The new Atlantic order: the transformation of international politics, 1860–1933

This book attempts to show how the reconfiguring of the world order started in the 1860s and culminated in the 1930s. Patrick Cohrs zooms in on the new Atlantic order to uncover the rise of military and economic cooperation. The book is a feat of intellectual investigation, with 24 chapters; it opens with a long introduction spanning some 40 pages and closes with a chapter on ‘final perspectives’. Cohrs aims to show how the Atlantic order emerged from competing world visions that essentially converged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Cohrs's narrative focuses on the ‘transatlantic alliance’—between France, the United Kingdom and the United States—and its ultimate goal of containing Germany. In the process, a political alliance, Pax Atlantica, materialized. As the author describes, it emerged out of a combination of American and European interests to form ‘a concerted system of security and economic revitalisation’ with the hope of avoiding military conflicts (p. 1001).