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David Wetzel, Bo Stråth. Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1679–1680, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1679
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Bo Stråth’s Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951, examines three different eras of peace, following the devastating Napoleonic and two twentieth-century world wars. The central question, stated forcefully and repeatedly, is how the victors of these wars designed their utopias for peace; what calculations entered into their decision making; and what challenges ultimately led to the destruction of the orders they envisaged. Stråth sees the same profoundly rooted strain in each of the three eras his book examines: “never again,” followed, as he puts it, “by phases of pre-war and war” (1). And in each case the result belied the intentions of the peacemakers. “Whatever the Vienna, Versailles and Paris orders were, they were never stable. Continuous challenges from within and without in mutually reinforcing dynamics destabilized the established orders” (449). Despite the existence of several valuable works on the various phases of some of these periods, there is no modern treatment of this subject tapping all the material available today, one that can serve as an adequate foundation for critical judgment of the questions and issues this book raises. What Stråth has produced is a major work of mature revisionist scholarship, one that no student of the period can afford to ignore.
