ABSTRACT
World order presents two principal aspects: wars and other armed conflictsand how to reduce their number; and slumps and other economic turmoils and how to manage them.
So long as the state remained the basic element in international society the prevention of wars could be secured only by states and co-operation among them. They had a choice of methods. Each major power might assume primary or exclusive responsibility in a given region; or all the major powers might together supervise and police the whole globe; or these same powers might equip and finance an association of states to do the job on their behalf. After the Second World War international organization and co-operation were theoretically based on the second of these methods after the first had been unsuccessfully advocated in some quarters; but the circumstances necessary for the success of the second method did not materialize, so that practice approximated rather to an adaptation of the third, imperfectly acknowledged and precariously pursued.
