EU, sadly, is making the same tragic mistake."
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