Modern industrial civilization has been shaped by two great antithetical trends, one moving it towards international cooperation, the other towards ever more destructive conflict. Both trends sprang from the scientific and technological revolutions that gathered force in 18th and 19th century Europe, and they have moved in cycles into the 21st century. Two such cycles ended in world wars. The third cycle, presided over by the United Nations, is now building towards another catastrophic breakdown.

Phase One Cooperation: Science and its technologies created a need for standardization that required unprecedented cooperation among States. International agreements were necessary to establish the metric system (1875), the Prime Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time (1884). Use of the telegraph was coordinated by the International Telegraphic Union (ITU), founded in 1865. As railways and steamships increased the volume of international mail beyond the capacity of old bilateral payment arrangements, a multilateral system became necessary, and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) was founded to oversee it in 1874.

Phase One Conflict: Industrialization created two new and revolutionary classes in European society: one of factory workers and the other of entrepreneurs. They were revolutionary because both were outside the control systems of land-based feudal aristocracy. The working class expressed its values and demands in terms of socialism and communism; the entrepreneurial class did so through capitalism. The conflict between the two classes grew steadily in violence, and after the 1917 revolution in Russia, became international.

Factory production created the need for large flows of raw materials and new markets, energizing Europe’s colonial expansion, especially into Africa during the 19th century. The competition among European Powers for foreign colonies led to increasing levels of conflict among them, eventually precipitating the “First World War.”

Phase Two Cooperation: The Treaty of Versailles that ended the “First World War” created the League of Nations, history’s first political effort to avoid war through consultation, negotiation and preventive action. In belated recognition of the threat posed by the 1917 revolution in Russia, an International Labour Office (ILO) was created as part of the League. In the aftermath of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 (which killed more people in a few months than the five-year war), a Health Organization was established in 1920.

The League enjoyed a period of vitality in which it resolved several intra-European political disputes, but by the end of the 1920s its most useful period was over. The International Labour Office and the Nansen International Office for Refugees continued useful work; the latter even receiving a Nobel prize in 1938, less than a year before the outbreak of another world war. There were a number of League conferences in the 1930s, on disarmament, the world economic situation, health, trafficking of women and children, the opium trade, and intellectual cooperation, but with few positive results. Hopes of resurrecting the League continued almost to the end: in 1936 the Assembly appointed a committee of 28 to study the “Application of the Principles of the Covenant.”

Phase Two Conflict: It is frequently said that the League failed because the United States was not a member. But that ignores the fact that Washington followed League proceedings closely, contributed to its expenses, participated in its conferences, and that Americans held senior positions on the staff. What really killed the League was the tendency of major Powers to act as if they had not signed the League Covenant. Poland took the city of Vilnius which the League had decided belonged to Lithuania. France occupied the coal-rich Ruhr region of Germany. Japan took Manchuria, withdrew from the League in 1933, and resumed aggression against China in 1937. Germany also withdrew in 1933, and five years later, seized Austria. In 1935 Italy took Ethiopia despite League protests, and the Soviet Union occupied Finland in 1939 as it girded for war.

Another major reason for the failure of international cooperation was the unbridled economic competition among major trading countries. Inspired by the belief that a country was strong if it maximized exports and minimized imports, governments used high tariffs and manipulated currency values to achieve those ends. The volatility in international markets created by such policies discouraged international trade. As trade shrank, so did production and employment. That downward spiral was the “Great Depression,” and as millions of unemployed people turned to the siren song of communism, big business countered by backing the rise of fascism in Europe. That set the scene for the “Second World War.”

[References to the First, Second and Cold wars are in quotations above to make a political point. The enormously violent spread of European colonial rule into Africa, Asia and Latin America was the real “First World War.” The European power struggles of the 20th century that are described as World Wars were not discrete events, but episodes in the broader context of colonialism. This perspective on history highlights the essential venality of war and the relationship of economic and security issues.]

Phase Three Cooperation: The creation of the United Nations and developments since 1945 have pushed the envelope of international cooperation. The acceptance of a Human Rights Commission as part of the United Nations (it is the only subsidiary body of ECOSOC mentioned in the Charter), reversed a European norm established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. By joining the International Monetary Fund (IMF), States gave up a long cherished attribute of sovereignty: the right to set the value of national currency. The unprecedented concept of “international cooperation for development” emerged in every sphere of human activity, from the most intimately personal (international programs for birth control and against sexually transmitted diseases), to the global (the extension of international law to the oceans and outer space). World conferences brought shared issues into focus and planned concerted action. Revolutionary new information and communications technologies engaged States as well as millions of ordinary people in unprecedented webs of interaction.

Phase Three Conflict: There have been no declared wars among industrially developed countries, but they have engaged in competitive militarization, menacing armed confrontations, and numerous proxy conflicts. During the "Cold War," that involved an enormously expensive nuclear arms race, the maintenance of thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert to assure deterrence, and the development of highly advanced capacities for electronic surveillance and covert action. Assassination of political opponents, economic subversion, fomenting of social conflict, and guerrilla war were all conducted covertly.

The major developed countries also waged war openly against developing countries. Some of these were dubbed “secret” by the mass media because they were not officially declared or openly funded by governments. Nevertheless, they have been enormously destructive: more bombs were dropped on Laos in the 1970s than in all of World War II. The need to fund covert warfare in South East Asia, Afghanistan and Latin America spawned the modern trade in illicit drugs (see below).

Both sides in the "Cold War" sponsored a variety of violent regimes in developing countries and created terrorist movements in strategically important areas they did not control. Such destabilization has outlived ideological excuses and continues now under a variety of different guises. The cause of “African conflicts” has been ascribed to “bad governance;” in Asia the villains have been “Islamic extremism,” or “ethnic conflicts” or unregenerate “Maoism;” in Latin America “warring drug lords,” “militias” of the left and “right wing death squads” share the blame. The common denominator in all regions has been the link of armed conflict to the economic interests of major industrialized countries.

Phase Four: The United Nations is now in a situation similar to that of the League in its final phase. It has no capacity to maintain international peace and security at a time when the doctrines of important military Powers justify proactive rather than defensive use of force, when the use of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists is considered likely, and when the emergence of covert and violent groups within and outside governmental structures has set the scene for potentially massive disasters. Previous cycles have seen conflict overwhelm cooperation. If that happens now, in a world more densely interconnected and interdependent than ever before, it could mean a collapse of the world economy and the end not only of the liberal, open world order, but of civilization itself.

In addition to catastrophic conflict, the fourth phase presents two entirely unprecedented problems. One is environmental. Human activity has begun unbalancing the natural environment globally, and destroying the ecosystems that sustain life. The release of industrial effluents into the atmosphere has created a greenhouse effect that seems to have set off a process of global warming. The polar ice caps are melting rapidly, and if unchecked would lead to a rise in sea levels and the flooding of areas where some two thirds of the world population is concentrated. Industrial pollution by itself is also a serious concern. Evidence of serious environmental damage is widespread, from the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer to the dying coral reefs of the tropics, to the chemical stew in the placental blood of unborn babies (287 industrial pollutants were reported in a random 2005 sampling in the United States). Between 1980 and 1995, developing countries lost 2 million square km. of forests, home to half the world’s biodiversity; and that has pushed the extinction rate of species to a level not seen since the period when the great dinosaurs disappeared.

The second reason why fourth phase conflict could be generally disastrous is the vastly expanded destructive potential of biological warfare. The capacity to engineer deadly new viruses (or resurrect old ones like the "Spanish Flu" that killed some 50 million people in 1918), has raised the prospect that small groups could initiate great depopulating plagues, significantly altering the human gene pool.

It is thus urgent that we move to a more effective system of international cooperation than the United Nations. None of the reform proposals now under discussion will do that, for they all envisage cooperation based mainly among governments, which are by definition committed to the defense of national interests. We must resolve the conflict between national and international interests in the next generation of international organizations. Fortunately, the information and communications revolutions of the last two decades allow us to do that by creating networks of cooperation using the Internet and the Worldwide Web that reach down to the level of individuals. 

A future United Nations would be one that functioned as Global Network Central, with governments serving as national intermediaries.  Such a system need not result from a single radical set of reforms; it can evolve if activists around the world work on a shared concept and plan.