The Locarno era
The Dawes Plan signalled American willingness to resort to using financial power to promote continental stability; the task of building a fresh European security structure and making it work was left to the Europeans themselves — that is, Europe minus the Russians.
The outlines of the structure came into focus in 1924—25 in talks between London and Paris. A Franco-German detente was the centrepiece. France would end the 1923 occupation and slowly surrender other controls over German sovereignty. Germany would be integrated into the states system and fulfil its obligations under the Dawes Plan. Britain would play the honest broker and offer some sort of pledge to French security, but only as part of a larger overarching guarantee of Western Europe's frontiers.Locarno treaties
The series of treaties concluded at Locarno in Switzerland in October 1925. The most important was the Rhineland Pact, signed by France, Germany and Belgium and guaranteed by Britain and Italy, which affirmed the inviolability of the Franco- German and Belgo-German borders and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. In addition, Germany signed arbitration treaties with France, Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
At the small Swiss resort of Locarno in October 1925, the outlines of this basic structure became concrete agreements. The most important, signed by France, Germany and Belgium, and guaranteed by Britain and Italy, was the Rhineland Pact. It affirmed the inviolability of the Franco-German and Belgo-German frontiers and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. Arbitration treaties between Germany and France, Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia were also concluded, and France handed out new security promises to its Central and East European allies. The Locarno treaties marked a turning point in international affairs. One British statesman wrote that ‘the Great War ended in November 1918.
The Great Peace did not begin until October 1925.' Its makers, Briand, Stresemann and the new British foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their achievement.Historians, with the benefit of hindsight, frequently deride the so-called ‘Spirit of Locarno' or ‘Locarno honeymoon' as just one among many other illusions of inter-war international security. There is substance to this view. Locarno was more the product of a French policy defeat rather than a change of heart; German nationalists of all shades had not given up the goal of overturning the Paris peace settlement. If anything, the British Locarno ‘guarantee' was more limited than anything offered previously to France by successive British cabinets, and confirmed Britain's detachment from the continent. Germany offered no assurances about fulfilling its disarmament commitments, and Stresemann did not conceal his ambition to revise the settlement of Germany's eastern frontiers. The weaknesses of the security structures erected in the mid-1920s, however, did not determine the course of the 1930s. The three foreign ministers, Briand, Chamberlain and Stresemann, each saw Locarno as a first step towards a more distant and difficult transformation of the status quo — although all three hoped for different yet not incompatible foreign policy outcomes. Chamberlain, who would have readily offered France the sort of guarantee Briand had wanted in 1922 had he been able to persuade his isolationist colleagues, hoped that the limited guarantee of Locarno would be enough to extinguish the most serious threat to peace, the Franco-German antagonism, and later permit peaceful change in Central and Eastern Europe. Briand likewise hoped that the guarantee would provide France with some security and restore a measure of Anglo-French unity. After the defeat of 1923, Briand understood that France's temporary advantage over the inherently more powerful Germany could not be frozen. France would now have to seek salvation within the constraints of a dysfunctional coalition of victorious Powers and Berlin's unwillingness to comply with Versailles.
Instead of strict enforcement of reparations, now the way forward economically appeared to be formal Franco-German industrial and commercial co-operation to meet the needs of French reconstruction and recovery.Because the victors of 1919 would not (and France alone could not) enforce the verdict of1918, the success of European detente rested on German behaviour. To see the possibilities here, we need to understand the rationale of German policy under Weimar's longest-serving foreign minister, Stresemann. He has been portrayed as both an unscrupulous nationalist working for the destruction of the post-war order and as a good European working for political stabilization and economic integration. Both images are caricatures. Although Stresemann was a vociferous liberal-nationalist before 1914, Germany's defeat in 1918 and the disaster of 1923 had profoundly altered his outlook. This should not be surprising. From his vantage point as chancellor in 1923 he saw how the Ruhr occupation had nearly plunged Germany into civil war and delivered the republic into the hands of the military, while France had come close to detaching the Rhineland. According to Stresemann's British biographer, Jonathan Wright, after 1923 the German foreign minister aimed at peaceful change in Europe and the construction of a broad nationalist consensus at home, which would be robust enough to keep the extreme right and left at bay. He accepted the Dawes Plan because it broke Germany's diplomatic isolation, enlisted Anglo-American sympathy to check France, and set the stage for an economic recovery that would elevate Germany once again to the rank of a Great Power. To extreme nationalists at home, he spoke of buying time before Germany could rearm and follow the path of the sword — but these words were only intended to appease his hard-line listeners. A consummate realist, Stresemann believed that the only way ahead was through the exercise of political and economic leverage within the states system.
For Stresemann's revisionist programme to succeed, Weimar first needed to be accepted as an equal among the Great Powers. In early 1925, fearing that Britain might offer France a security pledge and that the League of Nations might tighten the supervision of German disarmament, Stresemann seized the initiative. To forestall Germany's isolation, he launched a bold ‘peace offensive' that ultimately resulted in the Locarno treaties. The treaties were his triumph. Stresemann's goal was to get French troops out of the Ruhr and to secure the Rhineland in exchange for a voluntary renunciation of Alsace-Lorraine, which he considered lost anyway. Locarno would encourage private American investment and give Washington a stake in German prosperity. An intricate balance had to be struck between immediate pacification in the west and future revision in the east. Stresemann refused to recognize Germany's eastern frontiers as final, but the French had military conventions with Poland and Czechoslovakia, and London and Washington would not countenance violent change. Frontier revision would have to come with the co-operation of the Western Allies. Yet the danger of courting the West was the alienation of Germany's Rapallo partner, the USSR. Though utterly repelled by Bolshevism, Stresemann needed Moscow to pressure Warsaw and to exploit any future crisis in Eastern Europe. In the event of a Russo- Polish war or some other great upheaval, Germany could bridge the ideological gulf between the Powers, and act as the chief broker of a new settlement. Indeed, Stresemann imagined that at some future Great Power conference assembled to redraw Central and Eastern Europe's frontiers, Germany would benefit from the support of the West and the acquiescence of Moscow.
In 1926—29, such calculations did not appear unrealistic. Certainly, nothing could erase the scars of 1914—18 or ease the deep fears and antagonisms that the war had engendered among political elites and electorates alike.
Yet the trajectory of events in these years permits us to see a stable but fragile international structure taking shape. European economies emerged from the dislocation and destruction of 1914—18. The influx of American short-term loans into Germany and American capital investments generally promoted European recovery. Talks on inter-Allied war debts made progress and the burden of payment was reduced by lower interest rates. A bargain encompassing Germany, France, Belgium, the Saar and Luxembourg on steel production quotas was struck. Currencies stabilized and a general return to the gold standard signalled confidence. In May 1927, the first steps were taken at the World Economic Conference in Geneva to lower trade barriers. Of course the economic recovery was uneven and fitful. Industrial production remained below pre-war levels, and the agrarian economies of Eastern Europe were vulnerable to fluctuations in food prices and extra-European competition. But at this stage the world economic crisis that began with the New York stock market crash in 1929 was still over the horizon, and the short-lived economic revival of 1925—28 buttressed the emerging truce between the Western Great Powers.In September 1926, Briand and Stresemann agreed on troop withdrawals from the Rhineland and an end to inter-Allied inspection of German disarmament. On 8 September 1926, Germany joined the League of Nations with a place on the Permanent Council. Unquestionably, the League of Nations in action disappointed one-world idealists everywhere. There was no break between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ diplomacy. The 1928 ‘International Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy’ (the so-called Kellogg—Briand Pact) expressed an aspiration, not a reality. Important diplomatic activity took place outside the League. In 1923, for instance, the crisis between Italy and Greece over Corfu was resolved by Great Power diplomacy. Measures to strengthen the legal mechanism of collective security and arbitration likewise ran up against the hierarchical nature of international politics: the League of Nations was for regulating the small states; the Great Powers turned to the League only if it suited their purposes.
The ideological war between the West and the Bolsheviks engendered bitter hostility and fear. An Anglo-Soviet dispute over espionage triggered a Russian ‘war scare’ in 1927. Quarrels between the Allies were also common. A spectacular row over the construction of cruisers split Washington and London at the 1927 Geneva Naval Conference. Yet international disputes were as much a feature of the late 1920s as they are in any other post-war period. The question is whether the structures of peace and stability were strengthened or eroded by these disputes. Despite the limited powers of the League, the breakup of the wartime coalition against Germany and its allies, and the precarious balance between revisionists and status quo powers, a political equilibrium was emerging.As before, the European system suffered from the disengagement of the two peripheral Great Powers. Washington was content with dollar diplomacy, while Moscow, fearful of a capitalist crusade against socialism, concentrated on industrialization and rearmament. Italy was an important prop of the European system but not a critical one. In fact, one success of the Locarno system was the way in which Italian revision in the 1920s was contained by the concerted action of the Powers. To be sure, Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist head of government (of whom more in Chapter 7), had designs on the Danube Basin and the Balkans. He encouraged Croatian separatism and intrigued with the Hungarians. Nonetheless, so long as Germany sought peaceful territorial revision inside the states system, there was little scope for a serious Italian challenge. And, at this phase in his career, the Fascist leader’s craving to be accepted as a fellow player in the circle of Great Power statesmen suppressed his appetite for military adventures. Ultimately, the Locarno equilibrium rested on the relationship between the Western Europeans. Locarno’s architects understood this, as well as the need to reinforce the Franco-German detente and to facilitate change. Serious obstacles remained. Disarmament foundered on France’s refusal to see Germany rearm and Germany’s demand to be treated as an equal. But there were signs that revision could take place and be successfully absorbed. In 1929, a committee of experts under another American, Owen D. Young, once again scaled down German reparations. The final evacuation of Allied occupation forces from the Rhineland was scheduled. Moreover, in an effort to contain Germany’s economic revival with a mutually beneficial economic alliance — foreshadowing the later success of the Schuman Plan that led to the European Coal and Steel Community of 1950—51 — Briand proposed a ‘United States of Europe’ in an address to the League of Nations in September 1929. Unfortunately for Briand and the era of Locarno peace, time had run out for European solutions.
Kellogg-Briand Pact
Or more formally the ‘International Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy’, 27 August 1928. It arose from a suggestion by the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, to the US secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, that the two states should agree to renounce war. At Kellogg’s suggestion, other states were invited to join France and the United States in signing an agreement. In total, sixty-five did so. Manifestly a failure, the pact is often ridiculed as an empty gesture indicative of the idealistic internationalism of the inter-war years. In fact, Briand saw the treaty as a way to obtain some sort of moral American commitment to the preservation of the status quo.
see Chapter 7
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Established by the Treaty of Paris (1952) and also known as the Schuman Plan, after the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, who proposed it in 1950. The member nations of the ECSC — Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany — pledged to pool their coal and steel resources by providing a unified market, lifting restrictions on imports and exports, and creating a unified labour market.