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Anna Ross, Beatrice de Graaf. Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 426–427, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad024
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Extract
The writing of international history has become noticeably vibrant over the last decade, and this latest contribution by Beatrice de Graaf on the theme of postwar security in Europe is a masterful example of new international history at its best. Historical explorations of collective postwar security in Europe have generally focused on the Allied Control Council in Berlin after 1945. In addition, recent works have turned to the post-1918 period, recasting anew the committees charged with implementing the peace treaties after the First World War and the resulting conditions imposed on Europe’s vanquished empires. While we have learned a great deal about postwar security from such studies, none are able explain when and where the modern impulse for collective security originated, and what its earliest iterations can tell us about the history of security, international relations, and international law more generally. Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 meets and exceeds these challenges. It pulls us back into the nineteenth century to explore the first experiment to establish a collective security system in the aftermath of war. As de Graaf shows, collective and institutionalized security management after the Napoleonic Wars not only foreshadowed the twentieth-century iterations we are more familiar with; it shaped the European system of mutual security as we know it today.
