In chapter 6 we saw four major patterns of thought emerge against the background of the perceived inadequacies and the eventual collapse of the League of Nations. To recapitulate, these were: (1) a reformed-League idea (e.g., of Woolf), which held that a new organization incorporating the basic features of the League, with certain necessary improvements made, should be established after the war; (2) federalism (e.g., of Schwarzenberger), a radical view, which stressed the necessity to replace the sovereign states system by a federal union, though not necessarily encompassing the whole world at the initial stage; (3) the approach (e.g., of Mitrany) which stressed the importance of international co-operation in the economic and social fields; and (4) the view (e.g., of Borchard) that in the area of the control of force international law should revert to the pre-1914 system.

These were not in fact exhaustive of all the ideas which developed in the period regarding how best to rearrange the framework of the states system. For example, Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist, notorious for his support of Hitler, formulated in 1939 the idea of non-intervention between a number of blocs, each led by a Great Power, as a basis of world order. What he envisaged was a reciprocal adoption, by each of the Great Powers, of the principle of inter-bloc non-intervention on the model of the Monroe Doctrine.