If that precedent is followed, however, the defeat of the United States would be followed by a period of fragmentation similar to or even more intense than the fragmentation of the 1950's and 1960's.

Minor changes were made in boundary lines and in internal relationships of property and privilege, but the European maps of the period present a record of persistent fragmentation of the continent into strongly frontiered sovereign segments.

Planetary fragmentation which accompanied the dissolution of Roman civilization divided and sub-divided mankind into unnumbered self-contained segments: families, tribes, classes, villages, cities, kingdoms, principalities, nations, empires.

Unrestrained and undirected social fragmentation leads to conflict, destruction, perhaps to chaos.