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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2022

Patrick O. Cohrs
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Florence
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Summary

This book seeks to shed new light on a fundamental question – the question of why no durable international order could be created after the First World War – for Europe and for the wider world. And it argues that this requires reappraising a no less fundamental question: why it proved so extremely difficult, and ultimately impossible, to lay the groundwork for a legitimate peace in the aftermath of a war that became the formative catastrophe of the “long” twentieth century, which began around 1860 and has reached its end around 2020. As the following analysis aims to show, to provide new and hopefully more illuminating answers to these questions it is crucial to explore as comprehensively as possible how the protagonists of post–First World War peacemaking dealt with the most profound and indeed pivotal challenge that arose during the war and became acute in its aftermath – and which has not been fully understood. It was the challenge to supersede the still Eurocentric world “order” of the age of imperialism – or rather: the war-prone “disorder” to which it had degenerated by 1914 – and to lay foundations for something unprecedented: a new international system that could no longer be European-dominated, and could not yet be global, but had to be essentially transatlantic. In short, the core theme of this book is that at the heart of the search for a new global order after the First World War, which reached a first highpoint but did not end in 1919, lay the first and in crucial respects unsuccessful attempt to found a new Atlantic order. Yet what ensued had far-reaching global implications. In many ways, it indeed turned into a struggle over the terms and rules of an Atlantic world order for the long twentieth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
The New Atlantic Order
The Transformation of International Politics, 1860–1933
, pp. 1 - 40
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Introduction
  • Patrick O. Cohrs, Università degli Studi, Florence
  • Book: The New Atlantic Order
  • Online publication: 22 April 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316338988.002
Available formats
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Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Patrick O. Cohrs, Università degli Studi, Florence
  • Book: The New Atlantic Order
  • Online publication: 22 April 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316338988.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Patrick O. Cohrs, Università degli Studi, Florence
  • Book: The New Atlantic Order
  • Online publication: 22 April 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316338988.002
Available formats
×