Everything went wrong for Europe in 1992. The "whole and free" continent promised by the end of the Cold War appeared to be coming rapidly unstuck.
To the east, the former Communist bloc was menaced by political instability and economic hardship; to the west, the European Community's plans for union tottered on the brink of collapse; to the south, the Yugoslav war raged out of control.The political troubles of a Europe no longer kept in balance by nuclear terror were accompanied by a harsh economic recession affecting much of the world.
Ethnic groups clashed, refugees poured across frontiers, currencies seesawed, unemployment lines lengthened.
Europe had seen nothing like it for decades. The combination of racial intolerance, especially in Germany, and economic slump reminded some observers of the 1930s, when Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler rose to power.
As 1993 approached, there were signs that politicians were starting to address the problems, though solutions looked a long way off. It also seemed the recession could be bottoming out.
The year had begun an optimistic note. It was the first in seven decades to be rung in without the Soviet Union, which had collapsed along with the Soviet Communist Party.
In its place, 15 nominally independent, nominally democratic states were thrust blinking into the light of day.
But all, from resource-rich Russia to remote Kyrgyzstan, soon learned that - as one Ukrainian newspaper put it - "independence is not a ready buttered piece of bread."
Decades of state control had left their economies in shambles. Old problems of decrepit industries and infrastructure were compounded by rocketing inflation and unemployment.
A Vienna institute estimated that the former Soviet Union would need annual investment of $465 billion a year from 1995 to 2005 to even approach Western standards of prosperity.
In Russia, President Boris Yeltsin, though still the most popular politician, was struggling by the year's end to defend his economic reforms and his government against an onslaught by conservatives seeking to slow the move to a market economy.
The vast ex-Soviet territories were plagued by ethnic and factional violence. The 4-year-old war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh dragged on, and there was serious fighting in Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan.
The former Soviet Union's problems echoed those of the East European states, which scrapped communism two years earlier.
Everywhere, living standards dropped, governments were ridden by factionalism and ethnic problems loomed large.
The Czechs and Slovaks decided, albeit peacefully, to split Czechoslovakia into two countries from Jan. 1, 1993.
"Central Europe," wrote Jan Zielonka of Leiden University in the Netherlands, "is turning into the weak and unstable back yard of Western Europe, and of Germany in particular."
But its problems were dwarfed by the carnage in the former Yugoslavia, where clashes in 1991 between Serbs and Croats had already ignited Europe's worst conflict since World War II.
The war entered a new dimension of violence and horror when it spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina after that republic declared independence in March.
In early December, Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic estimated that 17 months of fighting had cost 138,000 lives, while the United Nations said it had created over 3 million refugees.
Worse still was the widely predicted prospect of the clashes spreading southward and touching off a general Balkan war that could drag in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.
Yugoslavia and other ethnic trouble spots cast a harsh light on the weakness of the European institutions that many had hoped would deal with just such crises as these.
Neither the 52-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, nor NATO, groping for a new role, nor the EC, which along with the United Nations set up open-ended Yugoslav peace talks in Geneva in September, were able to stop the war.