Oecumene

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Oecumene is a term originally adopted within Christianity, where it has been suggested there is a single believing community amongst the various different Christian denominations, particularly between the Roman Catholic Church and the denominations which arose by the Great Schism of 1054 and from the European Reformation. The most important document in the Christian oecumene the declaration of the Commission for Belief and Church Order of the World Council of Churches concerning Baptism, the Eucharist and Holy Office, also known as the Lima Report, which appeared in 1982.

Amongst cultural historians, the term was first used by Lewis Mumford^{[citation needed]} and later popularised by William McNeill. In its modern cultural historic use, the term was popularised in McNeill's "Rise of the West" where he suggested that a single global oecumene was created through the dominance of European political institutions, science, technology, and economic forms, from the late 18th century onwards. One could argue that prior to the great voyages of discovery, initated by Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, there were originally two separate world oecumenes - one covering north and east Africa, Eurasia and its surrounding Japanese, Indonesian and European archipelagos, and the other covering Mesoamerica, the South East of the USA, and the Andean region. It was the Spanish Conquistadores that fused this second oecumene within the first to create a single integrated "world system". With the eclipse of Europe first by the USA and USSR, after World War II, and with the emergence of the newer forces of globalisation, Europe has become once again a small promontory on a continent with several potentially equal powers.