ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.
The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions - in a Freudian way - to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it.
In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.
The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.
By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief.
In the Roman commonwealth, even on the conversion of the monarchy into a republic, the old was as far as possible retained.
Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
Rome had Senators too, that's why it declined.
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
For Europe, the fall of Communism has to be taken into account, and the fact that in the fight against Communism the recovery of Europe's Christian roots was the driving force.