THE end of the Cold War and the break up of the Russian empire have led to the reemergence of ancient historical patterns which seemed buried or no longer relevant. By means of television, airlines and thousands of university scholarships, Turkey has renewed links with the Turkic peoples of Central Asia from where the Turks originally came.
The war in Bosnia was fought adjacent to the north south line of the River Drina, the old boundary between the eastern and western Roman Empire. Orthodox Serbs, Christianised from Constantinople, fought Catholic Croats affiliated to Rome, and Muslim Slavs whose ancestors gave allegiance to the Ottomans.
But the most important reemergence of an old pattern in Europe came a few decades earlier, as Western Europe, in the wake of the second World War, lost its world power and became a US protectorate. As if by a self preserving instinct, it returned to its origin - and indeed to the origin of European civilisation as a whole. Germany and France, the two halves of the old Frankish realm, formed a close partnership to lead Europe to a second founding.
An exhibition called The Franks, Founders of Europe" has recently been touring Germany and France. Those two nations have achieved such distinctive personalities that it requires imagination to see them as originally two halves of one kingdom, sharing common institutions - as they do again today. They had been going separate ways, politically, only since the 10th century.
After the final collapse of the western Roman Empire, around 475, the Franks founded the first large and enduring European state. A Germanic people, they had settled on both sides of the imperial frontier, in the present day Rhinelands, Netherlands and Belgium. Seizing the opening left by the Roman collapse, their Catholic king, Clodwig (Clovis) led his army south into Gaul.
By 560, under his successors, the Frankish kingdom extended from the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the English Channel into much of western and southern Germany. The Irish missionaries, Columbanus, Gall, Cilian and the rest, got to know it well; they helped to build it, culturally and socially, by their example and their monastic foundations.
More then two centuries later Karl the Great (Charlemagne), crowned by the Pope as Roman Emperor, enlarged the realm to Hamburg, Magdeburg and Salzburg. That, along with much of Italy, was the greatest extent of the Frankenreich as a single political unit.
For centuries, the Saxons, to the north of the Franks, had resisted Frankish attacks. Many of them put to sea and found another home in those southern counties of England whose names end in "sex for Saxon". The Irish called the whole new nation, Angles included, Sacsain or Sasanaigh. Karl the Great, driving north towards Hamburg, finally conquered the Saxons who had remained at home.
Perhaps there is some truth in seeing the subsequent wars of the new island nation, first with the French, later with the Germans, as revenge wars of the Saxons against one or other half of the people who had bloodily conquered their ancestors.
For a century and a half after the death of Karl the Great, roughly what we now call France was known as West Frankland. Germany to the Elbe and Salzburg, with the Netherlands, was East Frankland. When both parts finally developed into separate kingdoms, the division occurred along the language frontier between early French and German. The Germanic Franks had remained thinly spread in Latin speaking Gaul and had adopted the vernacular language.
The German speaking lands then included Flanders, the Netherlands, part of Switzerland, and the west of what we now call France. German, or dialects of German (even "Dutch" is "Deutsch") are still spoken, more or less, in all those lands today. By a strange irony, the first king to pull Germany into shape as a separate kingdom was a Saxon, Otto I. In 962 he was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in Rome.
When Helmut Kohl meets Jacques Chirac, they are aware of all this history. They are conscious that they are trying both to recreate an ancient political reality and to lead Europe, once again, as their ancestors did before them.
Throughout the decades of this FrancoGerman partnership, from Adenauer and de Gaulle onwards, it has helped that the German capital is in Bonn, on Frankish home ground, in the Francophile Rhineland. What will happen when the capital moves to Berlin - which the Franks never reached nor heard of (it didn't exist) and whose historical associations are eastern?
Doubtless this is one reason why Helmut the Great wants to have his new Europe packaged and sealed before that.
Dr Ferinell's latest book is Dreams of Oranges: An Eyewitness Account of the Fall of Communist East Germany.