IT was apparently the biggest European joke since Blackburn Rovers’ Champions League campaign of the mid 1990s which ended with David Batty and Graeme Le Saux trading punches on the pitch in Moscow.

In a stroke of comic genius, the Nobel Peace Prize committee decided this was the year the European Union (EU) deserved to get the Norse nod as the planet’s premier pacifist.

Within seconds of the announcement, the hollow laughter was ringing out across the continent from Athens to Athenry and from Marsden to Malta.

At last Europe was united – in bitter mirth.

Martin Callanan, the Tories’ top man in the European Parliament, condemned last Friday’s announcement as an April Fool’s joke while his party colleague and former chancellor Norman Lamont said the decision was “ridiculous and absurd.”

A crueller man than me might suggest those two adjectives were better suited to describe a certain politician’s time in Number 11 Downing Street.

But it was not just the right who could barely contain their guffaws last week.

France’s far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon said the awarding of the prize to the EU showed the Nobel committee’s “black humour” while our own dear Ed Balls asked sarcastically: “They’ll be cheering in Athens tonight, won’t they?”

The naysayers should stifle their sarcastic laughter for a moment and consider, as John Cleese might ask, what the EU has ever done for us.

To answer that question we need to go back to 1951 when the European Coal and Steel Community was formed between France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries.

In the 60 years since then the group has grown from six members to 27 and been through more name changes than Puff Daddy.

It’s taken in the former right-wing dictatorships of southern Europe and the former left-wing dictatorships of eastern Europe. It’s even let those weird island people in.

But one thing has remained constant – members of the EU trade goods, not gunfire. In the last 60 years no two countries within the group have ever gone to war with each other.

The closest thing to a conflict inside the EU was the 25-year long Troubles in Northern Ireland – and even that started four years before Britain and Ireland joined the European Common Market.

Some 3,600 people died in that conflict. I don’t wish to diminish the suffering of anyone during the Troubles – not least because the majority of the dying took place within five miles of my childhood front door.

But I do want to put that misery in its proper context. Next to the few thousand deaths of the last 61 years, let us remember the six decades before the European Coal and Steel Community came into being.

For those who have problems with subtraction, that takes us back to 1890. So the period in question includes the two world wars, both of which are firmly stamped “Made in Europe.”

Those two conflicts took 71 million lives. Nearly everyone reading these words lost at least one ancestor in those wars.

Since 1951 there have been no major wars in western Europe whatsoever. Only the most dyed-in-the-wool Europhile would claim that the EU deserves all the credit for this remarkable period of peace.

But only the most blinkered Brussels basher would deny that the union has played a major role in preventing conflict in much of the continent.

At the heart of the EU’s success are France and Germany, the two countries kind enough to have provided the scenic backdrops for a good deal of the last century’s blood-letting.

These two neighbours, so tragically matched in power and ambition, no longer compete on the battlefield. Now they trade with each other across open borders, they share a currency and their leaders meet for cordial chats rather than surrender talks. Surely no-one would argue that the EU, and all the co-operation it brings, has played no part in the generations of peace we have enjoyed. And if the union has contributed to the absence of conflict in a once war-ravaged continent, why shouldn’t the Nobel committee recognise this?

No previous winner had to make peace for six decades before getting their gong.

Yet the EU and its predecessors have been reconciling the people of our continent since before most of us were born – and maybe that’s why we don’t appreciate the achievement.

It is a testament to just how normal peace has become that we no longer notice it. Most of the EU’s citizens are so unfamiliar with war that they can afford the luxury of joking about last week’s Nobel announcement.

It may not be laugh-out-loud funny, but this total lack of perspective is still rather amusing.