ABSTRACT| This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric “world order” of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system – a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after the First World War, which became the long twentieth century’s cathartic catastrophe.
In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of selfdetermination, liberal-democratic government and the West.
BIO Author | Patrick O. Cohrs is Professor of International History at the University of Florence. He specialises in the history of modern international politics. His work focuses on war and peace and the transformation of the transatlantic and global order in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Before coming to Florence, Prof. Cohrs was Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Yale University where he also was one of the co-founders of the Yale International History Workshop. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2002 and was subsequently Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, in 2006-7. Earlier, he was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He has also held fellowships in London, Paris, Tokyo and Budapest. Having early on taught at Humboldt University Berlin, he was a visiting professor at the Free International University of Social Studies in Rome (2016) and at Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg (2017-18).
Prof. Cohrs is the author of The Unfinished Peace after World War I. America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919-1932 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and of The New Atlantic Order. The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is currently working on the third and final volume of his study of the transformation of the modern Atlantic and global order, which will cover the second half of the "long" twentieth century (1933-2020).
BIO Discussants|
Michael Ignatieff, Rector Emeritus, Professor of History
Between 2006 and 2011, Michael Ignatieff served as an MP in the Parliament of Canada and then as Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and holds thirteen honorary degrees.
Between 2012 and 2015 he served as Centennial Chair at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York.
Between 2014 and 2016 he was Edward R. Murrow Chair of the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Michael Ignatieff was until recently the Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest. He stepped down at the end of July 2021, to stay as a Professor in the History Department.
Elisabeth Roehrlich is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Vienna's history department. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and has held fellowships at the German Historical Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (both in Washington D.C.), the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies in Oslo, and Monash University South Africa in Johannesburg.
Her second book Inspectors for Peace: A History of the International Atomic Energy Agency was published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022.