I've read the book about this: _War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires_, by Peter Turchin. (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/0452288193/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#38;s=books&#38;qid=1264020585&#38;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/0452288...</a> )<p>Turchin's model of asabiya is much more developed than the article's, but goes in exactly the same direction. He emphasizes the importance of frontiers and warfare -- the civilizational counterpart to Darwinian selection pressure, and a reminder that there are worse enemies than one's neighbor and higher causes than one's checkbook -- for asabiya development and, thus, the cohesion of societies. All this is borne out with some very impressive styles of measurement; he's the founder of a new discipline called "cliodynamics," taking its approaches from ecological population modeling.<p>On the other hand, before we embrace war as the road to prosperity, we need to remember what commentors here observed -- that most civilizations wage war lawlessly, to the point of torture and genocide; so some sort of authority to control the intensity and severity of warfare would be a good idea. I don't think the United Nations will cut it; but Chesterton thought that the Pope would have, had the medieval project been taken to its conclusion...