A tsunami has crashed over Europe, disrupting, submerging, subverting, uprooting most of the certainties that underpinned the condescending Eurocentrism of the late 1980s, which saw in the fall of the Berlin Wall the end of history, and in economic integration the definitive triumph of what the intellectual comedian Jeremy Rifkin called the "European Dream". In 2004, the American sociologist went so far as to claim that the European Union is the most advanced example of the new model of transnational governance. The European Union is now the first truly postmodern institution of governance and the collective psyche, between the extreme individualism of the United States and the extreme collectivism of Asia, best suited to lead the way into the new epoch.