Why doesn't Britain make things any more? (2011)(theguardian.com)

  "The German question produced the Europe of today, as well as the 
  transatlantic relationship of the past seven-plus decades. Germany’s 
  unification in 1871 created a new nation in the heart of Europe that was 
  too large, too populous, too rich, and too powerful to be effectively 
  balanced by the other European powers, including the United Kingdom. The 
  breakdown of the European balance of power helped produce two world wars 
  and brought more than ten million U.S. soldiers across the Atlantic to 
  fight and die in those wars. Americans and Europeans established NATO 
  after World War II at least as much to settle the German problem as to 
  meet the Soviet challenge, a fact now forgotten by today’s realists—to 
  “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” as 
  Lord Ismay, the alliance’s first secretary-general, put it. This was also 
  the purpose of the series of integrative European institutions, beginning 
  with the European Steel and Coal Community, that eventually became the 
  European Union. As the diplomat George Kennan put it, some form of 
  European unification was “the only conceivable solution for the problem of 
  Germany’s relation to the rest of Europe,”