EU leaders will search for unity at a special summit without the UK on Friday, in the hope of setting a course for a union battered by the Brexit vote and riven by a simmering east-west row over migration.
Or perhaps they're an oblique comment on Pärt's quest for oneness: "the complex and multifaceted only confuse me, and I must search for unity", he has said.
"Don't let our enemies laugh at us for putting people in prison," the cleric urged, "We must search for unity to find a way out of our quandary".
In searching for reductive unity underlying the variety of cognitive systems, Paul Churchland (1982) once recommended descending "below" neurobiology and even biochemistry, to the level of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
That said, Abulafia warns us, in his conclusion, against searching for a "fundamental unity" of Mediterranean identity, and to "note diversity" instead.
Their type of nasty firebrand always exists, but they receive greater support at times when people who feel disconnected, disenchanted and disenfranchised are looking for a sense of unity, searching for a "we".
The men of the Essex were unified when they were searching for whales, but that unity was sorely tested when they found themselves the victims of a whale's revenge.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has been in almost as many pulpits in South Florida as the New Testament, preaching Democratic Party unity and searching for voting irregularities, while, on national talk shows and Florida drive-time radio, Republicans accuse Democrats of trying to steal the election the Democrats claim has already been stolen once.
Pärt has said that, in composing, he is engaged in a "search for unity," and this could be said to describe "Tintinnabuli" as well.
Although we were victorious we were only marginally victorious: we did not have the spur that defeat might have provided, nor did we have the strength with which victory should have endowed us.Because we had survived the war intact we did not realise fully the motives or strength of the European search for unity.
