Last May, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright handed German foreign minister Joschka Fischer a most confusing diagram. Beneath an array of apparently random scribbles, it depicted a map of Europe that appeared to have been defaced by an unusually energetic infant who had been allowed to run wild with a box of crayons.

After some effort, the eye could discern a number of sharply dissimilar circles drawn upon the map in different hues. There was one circle in blue for the 15 members of the European Union (EU), and another in red for the 19 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and another in green for the seven countries jostling to join NATO in its next round of enlargement. The 11 countries that have adopted the new single currency, the euro, were marked in brown. There was another circle, in yellow, for the six countries of central and eastern Europe that are deemed to be on the fast track for early membership in the EU, and another in orange for the six thought to be on a rather slower course toward entry. There was yet another, in a kind of violet, which marked the 12 EU countries that had signed on to the Schengen Accord. Named after a quaint Luxembourg village where one can stand on the bank of a stream and toss pebbles into either France or Germany, the accord eliminates internal border controls. Having entered any one of the 12 states, a visitor can pass without a passport into the rest.

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