As for the principle of collective security, it falls at the first fence of strategic historical
reality. The idea requires that a state declared by the League (or later by the UN) to be
an aggressor should be opposed by the whole collectivity of states, by force if necessary,
and regardless of the interest of individual polities in the case at issue. The trouble with
collective security as the leading deterrent to aggression and the principal tool to restore
international order is that it ignores the nature of the modern system of states. All states
are self-regarding entities that act collectively only when the advantages of so doing
outweigh the disadvantages. Only very rarely will states thoroughly indifferent to an
international dispute be prepared to commit blood and money for the common good.
‘[N]ew world orders...need to be policed,’ according to historian Michael Howard
(2001: 124). Every international order in every period requires that someone or some-
thing functions as a protector of the system. If there is no such protector or protective
mechanism, then that particular international order cannot endure. The consequences of
the absence of a capable and willing international policeman, or of a practical policing
arrangement, inevitably is disorder, and disorder is a precursor to warfare. Rephrased,
someone has to do the dirty and expensive work on behalf of international order if there
is to be an order worthy of the title.
By the late 1930s, Germany had joined and left the League of Nations (1926–33),
everyone was rearming and the principle of collective security was dead and buried. A
condition of international disorder had returned to where it had been in the decade before
1914, only this time the political, socio-cultural, strategic and technological contexts
were even less promising for a peaceful future. The reasons why can be summarized thus:
- In the late 1930s, as in 1914, Germany was too powerful to be contained and
balanced by its continental European neighbours. In 1914, Germany did not believe
this, which is the principal reason why it manipulated a crisis in the Balkans as an
excuse to launch a preventive war. In the late 1930s, Hitler believed that the other
great powers would catch up with, and overmatch, Germany’s rearmament by 1943.
So, in an eerie replay of German reasoning in 1912–14, Nazi Germany believed that
it had only a narrow historical window for victorious war-making. - Contrary to the 1914 context, Germany in the 1930s was set firmly and irrevocably
on a course for war. Nazism was a quasi-religion that honoured, indeed required, war.
And Hitler’s bizarre ideological purpose was to establish by force a racially pure
Aryan super-state. That was his dominant mission. Therefore, it was the destiny of
his Germany to attempt to transform ideology into reality. Also, in a minor key, Nazi
Germany had some old scores to settle from 1914–18. Revenge is a powerful non-
strategic makeweight among motives for war. - In 1914, in theory at least, Germany and Austria-Hungary were overmatched
materially by the Franco-Russian Alliance. In 1939, Russia was not playing for the
anti-German team. Indeed, Stalin joined Hitler in a pact of temporary mutual
convenience on 23 August of that year. Britain and France were confident of their
ability to defeat Germany in a long and total war, a replay of 1914–18, but they had
some fatal weaknesses in the short-war zone. - In 1914, Britain could worry almost exclusively about the danger posed to its
interests by Germany. But in the 1930s London faced the strategic nightmare
of possible war with three great powers simultaneously. And those three were
270 War, peace and international relations