From 1914 to 1945, the European great powers ceased to dominate the globe. In their place, the US, primarily a regional power in 1914, became a 'super power' along with the half-Asian USSR. This text addresses what happened to work such a change.

Challenging the standard narrative of Interwar International History, this account establishes the causal relationship between the global political and economic crises of the period, and offers a radically new look at the role of ideology, racism and the leading liberal powers in the events between the First and Second World Wars.

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 formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West.

Condemned to Repeat It addresses six historical myths that underwrote U.S. containment policy during the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to confirm the wisdom of U.S. containment policy and these lessons of history as universal truths that still influence U.S. foreign policy thinking today. A European states system based on realism, balance-of-power, raison d'etat, and great power diplomacy did not keep a "long peace" from 1815 to 1914. The punitive Versailles Treaty with Germany did not cause the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II. Erroneous analogies to Neville Chamberlain's failed attempt to avert war at Munich in 1938 worked its way into virtually every debate on the use of force to stop communist aggression during the Cold War. Franklin Roosevelt did not "give away" Eastern Europe to Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945. The conventional version of Yalta as a deal to divide Europe is fictional. U.S. containment policy did not create a stable bipolar world and, like the nineteenth-century balance-of power system, preserve another "long peace" for forty-five years after World War II. Ronald Reagan's military build-up and ideological crusade against the Soviet Union did not cause the fall of communism in 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev gave up the Soviet Empire. The Reagan "victory school" version of the end of the Cold War has given American leaders the dubious belief that the United States alone possesses the power to create a liberal democratic, free market world order. Condemned to Repeat It appeals to anyone with an interest in the legacy of the Cold War, including undergraduate students.

The Versailles Settlement, at the time of its creation a vital part of the Paris Peace Conference, suffers today from a poor reputation: despite its lofty aim to settle the world’s affairs at a stroke, it is widely considered to have paved the way for a second major global conflict within a generation. Woodrow Wilson’s controversial principle of self-determination amplified political complexities in the Balkans, and the war and its settlement bear significant responsibility for boundaries and related conflicts in today’s Middle East. After almost a century, the settlement still casts a long shadow. This revised and updated edition of The Consequences of the Peace sets the ramifications of the Paris Peace treaties—for good or ill—within a long-term context. Alan Sharp presents new materials in order to argue that the responsibility for Europe’s continuing interwar instability cannot be wholly attributed to the peacemakers of 1919–23. Marking the centenary of World War I and the approaching centenary of the Peace Conference itself, this book is a clear and concise guide to the global legacy of the Versailles Settlement.

Sally Marks provides a compelling analysis of European diplomacy between the First World War and Hitler's advent. She explores in clear and lively prose the reasons why successive efforts failed to create a lasting peace in the interwar era. Building on the theories of the first edition - many of which have become widely accepted since its publication in 1976 - Marks reassesses Europe's leaders of the period, and the policies of the powers between 1918 and 1933, and beyond. Strongly interpretative and archivally based, The Illusion of Peace examines the emotional, ethnic, and economic factors responsible for international instability, as well as the distortion of the balance of power, the abnormal position of the Soviet Union, the weakness of France and the uncertainty of her relationship with Britain, and the inadequacy of the League of Nations. In so doing, the study clarifies the complex topics of reparations and war debts and challenges traditional assumptions, concluding that widespread western devotion to disarmament and dedication to peace were two of several reasons why democratic statesmen could not respond decisively to Hitler's threat. In this new edition Marks also argues that the Allied failure to bring defeat home to the German people in 1918-19 generated a resentment which contributed to interwar instability and Hitler's rise. This highly successful study has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect the latest scholarship. Now in its second edition, it remains the essential introduction to the tense political and diplomatic situation in Europe during the interwar years.

Every event has a beginning, middle, and end. The Road to War begins with the Treaty of Versailles. It is here where the seeds of instability in Europe are sown. While the 1930s bore witness to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the beginning of World War II, the 1920s were a unique and influential decade during which peace; order and stability were contested and constructed. World War I irrevocably altered the map of Europe and adversely affected each nation involved. The defeat of Germany left Europe in a state of chaos and the Allies, Britain and France, in the position of designing a lasting peace settlement. While the peacemakers were united in their desire to create a lasting peace, distrust and mutual suspicion began to take shape as they gathered in Versailles to decide the fate of Europe.

The book explores the reasons why the Second World War broke out in September 1939 and not sooner, and why a European war expanded into world war by 1941. The war has usually been seen simply as Hitler’s war and yet the wider conflict that broke out when Germany invaded Poland was not the war that Hitler wanted. He had hoped for a short war against Poland; instead, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Richard Overy argues that any explanation of the outbreak of hostilities must therefore be multi-national and he shows how the war’s origins are to be found in the basic instability of the international system that was brought about by the decline of the old empires of Britain and France and the rise of ambitious new powers, Italy, Germany and Japan, keen to build new empires of their own.

Consequences of Peace: The Versailles Settlement - Aftermath and Legacy. This final volume in the Paris Peace Conference series will evaluate the immediate and later effects of the last great peace gathering which sought to settle the world's affairs at a stroke - something that was not attempted after either the Second World War or the Cold War. The Versailles settlement has not enjoyed a great reputation. It has been blamed for causing a second major conflict within a generation, thus apparently fulfilling Marshal Foch's gloomy prediction that "This is not a peace, it is an armistice for twenty years." More recently commentators have suggested that the post-1989 ethnic disturbances in the Balkans and on the fringes of the former Soviet Union are "the old chickens of Versailles coming home to roost." The contemporary world still struggles to come to terms with the implications of President Woodrow Wilson's troublesome principle of national self-determination, and remains embroiled in the ambiguities and complexities of the Middle East, an area for whose boundaries and problems the Great War and settlement bear significant responsibility. We are also still seeking to realise more effectively some of the nobler ambitions of the peacemakers, expressed in the Covenant of the League of Nations, in their concern for the human rights of minority nationalities left on the wrong side of the new borders that they sanctioned, and in their attempt to extend criminal responsibility for war beyond the operational irregularities of combatants to political and military leaders. Ninety years on, the settlement still casts a long shadow.

The Versailles Settlement, at the time of its creation a vital part of the Paris Peace Conference, suffers today from a poor reputation: despite its lofty aim to settle the world’s affairs at a stroke, it is widely considered to have paved the way for a second major global conflict within a generation. Woodrow Wilson’s controversial principle of self-determination amplified political complexities in the Balkans, and the war and its settlement bear significant responsibility for boundaries and related conflicts in today’s Middle East. After almost a century, the settlement still casts a long shadow. Fully revised and updated for the centennial of the Conference, Versailles 1919 sets the ramifications of the Paris Peace treaties—for good or ill—within a long-term context. Alan Sharp mounts a powerful argument that the responsibility for Europe’s continuing interwar instability cannot be wholly attributed to the peacemakers of 1919–23. Concise and convincing, Versailles 1919 is a clear guide to the global legacy of the Versailles Settlement.