246 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

least temporarily stable oecumenical regime in which political pow

would be a monopoly administered from some single centre.

On a political plane which was the field of cycles of war and peace,
on an economic plane which was the field of 'booms* and 'slumps', tl
strength of this secular tendency towards integration was indicated t
the failure of a concomitant tendency towards geographical expansion 1
counteract it. By A.D. 1952 the world-wide extension of the tentacles <
a Western Industrial System of Economy that had made its epiphany i
Great Britain during the later decades of the eighteenth century ha
been matched by the attraction of all the states then still surviving o
the surface of the planet into a Western system of international relation
that had made its epiphany in the last decade of the fifteenth century a
a local West European political vortex round the nucleus of a Lat
Medieval city-state cosmos in Italy. In A.D. 1952 the prize at stake in th
contest between the United States and the Soviet Union was nothing les
than the command over all other habitable lands and navigable sea
routes and airways; and the General War of A.D. 1939-45 had bee*
already 'global', and no longer merely 'European'; for in this war th<
battlefields had not been confined to a Lombardy and a Flanders tha
had been the cockpits of latter-day Western warfare during its overtun
and its first three regular cycles (currebant A.D. 1494-1914), and had noi
been confined, either, to the wider Continental European arena of the
General War of A.D. 1914-18, with its western front stretching from the
North Sea to the Alps and its eastern front stretching from the Baltic to
the Carpathians. The General War of A.D. 1939-45 had been literally
'a world war' in which one battlefield embracing Europe, the Mediter-
ranean, and the Eastern Atlantic had been matched by another embracing
the Western Pacific and the Far East.

This twentieth-century integration of international relations all round
the globe into a single system, centring on a Balance of Power that had
originated in Western Europe and had then progressively brought the
rest of the Earth's surface within the field of its magnetic attraction,
presented a striking contrast to the configuration of the field of force in
earlier chapters of the same story. The overture (cumbat A.D, 1494-
1559) had ranged no wider than the areas involved in a competition for
hegemony over Italy between nascent adjoining Great Powers in the
Transalpine and Transmarine provinces of Western Europe; and even
Flanders had then been only a secondary theatre of military operations,
though the two Great Powers of the day actually marched with one
another there, without being insulated on this front by any intervening
political vacuum or buffer. The civil war between Catholics and Pro-
testants in France (gerebatur A.D. 1562-98) went on its way more or
less independently of the contemporary civil war between Dutch and
Spaniards in the Spanish Hapsburg Monarchy (gerebatur A.D. 1568-
1609). The civil war in England (gerebatvr A.D. 1642-8) likewise followed
its own course without becoming implicated in the contemporary civil
war in the Holy Roman Empire (gerebatur A.D. 1618-48). The Americas
and the Indies were drawn into the main vortex of Western warfare only
in the course of the first regular cvcle (currphnt A r> YI.AQ_-.A~~\. —J