When does a conflict become a war?

How many simultaneous conflicts/wars does it take to become a world war? Did WWII really end? Actually, for that matter, did WWI really end (there was only about 10 years of relative peace between the end of action in WWI and the death spiral into WWII using the current terminology for both events)?

I wonder how history will regard the period (assuming there's someone left to give a shit) of the last 100 years and the next 30 or so. If one considers all the "conflicts", "wars", "police actions" (I honestly lack for different means to define "war" with terms that indicate its size or severity) that have occurred and those that are likely to happen, what we see now as two world wars may really be a single event.

No real revelation here. It seems we have never stopped fighting each other somewhere on this globe for the past 100 or so years and the "end" of a war/conflict generally germinates the start of the next mess. Not that we didn't fight each other before that but the technological advances in the last and this century make us much more proficient at the task. Enough so that we can now exterminate ourselves (that'll show `em!)

Allow my rant here: As I think I'm picking up a trend... we do all these "wars" that we first have to name, then we agree on what the goal is or how we achieve victory. We can move the goal, rename it, whatever, it isn't important as long as we get there. Once that is achieved, then we can go to the next one. The end result is that we are still in THE world war. Contestants, governments, armies revolutionaries, resistance fighters, etc, all may change but that doesn't matter. What does matter is the size and span of the conflict across the globe and the human suffering because of it. The wars don't even have to relate, Columbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, etc. They aren't the same combatants but its the same globe.

We are, and have been for about 100 years, in a world war. Numbering them doesn't mean crap.

Check out the two time lines links.

1914 - 1948: http://worldatwar.net/timeline/18-48.html
1948 and on: http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/timeline/

Thanks for listening,
Splat!