ABSTRACT
Integration is built on shared adaptive needs. Conflict reflects contradictory or competitive adaptive needs. Integration is likely to occur where shared adaptive problems are most critical. This chapter argues that integration develops to cope with problems of survival at the very level where those problems are most critical. The public-choice analysts relied not only on the rational self-interest view of market economics but also on the game-theory strategies that became so prominent during and after World War II. Nation-state sovereignties can frustrate global collective action to cope with world-scale survival threats. As for ethnocentrism, ethnicity, and nationalism, they present a challenge to any tight and comprehensive integration on a global scale. But they also challenge the present integration of each of our three major Worlds—capitalist, socialist, and Third—just as they challenge even the integration of the nation-states within each of these Worlds.
