ABSTRACT
The modern state—as a government supreme over a particular territory and population—has provided order on a local scale. States have cooperated with one another in maintaining a structure of interstate, or international, order in which they confirm one another's domestic authority and preserve a framework of coexistence. Order in world affairs depends vitally upon the positive role of the state. It is true that the framework of mere coexistence, of what is sometimes called "minimum world order," inherited from the European states-system, is no longer by itself adequate. The connected issues of the control of the world's population, the production and distribution of food, the utilization of the world's resources, and the conservation of the natural environment, it is said, have to be tackled on a global basis, and this is prevented by the division of mankind into states.
