Roberta Ducci

We live, no doubt, in a period of accelerating history, though what precisely we can expect from this acceleration nobody dares predict. The end of World War II is still not 20 years away, yet there already is little resemblance between the blueprint for world order drawn in 1944 and the world of 1964. A world order after a war which caused 30,000,000 casualties should last somewhat longer than that. The Pax Romana after the civil wars fought just before the birth of Christ lasted, on and off, a couple of centuries. The Pax Anglica after the Napoleonic Wars lasted a century. The Pax Americana (nobody can deny that the United States has kept the peace since VJ-Day, with some tacit coöperation from Russia) has now lasted nineteen and a half years, but thanks only to several changes in the organization of the world, some of them improvised under the pressure of events.