The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

The continued relevance of Keynes’s famous polemic, after more than a century, is itself remarkable. It has always been controversial: first as polemic, then as economic analysis, and finally as historiography. In which genre should we place it? The literary force of its vignettes of the key participants must be acknowledged. Likewise the concentration on reparations in linking the Armistice to a burden of post-war debt highlights the notion of guilt. And the distinction between historic ‘indemnities’ and the wholly new coinage of ‘reparations’ still needs to be better understood. Hence the inescapable centrality of Article 231 of the Treaty, the famous War Guilt Clause. Subsequent controversy has focused largely on assessments of the actual burden that reparations posed – or would have done if actually paid. Here the salience of Etienne Mantoux’s contribution in 1945 is still worthy of acknowledgment (though, ironically, not in castigating Keynes as ‘anti-French’). Instead, the ongoing significance of the analysis presented in the Economic Consequences points to the centrality of Keynes’s vision of the welfare of Europe as an integrated organic whole – rather than seeing the Treaty as a zero-sum game in which Germany had to punished, for moral as much as economic reasons.

Peace planning intensified starting in 1917, as the Russian Revolution and Wilson’s decision to join the war raised its ideological stakes. There were several competing projects for cooperative control over raw materials and for international free trade, but these plans were undermined by conflicts over resource sovereignty and imperial preference. The final League Covenant included a barebones commitment to ‘equitable treatment of foreign commerce’ In the 1920s, Llewellyn Smith, Harms, Coquet, and Riedl used this legal placeholder to revisit the work that was left undone at the peace conference, drawing on the new organizational structures that developed around foreign trade policy during and after the war.

It was the departure from the pre-Armistice ‘contract’ with Germany that became the crucial issue – famously blamed on Lloyd George and Wilson alike in Keynes’s tract The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). In particular there was a crucial ‘breach of contract’ when the two leaders included war pensions as so-called ‘reparations’; and these were now demanded under a specifically drafted War Guilt Clause of the Treaty. Dulles subsequently admitted his own role in what he came to regard as the Treaty’s greatest failing. What Chapter 2 demonstrates, through a close reading of the published documentation, is that Dulles’s collaborator at each crucial stage was none other than Keynes himself.

The great Migration started in World War I as the demand for war work rose. The United States broke the European stalemate and ended the war. The Treaty of Versailles created a lot of economic trouble that led to World War II. Unrest during the 1920s led to women’s suffrage and immigration restrictions. The Great Depression was partly the result of the Versailles Treaty. Roosevelt’s New Deal alleviated American worker’s problems, but Blacks were excluded from the New Deal programs. World War II enlisted Black soldiers who were victimized as they returned to Southern homes after the war.

International criminal justice began with efforts to prosecute Germans, including the former Emperor Wilhelm II, following the First World War. The first international trials took place at Nuremberg and Tokyo in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the early 1990s, the United Nations International law Commission submitted a draft statute for an international criminal court to the General Assembly. Subsequent work under the aegis of the Assembly culminated in the 1998 Rome Conference and adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It entered into force in 2002. Meanwhile, several temporary international criminal tribunals were set up for situations in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

The civil truce between parties and religious confessions proclaimed by the Kaiser in August 1914 was severely eroded by the controversy over war aims that Karl Rathgen, Hermann Schumacher, and Max Sering played key roles in defining. Set in the context of the preceding chapters, annexationist war aims must be seen as a continuation of “World Policy” with liberal imperialist features. Meanwhile, Gustav Schmoller became embroiled in a public controversy sparked by the army’s “Jewish census,” lending anti-Semitic prejudice credibility and further eroding the civil truce. War aims would prove highly controversial, and along with the debate over the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, fueled the anti-government and anti-Kaiser populism that culminated in the formation of the Fatherland Party and the final gamble to secure a victory with annexations and war indemnities. After Germany’s defeat the war aims debate, the Jewish census, and the Fatherland Party would cast a long shadow. Along with the inherent contradictions of the Paris Peace, they turned a sizeable portion of the German public into intractable foes of their republic and the new world order.