Journal of International Studies

In early August next year, it will have been 100 years since investors suffered a very nasty shock indeed, when the London and New York stock markets closed for some five months and many international bonds previously thought to be high-grade proved worthless. It should be remembered: for the average investor, World War I, the cause of this disruption, blew up very quickly out of a clear blue sky.  The sky is again blue; certainly many markets, notably that for US stocks, are priced as if it were positively ultra-violet. So could such an event occur again?  The closure of the New York market at the outbreak of World War I had surprisingly little effect; the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened on December 12, 1914, at 54.3, somewhat above the 52.6 at which it had closed on July 30. The market then went into a steady upward march, so that by the peak in November 1916, after Woodrow Wilson had won re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of war", it had more tha...

On October 7, Brookings  hosted Oxford University Professor Margaret MacMillan  to talk about her new book on World War I,  The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 , and specifically what comparisons may be drawn between the world leading up to that war and tensions around the world today. After an introduction by  Ted Piccone , acting vice president of Foreign Policy at Brookings, Senior Fellow  Robert Kagan responded to MacMillan's opening remarks and moderated questions from the audience. Kagan and MacMillan engaged in an interesting discussion about the changing understanding of World War I's origins, China's rise and how it might echo Germany pre-1914, and whether contemporary global tensions have any useful parallels to the world of 1914. Margaret MacMillan: "And I think we can’t learn clear lessons from history. What we can learn is to watch out for dangerous possibilities." MacMillan called the origins of World...