International organizations, NGOs, transnational movements, and international law faced new challenges in the postwar period. While topics such as human rights, crime, the environment, and development occasioned entire alliances of state, international, and non-governmental organizations, the Cold War, decolonization, and the accompanying enforcement of the model of the nation-state as a global standard produced a complex situation characterized in equal measure by hopes and expectations for the future, international cooperation, competition, bloc formation, and retreat into the national. Taking the two German states as its starting point, this field of research addresses the question of how the international order changed in the post-war period under the aegis of competition, cooperation and conflict, and what new, specifically contemporary historical forms of globalization this produced.