Imperial collapse is dangerous for international order and stability, especially when it involves one of the parties to a nuclear confrontation. In that perspective it is extraordinary that the disintegration 10 years ago of the Warsaw Pact, the Stalinist regimes in central and eastern Europe and then of the Soviet Union was accompanied by so little violence.

One must beware of putting the Yugoslav implosion at the centre of the post-Cold War picture in Europe, profoundly disastrous though it was. Against that story must be set the peaceful achievement of German unification and a series of more or less peaceful secessions: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan from the Soviet Union and Slovakia from Czechoslovakia.

And of more or less achieved reconciliations concerning ethnic minorities and borders: between Germany and Poland; Poland and Ukraine; Hungary, Romania and Slovakia; Bulgaria and Macedonia.

There was an eruption of new nationalisms, renewed confrontations between majorities and minorities and widespread ethnic conflicts. Many of them represent a reversion to conditions before the first World War, or to business unfinished by the Versailles settlement after it.

The League of Nations was given the job then of regulating and reconciling the new nation-state system endorsed by that treaty with the fact that there was a substantial mismatch between ethnic nationalism and state citizenship built into it.

An ambitious minority rights regime was installed, to be policed by an international court. It failed because of the big powers' refusal to universalise and enforce it. Hitler then put paid to its vision. The genocide of six million Jews and the forced expulsion of millions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia after the second World War homogenised those societies and facilitated the installation of communist regimes.

What is distinctive about Europe after the end of the Cold War is that these questions are being addressed once again, using the means of supranational integration and the converging norms and values of democratic stability established by the EU, the Council of Europe, the UN, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and with a much greater assurance that all the large powers will participate in it.

Some variant of federalism is still democracy's answer to empire, as the Austro-Marxists said 100 years ago. Another Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, used the phrase "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" to describe the antinomies of early 20th-century Europe. It might be reversed at its end to read "optimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will". The question is whether political leaderships can rise to the challenge presented by these new and more favourable objective conditions.

Chou En-lai famously remarked in the 1960s that it is too soon to assess the significance of the French Revolution. A prominent French historian of events in 1789, Francois Furet, doubted whether 1989 was a revolution at all because it was not animated by any major new ideas. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, prefers to talk of a liberation from occupation by the Soviet empire.

There is a lot of sense in the distinction; but to draw it too sharply would be to miss the originality of the ideas that contributed to such a comparatively peaceful outcome, and which has now - following the Kosovo war - put continental unity clearly if still precariously on the European Union's political agenda. That is quite an achievement compared to the two world wars this century associated with the fall of dynastic and colonial empires in Europe.

The Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe puts the Balkan states on a long-term road to integration with EU structures by way of stabilisation and accession agreements. It coincides with a proposal by the President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, to create a "fully flexible, multi-speed accession process" involving 12 countries, which is set to be accepted by the member-states at the Helsinki Council next month.

They must also decide on the mandate for the next Inter-Governmental Conference. Debate continues on whether and how to link institutional and decision-making preparations for continental unity with the urgent need to deal with questions of democratic legitimacy so that the EU's citizens are much more involved in the process.

If such an interpretation makes large assumptions about the future stability of Russia, the political and military capacity to contain instability in the Balkans, gross and growing inequalities between winners and losers in the transition societies, or the long way their weaker states have to go to catch up with core Europe, so be it.

But in the light of Kosovo and the response from the rest of Europe it can be argued that unity of the continent will in time be judged the main outcome of 1989.

The Yugoslav disaster was the exception to the rule and was effectively contained. And this is so despite the criticism, raised by Timothy Garton Ash and others, that opting for a single currency rather than rapid enlargement was the wrong response to the end of the Cold War. Had the EU not so deepened its structures it would be far more difficult now to contemplate a pan-European enlargement.

This is better appreciated by looking at the relationship between some of the main ideas put forward by leaders of the 1989 events and the chain reaction of reconciliation that followed during the last decade. Ethical and political ideals about European unity and identity pervaded them, most notably as expressed by Vaclav Havel - but also by Mikhail Gorbachev.

While they have come up against the harsh realities of Western indifference and condescension, or the EU's hard-headed take-it-or-leave-it approach to acquis communautaire as it bargains about an accession that some define as an annexation, those ideas are still operative and have been actively reciprocated.

Behaviour was altered and the new nationalisms mitigated in order to qualify for membership of core Europe, whether in protecting human rights and minorities or instituting the rule of law, commercial contracts and marketisation of their stratified economies.

Adam Michnik recalls that on the day Poles elected their first powersharing government, June 4th, 1989, following prolonged inclusive round-table negotiations, Chinese tanks attacked the protesters in Tiananmen Square, Soviet tanks attacked in Tbilisi and the parliament building was stormed in Vilnius.

"Our responsibilities made us act cautiously, so as not to expose these changes to disintegration. We could not have thought the Soviet empire would fall apart in the way it did. We were afraid of violent actions leading to reactions from Moscow. We did not seek power, we looked for truth, not revenge, prison or reeducation camps".

Those values look more durable and influential following a decade in which emulation of such norms has so altered behaviour in many of the countries mentioned, as a contribution to Europe's peaceful civil order.

Ireland has a real interest in helping to create sufficient solidarity between east and west in coming years to prove the pessimists wrong. The year 1989 also helped to reconcile Britain and Ireland by removing a strategic obstacle to reaching a settlement in Northern Ireland.

It rendered our double minority problem - nationalists in the North, unionists on the island - more normal and soluble, because more comparable with central and eastern Europe. The experience gained in the peace process is therefore highly relevant to the continent, not least because Europeanisation has so helped to mitigate the conflict here over the last generation.

Paul Gillespie can be contacted at pgillespie@irish-times.ie