Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- A note on the footnotes and bibliography
- Introduction
- Prologue
- 1 The wider challenges
- 2 Wilson, Lloyd George and the quest for a ‘peace to end all wars’
- 3 The ill-founded peace of 1919
- 4 The escalation of Europe's post-Versailles crisis, 1920–1923
- Part I The Anglo-American stabilisation of Europe, 1923–1924
- Part II Europe's nascent Pax Anglo-Americana, 1924–1925
- Part III The unfinished transatlantic peace order: the system of London and Locarno, 1926–1929
- Epilogue
- Conclusion
- Map: Post-World War I Europe after the peace settlement of Versailles
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue
The disintegration of the unfinished transatlantic peace order, 1930–1932 – an inevitable demise?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- A note on the footnotes and bibliography
- Introduction
- Prologue
- 1 The wider challenges
- 2 Wilson, Lloyd George and the quest for a ‘peace to end all wars’
- 3 The ill-founded peace of 1919
- 4 The escalation of Europe's post-Versailles crisis, 1920–1923
- Part I The Anglo-American stabilisation of Europe, 1923–1924
- Part II Europe's nascent Pax Anglo-Americana, 1924–1925
- Part III The unfinished transatlantic peace order: the system of London and Locarno, 1926–1929
- Epilogue
- Conclusion
- Map: Post-World War I Europe after the peace settlement of Versailles
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Why did the nascent transatlantic peace order of the post-World War I era disintegrate so rapidly under the shock-waves of the World Economic Crisis? Why were its mainstays basically eroded within less than four years after the landmark settlement of the first Hague conference, to be finally swept away by Hitler after 1933? Did the Great Depression reveal that the system founded at London and Locarno was built on flawed premises? Did it reveal that the ‘illusory’ cease-fire that these settlements had allegedly instituted was merely one stage in the twentieth century's ‘thirty years' war’? If so, then the stabilisation efforts of the 1920s had indeed prepared the ground for Hitler's ascent to power. Or was the unprecedented world crisis of the early 1930s the crucial caesura? Was the crisis simply too overwhelming to be mastered by policymakers on either side of the Atlantic? Did it not only wreck what had been forward-looking attempts at a ‘European restoration’? Did it also undermine America's bid for a Progressive reconstruction of the Old World?
The key question is, indeed, a different one. What should be analysed is what made the international system of the 1920s, as altered through the Hague settlements and the Young regime, so susceptible to collapse when the World Economic Crisis escalated. In essence, the disintegration of the ‘unfinished transatlantic peace order’ between 1930 and 1932 was by no means an inescapable outcome.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Unfinished Peace after World War IAmerica, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932, pp. 572 - 602Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006