A System of Collective Security

Abstract

By the beginning of the twentieth century the system of regular conferences among the “powers” was seen as increasingly inadequate as a means of resolving international conflicts. There were demands for a new and better system for maintaining world order. Successive crises, over Fashoda in 1898, Morocco in 1905–6 and 1911 and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, had demonstrated the fragility of the system even before the First World War. After the total breakdown of the existing international order in 1914 calls for a better way of maintaining the peace became more insistent.