ABSTRACT
In the course of the next decade the member states of the European Union will confront a formidable challenge: the unprecedented opportunity to unify the eastern and western parts of a continent devastated, between 1914 and 1945, by a cataclysmic ‘civil war’ and divided, between 1945 and 1989, by the Cold War. The division between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Europe, however, had preceded these events by several centuries. In the Eastern part, serfdom and absolute rule prevailed for a more protracted epoch than in the West. Later this area was under the sway of authoritarian regimes and oppressive forms of socialism. In the West a complex entwining of economic, political and cultural patterns resulted, first, in the development of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and political liberalism and, later, the concurrent rise of capitalism and social democracy under the aegis and protection of nationstates. At the beginning of the third millennium the limitations of these European nation-states – in both East and West – are manifest. Nevertheless, obituaries are premature. Nation-states are as popular as ever.
