No part of the world has experienced as much state formation as Europe. Before the First World War Europe had nineteen monarchies and three republics; after the war there were fourteen monarchies and sixteen republics. This process of state formation continues up to the present day. After 1989 the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated one after the other, but the partition of Germany was brought to an end.

In The Shield of Achilles (2003) the American author Philip Bobbitt described the period between the beginning of the First World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the ‘Long War’. In his view, this was a period characterized by the struggle between communism, fascism and parliamentarianism. Bobbitt argues that Bismarck ‘united’ Germany with a doctrine of militarism and ethnic nationalism, which ultimately led to fascism posing a threat to parliamentary democracy. This occurred after the Weimar Republic failed to pull the country out of the economic morass. Fascism also took root in Italy. After the First World War, when the fascists had taken control in Germany and the communists in Russia, each started to ‘roll out’ their systems to other countries. Fascism was a spent movement after the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Cold War heralded the end of communism as a system. This meant not only the triumph of parliamentary democracy in Europe, but also the map of Europe's being redrawn.

In the meantime numerous institutions had been founded in Europe that, with the exception of the breakup of Yugoslavia, contributed to the peaceful character of the revolutions of 1989. NATO, the European Union and the OSCE all contributed to this. With the OSCE's Charter of Paris for a New Europe (1990), a new European order emerged that was characterized by a united Europe that wanted to strengthen its security and prosperity through cooperation with its former adversaries. In a certain sense, the charter resembled the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Versailles Conference (1919), which were also attempts to re-define the European order.