The Unfinished Peace After World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919-1932

This is a highly original and revisionist analysis of British and American efforts to forge a stable Euro-Atlantic peace order between 1919 and the rise of Hitler. Patrick Cohrs argues that this order was not founded at Versailles but rather through the first 'real' peace settlements after World War I - the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno security pact of 1925. Crucially, both fostered Germany's integration into a fledgling transatlantic peace system, thus laying the only realistic foundations for European stability. What proved decisive was that key decision-makers drew lessons from the 'Great War' and Versailles' shortcomings. Yet Cohrs also re-appraises why they could not sustain the new order, master its gravest crisis - the Great Depression - and prevent Nazism's onslaught. Despite this ultimate failure, he concludes that the 'unfinished peace' of the 1920s prefigured the terms on which a more durable peace could be founded after 1945.

Author: Patrick O. Cohrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/01/2008
Pages: 708
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.43lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.15w x 1.72d
ISBN: 9780521723435

About the Author
Cohrs, Patrick O.: - Patrick O. Cohrs is Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Yale University. Professor Cohrs received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2002. He has held fellowships at the Center for European Studies and the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Before moving to Yale, he was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and taught at Humboldt University Berlin. Professor Cohrs is currently working on a history of the Pax Americana which reappraises American aspirations for a 'new world order' from their origins to the Cold War and explores how far they contributed to the creation of a more legitimate international system. He teaches courses in modern international history, particularly on the United States and the world, the history of global, transatlantic and European international politics, and classic and new approaches to international history. He is one of the co-founders of the Yale International History programme.