Rosenau provides an overview of normative issues confronting us at the end of the twentieth century. He writes that the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the story of convergence around ever more encompassing political entities in order to preserve individual values in the context of collective needs and wants; but today the process of community building has been reversed. He concludes that today, the story is one of fragmentation, of people opting for individual and subgroup needs and wants, and neither citizens nor leaders have any experience in adapting their traditional values to the demands of subgroupism and the increasing ineffectiveness, even the breakup, of whole systems.
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