Two world wars within a generation
and the potentialities of nuclear warfare have made the establishment of
international order and the preservation of International peace the paramount
concern of western civilization. War has always been abhorred as a scourge. As
the rise of the territorial state transformed the Holy
Roman Empire from the actual political organization of Christendom
into an empty shell and a legal fiction writers and statesmen reflected more
and more on substitutes for the lost political unity of the western world.
Erasmus in the sixteenth century, Sully, Emeric Cruce Hugo Grotius, and William
Penn in the seventeenth, and the abbe desaint-pierre, Rousseau Bentham and kant
in the eighteenth were the great intellectual fore-runners of the practical
attempts undertaken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to solve the
problems of international order and peace.
Of these attempts, the Holy
Alliance the, Hague peace conferences of 1899 and 1907, the League of the
Nations and the United Nations are the outstanding examples. These
organizations and conferences, together with other less spectacular endeavors
to shape a peaceful world, were made possible by four factors-spiritual moral,
intellectual and political which started to converge at the beginning of the
nineteenth century and culminated in the theory and practice of international
affairs prevalent in the period between the two world wars.
Science the times of the stoics and
the early Christians, there have been alive in western civilization a feeling
for the moral unity of mankind which strives to find a political organization
commensurate with it. The Roman Empire was
such a political organization of universal scope. After its downfall, the Roman
Empire remained throughout the ages a symbolic reminder of the unity of the
western world and the ultimate goal and standard which inspired Charlemagne no
less than Napoleon and determined the policies of the Holy
Roman Empire until the beginning of the religious wars. It is not
by accident that the dissolution of the Holly Roman Empire in 1806 coincided
with Napoleon’s attempt to revive it and antedates by little less than a decade
the beginning of that period of modern history which has made the restoration
of international order one of its major objectives.