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, competition, revolt, rebellion, civil war and wars of self-determination carried on by unassimilated regional, provincial and colonial elements. From beyond their frontiers civilizations have been assailed by rival aspirants for power, by armed bands in search of plunder or by migrating peoples seeking greener pastures. All of these forces have held the ground for diversity and barred the way to universality.
Another factor of great consequence leading to the instability of civilizations has been the concentration of wealth, power, privilege, comfort and security in the hands of a minority, in sharp contrast with poverty and insecurity among the less well-placed majority. Generally, the privileged minority has been relatively small and the exploited majority overwhelmingly large.
Still another disturbing factor in each civilization is the transformation of its military arm from a means of defense against external enemies into a major factor in the direction of domestic affairs. The professional military build-up has frequently usurped the state power and became king-maker by virtue of its monopoly of weapons, organization, and its highly trained personnel of professional destroyers and killers.
Upset by one or another of these disturbing and disruptive forces, civilized populations have panicked and retreated from their collectiveness toward more localized, more fragmented, less social and more individual life patterns. Such a retreat rounds out the later phases of a cycle of civilization—the phases of decline and final dissolution.
Civilizations perish in the first instance because of internal contradictions and conflicts, the struggle to grab, monopolize, and keep wealth, status, power.
They perish because of the division of the nucleus and its associates and dependencies between those who work for a living, those who have an unearned income and those parasites who scrounge for a living. They perish because of the hard class and caste lines that grow out of economic contradictions; because of the development of a social pyramid, layer above layer, until the summit is reached where there is standing room for only a few. Competent, talented persons may rise from level to level in this pyramid. A political and social bureaucracy develops which feeds at the public trough. Then comes a bitter struggle to get both feet in the trough and keep them there side by side with an equally determined effort to exclude outsiders and other intruders. An army of volunteers and novices is converted into a military establishment which becomes a state within the state, extending its control until it makes policy, selects top leaderships and carries on its internal feuds and wars of succession dividing the defense forces and using them for partisan purposes. Overhead costs rise; deficits in the public treasury grow; so does public debt. Inflation follows, and the debasement of the currency. Levies are made on private wealth for public purposes. There is expropriation of the property of political enemies. Espionage, secret agents, the growth of informers become part of the society, along with the use of assassination as a political weapon, the increase of violence and crime, and eventually, a flight from the cities.
This tragic enumeration only skims the surface of the many and various aspects of a situation that reaches its breaking point in civil war, famine, pestilence and eventually in depopulation.
Social dissolution is accelerated by provincial revolts against central authority; by survival struggle between the empires which were coordinated and consolidated into the civilization; by revolt in the subordinate and dependent segments of the civilization; by rivalry and conflict between racial, cultural and political sub-groups forced into the civilization, held there by coercion, policed by armed force and taking the first opportunity to win political independence and self determination.