Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book and gives an overview over the scholarly debates to which it contributes. It begins by considering the post-imperial context of Central and Eastern Europe after World War I. The mass upheavals of the post-imperial moment drove police officers and jurists from the region to develop new ways of thinking about how to organize and structure international crime control. The chapter then turns to the League of Nations, the site where these actors proved most successful in pursuing their ideas. Focusing on Central and Eastern Europeans operating on the margins of the League structures provides new insights into the scope and nature of interwar internationalism. Finally, the chapter suggests that the book provides new understandings of the interwar crisis of liberalism, and of how new illiberal ideas were transferred to the international sphere in the 1930s.