Even as many of its institutional legacies endured, the First World War brought about the collapse of the German colonial empire. The July Crisis of 1914 was triggered by mounting tensions in the Balkans, but colonial rivalries and the naval arms race had already helped to entrench some of the alignments that defined the war. Germany’s bid to construct Mittelafrika and to challenge Britain at sea failed. Most German colonies were conquered early with only Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign in East Africa continued until 1918. Germany’s war aims combined continental annexations with overseas expansion, but these ambitions collapsed with the military defeat on the Western Front, creating the conditions for the November Revolution. For Germany, the Treaty of Versailles brought a double loss of empire with the cession of its European borderlands and the transformation of its colonies into League of Nations mandates. Reduced to its national core, the Weimar Republic codified a more centralised nation-state, consolidating institutional developments fostered by the colonial empire in preceding decades. At the same time, the loss of imperial status fuelled a politics of resentment that contributed to the erosion of the republican order.

Chapter 7 examines how the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, AA) strategically engaged with scholarly international law between 1920 and 1925 to challenge the post-Versailles international order. Drawing on extensive archival research, it explores how the AA mobilized legal scholars, subsidized international law publications and institutes, and sought to exploit the legal framework established by the League of Nations as a double-edged sword – originally designed to serve the Entente, yet also capable of inflicting damage on its wielder. The study demonstrates that the AA covertly collaborated with international law scholars as informants and agents and actively sought to influence international legal discourse – as seen, for example, in the case of the Hague Academy of International Law. It highlights the AA’s increasing sophistication in navigating within the newly formed Versailles system of international law. Ultimately, the study reveals a deeply entangled relationship between diplomacy and academia, suggesting that international law was not merely a normative framework but an instrument of statecraft in German foreign policy, weaponized in the service of national interests under the guise of academic independence.

Systemic change by means of hegemonic war amounts to a transformation of the parameters of political legitimacy. The war decides who rules and the content of legitimacy at the global level. As such, only the most extensive major-power wars – ones that end in a new phase of substantial capability re-concentration and global military-political and economic leadership – can be designated hegemonic wars. The history of international order and, therefore, of the Long Cycle started with the Italian renaissance and the West European maritime explorations of the late fifteenth century. I identify four hegemonic wars: the Italian Wars (1496–1559), the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), and World War II (1939–1945). To this list, I add one “failed” power transition, the end of the Cold War (1989–1991). A new Long Cycle began in 1991, with the United States serving as the lone World Power. This chapter explores each Long Cycle and all four phases therein. This discussion is comparatively brief for the first two long cycles, becoming more extensive for the three most recent cases, for they offer more “usable pasts” than the earlier cycles from which to draw relevant lessons for modern times.

The major European adversaries who fought World War I began by following offensive plans designed to win victory quickly, but all these failed. The war became one of grinding attrition, and by 1918, the European adversaries were exhausted. That year, the desperate Germans launched one last offensive to win the war on the Western Front, but it stalled. After the Allies drove the Germans back, fighting ended with the Armistice of November 11. This armistice was a German surrender in all but name. It disarmed German forces, demanded immediate withdrawal from all conquered territory, and imposed an Allied occupation of Germany west of the Rhine. The Treaty of Versailles elaborated the details, imposing staggering war reparations and German acceptance of guilt for the war itself. Much of the German population believed that German forces had not been defeated in battle, instead blaming German liberal politicians and Jews for undermining the war effort. This misconception contributed to the onset of World War II. World War I was the first war in which belligerents adhered to the Hague Conventions concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. There were abuses, but nothing like those that occurred in World War II.

This chapter examines the response of five prominent Swedish economists, David Davidson, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Knut Wicksell and Bertil Ohlin, to John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and to the German reparations in the 1920s. When Keynes’s book appeared, Davidson and Cassel strongly endorsed it. Heckscher also agreed with Keynes in a long review entitled “Too Bad to Be True”. Inspired by his Malthusian view, Wicksell found the reparations feasible if only German population growth was arrested. The contacts between the Swedes and Keynes became close after Keynes’s book, in particular between Cassel and Keynes. The exchange of views took a new turn when Bertil Ohlin responded to an article by Keynes in The Economic Journal in 1929 on the transfer problem. The famous Keynes–Ohlin discussion laid the foundation for the analysis of the transfer problem, bringing Ohlin international recognition. We also trace how Davidson, Cassel and Heckscher changed their appreciation of Keynes in the 1930s with the publication of the General Theory while Ohlin viewed the message of Keynes in the 1930s as consistent with the policy views of the Stockholm school of economics.

The four years after World War I proved disastrous to the grand hotels of Berlin. There were threats from the left in the form of revolution, the January Uprising, and strikes, and there were threats from the right in the form of vandalism, looting, atrocity, and an unsuccessful coup d’état. Then there were the threats that originated neither on the right nor on the left: material and labor shortages, high crime, inflation, hyperinflation, and rising taxes. Between 1918 and 1923, hoteliers began blaming the left and the state for all these misfortunes – a tendency that pushed them into the camp of the anti-republican right, Weimar’s enemies. With the hyperinflation of 1923, an unmitigated disaster for Berlin’s grand hotels, that tendency became the rule. The republic, Berlin’s grand hoteliers had come to believe, was bad for business. Their efforts to manage the crisis of the postwar era, 1918–23, reveal the links between quotidian struggles and political decisions – decisions against the republic in favor of more authoritarian solutions to Germany’s problems.

Upholding international law was crucial for the line of reasoning of the Allied powers during the Great War. German aggression was confronted with ideas about the sanctity of treaties, about sovereign equality, or about the binding force of law governing the relations between nations as standard of civilisation. But what happened with these rationalisations after the armistice of 1918? Mostly dismissed as propaganda, meaningless once the guns fell silent, the lingering influence of those ideas on the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 is often under-appreciated. This chapter assesses how the Allied invocation of international law informed and influenced negotiations in Paris. It demonstrates different understandings of legal arguments and international norms among the delegates and why, or why not, these were seen as meaningful for the restructuring of the international order. Even if there was no coherent plan among the Allies to promote the codification of international law, the peace settlement was characterised by an inherent normativity. Three features stand out: the formalisation of international relations through the League of Nations, the stabilisation of the international order by means of defining borders and peoples, and the effort to legally sanction violations of international norms. These ideas mark the recasting of nineteenth-century ideas about the ’fabric of civilisation’ in the shape of a new international order based on legally responsible nations and overseen by the League

This chapter first explores in general the often forgotten contributions to the birth of international law study and practice in China by the Beiyang or “warlord” government, first dominated by the former Qing Viceroy Yuan Shikai. Some achievements of China’s first holders of international law degrees from elite foreign universities, which included arguments and publications that exerted an immediate and at times remarkable impact upon the international law field in the West, have been almost forgotten today.

This chapter examimes the acute crisis of the world war and its role in destabilizing the political balance in both cities and in the overthrow of both the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Empire (as well as its constituent state, the Bavarian Monarchy). It compares the revolutions and counterrevolutions and the violence that accompanied the political struggles in both cities.

This chapter opens the third section of the book on the aftermath of the war. It addresses the end of the war and its many legacies. It starts with the armistice, and then considers the discussion about enemy aliens during the peace conference; it also explores the treaties that ended the war and their consequences for aliens, citizenship and property rights. It continues with the signing of all the final treaties, the emptying of the concentration camps and the lifting of the provisions on foreign movements, the agreement that regulated restitution or liquidation of assets, and the final exchange of populations. The chapter covers the period up to the late 1920s and deals with the transition from the state of emergency to peace, the resumption of naturalization procedures, new rules on borders and migration, new citizenship regimes that emerged from the war in both victorious and defeated countries as well as in the new successor states, and mass denaturalization and statelessness as a consequence of the emergence of new political regimes (such as the Soviet Union) or population exchange. It investigates the impact of special legislation on alien and enemy aliens on policies of migration control and explores the debate among jurists about the many violations of the conventions and human rights and the failed attempts at writing a new convention on enemy aliens.