Some European states had become super-states, armed to the teeth, surrounded with their satellites, dependencies and colonies. They expanded, exploited and battled as they played the absorbing and ruinous game of "Beggar My Neighbor". Politically and economically the struggle reached and passed its high point between 1914 and 1945. The subsequent years have revealed the aftermath--a down-graded Europe and an ascendant Asia.
Empire building has been made prohibitively expensive by the revolution in science and technology; if the human family is to survive in anything like its present numbers, a way must be found to end the use of war as a means of attaining social objectives. New techniques, chiefly non-competitive, must be discovered and employed in the maintenance of social relations.
Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.
Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written record.
Western civilization, like its predecessors, had consisted of rival nations and empires competing for living-space, wealth, position, expanding territorially as they exploited nature and available labor power for the advantage of the few.
Civilization as a life style, built around the competitive struggle for wealth and power, using war as an instrument of policy and multiplying the techniques of expansion and exploitation, has had a series of experimental tryouts already under way at the dawn of written history. Under no circumstances has civilization proved to be wholly rewarding and satisfying. The current revolution in science and technology has rendered civilization unreformable as well as obsolete.
The structure or pattern of civilization has divided western civilization into separate parts that benefit by separateness and profit from conflict. The result is a typical example of a self-destroying life style struggling through an impasse from which there is no escape save through a third fratricidal war.