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.
This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system – a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for
