ABSTRACT
The present eastern border of Europe closely corresponds to the line drawn up in the peace treaty that ended World War I. The geographic definition of Europe is usually thought to reach eastward all the way to the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, thus including Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and "European Russia". The history of Europe should be familiar to us if we study the history of Western civilization. The collapse of the Soviet Union and of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe gave rise to the hope that all of Europe would now become free, modern, and democratic. The first and most important principle of European democracy is parliamentary government. The second principle is the subordination of the executive branch to the legislative, to parliament. Southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s democratized, took off economically, and eventually joined the European Union (EU), although by social and economic indicators, Southern Europe still lags behind the North.
