4 J.-A. PEMBERTON
by the whip within their own domain while periodically turning their
batteries on their neighbours without.^15 Toynbee stated that militarism
has been by far the greatest cause of the breakdowns of civilizations during
the last four or five millennia....Militarism breaks a civilization down by
causing the local states in which the society is articulated to collide with
one another in destructive fratricidal conflicts. In this suicidal process, the
entire social fabric becomes fuel to feed the devouring flame in the brazen
bosom of Moloch.^16Naturally given Europe’s own recent experience of fratricidal conflict, the
possibility of European decline was at the forefront of Toynbee’s mind
during the time in which he was preparing the first three volumes of A
Study of History. This was evidenced by his meditations on the destiny
of European culture in a paper he gave at a conference in Copenhagen
under the auspices of the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific
Study of International Relations (CISSIR) in 1931, by which time he
had been working on the various volumes of A Study of History for some
years.^17 That said, it should be noted that Toynbee did not directly con-
front the question of the possibility of European decline in the first three
volumes of A Study of History. In the case of the fourth volume how-
ever, it was a different matter altogether. The preface to this volume was
dated March 31, 1939, and therein Toynbee confessed that in light of
the ‘catastrophe’ that might descend upon his world at any moment,
he had felt at times that in writing the book, the ‘painfully appropriate’
themes of which, he observed, were ‘breakdown’ and ‘disintegration,’ he
was ‘tempting Fate’ and ‘wasting effort.’ He openly wondered whether
the ‘paroxysm’ of nationalism that had engulfed the Western world in
the previous year suggested that ‘our parochial national states might
have to pass through further bouts of internecine fratricidal warfare’
(^15) Ibid., 190, 245–46.
(^16) Ibid., 190.
(^17) Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ International
Affairs 10, no. 6 (1931): 803–26, 819. While Toynbee accepted that Europe would
decline in political and economic importance in the future, he warned that if its cultural
lights ‘were to be extinguished, the rest of the world would surely find itself going intel-
lectual and aesthetically stale...Therefore we must exert ourselves to safeguard the position
of Europe in the new international society—and this not just in the interests of us poor
Europeans, but in the interests of mankind at large’ (ibid.).