Chapter 15 offers new perspectives on the formative struggle to establish the League of Nations as an effective international organisation at the heart of the postwar order. It argues that in spite of the global conceptions they advanced its key architects intended the League to become the superstructure of a new transatlantic international order and security architecture. It analyses how far it was possible to find common ground between the most influential American and British blueprints for an integrative League and the markedly different French plans for an institution of the victors whose main purpose was supposed to be to protect France and constrain Germany. And it illuminates why ultimately the League of Nations came to be founded as a truncated organisation dominated by the principal victors of the Great War and initially excluding the vanquished, which were required to undergo a period of probation to become eligible for membership. Finally, it explains the far-reaching consequences this had and examines how far the League nonetheless had the potential to become the essential framework of a modern Atlantic and global order over time.

Chapter 14 presents a new interpretation of the peacemaking and reordering process that unfolded at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It argues that it was not only the most complex process of its kind in history but also, at the core, a process that was dominated by the struggle to negotiate the underpinnings and ground-rules of a new Atlantic order – which in turn had far-reaching global repercussions. Taking into account the unprecedented multiplicity of governmental and non-governmental actors who tried to influence this process in and beyond Paris it sheds new light on how the peace negotiations ultimately came to be shaped by the interests, concepts and strategies of those who led and represented the most powerful states after the war: Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau – and their main advisers. And it opens up new perspectives on why the first truly modern peacemaking process remained in crucial respects incomplete. It shows that while the principal “peacemakers” began to learn how to forge complex compromises under the challenging conditions of 1919 what they ultimately managed to negotiate could not lay firm and legitimate foundations for a sustainable Atlantic, and global, peace order.

Chapter 20 sheds new light on what arguably was the crucial problem of the peacemaking process of 1919 – the fact that ultimately the peace settlement and the terms and rules of the new order were not negotiated between the victors and the vanquished but imposed by the western powers, above all on the fledgling Weimar Republic. It shows that what led to this outcome were not only the unprecedented transatlantic complexities Wilson and the principal British and French “peacemakers” faced when trying to hammer out the fundamental parameters of the peace and postwar order, and to reconcile their often all but irreconcilable interests, aims and ideological priorities. As it underscores, the imposed peace of 1919 was also the outgrowth of underlying hierarchical assumptions the victors shared about their “right” to dictate terms to the defeated German power and to place it on probation. Also analysing the strategies that leading German policymakers like Brockdorff-Rantzau and Matthias Erzberger pursued to open the door to a negotiated peace it finally reappraises the eventual political-cum-ideological battle between the victors and the vanquished that escalated in 1919 and analysis the destructive consequences of the peace settlement’s ultimate imposition.

Chapter 19 focuses on the political and moral stakes of one of the most contentious questions of the peace conference: on what grounds Germany was to pay reparations and how high the reparation claims of the victors were to be. It not only demonstrates how intricately the indemnity problem was linked with the fundamental question of who bore responsibility for the Great War and all the casualties and destruction it had caused, eventually leading to a clash between western claims of Germany’s “war guilt” and German efforts to refute them. Placing this problem in a transatlantic context, it also emphasises that the reparations conundrum was inseparable from the tectonic changes the war brought in the financial and economic spheres, especially America’s ascent to the status of the world’s pre-eminent economic and financial power and the massive indebtedness of Britain and France to the new “world creditor”. It thus casts fresh light on the question of why it proved impossible to negotiate a “rational” and mutually acceptable reparations settlement in 1919. And it reappraises why only limited advances towards a new financial and economic order and effective postwar reconstruction could be made. Finally, it highlights the far-reaching political consequences this had.