| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain, and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932. By Patrick O. Cohrs. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv, 693 pp. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-521-85353-8.)

A generation ago, American scholars at conferences on diplomacy of the 1920s frequently talked about Washington policy makers of the interwar period as "we." Their German colleagues commonly had the delicacy to refer to their Weimar Republic forbears as "they." Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a fresh cohort of German scholars seeks to construct a democratic "useable past." In this self-consciously revisionist treatment, Patrick O. Cohrs labors mightily to rehabilitate Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and his Wilhelmstrasse colleagues as protagonists of "peaceful change" (a mantra he employs throughout). In the 1924 London reparations conference and the 1925 Locarno accords, Cohrs perceives the germ of a new mode of Anglo-American cooperation that almost succeeded in creating a western-oriented concert of Europe, including Germany, to replace the "ill founded" Treaty of Versailles (p. 7). If only his heroes—secretaries of state Charles Evans Hughes and Frank Kellogg and the British statesmen James Ramsay MacDonald and Austen Chamberlain—had fought more vigorously to impose a grand strategic bargain at the expense of Poland and other East European states, the tragedy of Nazi rule might never have come to pass.

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