I start with the international political setting after VE-day and the disagreements, also over reparations, that the four Allied Powers ran into after the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. This stipulated that Germany should be treated as a single economic unit by the Allied Control Council. The Council of Foreign Ministers was established to prepare a peace treaty with Germany. It failed despite its several conferences 1945 to December 1947. For US Military Governor in Berlin, General Lucius D. Clay, Gerhard Colm and Raymond Goldsmith, Jewish economists who had emigrated from Germany 1933/34 to the US, had produced a currency-reform plan already in May 1946. Clay tabled it in the Allied Control Council in September 1946, where it got stuck. These developments progressively increased the danger of a partition of Germany. A separate currency reform would automatically entail political partition. I pinpoint the day the dice were cast in Washington DC 1. on giving up on a currency reform with the Soviets: 11 March 1948, and 2. on printing Deutschmarks in the USA: 13 October 1947. I then deal with Tenenbaum’s leading roles among all Western currency experts and in the top-secret meeting with eleven West German financial experts at Rothwesten. Lastly, I analyze the reform of 20 June 1948, C-day, itself, its consequences, and assessments.

This chapter provides an overview of responses to situations of mass atrocity and armed conflict outside of criminal prosecution. The chapter begins by discussing transitional justice. It then turns to a description and analysis of specific forms of transitional justice: amnesties, truth and reconciliation commissions, lustration, reparations and civil claims, and local justice mechanisms. It defines each of these terms and discusses their international law status, positive and negative features, and, where applicable, the relationship of that form of transitional justice to the International Criminal Court, and use in domestic systems. This chapter provides examples of each form of transitional justice, such as amnesties implemented in Latin American countries, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, lustration in Eastern Europe after the end of communism, reparations in Germany after World War II, and local justice mechanisms in northern Uganda.

The chapter discusses the position of victims in international criminal justice and the evolution of their status and modalities of their involvement in the administration of justice by international criminal jurisdictions, with a particular focus on the legal regime of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The chapter highlights the centrality of victims as the core constituency of international criminal law and the mismatch between this aspiration and the limited recognition of their agency and rights before the UN ad hoc tribunals. It then examines how the ICC’s architects have sought to bridge this gap in the Court’s Statute and Rules of Procedure and Evidence. The ICC’s legal framework is unprecedented in this respect. Over and above the protective measures necessary on account of their engagement in the proceedings, it granted victims extensive rights to participate and be legally represented at different stages the ICC proceedings as well as the autonomous right to obtain reparations. The chapter surveys the key challenges this ambitious scheme has raised, as far as the admission of victims to participate, the organisation of their legal representation, and the implementation of reparations are concerned, and solutions that have been developed in the Court’s practice to date.

Between 1966 and 1996, France conducted 193 nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia, including 41 detonations at or above ground level. This chapter explores the history of legal and diplomatic contestations of the French right to conduct nuclear tests in the South Pacific through the lens of environmental violence. Polynesians and other Pacific stakeholders saw France’s use of the South Pacific as a nuclear proving ground as an act of colonial violence and sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the imposition of any additional radiological risk in Polynesia. Data gaps, information asymmetries, and the inherent causal uncertainty surrounding harms from exposure to ionizing radiation frustrated both prospective and retrospective legal recourse, as Pacific Islanders struggled to prove that they would be – or, in ensuing decades, that they had in fact been – harmed by French nuclear tests. The complex dynamics around radiological risk provoked anguish not only during the period of nuclear testing, but also afterwards, as individuals who developed potentially radiogenic conditions continued to navigate challenging victim compensation landscapes. This chapter illustrates the particular difficulties of coming to terms with causally complex, underdetermined harms in modern contexts of environmental violence.

Victims’ rights, whether they take the form of a procedural right of access to justice or participation, or a substantive right to reparation, fulfil a number of important functions. Ideally, they allow victims to assert their rights, redress power imbalances manifest in violations, provide a measure of justice and furnish the victim(s) with the means to cope and rebuild their lives. They may also lead to a public acknowledgement of wrongdoing that recognises unlawful suffering, demonstrates society’s respect for, and solidarity with, the victim(s), and affirms the rule of law. In addition, victims’ rights play an important role in contributing to prevention through deterrence (punishment and/or payment of damages or other forms of reparation) and systemic changes to counter violations, such as legislative and institutional reforms. A series of open questions and challenges remain. Do the rights granted in various treaties and declarations translate into a right to reparation under international law, and, if so, does this apply in relation to all or only some particularly serious human rights violations? Who are the rights-holders and what are their entitlements? Recent developments also raise questions of coherence and effectiveness in light of the proliferation of victims’ rights in various bodies of international law.

Chapter 5 turns to social embeddedness, describes this in terms of two kinds of social identities people have, and explains how a world stratified by social groups produces two kinds of shortfalls in the capability development of people in disadvantaged social groups. First, a microlevel mechanism, social group stigmatization, or social identity stereotyping operates in relational social identity settings, limits stigmatized individuals’ ability to develop their capabilities, and results in what I call capability devaluations. Second, a macro-level process, sorting people over club goods and common pool goods types of social economic locations, produces social group inequalities especially by race/ethnicity and gender, limits lower ranked groups’ capability development, and results in what I call capability deficits. How these two kinds of capability shortfalls combine and reinforce a hierarchical ordering of social groups is explained using a basic complexity theory analysis from Simon. Combatting these two capability shortfalls – motivated by the goal of creating nonhierarchical, democratic societies that promote individuals’ capability development irrespective of social identity – is associated with policies to eliminate social discrimination in the case of capability devaluations and to advance social group reparations in the case of capability deficits.

This chapter examines different styles and contents of attempts to revise the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. It contrasts the devastating critique of the Economic Consequences, with specific proposals with which Keynes was involved that began in November 1919 with meetings in Amsterdam hosted by the Dutch banker Gerard Vissering, and involving a wide range of international bankers, including some influential Americans. The Amsterdam meeting suggested a plan for leveraging private U.S. finance for the sustainable reconstruction of Europe that anticipated some aspects of the 1924 Dawes Plan. Keynes found his role in the Amsterdam plan undermined by the notoriety of the Economic Consequences and the disapprobrium it attracted. How could he hope to persuade the U.S. government after the attack on Woodrow Wilson mounted in the Economic Consequences? There is a sharp contrast – even contradiction – between the Cambridge world of sharp analysis and polemic and the Amsterdam approach, where market-oriented people tried to devise a solution using financial products/financial engineering. And each of these approaches was also quite different from the diplomatic logic that had produced the Versailles Treaty.

Even a century after a French translation of Consequences was published in 1920 by France’s foremost editor, the Nouvelle Revue française, there remains a myth that Keynes’s international bestseller was not only barely read in France but met with a homogeneously hostile reception. Recent historical discourse tends to overlook, however, how French reactions to Consequences mirrored France’s own internal political dissensions on the merits of the Treaty. Keynes, it turns out, was well in tune with predating and intellectually relevant French condemnations of the Versailles Peace.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace was first published in 1919 and, since then, changed the economic discourse surrounding reparations and Carthaginian peace. This chapter specifies how three elements hinted at in the introduction of the Economic Consequences of the Peace – social classes, national sovereignty, and the international political system – can explain Keynes’ assessment of Carthaginian peace. The chapter analyses the optimality of reparations in the context of these three elements.

This chapter examines the response of five prominent Swedish economists, David Davidson, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Knut Wicksell and Bertil Ohlin, to John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and to the German reparations in the 1920s. When Keynes’s book appeared, Davidson and Cassel strongly endorsed it. Heckscher also agreed with Keynes in a long review entitled “Too Bad to Be True”. Inspired by his Malthusian view, Wicksell found the reparations feasible if only German population growth was arrested. The contacts between the Swedes and Keynes became close after Keynes’s book, in particular between Cassel and Keynes. The exchange of views took a new turn when Bertil Ohlin responded to an article by Keynes in The Economic Journal in 1929 on the transfer problem. The famous Keynes–Ohlin discussion laid the foundation for the analysis of the transfer problem, bringing Ohlin international recognition. We also trace how Davidson, Cassel and Heckscher changed their appreciation of Keynes in the 1930s with the publication of the General Theory while Ohlin viewed the message of Keynes in the 1930s as consistent with the policy views of the Stockholm school of economics.

This chapter argues that Chapter Two of the Economic Consequences contains a much more important piece of economic analysis than is generally recognized, namely the Ramsey model of economic growth. It is well known that Keynes helped Ramsey to explain that model in the Economic Journal in 1928. But I show here that Keynes had himself given an exposition of the model, nearly a decade earlier, in this chapter. What is more, Keynes then generalizes this model in order to help him think about Europe’s growth process within the global economy, and why it was so fragile. I claim that the analysis in this chapter provides the underpinning for Keynes’s famous criticism of the reparations imposed on Germany. The chapter also makes clear that Keynes is starting to realize what he will need to do to get to the General Theory in 1936. And there are the beginnings of the ideas which would lead to the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 and to the rebuilding of the international monetary system after World War II. Understanding these connections helps us to visualize the arc of Keynes’s discovery, one which stretched all the way from 1919 until his death in 1946.

The continued relevance of Keynes’s famous polemic, after more than a century, is itself remarkable. It has always been controversial: first as polemic, then as economic analysis, and finally as historiography. In which genre should we place it? The literary force of its vignettes of the key participants must be acknowledged. Likewise the concentration on reparations in linking the Armistice to a burden of post-war debt highlights the notion of guilt. And the distinction between historic ‘indemnities’ and the wholly new coinage of ‘reparations’ still needs to be better understood. Hence the inescapable centrality of Article 231 of the Treaty, the famous War Guilt Clause. Subsequent controversy has focused largely on assessments of the actual burden that reparations posed – or would have done if actually paid. Here the salience of Etienne Mantoux’s contribution in 1945 is still worthy of acknowledgment (though, ironically, not in castigating Keynes as ‘anti-French’). Instead, the ongoing significance of the analysis presented in the Economic Consequences points to the centrality of Keynes’s vision of the welfare of Europe as an integrated organic whole – rather than seeing the Treaty as a zero-sum game in which Germany had to punished, for moral as much as economic reasons.