Expansion through armed struggle no longer paid its way.  It was the obvious lesson stressed by J.A.  Hobson and Nicolai Lenin in their respective studies of imperialism (1903 and 1916).  It was the theme of Norman Angel’s Great Illusion. It was summarized by Arnold Toynbee’s War and Civilization.

If the costs of expansion exceeded the income, the outcome of expansion would be dismemberment for the vanquished and bankruptcy for the victors.  Indeed, this formula generalises the experience of the survival struggles during the war years which began in 1911.  I summarized the experience in The Twilight of Empire(1929).

The catastrophic economic breakdown during the Great Depression of 1929-1938, the spectacular and fateful rise of Hitlerism in Germany after 1927, the destructive Civil War in Spain from 1936 to 1939, followed immediately by the war devastations of 1939-45 were part and parcel of the same picture.  The same may be said for the revolt of the colonial peoples, downgrading all European “victors” in the war of 1914-18, and the social revolutions following 1945 that shook up the planetary power structure and opened the way for socialist-communist forces to begin socialist construction in one country after another.

Some European states had become super-states, armed to the teeth, surrounded with their satellites, dependencies and colonies.  They expanded, exploited and battled as they played the absorbing and ruinous game of “Beggar My Neighbor”.  Politically and economically the struggle reached and passed its high point between 1914 and 1945.  The subsequent years have revealed the aftermath—­a down-graded Europe and an ascendant Asia.

Empire building has been made prohibitively expensive by the revolution in science and technology; if the human family is to survive in anything like its present numbers, a way must be found to end the use of war as a means of attaining social objectives.  New techniques, chiefly non-competitive, must be discovered and employed in the maintenance of social relations.

Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.

Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written record.

Western civilization, like its predecessors, had consisted of rival nations and empires competing for living-space, wealth, position, expanding territorially as they exploited nature and available labor power for the advantage of the few.

Civilization as a life style, built around the competitive struggle for wealth and power, using war as an instrument of policy and multiplying the techniques of expansion and exploitation, has had a series of experimental tryouts already under way at the dawn of written history.  Under no circumstances has civilization proved to be wholly rewarding and satisfying.  The current revolution in science and technology has rendered civilization unreformable as well as obsolete.