ABSTRACT
On the eve of the millennium, old Europe is scheduled to become new "Europe", so as to realize, at last, the true potential of an immemoriably divided continent. This chapter offers a "master narrative" of European history oriented toward its unanticipated early twentieth-century denouement in tragedy and toward its anticipated return to primordial unity. The central problem, then, of the master narrative offered is to trace how old Christendom became new Europe and then how this modern Europe led to terminal disaster. The conversion of the northern Barbarians furnished the first substratum of historic Europe. Old Europe was what later sociology would call an organic Gemeinschaft, not an atomistic Gesellschaft. Europe has clearly learned the lesson of the perils of democracy unrestrained by the rule of law; this is why, for almost half a century, it has been busy building "Europe".
