Forbidden rites pdf download

Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. Themes and Colors. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Giver , which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. The Individual vs. By celebrating group birthdays, allowing only one kind of clothing and haircut, assigning spouses, jobs, children and names, and eliminating sexual relations, Jonas's society stifles the things that allow… read analysis of The Individual vs.

Freedom and Choice. Consequently, the people lead… read analysis of Freedom and Choice. Feeling and Emotion. Every decision made in the community serves a purely practical purpose and is based… read analysis of Feeling and Emotion. Coming of Age. Yet these rites of passage… read analysis of Coming of Age. Yet Jonas realizes that without memories, a person can't learn from mistakes, celebrate accomplishments, know love or happiness or any… read analysis of Memory. Cite This Page. Home About Story Contact Help.

O, sweet my mother, cast me not away! Delay this marriage for a month, a week; Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies. My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven; How shall that faith return again to earth, Unless that husband send it me from heaven By leaving earth? Alack, alack, that heaven should practise stratagems Upon so soft a subject as myself! Some comfort, nurse. Nurse Faith, here it is.

Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, I think it best you married with the county. Nurse And from my soul too; Or else beshrew them both.

Nurse What? Nurse Marry, I will; and this is wisely done. O most wicked fiend! Is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn, Or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue Which she hath praised him with above compare So many thousand times?

Go, counsellor; Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain. Now, sir, her father counts it dangerous That she doth give her sorrow so much sway, And in his wisdom hastes our marriage, To stop the inundation of her tears; Which, too much minded by herself alone, May be put from her by society: Now do you know the reason of this haste. Look, sir, here comes the lady towards my cell. Are you at leisure, holy father, now; Or shall I come to you at evening mass?

My lord, we must entreat the time alone. Juliet, on Thursday early will I rouse ye: Till then, adieu; and keep this holy kiss. As that is desperate which we would prevent. In the mean time, against thou shalt awake, Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift, And hither shall he come: and he and I Will watch thy waking, and that very night Shall Romeo bear thee hence to Mantua. And this shall free thee from this present shame; If no inconstant toy, nor womanish fear, Abate thy valour in the acting it.

O, tell not me of fear! Farewell, dear father! Exit First Servant Sirrah, go hire me twenty cunning cooks. Exit Second Servant We shall be much unfurnished for this time. What, is my daughter gone to Friar Laurence? Nurse Ay, forsooth. Nurse See where she comes from shrift with merry look. Henceforward I am ever ruled by you. Let me see the county; Ay, marry, go, I say, and fetch him hither. Now, afore God! They are all forth. God knows when we shall meet again. What should she do here?

My dismal scene I needs must act alone. Come, vial. What if this mixture do not work at all? Shall I be married then to-morrow morning? No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there. I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not, For he hath still been tried a holy man.

How if, when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo Come to redeem me? Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault, To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud? O, look! Romeo, I come! She falls upon her bed, within the curtains. Nurse They call for dates and quinces in the pastry. First Servant Things for the cook, sir; but I know not what.

Second Servant I have a head, sir, that will find out logs, And never trouble Peter for the matter. Thou shalt be logger-head. Music within Nurse! What, nurse, I say! Enter Nurse Nurse Mistress! Why, love, I say! What, not a word? God forgive me, Marry, and amen, how sound is she asleep! I must needs wake her.

Madam, madam, madam! Will it not be? I must needs wake you; Lady! Alas, alas! Help, help! O, well-a-day, that ever I was born! Some aqua vitae, ho! My lord! Nurse O lamentable day! Nurse Look, look! O heavy day! My child, my only life, Revive, look up, or I will die with thee!

Call help. O son! There she lies, Flower as she was, deflowered by him. Nurse O woe! O woful, woful, woful day! Most lamentable day, most woful day, That ever, ever, I did yet behold!

O day! O hateful day! Never was seen so black a day as this: O woful day, O woful day! O love! O life! Uncomfortable time, why camest thou now To murder, murder our solemnity? O child! Dead art thou! Heaven and yourself Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all, And all the better is it for the maid: Your part in her you could not keep from death, But heaven keeps his part in eternal life.

CAPULET All things that we ordained festival, Turn from their office to black funeral; Our instruments to melancholy bells, Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast, Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change, Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, And all things change them to the contrary. Nurse Honest goodfellows, ah, put up, put up; For, well you know, this is a pitiful case. Exit First Musician Ay, by my troth, the case may be amended.

First Musician No. First Musician What will you give us? First Musician Then I will give you the serving-creature. First Musician An you re us and fa us, you note us. Second Musician Pray you, put up your dagger, and put out your wit. I will dry-beat you with an iron wit, and put up my iron dagger. What say you, Simon Catling? Musician Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound. What say you, Hugh Rebeck? What say you, James Soundpost? Third Musician Faith, I know not what to say.

Second Musician Hang him, Jack! I dreamt my lady came and found me dead— Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think! Ah me! Dost thou not bring me letters from the friar? How doth my lady? Is my father well? How fares my Juliet? Hast thou no letters to me from the friar? Noting this penury, to myself I said An if a man did need a poison now, Whose sale is present death in Mantua, Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him.

As I remember, this should be the house. Enter Apothecary Apothecary Who calls so loud? Apothecary My poverty, but not my will, consents. Apothecary Put this in any liquid thing you will, And drink it off; and, if you had the strength Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight.

I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none. Farewell: buy food, and get thyself in flesh. Welcome from Mantua: what says Romeo? Or, if his mind be writ, give me his letter. Friar John, go hence; Get me an iron crow, and bring it straight Unto my cell. Give me those flowers. Do as I bid thee, go. The Page whistles The boy gives warning something doth approach. What with a torch! Hold, take this letter; early in the morning See thou deliver it to my lord and father.

Take thou that: Live, and be prosperous: and farewell, good fellow. Can vengeance be pursued further than death?

Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee: Obey, and go with me; for thou must die. Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man; Fly hence, and leave me: think upon these gone; Let them affright thee.

I beseech thee, youth, Put not another sin upon my head, By urging me to fury: O, be gone! I will go call the watch. Falls If thou be merciful, Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet. Let me peruse this face.

What said my man, when my betossed soul Did not attend him as we rode? I think He told me Paris should have married Juliet: Said he not so? Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet, To think it was so?

O my love! Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet? O, what more favour can I do to thee, Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain To sunder his that was thine enemy? It is the second largest in the UK after the British Library. Visit the Bodleian Library website. Every College has its own library, often consisting of a modern, working library and older collections. See more information on College libraries. SOLO Search Oxford Libraries Online is the main search engine for library collections across Oxford, providing access to information in over Oxford libraries including circa eight million bibliographic records and more than 13 million item records.

Single Sign-On offers easy access to subscription resources, whether on or off campus. Visit the SOLO website. Find more information on finding resources at the Bodleian Libraries. Ultimate decisions would depend strictly on considerations of utility. The European order as seen in the eighteenth century, as a great Newtonian clockwork of interlocking parts, had been replaced by the Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest. With the conservative monarchies of the East divided in the aftermath of the Crimean War, France isolated on the Continent because of the memories evoked by its ruler, and Austria wavering between its national and its European roles, Bismarck saw an opportunity to bring about a German national state for the first time in history.

With a few daring strokes between and , he placed Prussia at the head of a united Germany and Germany in the center of a new system of order. What emerged after the unification of Germany was a dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all the continental countries together.

The bond of legitimacy had disappeared. Everything now depended on calculations of power. The crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of —71, which Bismarck had adroitly provoked France into declaring, was attended by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, a retributive indemnity, and the tactless proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles in Bismarck understood that a potentially dominant power at the center of Europe faced the constant risk of inducing a coalition of all others, much like the coalition against Louis XIV in the eighteenth century and Napoleon in the early nineteenth.

Only the most restrained conduct could avoid incurring the collective antagonism of its neighbors. In a world of five, Bismarck counseled, it was always better to be in the party of three. This involved a dizzying series of partly overlapping, partly conflicting alliances for example, an alliance with Austria and a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia with the aim of giving the other great powers—except the irreconcilable France—a greater interest to work with Germany than to coalesce against it.

The genius of the Westphalian system as adapted by the Congress of Vienna had been its fluidity and its pragmatism; ecumenical in its calculations, it was theoretically expandable to any region and could incorporate any combination of states.

With Germany unified and France a fixed adversary, the system lost its flexibility. But a country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met. Leo von Caprivi, the next Chancellor, complained that while Bismarck had been able to keep five balls in the air simultaneously, he had difficulty controlling two.

Almost inevitably, France and Russia began exploring an alliance. Such realignments had happened several times before in the European kaleidoscope of shifting orders. The novelty now was its institutionalized permanence. Diplomacy had lost its resilience; it had become a matter of life and death rather than incremental adjustment.

Because a switch in alliances might spell national disaster for the abandoned side, each ally was able to extort support from its partner regardless of its best convictions, thereby escalating all crises and linking them to each other. Diplomacy became an effort to tighten the internal bonds of each camp, leading to the perpetuation and reinforcement of all grievances. It did so not formally but de facto via staff talks, creating a moral obligation to fight at the side of the counterpart countries.

Military planning compounded the rigidity. The Franco-Prussian War was confined to the two adversaries. It had been conducted about a specific issue and served limited aims. By the turn of the twentieth century, military planners—drawing on what they took to be the lessons of mechanization and new methods of mobilization—began to aim for total victory in all-out war.

A system of railways permitted the rapid movement of military forces. With large reserve forces on all sides, speed of mobilization became of the essence. Preemption was thereby built into its military planning. Mobilization schedules dominated diplomacy; if political leaders wanted to control military considerations, it should have been the other way around. Diplomacy, which still worked by traditional—somewhat leisurely—methods, lost touch with the emerging technology and its corollary warfare.

They were reinforced in that approach because none of the many previous diplomatic crises of the new century had brought matters to the breaking point. In two crises over Morocco and one over Bosnia, the mobilization schedules had no operational impact because, however intense the posturing, events never escalated to the point of imminent confrontation.

Paradoxically, the very success in resolving these crises bred a myopic form of risk-taking unmoored from any of the interests actually at stake. It came to be taken for granted that maneuvering for tactical victories to be cheered in the nationalist press was a normal method of conducting policy—that major powers could dare each other to back down in a succession of standoffs over tangential disputes without ever producing a showdown.

But history punishes strategic frivolity sooner or later. World War I broke out because political leaders lost control over their own tactics. For nearly a month after the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in June by a Serbian nationalist, diplomacy was conducted on the dilatory model of many other crises surmounted in recent decades.

Four weeks elapsed while Austria prepared an ultimatum. Consultations took place; because it was high summer, statesmen took vacations. But once the Austrian ultimatum was submitted in July , its deadline imposed a great urgency on decision making, and within less than two weeks, Europe moved to a war from which it never recovered. All these decisions were made when the differences between the major powers were in inverse proportion to their posturing.

A new concept of legitimacy—a meld of state and empire—had emerged so that none of the powers considered the institutions of the others a basic threat to their existence.

The balance of power as it existed was rigid but not oppressive. Relations between the crowned heads were cordial, even social and familial. But in the Balkans among the remnants of the Ottoman possessions, there were countries, Serbia in the forefront, threatening Austria with unsatisfied claims of national self-determination. If any major country supported such a claim, a general war was probable because Austria was linked by alliance to Germany as Russia was to France.

A war whose consequences had not been considered descended on Western civilization over the essentially parochial issue of the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince by a Serb nationalist, giving Europe a blow that obliterated a century of peace and order.

In the forty years following the Vienna settlement, the European order buffered conflicts. In the forty years following the unification of Germany, the system aggravated all disputes. None of the leaders foresaw the scope of the looming catastrophe that their system of routinized confrontation backed by modern military machines was making almost certain sooner or later. Russia, by its constant probing in all directions, threatened Austria and the remnants of the Ottoman Empire simultaneously.

And Britain, by its ambiguity obscuring the degree of its growing commitment to the Allied side, combined the disadvantage of every course. Its support made France and Russia adamant; its aloof posture confused some German leaders into believing that Britain might remain neutral in a European war. Reflecting on what might have occurred in alternative historical scenarios is usually a futile exercise. But the war that overturned Western civilization had no inevitable necessity.

It arose from a series of miscalculations made by serious leaders who did not understand the consequences of their planning, and a final maelstrom triggered by a terrorist attack occurring in a year generally believed to be a tranquil period. In the end, the military planning ran away with diplomacy.

It is a lesson subsequent generations must not forget. In the ordeal, the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires perished entirely. In Russia, a popular uprising on behalf of modernization and liberal reform was seized by an armed elite proclaiming a universal revolutionary doctrine. None of the leaders who drifted into war in August would have done so could they have foreseen the world of They blotted from their minds nearly every lesson of previous attempts to forge an international order, especially of the Congress of Vienna.

It was not a happy decision. The Treaty of Versailles in refused to accept Germany back into the European order as the Congress of Vienna had included acceptance of a defeated France. The new revolutionary Marxist-Leninist government of the Soviet Union declared itself not bound by the concepts or restraints of an international order whose overthrow it prophesied; participating at the fringes of European diplomacy, it was recognized only slowly and reluctantly by the Western powers.

Of the five states that had constituted the European balance, the Austrian Empire had disappeared; Russia and Germany were excluded, or had excluded themselves; and Britain was beginning to return to its historical attitude of involving itself in European affairs primarily to resist an actual threat to the balance of power rather than to preempt a potential threat.

Traditional diplomacy had brought about a century of peace in Europe by an international order subtly balancing elements of power and of legitimacy. In the last quarter of that century, the balance had shifted to relying on the power element. The drafters of the Versailles settlement veered back to the legitimacy component by creating an international order that could be maintained, if at all, only by appeals to shared principles—because the elements of power were ignored or left in disarray.

Britain was increasingly withdrawn. The United States, having entered the war decisively in despite initial public reluctance, had grown disillusioned by the outcome and withdrawn into relative isolation. The responsibility for supplying the elements of power therefore fell largely on France, which was exhausted by the war, drained by it of human resources and psychological stamina, and increasingly aware that the disparity in strength between it and Germany threatened to become congenital.

Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union. With Germany neither morally invested in the Versailles settlement nor confronted with a clear balance of forces preventing its challenges, the Versailles order all but dared German revisionism.

Germany could be prevented from asserting its potential strategic superiority only by discriminatory clauses, which challenged the moral convictions of the United States and, to an increasing degree, Great Britain. And once Germany began to challenge the settlement, its terms were maintainable only by the ruthless application of French arms or a permanent American involvement in continental affairs. Neither was forthcoming. France had spent three centuries keeping Central Europe at first divided and then contained—at first by itself, then in alliance with Russia.

But after Versailles, it lost this option. Left alone to balance a unified Germany, it made halting efforts to guard the settlement by force but became demoralized when its historical nightmare reappeared with the advent of Hitler. The major powers attempted to institutionalize their revulsion to war into a new form of peaceful international order.

A vague formula for international disarmament was put forward, though the implementation was deferred for later negotiations. The League of Nations and a series of arbitration treaties set out to replace power contests with legal mechanisms for the resolution of disputes. Yet while membership in these new structures was nearly universal and every form of violation of the peace formally banned, no country proved willing to enforce the terms.

Two overlapping and contradictory postwar orders were coming into being: the world of rules and international law, inhabited primarily by the Western democracies in their interactions with each other; and an unconstrained zone appropriated by the powers that had withdrawn from this system of limits to achieve greater freedom of action.

Looming beyond both and opportunistically maneuvering between them lay the Soviet Union—with its own revolutionary concept of world order threatening to submerge them all. In the end the Versailles order achieved neither legitimacy nor equilibrium.

Hitler, who came to power in by the popular vote of a resentful German people, abandoned all restraints. He rearmed in violation of the Versailles peace terms and overthrew the Locarno settlement by reoccupying the Rhineland. When his challenges failed to encounter a significant response, Hitler began to dismantle the states of Central and Eastern Europe one by one: Austria first, followed by Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland.

The nature of these challenges was not singular to the s. In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. Europe had constructed an international order from three hundred years of conflict. It threw it away because its leaders did not understand the consequences when they entered World War I—and though they did understand the consequences of another conflagration, they recoiled before the implications of acting on their foresight.

The collapse of international order was essentially a tale of abdication, even suicide. Having abandoned the principles of the Westphalian settlement and reluctant to exercise the force required to vindicate its proclaimed moral alternative, Europe was now consumed by another war that, at its end, brought with it once more the need to recast the European order. Their residue would continue, perhaps most consequentially in some of the countries to which they were brought in the age of discovery and expansion.

Every continental European country with the exception of Switzerland and Sweden had been occupied by foreign troops at one time or another. It became obvious that no European country including Switzerland and Sweden was able any longer to shape its own future by itself.

That Western Europe found the moral strength to launch itself on the road to a new approach to order was the work of three great men: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy. At a moment of greatest weakness, they preserved some of the concepts of order of their youth. They had to cope first with another division of Europe.

In , the Western allies combined their three occupation zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany. Russia turned its occupation zone into a socialist state tied to it by the Warsaw Pact. Germany was back to its position three hundred years earlier after the Peace of Westphalia: its division had become the key element of the emerging international structure.

France and Germany, the two countries whose rivalry had been at the heart of every European war for three centuries, began the process of transcending European history by merging the key elements of their remaining economic power.

For the first decade of the postwar period, the course of its national leadership would be crucial. Patrician in style, suspicious of populism, he created a political party, the Christian Democratic Union, which for the first time in German parliamentary history governed as a moderate party with a majority mandate. In , he brought West Germany into the Atlantic Alliance. So committed was Adenauer to the unification of Europe that he rejected, in the s, Soviet proposals hinting that Germany might be unified if the Federal Republic abandoned the Western alliance.

This decision surely reflected a shrewd judgment on the reliability of Soviet offers but also a severe doubt about the capacity of his own society to repeat a solitary journey as a national state in the center of the Continent. It nevertheless took a leader of enormous moral strength to base a new international order on the partition of his own country.

The partition of Germany was not a new event in European history; it had been the basis of both the Westphalian and the Vienna settlements. What was new was that the emerging Germany explicitly cast itself as a component of the West in a contest over the nature of international political order.

This was all the more important because the balance of power was largely being shaped outside the European continent. For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe.

America had helped restart the European economy with the Greek-Turkish aid program of and the Marshall Plan of In , the United States for the first time in its history undertook a peacetime alliance, through the North Atlantic Treaty. The European equilibrium, historically authored by the states of Europe, had turned into an aspect of the strategy of outside powers. The North Atlantic Alliance established a regular framework for consultation between the United States and Europe and a degree of coherence in the conduct of foreign policy.

After the shock of two devastating wars, the Western European countries were confronted by a change in geopolitical perspective that challenged their sense of historical identity. The international order during the first phase of the Cold War was in effect bipolar, with the operation of the Western alliance conducted essentially by America as the principal and guiding partner.

What the United States understood by alliance was not so much countries acting congruently to preserve equilibrium as America as the managing director of a joint enterprise. The traditional European balance of power had been based on the equality of its members; each partner contributed an aspect of its power in quest of a common and basically limited goal, which was equilibrium. The Cold War international order reflected two sets of balances, which for the first time in history were largely independent of each other: the nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the internal balance within the Atlantic Alliance, whose operation was, in important ways, psychological.

European countries built up their own military forces not so much to create additional strength as to have a voice in the decisions of the ally—as an admission ticket, as it were, to discussions regarding the use of the American deterrent. France and Britain developed small nuclear forces that were irrelevant to the overall balance of power but created an additional claim to a seat at the table of major-power decisions.

The realities of the nuclear age and the geographic proximity of the Soviet Union sustained the alliance for a generation. But the underlying difference in perspective was bound to reappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall in The fall of the Berlin Wall in led rapidly to the unification of Germany, together with the collapse of the Soviet satellite orbit, the belt of states in Eastern Europe with an imposed Soviet control system.

Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development.

The nations of Eastern Europe, suppressed for forty years some longer , began to reemerge into independence and to regain their personalities. The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the emphasis of diplomacy. The geopolitical nature of the European order was fundamentally transformed when there no longer existed a substantial military threat from within Europe.

The Atlantic Alliance, it was now professed, should be concerned less about security and more about its political reach. The expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia—even perhaps including it—was now broached as a serious prospect. In the face of a direct threat, international order had been conceived of as the confrontation of two adversarial blocs dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. As Soviet power declined, the world became to some extent multipolar, and Europe strove to define an independent identity.

It had launched itself on global explorations and spread its practices and values around the world. It had in every century changed its internal structure and invented new ways of thinking about the nature of international order. Now at the culmination of an era, Europe, in order to participate in it, felt obliged to set aside the political mechanisms through which it had conducted its affairs for three and a half centuries.

Impelled also by the desire to cushion the emergent unification of Germany, the new European Union established a common currency in and a formal political structure in It proclaimed a Europe united, whole, and free, adjusting its differences by peaceful mechanisms.

German unification altered the equilibrium of Europe because no constitutional arrangement could change the reality that Germany alone was again the strongest European state. The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire.

The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. The outcome has combined aspects of both the national and the regional approaches without, as yet, securing the full benefits of either. On the other hand, European politics remains primarily national, and in many countries, objections to EU policy have become the central domestic issue. The result is a hybrid, constitutionally something between a state and a confederation, operating through ministerial meetings and a common bureaucracy—more like the Holy Roman Empire than the Europe of the nineteenth century.

But unlike the Holy Roman Empire for most of its history, at least , the EU struggles to resolve its internal tensions in the quest for the principles and goals by which it is guided. In the process, it pursues monetary union side by side with fiscal dispersion and bureaucracy at odds with democracy. In foreign policy it embraces universal ideals without the means to enforce them, and cosmopolitan identity in contention with national loyalties—with European unity accompanied by east-west and north-south divides and an ecumenical attitude toward autonomy movements Catalan, Bavarian, Scot challenging the integrity of states.

EU policies enshrine tolerant inclusiveness, approaching unwillingness to assert distinctive Western values, even as member states practice politics driven by fears of non- European influxes. The result is a cycle testing the popular legitimacy of the EU itself.

European states have surrendered significant portions of what was once deemed their sovereign authority. Especially in crises such as that which began in , the European structure is then driven toward increasingly intrusive emergency measures simply to survive. Europe has returned to the question with which it started, except now it has a global sweep. What international order can be distilled from contending aspirations and contradictory trends? Which countries will be the components of the order, and in what manner will they relate their policies?

How much unity does Europe need, and how much diversity can it endure? But the converse issue is in the long run perhaps even more fundamental: Given its history, how much diversity must Europe preserve to achieve a meaningful unity? When it maintained a global system, Europe represented the dominant concept of world order.

Its statesmen designed international structures and prescribed them to the rest of the world. Today the nature of the emergent world order is itself in dispute, and regions beyond Europe will play a major role in defining its attributes.

Is the world moving toward regional blocs that perform the role of states in the Westphalian system? If so, will balance follow, or will this reduce the number of key players to so few that rigidity becomes inevitable and the perils of the early twentieth century return, with inflexibly constructed blocs attempting to face one another down?

In a world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional unit? So far the process of integration has been dealt with as an essentially bureaucratic problem of increasing the competence of various European administrative bodies, in other words an elaboration of the familiar.