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