ABSTRACT
World War II marked the end of the modern epoch which had begun 300 years earlier with the Treaty of Westphalia, ending another great European war, the Thirty Years War, fought between the same peoples and powers in their earlier political frameworks. The state system inaugurated by the Treaty of Westphalia came to dominate the European scene until it was perverted by totalitarianism and then brought down in the gotterdammerung of World War II. By the late 1940s when a new postwar Europe began to emerge, it was clear that there was much sentiment among Europeans for greatly modifying if not abandoning the Westphalian system of states and balances of power among them and achieving a substantial degree of European integration.
