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 O. 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 the leading actors’ capacity to draw 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 the onslaught of Nazism. Despite this ultimate
failure, he concludes that the ‘unfinished peace’ of the 1920s prefigured the
terms on which a more durable peace could be built after 1945.