4o8 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

alone in the true sense in which these words expressed France's former
political ideal of genuine national sovereign independence. In 1950 the
more sanguine and constructive spirits in France saw their country's
salvation in a merger of her once jealously vindicated separate national
identity in a supra-national Western community that was to embrace at
least all Western Europe and was perhaps eventually to bestride the
Atlantic. In the hearts of Frenchmen who were 'good Europeans', as in
those of Frenchmen who were 'defeatists', the ideal of parochial national-
ism was thus dead; and this was a portent for the Western World as a
whole; for, in a post-Medieval Western Society, France had been the
archetype of the seif-sufficiently sovereign independent national state;
and therefore, if, in France, a five-hundred-years-old tradition of political
parochialism had been broken between the years 1933 and 1940 by the
irresistibly mightier force of an explosive German imperialism, it could
be foreseen that tougher wills to retain a sovereign national indepen-
dence might likewise be broken by the impact of forces mightier than a
National-Socialist Germany.

Great Britain, for instance, had refused to give in when, in 1940,
France's will to resist Germany had broken down; yet from 1931 to
1940 Great Britain had been France's fellow-traveller down the road of
appeasement which France had followed to the bitter end; and, after
1940, Great Britain's happy issue out of afflictions to which she had then
exposed herself at the eleventh hour—by then taking an heroic decision—
had been due to the mighty reinforcement of her own inadequate national
strength by the arms of a Soviet Union and a United States who were
successively drawn into the war on the anti-Axis side thanks to a German
and a Japanese miscalculation that were, either of them, egregious. The
Second World War left Great Britain's two eventual allies alone still
capable of playing the part of Great Powers in a struggle for existence
between parochial states that had now become vastly more strenuous
than it had been in A.D. 1929; America's and Russia's fellow victor
Great Britain, no less than a defeated Germany, Japan, Italy, and France,
had fallen out of the running; and a Second World War which had thus
reduced the number of the Great Powers in a Westernizing World from,
seven to two had, in the act, forged a new weapon that might prove
potent enough to break the spirit of parochial Powers even of a Russian
or an American calibre. Even if the uranium atom bomb should fail to
produce the same morally devastating effect on these two loose-limbed
giants as it had produced on a congested and exhausted Japan, an in-
conscionable post-Modern Western Science still had up her sleeve a
hydrogen atom bomb that could be guaranteed, if ever detonated, to
blow even a United States or Soviet Union out of the water—at the cost,
perhaps, of making the whole face of the Planet uninhabitable by human
or any other living organisms.1

1 The following comment on this passage, and on other passages to the same effect in
the present Part of this Study, has been made by Professor William McNeill:

*I doubt the likelihood of total extinction of Civilization, still more of Mankind, as a
result of a third -world war. The will to resist and the capacity to conduct an organized
campaign breaks down short of physical extinction; and the breaking point is removed
farther from the point of physical extinction in proportion as the waging of war becomes