Unit plants and their coordinated managements in the aggregate compose the present-day world economy. They are the essence of its being. They occupy the skyline and dominate the economic life of modern industrial society. They are the units which make up the sum-total of modern industry which, in its turn, is the bony structure around which have grown the sinews and muscle of present-day planetary economy.
Modern state structure goes back through the half dozen centuries during which it has been developing. Its ancestors may be met with in the history of previous civilizations.
Modern industrial structure on the other hand is something essentially new under the sun--newly imagined, designed, constructed, productive. It has no ancestry before 1750 because its essential building unit--the modern machine--did not exist previous to that date.
In the last chapter we dealt with the growth of states into empires and the aggregation of empires into civilizations with the possibility that the existing states could be welded into a world federation. One of the chief obstacles to such a development is the centuries of conflict during which modern nations have been built up and the strong bonds of nationalism have been established as a means of holding divergent groups of people in line by particular oligarchies operating in particular civilizations.
On the economic level such difficulties are minimal. The process of coordination and consolidation was far advanced before the end of the last century. The practice of integration--joining productive units in functional sequences--was also accepted and followed, with little regard for political or cultural considerations. The result has been an economic integration which has developed inside the chief industrial nations and across national boundaries.
Despite political obstacles, economic integration has proceeded with giant strides, especially during the past hundred years. Under a well developed world political federation the world economy could be integrated and used to provide the necessaries, conveniences and minimal comforts for the entire human family. There are nationalistic obstacles to political federation. Economic integration is an obvious must and a logical outcome of the industrial integration that has gone on so swiftly during the great revolution of 1750-1970.