s the building forces in western civilization were in the
ascendant. Since the turn of the century a shift of forces has been
under way. The wearing down forces presently are in the ascendant. Had
it been less competitive and more cooperative and co-ordinated, western
civilization might have taken another step in advance by extending
cultural unification into the political arena. The League of Nations and
the United Nations were efforts in this direction. Neither succeeded in
breaking down sovereignty far enough to permit planet-wide political
federation.

Having failed to co-ordinate and establish a planet-wide authority
during the critical years following 1870, western civilization accepted
the antithesis of co-ordination and entered a period of fragmentation:

1. During the century and a half from 1815 to the present
day, as facilities for co-ordination were multiplied by discovery
and invention, Europe remained stubbornly fragmented
into more than a score of sovereign states. Minor
changes were made in boundary lines and in internal relationships
of property and privilege, but the European maps
of the period present a record of persistent fragmentation
of the continent into strongly frontiered sovereign segments.

2. Break-up of the European empires after two general wars
led to the fragmentation of each empire into self-determining
sovereign units.

3. The "third world," consisting chiefly of European empire
fragments, has not consolidated, but after the Bandung
Conference of 1955 has consisted of a fragmented Africa
and Asia torn by domestic and inter-state conflicts and
harried by the persistent intervention of the western powers.

4. Rivalry in the Pacific and in Asia has been heightened by
the meteoric rise of Japan as a world power, the dismemberment
of the Japanese Empire after 1945 and the fierce
subsequent economic competition between Japan and her
planetary competitors, chiefly the United States.

5. United States efforts to coordinate Latin America as a
source of raw materials and a market for manufactures and
investment capital have not produced a United Latin
American front against a common Yankee menace, but a
sturdy refusal even of the tiniest Latin American Republic
to surrender or limit its sovereignty has pushed a thorn
into the vulnerable side of Washington's Monroe Doctrine
control of the western hemis