The morning of Saturday, September 14, 1793, was bitterly cold, and George Macartney, Viscount Macartney of Dervock in the county of Antrim, had been up since four o'clock, making final preparations for his audience with the emperor of China at his summer palace at Jehol, just north of the Great Wall. He stood waiting in the large, silken tent for over an hour before Ch'ien-lung eventually arrived, “seated in an open palanquin, carried by sixteen bearers, attended by numbers of officers bearing flags, standards, and umbrellas.” To the fury of the watching Chinese courtiers who had wanted him to execute the full kowtow (three separate kneelings and nine knockings of the head on the floor), Macartney went down on one knee only and presented the emperor with a letter from George III in a gold casket covered with diamonds. He followed this with other gifts—pottery, the best that Josiah Wedgwood's factory in Staffordshire could produce, a diving bell patented by the Anglo-Scottish engineer John Smeaton, sword blades from Birmingham, an orrery, a telescope, and some clocks.

The prospect of l'Europe des régions, which appears to promise a simultaneous migration of power outward to a wider federal Europe and downward to the devolved regions — both goals to be achieved at the expense of the presently constituted national governments — has raised expectations in the periphery as well as concern in the established centers. The question of national identity is suddenly on the agenda and has evoked a response throughout the countries of Europe: an attempt to define a specifically European identity to accompany the little maroon passports carried by its citizens has also caused confusion in capital cities and thrown out a challenge to the peripheral nations and regions. In some respects such areas might already have arrived at the destination, for, unlike the English or the French, the Scots and the Welsh have for centuries sustained an identity without the protective buttressing of a state of their own. The Welsh, in particular, have survived despite the lack of a separate legal and educational system and a recent history that has witnessed massive immigration and integrationist pressures. A series of traditional identities of and for the Welsh has suddenly been rendered as redundant as a coal miner. The Welsh, nevertheless, are, in their contrasts and diversity, yma o hyd— “still here,” in the words of a popular song. It might be that there are pointers in the Welsh experience of national identity of how to move beyond the confines of that debate itself, a debate only just beginning among the English.

When we were a little tiny colony of Britain
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
Our feckless history began to be written
(And the waves break busily night and day).
When first we fought in an Empire's cause
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
It wasn't for the loot, nor yet for the applause
(And the waves break busily night and day).
Then when we came to Dominion Status
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
Nor slump nor squeeze could alienate us
(And the waves break busily night and day).

These are lines in which Allen Curnow, New Zealand's most important living poet, responded in his secondary capacity, as Whim Wham, a weekly contributor of comic verse to newspapers, to the decision of Great Britain to seek entry to the European Community. He could see as everyone could that this would mean a dissolution of Britain's role in a global community and, in particular, of a relationship with Britain that had hitherto given meanings good and bad to New Zealand's history, its sense of itself, and the meaning of its existence.

Sir, have you thought what it's like to be
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
All, all alone on a wide, wide sea?
(And the waves break busily night and day).
Much can happen in a very short time
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves).
A feckless history, a foolish rhyme!
(And the waves break busily, night and day).

We are in the midst of a remarkable moment of historical change, in which the very meaning of “Europe” — as economic region, political entity, cultural construct, object of study—is being called dramatically into question, and with it the meanings of the national cultures that provide its parts. While perceptions have been overwhelmed by the political transformations in the east since the autumn of 1989, profound changes have also been afoot in the west, with the legislation aimed at producing a single European market in 1992. Moreover, these dramatic events — the democratic revolutions against Stalinism in Eastern Europe, the expansion and strengthening of the European Community (EC) — have presupposed a larger context of accumulating change. The breakthrough to reform under Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Solidarity crisis in Poland, and the stealthful reorientations in Hungary have been matched by longer-run processes of change in Western Europe, resulting from the crisis of social democracy in its postwar Keynesian welfare-statist forms, capitalist restructuring, and the general trend toward transnational Western European economic integration.

Taken as a whole, these developments in east and west make the years 1989-92 one of those few times when fundamental political and constitutional changes, in complex articulation with social and economic transformations, are occurring on a genuinely European-wide scale, making this one of the several great constitution-making periods of modern European history.