After the end of the Cold War, commentators such as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama became fond of describing the new global order as one in which ideological conflict and great-power rivalry were a thing of the past. In the newly translated How the West Lost Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War (2023), the German and Austrian historian Phillip Ther makes the case that the period between 1989 and 2020 marks an interregnum, rather than a radical break with the past.

While Ther debates the inevitability of European peace under the capitalist-dominated umbrellas of the United States and Russia, he does note a surprising “end,” or at least decline, of conflict on the European landmass after centuries of violent bloodshed. Indeed, How the West Lost the Peace sets out to chart through a series of personal and analytic essays why the ideal of European peace was undermined by processes of rapacious capitalism, foreign intervention, and combined and uneven investment and development in eastern Europe.

Over several polemical essays, Ther details how the neoliberal pursuit of deregulation, privatization, and free markets destabilized America, Russia, Italy, Germany, Poland, and the rest of the post-Soviet world. For Ther, this pursuit of a neoliberal “peace” in Europe ultimately created the conditions for populist revolt and what the book terms “antiliberalism,” a distinct policy platform shared by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and the Polish president Andrzej Duda.