In the 1990s, in order to block closer integration, the British Conservative Party pressed the case for enlargement to the East. As this was politically admirable, fraternal and in the economic interests of Germany while diluting its political power in the Union, it could not be opposed. But the Conservatives supported this in tandem with a policy of unanimity in decision-making. Having got most of an open market in goods and services, the plan was to render the Union ungovernable as a political institution. Nice confirmed that the Conservative strategy has largely prevailed.

• There will be a European army -- of some sort;
  
  
• there will be enlargement to the East;
  
  
• there will be a steady advance in the global use of the Euro which may yet become an equal of the Dollar, in anticipation of a serious oriental currency, but;
  
  
• there will be no Franco-German super state, even less a super state made up of the geographical core of Western Europe.

If George W. Bush, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice are able to reject the baggage of accustomed rhetoric - easier said than done - then our hope must be that Europe is goaded into a greater degree of self-sufficiency and independence while NAFTA looks Southwards.

The urgent priority is to forge a new strategy for Asia which does not centre on sclerotic Japan but seeks to understand the fundamental political and economic contradictions in emergent China.

So much for the stuff of the diplomatic pages.

But on the day when Bush received the keys to the Transitional Office, President Clinton, the true victor of the 2000 election, was speaking at the University of Warwick, advancing a global agenda on AIDS, the digital divide, human rights, education and economic development.

I regret that this agenda will almost certainly be dismissed as sentimental marginalia.

If this is so, then Europe must seriously consider 'adopting' Africa in a new form of political relationship which, perhaps, separates sovereignty from implementation in much the same way as Western economies have privatised many public utilities.

America would develop similar relationships with Latin America, while Asia would not be so neat and tidy.

There is a rough symmetry here as Africa's depth of misery is matched by Latin America's breadth. The United States culture of trade is a better tool for Latin American development than for African. The European social model, combining aid and trade, fits Africa much better than it fits Latin America.

What, then of Asia?

There was a time, not long ago, when the centre of the universe was said to have shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific and it may yet --- but the delicate symbiosis of political and economic development has not yet developed significantly anywhere in Asia.

Japan's absence of politics has made it stagnate. India's lack of economic and social policy has kept back a potentially powerful economy. China still thinks that economic and political development can be totally divorced. Russia's economy and politics are in ruins. The Islamic patchwork is held together by rhetoric. The instabilities and unpredictabilities of these various entities and the relationships between them call for much greater learning, penetration and vigilance.

I think we can be reasonably sure that Bush will have less respect for global institutions which are not creatures of Washington.

So while the WTO will continue to tilt global trade in favour of the richest, the United Nations and its family of NGOs will continue to decline.

It is easy to blame Congress for ruining the prospects and effectiveness of the UN by refusing to pay its dues but by then the damage had already been done. The governing elites from the developing countries simultaneously appropriated western aid to their own private bank accounts and voted for the Soviet Union while claiming to be nonaligned.

The surprise is not that Congress was so mean but that the State Department was so generous and so patient for so long.

America is sadly accustomed to being bitten while it feeds. What kind of solidarity can there be between a black youth in an American ghetto who regards commitment to prison as an improvement in his condition and President Moi of Kenya who has systematically plundered his country for more than twenty years? What possible sympathy can there be from descendants of Stalin's victims in Nebraska when the West proposes to bank roll post-Communist Russia?

Most people, from the evidence, do not care for any arguments of prudence or ethics but are unthinkingly selfish.

The whole enterprise of civilisation is to temper this animal inheritance with mutuality and altruism. Institutions founded purely on selfishness or altruism are bound to fail. 19th Century capitalism ultimately had to recognise an element of mutuality; the grotesque altruism of communism and the partiality of racism both caused disaster on a global scale.

My word for the coming century, millennium, is "mutuality." As individuals we shall vary in the balance we strike between selfishness and altruism but as societies we will only survive on a steady and subtle diet of altruism.

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