Chapter 5 demonstrates how the league of nations became an important political issue in 1917–1918. While the pro-league movement succeeded in attracting public attention for the post-war plan, pro-leaguers came to promote a conception of the league that they had opposed in 1914–1915: a league of victorious powers aligned against Germany. Begun as a reaction against anti-German jingoism and the balance-of-power politics, the movement initially aspired to change the norms of international relations by creating a new institution comprised of all the great powers. Yet by 1918, the activists had come to promote the league as a continuation of the war-time alliance, backed by a powerful argument both to defeat Germany and to form the league as a coalition of democratic states. An extension of the war-time politics, not the yearning for peace as scholars have supposed, led to the creation of the League of Nations.

The civil truce between parties and religious confessions proclaimed by the Kaiser in August 1914 was severely eroded by the controversy over war aims that Karl Rathgen, Hermann Schumacher, and Max Sering played key roles in defining. Set in the context of the preceding chapters, annexationist war aims must be seen as a continuation of “World Policy” with liberal imperialist features. Meanwhile, Gustav Schmoller became embroiled in a public controversy sparked by the army’s “Jewish census,” lending anti-Semitic prejudice credibility and further eroding the civil truce. War aims would prove highly controversial, and along with the debate over the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, fueled the anti-government and anti-Kaiser populism that culminated in the formation of the Fatherland Party and the final gamble to secure a victory with annexations and war indemnities. After Germany’s defeat the war aims debate, the Jewish census, and the Fatherland Party would cast a long shadow. Along with the inherent contradictions of the Paris Peace, they turned a sizeable portion of the German public into intractable foes of their republic and the new world order.