5. Regional Associations were organized; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the Organization of American States and the Organization for European Unity.
6. Disarmament conferences were held. General peace treaties were signed like the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 and the United Nations Charter.
7. Two major efforts were made to establish a general confederation of nations and empires—the League of Nations in 1919 and the United Nations a quarter of a century later. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations proved to be feeble and ineffectual efforts to bridge the gulf between limited national sovereignty and planet-wide order and peace. But they were tentative steps in the direction of a federation of the world and they did mark a notable advance from the chaos and conflict incident to the planet-wide expansion of the European empires toward more stable economic and social conditions and more orderly international relationships.
Paralleling these changes in the political life of western civilization there have been a number of drastic economic reforms. One was the abolition of chattel slavery. A second was the replacement of serfdom and peonage by free labor receiving fixed wages and salaries. A third change was the division of large feudal estates and other concentrated landed properties into small units owned and operated by working farmers. A fourth change was the establishment of free trade areas within and among sovereign states. A fifth innovation was the transfer of individually operated and family businesses into associations and corporations with limited liability and widespread ownership by bond and stockholders. Sixth, trade unions and consumers' cooperatives were recognized and legalized. Seventh, legal provisions were made for social security against accident, sickness, unemployment, old age. Minimum incomes were guaranteed. Eighth, many steps were taken toward public or social ownership of the means of production, including land and other natural resources. Ninth, repeated governmental efforts were made to deal with the inflation that attends prolonged exhausting wars. These efforts included the regulation of credit and debt and the substitution of new currencies for old ones that had been hopelessly devalued.
Political and economic changes in the life-patterns of western civilization have been accompanied by far-reaching cultural reforms such as the provision of free public education; the emancipation of women; the provision of public recreation facilities; popularized culture through information, the drama, music, literature, art; equalizing opportunity and facilitating movement up and down the ladder of recognition, approval, disapproval.
Political reforms of western civilization date from the Reformation and the Renaissance. Economic reforms were speeded by the industrial revolution. Together they are often described as the bourgeois revolution, which resulted in the power shift from landlords, ecclesiastics and knights in armor to businessmen, protected and assisted by the state, the church, channels of information and propaganda, the police and other armed forces. Cultural reforms accompanied the reforms in politics and economics.
Underlying the changes and supplementing reforms were improvements in the means of communication and transportation; the discovery and use of new sources of energy and the changes in production and merchandizing which have played so vital a role in the transition from a skimpy economy of scarcity to an open-handed economy of abundance, extravagance and conspicuous waste.
Through all of the political, economic and social changes made in the structure and function of western civilization its basic activities have remained unchanged. The nuclei of civilized life have been cities concerned primarily with trade, commerce, industry, finance—planned, organized and administered by businessmen, their professional and technical associates and assistants. In practice, city centers of wealth and power have expanded, using the military as the readiest means of implementing policy. They have occupied and garrisoned the foreign territory brought under their control. At home and abroad they have exploited nature, men and other animals in their interest and for their profit. The trading cities of medieval Europe, the emerging nations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the colonizing empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the industrial European empires of the nineteenth century devoted their energies increasingly to expanding into new territory, occupying and exploiting it, and fighting the wars which pock-marked the ceaseless struggle for pelf and power. In short, they continued to build up the institutions and to follow the practices of civilized peoples. This has been true of the millennium that began with the crusades and has hastened the rise of western civilization and its extension to planet-wide proportions.
Similar conclusions can be drawn from the life stories of the score or more of civilizations that rose, flourished and sank into inconsequence during the previous five thousand years.
Each civilization has had its own habitat, its own life pattern. Each has had its own languages, laws, traditions and customs. But despite such local differences, all of the civilizations have had in common those characteristics which justify their inclusion in the family of civilizations.