As a European myself, I would prefer them to put less emphasis on collaboration and more on actually doing something's with the resources available to them and making that freely available. Collaboration will happen naturally and without having to coordinate.
But as they said, this is less about producing value then it's about signaling
(NB: I mean the good kind of collaboration of course, on science and industry - it's a loaded word in French at least)
Making another war in Europe was basically impossible. We had one in Yugoslavia which was not aligned with the two blocks and anyway only after the USSR lost the cold war.
Your point is about the Cold War, nuclear weapons prevented nuclear alliances to attack each other, it did not prevent say two NATO non nuclear members to start conflicts.
Without CERN, I think we would have eventually seen some form of hyperlinked document system emerge from either academia or industry, but it might have been more proprietary or fragmented.
The other values include redistribution of wealth, support for businesses, job creation, sustaining internal intellectual capabilities without depending on the whims of fickle corporations, and probably many others that I can't think of for now.
