Some argue that international administrations are contemporary manifestations of a project which began with the League of Nations Mandate System and the United Nations Trusteeship System. This chapter makes the case that these experiments of colonial administration systems are hardly international administrations, with sovereignty practices resting firmly within the European capitals at the time. If some projects envisionned a bigger role for the international organisations at the time, they were in fine defeated by officials brushing aside the idea of having these organisations play a crucial role in colonial governance. This discussion nevertheless sheds a new light on the specificities of contemporary international administration as a project of global governance.

Chapter 1 revisits the establishment of the League of Nations by providing an in-depth analysis of the Paris Peace Conference, with a particular focus on the negotiation of the Covenant. The chapter also explores alternative conceptualizations of order from the social sciences, law, and history. The chapter argues that the new international order constituted by the League exhibited three common characteristics. Firstly, the League was largely shaped by the dominance of the United States and Britain during the negotiations. Secondly, the core decisional logic of the League’s institutional system was political, not legal. Thirdly, the League constituted a dual international order. On the one hand, and despite its universal rhetoric, it reproduced an imperial logic by dividing countries into civilized and uncivilized ones in new ways. However, in an attempt to prevent another world war, it also sought to facilitate disarmament and collective security, primarily in Europe. In doing so, it helped stabilize the European state system by addressing several key challenges, such as the status of Danzig, the Saar and Upper Silesia, and the protection of national minorities.

The chapter introduces the origins of the plebiscite as a tool of international politics, and examines Sarah Wambaugh’s early career in the American women’s peace and suffrage movements. Wambaugh began researching the plebiscite following American entry into the First World War in 1917, and her early contributions reflected her youthful idealism and embrace of the principle of the self-determination of nations pronounced by Woodrow Wilson. Her early works may have influenced the peacemakers during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; however, the plebiscites that resulted were more frequently the result of instrumental bargaining among the victorious powers. If the plebiscite was not used as consistently as advocates such as Wambaugh would have liked, a major achievement was the inclusion of women’s suffrage in nearly all plebiscites written into the post-war settlement. In this the first plebiscite decided upon for the Danish–German border region of Schleswig set an important precedent.

This chapter explores the origins, nature, and persistence of Cold War liberalism in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by analyzing the writings and policies of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1953–59). Dulles was both a pivotal and archetypal figure in the history of U.S.–Middle East relations. The chapter posits three pillars of Cold War liberalism that, with some variation, have undergirded U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since Dulles’ tenure. First, the United States is preoccupied with the establishment of a global order predicated on a preponderance of American power. This is not a “rules-based” order but rather one upheld by security alliances constructed to advance America’s perceived interests, often in defiance of international laws or norms. Second, Cold War liberalism’s raison d’être is couched in and sometimes shaped by discourses of freedom and self-determination. Third, rhetorical commitments to promoting democracy notwithstanding, Cold War liberalism fuels skepticism, even hostility, toward genuine expressions of democracy and mass politics in the Middle East. Finally, the chapter argues that Cold War liberalism in the Middle East is not limited chronologically to the Cold War. All three pillars have Wilsonian antecedents and continue to shape US–Middle East relations.

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 Japanese racial equality proposal of at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 has long represented an important episode in understanding the role of race in international relations in the twentieth century. This chapter reconsiders the history of the Japanese proposal, asking why Japan raised the proposal, what responses it elicited at the peace conference and around the world, and why it was ultimately denied inclusion in the League of Nations Covenant. It concludes that although the proposal met with significant opposition at the conference, particularly from Australian leaders, and was eventually denied by US President Woodrow Wilson, it also found substantial support among the delegates gathered in Paris, including among the great powers. The proposal’s rejection, this chapter argues, was not foreordained but rather a contingent result of a complex train of events that unfolded over several months early 1919.

The chapter explores US–Russia relations in the years before Russia entered her second revolution in February 1917 and America joined the First World War in April 1917. This period was complicated by discrimination against Jews and other ethnic minorities in Russia, by ideological differences between American democracy and Russian autocracy, and by geopolitical disagreements. Yet these elements of conflict did not hamper the two states’ rapprochement, which began at the end of 1914 and at times resembled the euphoria of a honeymoon. This chapter emphasizes that the surprising thaw in US–Russia relations cannot be explained only by the convergence of the two governments’ interests: namely, that the Russian Empire desperately needed to buy American supplies for its armed forces, while Americans were eager to sell their surplus products. Interactions between Imperial Russia and the United States call for more comprehensive consideration, with a particular focus on the changes in mutual representations and the intensified process of Russians and Americans studying each other. This is precisely what this chapter sets out to provide.

When remembering America’s first ladies, there is a general assumption that these women were the wives of the presidents. This is not surprising since, with the exception of James Buchanan, all the presidents have been married men. However, several presidents were widowers or husbands of women who could not assume their duties. These men had to rely on women who were neither their wives nor their companions as stand-in first ladies with the primary duty of entertaining visitors to the White House. They included daughters Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, Martha Johnson Patterson, and Margaret Woodrow Wilson; nieces Emily Tennessee Donelson and Harriet Lane Johnston; daughters-in-law Angelica Singleton Van Buren and Priscilla Cooper Tyler; and sisters Mary Arthur McElroy and Rose Cleveland. They were real persons who each brought a unique experience to their work, which, unlike the service of their more famous married counterparts, has long been forgotten.

Why didKeynes an exceedingly well connected young man with his feet very well planted in the English establishment,decide to take the risk of writing such an explosive book like The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919? After all, others had their doubts about Versailles; butnone went public;and ifor when theydid,it was certainly not to criticizethe peace settlementor the peacemakersin such a vitriolic fashion. SowhatledKeynes to write a book likeThe Economic Consequences of the Peace? What was his purpose in doing so? Who did he think he was writing it for?Was it his last word on the subjector was it – as Keynes believed at the time – merely the first step in a longer struggle to effectively render the economic parts of the Treaty invalid? Finally, why was the volumethe great success it turned out to be at the time, and whyis it still being debated today by both admirers and critics alike?

Developing “friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” is one of the purposes of the United Nations Organization, as stated in the founding charter of 1945. The principle of self-determination has even become a right through the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (December 1960). The Declaration states that: “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Self-determination has thus entered international law. Strangely enough, however, nowhere are the bearers of this right defined: who are the peoples entitled to claim self-determination? This omission is not there by chance. Indeed, the definition of peoplehood is far from evident. Should a people be defined on a territorial basis, i.e. include all the population living within a given territory delimited by given boundaries?

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.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.

U.S. political and economic influence in Latin America grew and the U.S. government proudly proclaimed its hegemonic position in the early twentieth century. The U.S. adopted the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine as a response to the specter of European intervention and to Latin America’s inability to get its economic and political affairs in order. Espousing a moral obligation to bring democracy to the rest of the world, President Wilson sent U.S. troops to occupy several countries. This combination meant that hegemony and “democratic promotion” were one and the same. With U.S. businesses demonstrating greater interest in the entire region, the dollar diplomacy era saw U.S. investors and troops move ceaselessly, as diplomacy and money worked closely together. Only with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s enunciation of the Good Neighbor Policy did the United States assert the integrity and sovereignty of Latin American countries. By the end of World War II, however, the Good Neighbor Policy would be largely discarded, replaced by the exigencies of the Cold War.

This draft of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson was written around November 1918 as Wilson was preparing to sail to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference and Du Bois was likewise about to sail to Paris, to convene the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Du Bois argues that the oppression of African Americans is a matter of international concern comparable to questions due to be taken up at the Paris conference such as the fate of the Polish and Yugoslav peoples. He calls attention to the inconsistency of the United States’ pretense to world leadership in defense of peoples’ right to representative government alongside its denial of civil and political rights to African Americans. He notes African Americans’ numbers, equivalent to those of a number of sovereign countries, and their significant contributions to the country’s history, economy, and military defense. He concludes that “America owes to the world the solution of her race problem.”

Chapter 22 elucidates how a consolidation of the truncated order of Versailles was first hampered by the divergent longer-term outlooks of the victors and later decisively affected by Wilson’s defeat in the battle over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations in the American Senate. It then analyses systematically, and in a global context, how in the aftermath of the American withdrawal from it the crisis of the Versailles system escalated into a full-blown conflict in postwar Europe, which culminated in the transformative Franco-German Ruhr crisis of 1923.

Chapter 8 reassesses the question of why it ultimately proved impossible to end the Great War earlier and through a “peace without victory” along the lines the American president Wilson and other proponents of a negotiated settlement proposed. Then it re-examines how the war actually came to an end in the west. And analyses the making and consequences of the armistice that was finally concluded on 11 November 1918, highlighting that it only provided frail foundations and parameters for a modern Atlantic peace.

Chapter 10 reappraises the evolving plans and visions for a League of Nations and a new, progressive international order that were advanced by Woodrow Wilson and those who came to advise the American president and contribute to the American peace agenda that was presented at the Paris Peace Conference. It reinterprets Wilson’s core aspiration as, essentially, the pursuit of a new Atlantic order – rather than a “new world order”. And it not only analyses the underlying assumptions and maxims of the peace programme that he and his core advisers elaborated after the end of the Great War – and the crucial changes they made to this programme and their approaches to peacemaking during the critical phase between the armistice and the peace negotiations at Versailles. It also evaluates how far Wilson and his advisers had drawn deeper lessons from the war – and how far the president’s reorientated ideas and strategies for a “peace to end all wars” actually met essential requirements that had to be fulfilled to create a durable and legitimate postwar order in and beyond the newly vital transatlantic sphere.