The world trends beginning to emerge in the 1960's and '70's are qualitatively new and change fundamentally the traditional concepts of relations among states. There may be, therefore, no proper historical antecedents to the detente developing between the United States and the Soviet Union. Communication, transportation, trade patterns, and mutual dependencies have made the world substantially smaller. Modernization and industrial and commercial development are inexorably drawing the world's people closer. The most telling evidence of fundamental change during this period was the emergence of concern, for the first time in human history, over the survival of the human species. This concern may take the form of some specific questions: Are nations engaged in the creation of a true global interdependence in which all nations are inevitably linked in common need for support and sustenance. Or are such linkages only the creation of men and nations bent on assuring their own survival, designs that bind us enduringly to no nation no resource, other than those dictated by the shifting requirements of the marketplace and the maintenance of security.
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