Introduction

There is no doubt that the world of today is, in many ways, radically different from the years that preceded the First World War. The so-called “Pax Britanica”, which basically prevailed from the Congress of Vienna until the summer of 1914, came to an abrupt end with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the fateful morning of June 28 in Sarajevo. A century of relative peace and tranquility had concluded only to be followed by one that witnessed one of the greatest man-made calamities that the civilized world had ever known.

Most, if not all, of the basic unwritten codes of behaviour and chivalry, which prevailed in the pre World I decades, were ignored or openly rejected by the new generation of statesmen and politicians who, in general, were guided by unprecedented selfish motivations that relied heavily on whipped up mass emotions. The wave of optimism that prevailed in the nineteenth century set in motion a series of idealistic concepts that, it was believed, would guarantee peace, prosperity and ever increasing standards of living for humanity. The sought for fruits of the Enlightenment, with its stress on the power of reason, experimental knowledge and man’s unlimited capacity for continual progress, seemed to have been realized as Europe and the North America continents advanced rapidly in technological and scientific development.

As professor David Fromkin stated in his book Europe’s Last Summer: “At the start of the twentieth century Europe was at the peak of human accomplishment.In industry, technology, and science it had advanced beyond all previous societies. In wealth, knowledge and power it exceeded any civilization that ever had existed”.[1] The roaring guns of August 1914 shattered the optimistic forecasts of the overly confident Europeans.Suddenly it became apparent that a European diplomacy based on the balance of power, elaborated by the British and which had lasted for 200 years, had been dismantled and, as Kissinger wrote in his book Diplomacy was reshaped “into a cold-blooded game of power politics”.[2]

As a result, the most devastating fratricidal war that the world had ever known ravaged for four years not only the peaceful fields of Europe but also the far off lands of other continents.  President Woodrow Wilson, one of the main Big Four signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, was convinced that the European balance-of-power system was, to a large degree, responsible for the Great War.[3] He firmly believed that the international order that preceded the war was a system of organized rivalries. The American President proposed that there should be: “…not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries but, but an organized common peace”.[4] This new concept later became known as “collective security”.

To institutionalize this idea, Wilson put forward the League