Wilson sought to base the League of Nations on
the lofty principle of collective security – a principle
denounced by realists as an example of
idealism – under which the invasion of any
country would automatically bring forward the
combined might of all countries. Collective
security assumed that all states shared a common
interest in global peace and stability and that,
therefore, it was in the national interest of every
state to aid any victim of aggression, even if this
required violating other alliances. In meeting
aggression promptly, states would be serving the
collective good of humankind. This assumption
was succinctly summarized by the League representative
of Haiti, on the occasion of Italy’s
invasion of Ethiopia (1935–36) when he declared
that: “Great or small, strong or weak, near or far,
white or colored, let us never forget that one day
we may be somebody’s Ethiopia.”22 Collective
security thus required states to surrender their
autonomy in questions of war and peace to the
League. Wilson, like philosophers Immanuel Kant
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chapter 10, p. 358),
believed that most potential aggressors or “bad
states” would be ruled by autocrats and that peace
would ensue only when the true sentiments
of humankind were respected. The principle was
incorporated into the Covenant of the League
of Nations, which spelled out the obligations of
member states to prevent or end aggression (see
Key document, below).
Collective security was supposed to maintain
peace by the certainty that all states would combine
their might to punish aggressors. Like the
flexible balance-of-power alliances that collective
security was expected to replace, states were to
have no permanent friends or enemies; and like
balance of power and the later idea of credible
deterrence, collective security sought to prevent
aggression by the threat of war. Realists never
thought much of collective security because it