The First World War and its aftermath destabilized the international economic system. From volatile exchange rates and hyperinflation to industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, the collective challenges facing the nations of Europe threatened to undermine the prevailing order. In response, the Bank of England assumed a set of responsibilities aimed at upholding the City of London as an international financial center. It employed technical advisers who were able to shape domestic industrial policy, coordinate the creation of new central banks across the empire, and exert additional pressure on foreign governments abroad. Through these interventions, the Bank established a reputation as a leading monetary and intellectual authority and, in the process, redefined the structures of economic governance.

What is the relevance of global politics and international relations for companies, managers, and work? How will it impact your company and why should you care? This chapter identifies how changing global order thrusts upon all global businesses to respond to and actively manage geopolitics. Companies have to balance corporate interests with broader security externalities that their governments emphasize because geopolitics and economics are closely intertwined. Geopolitical risk arises when states prioritize national security and limit how companies leverage their assets in generating economic rents. A key factor shaping how a company will be impacted by the risk is its corporate nationality. Geopolitical risk in a given market is higher for companies from perceived rival countries than those from friendly ones. In order to assess the impact of geopolitical risk on their firm, companies, managers, and employees can focus on a structural perspective that emphasizes four levers that reshape the basic market structure for global companies: market access, level playing field, investment security, and institutional alignment. Ultimately, while navigating geopolitical tensions is increasingly a part of the job for many managers, it can also come at a cost to the company.

Just over a century old, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains a seminal document of the twentieth century. At the time, the book was a prescient analysis of political events to come. In the decades that followed, this still controversial text became an essential ingredient in the unfolding of history. In this essay, we review the arc of experience since 1919 from the perspective of Keynes’s influence and his changing understanding of economics, politics, and geopolitics. We identify how he, his ideas, and this text became key reference points during times of turbulence as actors sought to manage a range of shocks. Near the end of his life, Keynes would play a central role in planning the world economy’s reconstruction after World War II. We argue that the “global order” that evolved since then, marked by increasingly polarized societies, leaves the community of nations ill prepared to provide key global public goods or to counter critical collective threats.

The Conclusion summarises the sum of the individual parts of the knowledge contained across the ten chapters of this book. This is done by answering the three research questions that were posed in the Introduction of the book.

The simultaneous rise of China and India is exacerbating their strategic rivalry. The aim of this book is threefold. First, we describe and analyze the Sino-Indian strategic rivalry and its implications for rivalry escalation. We also pay attention to the spatial and positional contests that characterize their rivalry. Second, we examine how their material and cognitive asymmetries are shaping their conflict behavior. Third, we show that the Sino-Indian rivalry is consequential for the regional order in Asia and for the global order.

This chapter defines robustness and fragility, argues that they can only be determined confidently in retrospect, but that assessments made by political actors, whilst subjective, have important political implications. We suggest some of the consideration that may shape these assessment. They include ideology, historical lessons, and the Zeitgeist. We go on to describe the following chapters, providing an outline of the book.

Chapter 14 presents a new interpretation of the peacemaking and reordering process that unfolded at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It argues that it was not only the most complex process of its kind in history but also, at the core, a process that was dominated by the struggle to negotiate the underpinnings and ground-rules of a new Atlantic order – which in turn had far-reaching global repercussions. Taking into account the unprecedented multiplicity of governmental and non-governmental actors who tried to influence this process in and beyond Paris it sheds new light on how the peace negotiations ultimately came to be shaped by the interests, concepts and strategies of those who led and represented the most powerful states after the war: Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau – and their main advisers. And it opens up new perspectives on why the first truly modern peacemaking process remained in crucial respects incomplete. It shows that while the principal “peacemakers” began to learn how to forge complex compromises under the challenging conditions of 1919 what they ultimately managed to negotiate could not lay firm and legitimate foundations for a sustainable Atlantic, and global, peace order.

Chapter 2 illuminates the transformation of the European and global international system in the first decades of the “long” 20th century (1860–1914). It analyses how the turn towards ever more uncompromising power politics, the emergence of modern states and the intensification of ever more unlimited imperialist competition between older and aspiring world powers – essentially, the European great powers, the United States and Japan – came to recast Europe and the world. It throws into relief how this competition and the rise of dominant imperialist, militarist and “civilisational Darwinist” doctrines and assumptions not only led to the creation of a new global hierarchy characterised by unprecedented inequalities between imperial world states, smaller states and those who were subjected to different forms of informal imperialist domination and formal colonisation. And it offers new perspectives on how the confluence of European balance-of-power practices and escalating global rivalries successively corroded international peace.

Chapter 6 seeks to capture the tectonic changes the unprecedented cataclysm of the Great War engendered. It analyses both the catalytic and the transformative impact the war had on Europe, the United States and the wider world in every relevant sphere – international, domestic and transnational politics, economic order, finance as well as the realms of culture and worldviews. It then concentrates on mapping out how, at the core, the war fundamentally recast the transatlantic constellation, precipitating both the destruction of the pre-war European states-system and casting the United States in the role of the power that not only ultimately decided the outcome of the conflict but also seemed poised to dominate efforts to reorder Europe and the world in its aftermath.

Schmitt maintains an uneasy presence because of his involvement with National Socialism. Nonetheless, his views on domestic and international politics are the kind of view against which liberal thought must be defended. Accordingly, confronting Schmitt is a suitable way of ending this book. This epilogue explains some of Schmitt’s views. Schmitt offers a caricature of the political. Nonetheless, his approach proves insightful in certain pockets of that larger domain of the political (which explains to some extent Schmitt’s enduring presence). Accordingly, political liberals too must see themselves as Schmittian friends of sorts. We also investigate the substantial downgrading of justice entailed by Schmitt’s approach, as compared with meaning or love. On the account offered here, the meaning of life and justice are linked. The frame-of-human-life conception has resources to account for all these notions. Finally, we explore Schmitt’s international thought and offer the grounds-of-justice approach as an alternative.

The introduction situates GATT in relation to new approaches in international history and to political science literature on hegemony, trade and peace, the relationship between domestic and international spheres, and the agency of international organizations. It explains the main premise of the book – that trade is an essential component of global politics – and sets out the book s revisionist goals: to understand the role of international organizations in world affairs; rethink our understanding of the nature, drivers, and priorities of postwar international relations; and interrogate claims about the liberal global order that was established after the Second World War. Finally, it describes the four thematic case studies in the book: GATT in relation to the Cold War, the EEC and other regional trade agreements, development, and agriculture.