Decades of Reconstruction: Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War (Publications of the German Historical Institute)

As wars and other conflicts increase on a worldwide scale, the alleged 'new wars' of the present day have taught that military victory does not necessarily result in a sustained state of peace. Rather, societies in conflict experience a 'status mixtus' - a transformative period that includes substantial changes in economy, politics, society and culture. Focusing on these decades of reconstruction in Europe and North America, this book examines the transformation of state systems, international relations, and normative principles in international comparison. By putting the postwar decade after 1945 into a long-term historical perspective, the chapters illuminate new patterns of transition between war and peace from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Experts in the field show that states and societies are never restituted from a 'zero hour'. They also demonstrate that foreign and domestic policy are intermixed before and after peace breaks out.

Ute Planert is Professor of Modern History at Universität zu Köln. She was a Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts and held the Hannah Arendt Visiting Chair of German and European History at the Munk School for Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Recent publications include 'International Conflict, War, and the Making of Modern Germany, 1740–1815', in The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith (2011), and the edited volume Napoleon's Empire. European Politics in Global Perspective (2015).

James Retallack is Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of Germany's Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways (2015) and Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860–1918 (forthcoming). His current research project is a biography of the Social Democratic leader August Bebel.