policy in the inter-war period, The Troubled Giant ( 1966), and in A
Hundred Years of International Relations ( 1971). For him history
was at the very core of international relations studies: 'how can we
think or talk about the nature of international relations except on
the basis of our experience of the past, that is all we have to go on.'

In the present volume it is Northedge the historian who is
concerned to explain why the League as a security system failed.
To one engaged in a similar enterprise Wittgenstein once
exclaimed: 'Tell him first to find out why wolves eat lambs.'
Northedge would have recognised the aptness of this reaction. Yet
for him failure stemmed not so much from the rapacity or
pusillanimity of political leaders in the 1930s, as from a
fundamental flaw in the system itself, namely, that under Article
10 it was wedded to preservation of the world's territorial and
political status quo. Protagonists of the Covenant had supposed that
the inevitable challenge to the status quo would emanate from only
one quarter at a time and that the overwhelming majority of states
would be in a dominant position to deter or defeat it. Manchuria
exposed the fallacy of that presumption.

Abyssinia was, however, as Northedge rightly claims, the
decisive test for the League's system, for it highlighted the extent
to which a League collective security system of collective sanctions
against Italy could run counter to a balance of power policy in
which Britain and particularly France were desperate to retain
Italian suport to provide an effective counterweight to a resurgent
Germany under Hitler in the West and a militaristic Japan in the
East -- the latter being a factor which is often inadequately stressed.
The dilemma was a painful one, especially for France, but the
consequent vacillations in the Anglo-French handling of the crisis
effectively alienated Italy and destroyed the League. Was failure
inherent in the system, as Northedge claims, or was it mainly a
failure in leadership, a failure -- not shared either by Hitler or the
mass of public opinion in Britain -- to perceive the crucial
importance of the issues at stake and the disastrous consequences
of 'falling between two stools'? Effective coercion of Italy would
have saved the League and maybe helped to constrain Hitler;
conciliation of Italy along the lines of the Hoare-Laval pact might
have saved the Stresa front. Dithering between the two earned the
worst of both worlds. But inevitable? -- Truman over Korea and
Eisenhower over Suez?

To raise such questions is not to question Fred Northedge's
masterly handling of his material; the argument throughout is

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