Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/707

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT 683

struggle against the English ; the Moorish war was the means of converting the Spanish subdivisions into one community. The next lower grade is marked by the confederacies and leagues of states in the order of their coherence, and of the power of their central administration in manifold gradations. The United States required its War of the Rebellion, Switzerland its struggle against Austria, the Low Countries their uprising against Spain, the Achean League its war against Macedonia; and the found- ing of the new German Empire furnishes a parallel instance. In all these cases the characteristic element is that the unity came into being through the struggle and for the purposes of the same, to be sure ; but, over and above the struggle, this unity persists, and develops ulterior interests and combinations, that have no connection with the warlike purpose. The significance of the struggle is in these cases virtually that it is only the reagent to set the latent relationship and unity into activity ; it is thus much more the occasioning cause of essentially demanded unifications than their purpose. It is the latter, at the most, in the first moment. In the degree in which the unification is grounded in some other necessity than essential needs that is, not in the immanent qualities and affinities of the elements in precisely that degree does the meaning of the unity reduce, of course, to the militant purpose, as the externally exploited aim, which remains the irreducible element of the collectivity. How- ever particularistic the component parts of a confederated state or a confederation of states may be, however small may be the pro- portion of their individual rights and liberties which they concede to the federation, they usually transfer to it at least the prerogative of waging war. This is the ptice de resistance of coherence ; if this should fall away, the atoms would have to assume again their completely isolated life. Within the collective struggle-interest there is, to be sure, a still further gradation, namely, whether the unification for purposes of struggle is offensive and defensive, or only for defensive purposes. The latter is probably the case with the majority of coalitions between already existing groups, especially between numerous groups or those that are very different from each other. The defensive purpose is the collecti-