This paper proposes to take seriously the dialectic between internationalist and regionalist visions of world order by charting the half-century political career of British imperialist and statesman Leopold Amery: from his lifelong campaign for British imperial economic union organized around preferential tariffs, through to his fervent critique of both the League and post-1945 American internationalism. If the historiography has focused on the varieties of interwar internationalism, it has underplayed the extent of this regionalist challenge. They feared that geopolitical hegemony would soon belong to territorially contiguous super-states, such as the US and the Soviet Union. Among the critics were a host of European ‘regionalists’ who envisioned a world organized into federal super-states. Many rejected this regime embodied by the League of Nations and attempts to restore free trade. A new liberal international order was born in 1918.
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