Much like the dissolving international order confronting us, the concept of an international order is neither easily graspable nor predetermined, but it has provoked a range of theories and methods often depending on the international disciplines – law, politics, history. That said, while international relations scholars – whose own craft can be traced back to 1919 – became the proponents of its importance, historians in general have tended to avoid the term ‘international order’. Why have historians not directly and systematically engaged with the past of international order, or even the idea that it has a past? This afterword considers this question in the context of the significance of historical understanding of more commonly (and implicitly) studied national orders, and how historical interest in the international has significantly shifted over the last century.

This chapter explores post-war socialist internationalism as an experiment in international relations – one meant to offer a distinct and even alternative form of international relations to the better-known one dominated by state actors. The purpose of the socialist internationalism was never simply instrumentalist in a directly political sense. By the end of the nineteenth century, institutionalised cooperation between socialists across party and national lines had become a fundamental characteristic of socialism, contributing to the creation of an international socialist community. And as a community, socialist internationalism functioned as a site for socialists to consult on issues of common concern and to work out ’socialist’ positions on them. If this endeavour affirmed and reaffirmed the collective commitment to the community, it also actualised the hope of identifying policy positions distinct from those of non-socialists and especially of non-socialist governments.

This chapter draws on work by historians, international relations scholars, and international lawyers to demonstrate the significance of the Paris peace settlements after the First World War in accounts of international order. Building on recent historiographical debates, the chapter argues that Paris in 1919 was a site of remarkable innovations in the reinvention of international order. A wide range of actors set out new ways of thinking about international politics, established innovative institutions and transformed the conduct of international relations.

This chapter focuses on problems of raw materials and international order in the aftermath of the First World War. It shows how post-war planning during the war was premised on fears that crippling raw material shortages would weaken the military strength and economic vitality of the European Allied empires long after the conflict came to an end. However, efforts to ensure that wartime Allied measures of economic cooperation continued into the peace were blocked by the US government and industry groups. The chapter then shows how, after the war, a very different problem of raw materials – overproduction and glut – led to new, and more successful, international economic institution-building efforts. This other form of international cooperation, which was supported by powerful industry groups, proved highly durable, and later resulted in powerful institutions like OPEC. Where fears of raw material shortages were successful in spurring on preparations for war, it was the problem of overproduction that underpinned lasting peacetime efforts to reshape the international order and global economic governance

The sudden end of the war in 1918 gave rise to high expectations of the forthcoming peace congress. Yet neither the gathering at Paris nor the settlement to which it gave its name marked a new beginning in international politics. ‘New Diplomacy’ proved to be a short-lived blossoming. Old diplomacy, with its focus on the management of relations between states, persisted, though bearing outwardly the stamp of Geneva. Openness and democratic ideals did not lend themselves to peacemaking but rather complicated international relations. Not only was the Paris settlement not ‘a building finished and complete in all respects’, it also did not rest on stable foundations. In erecting it, the peacemakers had undermined the primacy of order; and into the cracks in the new building seeped malign ideas and narrowly defined interests which, ultimately, brought it down.

The year 1919 saw an unprecedented wave of female activism unleashed by women who collectively decried the exclusion of ’half of humanity’ from the peace negotiations. Promises of a new international order rooted in self-determination, popular sovereignty and social justice served as the catalyst for these women: suffragists, pacifists, labour activists, pan-Africanists and anti-colonialists from Europe, North America, India, Korea, Egypt, China and beyond. Throughout 1919, they congregated in meeting halls and marched in the streets, demanding a voice in the peace negotiations and insisting on representation in democratic states and the new institutions of global governance. In their vision, a just and secure international order depended as much on safeguarding the rights of individuals as it did on facilitating the peaceful coexistence of nations. The result of their activism was an ever-expanding and intersecting network of women’s organisations dedicated to securing gender equality around the world

Economic debates at the Paris Peace Conference were dominated by the principal question of who should meet the costs of war and reconstruction. While the need to re-establish a functioning and stable global financial and economic order was recognised, addressing that need was secondary to the more immediate questions of reparations and indemnities; this hierarchy has carried forth into the historiography as well, which, for better or worse, has tended to focus on the post-war reparations burden in an attempt to understand the rise of National Socialism in Germany. However, this emphasis on reparations obscures the very deliberate and determined work undertaken at the conference to restore stability and construct a functioning international financial order, however scarred the system might be by the burdens of inter-allied indebtedness, the effects of wartime destruction, and the exclusion of a considerable portion of the pre-war system by the revolutionary upheaval in Russia, to name just of a few of the challenges faced. This chapter offers a correction in emphasis on the reparations question as just one of an intricate nexus of stratagems proposed and implemented with the goal of engendering financial reconstruction and stability in the post-war period

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.

Without falling into the Keynesian trap of implying the entire settlement was created in President Wilson’s ‘hot, dry room’, this chapter acknowledges the central role of the Big Four at the Paris Peace Conference in providing a decision-making forum to which many of the most contentious issues were referred. Their ideas, conflicting ambitions and interactions helped to shape the peace. Wilson and Lloyd George, who largely shared a Gladstonian liberal philosophy, advocated self-determination, disarmament, trade and a new international order based on a League of Nations, though this did not prevent significant clashes between them over reparations and naval construction. Clemenceau pursued a more traditional, though potentially incompatible, policy of alliances and territorial adjustments to counter what he perceived to be a continuing threat from a neighbour with larger resources and a more dynamic demographic. Orlando’s vision was focused more closely on Italy and its European context, though not without imperial aspirations. Keynes dismissed him in a sentence and footnote but Italy had an important part in the negotiations and compromises, which moulded the settlement drafted by the Four and their colleagues. The extent, however, to which a ‘New Diplomacy’ had overtaken the old remained moot.

The enforced disarmament of Germany enshrined within the Treaty of Versailles was a cornerstone of the post-war order. It provided the essential foundation upon which all other calculations regarding security on the European continent were based. The problem was how to enforce it. Three inter-allied control commissions would have free access throughout German territory to monitor the implementation of the land, sea and air provisions, with all their costs to be borne by Germany. The land disarmament clauses provoked the most controversy and anxiety. Serious difficulties confronted the Allied inspectors on the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IMCC) trying to judge the good faith of a government, military and indeed people acting under duress. More significantly, British and French authorities came to different views on the purpose and focus of disarmament. These differences shaped the work of the IMCC, hindered the shared understandings necessary to develop a stable disarmament order, and limited the capacity of the League in the later 1920s to broaden disarmament agreements.

Throughout the twentieth century, the principle of ’self-determination’ had many lives – as political catch-phrase, legal possibility and a justifying logic of world order. In the aftermath of the First World War, it was a principle that suffused the treaty discussions of the Paris peace conference, and loomed large in the framing of the plebiscites, as well as the League of Nations mandate system. This was not least because it animated the claims of numerous nationalist and anti-imperialist activists agitating for increased rights and freedoms in this moment. This chapter explores how the notion of self-determination, and related ideas around national belonging, race and gender, manifested in this 1919 moment in the promises of the Allied leaders, in the claims-making of non-state actors and in the discussions of legal professionals. In so doing it shows how we can understand particular visions of international law in this period as part of a much larger political and cultural conversation about the relationship between the state and national, racial and gendered belonging.

The Great Conversation was a broad-based discussion on international issues and world peace that took place beyond the traditional circles of power and of the intellectual elite at the end of the Great War. In a time of global destabilisation and political innovations, it gave ordinary men and women, mainly in Western countries, the opportunity, the desire and the legitimacy to take a stand on international issues by virtue of a new interpretation of their political rights and their own agency. It was an unprecedented, unorganised, yet transnational movement of thought, which questioned the meaning of citizenship in a context of democratisation of political life.

The First World War precipitated a crisis in power politics in the creation and maintenance of the post-war international order. Peacemaking after 1918 revealed the difficulties in accommodating traditional practices of power politics within the new normative environment that prevailed in the aftermath of the Great War. This environment emphasised the importance of international law, the principle of self-determination and the creation of international institutions to manage conflicts and promote cooperation. This chapter explores the influence of these norms on territorial claims and settlements in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East, and the different strategies adopted by victors and vanquished. It highlights a fundamental paradox: power politics were marginalised in the creation of a settlement that owed its existence and future viability to a preponderance of power on the part of the victorious allies. The American Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, compounded by the onset of the global economic crisis at the end of the 1920s, deprived the international order of the combination of power that had delivered victory in 1918. This would have far-reaching consequences when that order was challenged by revisionist powers that rejected the norms underpinning the Paris peace settlement in Europe.

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