separate sovereign units are coordinated, consolidated, unified and
universalized. The result is an aggregate of parts, differing in many
local respects, but acknowledging the authority of the power center and
contributing material goods and manpower to its support and defense. The
main sociological purpose of each civilization has been to impose
central authority and universality upon political, economic and
ideological diversity.

Every civilization has been confronted with the advantages of unity over
diversity. Every civilization has professed its devotion to unity. Every
civilization at one or another stage in its development has subordinated
unity to the increasingly insistent demands of diversity.

For at least six thousand years one civilization after another has
sought to achieve centralization and universality. In every instance of
which history provides a legible record, centralized, universalized
institutions and practices have fragmented into diversity and stubborn
localism.

Western civilization is part and parcel of this generalization.
Generation by generation and century by century it has professed and
proclaimed the advantages of universality while it yielded to the
persistent demands of nationalism, regionalism and localism. Throughout
the latter years of the nineteenth century the will to unify gained much
ground. The tide turned with the turn of the century. For the first half
of the present century the forces of unity and of diversity seemed
stalemated. War's end in 1945 saw the shadow of a universal state
flicker across the screen of history. With the adjournment of the
Bandung Conference in 1955 the shadow dissolved and was replaced by the
strident nationalisms that have become an outstanding feature of
planetary politics, economics and social organization.

Despite the insistence of reason and experience that strength and
stability are the result of unity,--tradition, custom and habit have
held human society at the level of political, economic and ideological
diversity. Nowhere in history is this generalization more emphatic than
in the failure of the European standard-bearers of western civilization
to replace a millennium of diversity, discord and conflict by a unified,
coordinated, co-existing, cooperating European community.

At its best a civilization is insecure and even unstable, disturbed and
upset by an increasing domestic struggle for preferment and power that
includes rivalry,