ABSTRACT
Prospects for peace and stability, and of European Union, depend immediately upon the relationships between States or at any rate, between the most powerful of them: Russia, Germany, France, Britain and the extra-European United States. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was divided in 1918 between Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. States in Europe generally developed out of the feudal holdings held by kings. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they expanded and consolidated their territories often by military conquest. Denmark is physically smaller but more fertile than its Scandinavian neighbours, and its population of 5 million is almost entirely homogeneous. Politics in Norway are less consensual than in Sweden, mainly because religious, territorial, and urban-rural cleavages result in a more fragmented party system. The Baltic States consist of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, three nations which are geographically grouped on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea.
