Locarno Revisited

European Diplomacy 1920-1929

Gaynor Johnson, Gaynor Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135766443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection of essays examines European politics and diplomacy in the 1920s, with special emphasis on the Treaty of Locarno of 1925, often seen as the 'real' peace treaty at the end of the First World War.
Contributors discuss the diplomacy of the principle countries that signed the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 and consider the issues of greatest importance to the study of European history in the 1920s. They also assess whether the treaty could be seen as the 'real' peace treaty with Germany at the end of the First World War. Key chapters include: Locarno, Britain and the Security of Europe; Locarno: Early Test of Fascist Intentions; Locarno and the Irrelevance of Disarmament.
'Locarno diplomacy' meant different things to each of the countries involved. The inability of contemporaries to arrive at a working consensus about what the treaty was intended to achieve weakened it and paved the way for its destruction. Unlike the Paris Peace Conference, however, the Treaty of Locarno and the era of diplomacy to which it gave its name, were not always seen as flawed. Until 1945, they were held up as one of the high points of European diplomacy in the 1920s. This book asks whether it is still appropriate to under-rate the importance of the Treaty of Locarno

1

Locarno, Britain and the Security of Europe

JON JACOBSON

At Locarno in 1925, the core states of western Europe—France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Belgium—stated in treaty terms the great lesson of the Great War: a final end to military conflict among them was of greater value than anything to be gained from another resort to arms. They agreed that their primary common interest was in banishing war from the region and declared an end to centuries of military conflict over the territories adjacent to the Rhine. The treaties they concluded then were an historic effort to make a stable peace by means of a comprehensive regional settlement designed to end longstanding antagonisms and conflicts.

Locarno was also the place western Europe identified itself as an independent region of interdependent states distinct from the rest of Europe and the world. The Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, popularly called ‘the Rhineland Pact’,¹ addressed the problems of west European security separately from those inherent in the instabilities of eastcentral Europe. It included the United Kingdom, but not the British Empire, and not the United States, or the Soviet Union. Locarno Europe portended in some respects the original European Economic Community of the Treaty of Rome 30 years later, and in some respects the Europe of the Six Plus Britain that was aborted in 1961, and in some respects the west European-led Europe of the 1990s.

Inherent in the Locarno agreements was the principle that peace was regional. They were concluded when efforts at universal security, or nearly universal security, organised within the League of Nations, the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the Geneva Protocol, had been aborted. At the heart of Locarno was the principle that Germany, France and Belgium had a common interest in the security of the region they bordered. Britain's vital interests in Europe were limited to the territory of Continent most adjacent to the Channel and closest to the British Isles. Locarno offered no security to the world beyond western Europe and expected none from it.

Austen Chamberlain stated at the time that the Locarno Treaties marked ‘the real dividing line between the years of war and the years of peace’.² A.J.P.Taylor agreed, writing that they ended the First World War.³ Both were correct. Along with the Dawes reparations settlement, the Locarno Security Treaties ended the ‘war after the war’, the struggle between Germany and the Allies over the results of the Great War that had not been not settled at Paris and Versailles in 1919. Locarno reinvented peace after the Great War on updated, post-1919 terms. It incorporated the most significant developments of post-First World War international relations: a post-Ruhr reconstructed entente between France and Britain, a rapprochement between Germany and the Allies of the Great War initiated from Berlin, and the import of US capital severed from US strategic commitment. It was both Europe's true postwar settlement and best hope for durable peaceful stability following the Great War.

Europe became more vulnerable to a second world war as that settlement was undermined. Ten years and five months after the Locarno conference, Hitler repudiated the treaty concluded there, and German troops remilitarised the Rhineland. By June 1940, all the nations signing the agreements were again at war, with each other. It has been easy therefore to disparage Locarno retroactively. Some histories have characterised the agreement celebrated there in 1925 as impotent, inadequate and ineffective, dismissing it as an illusory peace, the product of mutual self-deception and collaborative denial, which ignored real conflicts and problems and papered them over with treaties and pacts, and a peace conjured up within an international order condemned to a second world war by the instabilities and hostilities inherent in the outcome of the first, which brought about no more than a blissful interlude, which was then obliterated without a trace by the Depression and Hitler.

British foreign relations have come in for their share of criticism. In particular, the Locarno promise of immediate military assistance in the event of an attack on one of the signatories, or in case of a flagrant violation of the demilitarised zone, has been dismissed as a mere gesture. In a now famous statement made in 1972, Correlli Barnett stated with compelling polemical force a proposition still widely held today:

Unfortunately the treaty was, so far as Britain and her guarantee were concerned, no more than a hollow gesture to soothe the French; a bogus commitment, a fraudulent IOU that was given only because the English Government never thought for a moment that they would ever have to make it good… In regard to Europe, therefore, English policy did not merely display a characteristic escapism and self-deception, but the realities of power and strategy having been left so far behind, now veered positively into fantasy… For under the cover of the humbug of apparent British commitment to defend the Rhineland demilitarized zone and the integrity of France and Belgium, Britain had really completed the liquidation of her wartime strategic involvement in Europe.⁴

By contrast, Austen Chamberlain defended the Locarno agreements at the time as a measure that increased the safety of the British Isles, augmented French security, both deterred and reconciled Germany, and reduced the danger of a general European war.

After 75 years, the contradictions inherent within British Locarno foreign relations remain intriguing. The treaty met the security requirements of the British Isles almost exactly, yet participation in European security negotiations was initially opposed almost unanimously within the government in the spring of 1925. Of the five powers signing the treaty, Britain was least directly threatened by aggression on the Rhine. Yet, British diplomacy carried the Germanproposed Rhineland Pact to success at the conference at the lakeside resort in Switzerland six months later. Austen Chamberlain, who referred to himself as ‘the most pro-French member of the government’,⁵ and a man with persistent reservations about the sincerity of German intentions, quickly became Locarno's most vocal and consistent public spokesman.

Was British policy a fantasy and a deception, or was it realistically suited to national/imperial interests? The argument that British Locarno policy was a pragmatic response to the strategic lessons of the First World War is a familiar one. France and the Soviet Union together could not prevent German military hegemony in Europe without Anglo-American intervention, and, unless effectively countered, the submarine could sever the Empire overseas from the United Kingdom while the British Isles were attacked directly from the air. Confronted with this situation, postwar governments might have sought protection in the devices of classical continental power politics and allied with France, maintained a high state of military preparedness, aggressively defended the status quo and directly confronted German revisionism. They did not do so. Instead, ideological conceptions, public opinion and structural elements, including changes in the international economy, domestic political imperatives and global strategic overreach, constrained them from making political and military commitments in advance. Together, the problems in Egypt, the threat to Britain's position in China, the persistent conflict with the Soviet Union, the strained relations with the United States, and the assertion of Dominion autonomy only widened the discrepancy between Britain's global commitments and defence capabilities during the Locarno era.

This stance was reinforced by the traditions inherited from their predecessors, principally Castlereagh, Gladstone and Lansdowne. In that policy tradition, armed conflict was avoided except in the defence of narrowly conceived vital national/imperial interests. Principles of justice and morality were applied to international politics. International society was assumed to be governed by a natural harmony of interests. The powers of Europe could be united together for the common good of all. Compromise among opponents was pref ferable to the costs of reciprocal destruction. The best way to reach compromise was through mutual concession to the point of optimum mutual benefit. Disputes could be settled through rational negotiation. Agreement could be reached through the exercise of reason, fairness and trust.⁶ These notions were reinf orced f ollowing the Great War by a Wilsonian concept of international relations that not only rejected arms races, secret diplomacy and territorial imperialism, but also advocated the rule of law, the moral force of international public opinion and national self-determination as the essential ingredients of international justice.

There is some reason for believing that British Locarno policy fits this model closely. The Locarno agreements increased the safety of the United Kingdom while limiting commitment on the Continent, for which there was no advance promise of Dominion support,⁷ in order to meet the demands of imperial defence. The obligations of a general treaty of security, such as the Geneva Protocol, making Britain potentially liable to defend or aid any League member and submit its own disputes to arbitration, were shunned. West European security could be achieved without harnessing British policy to one continental power or the other, and without dividing Europe into opposing political camps, as might have been the consequence of a trilateral military alliance with France and Belgium.⁸ The demands imposed on limited resources by the need to protect the British Isles, to attend to the needs of an overseas Empire and to secure a durable peaceful stability in western Europe could be limited. Military preparation could be restricted to the most likely potential threats and eventualities for intervention. In this interpretation, the limited liabilities of the Locarno agreements were a rational response of an over committed world power seeking peace. They corresponded to the natural interest of a satiated power estimating both the European security situation and the assets of the Empire. ‘I do not think’, Chamberlain told the Commons in the debate over the ratification of the Locarno Treaty, ‘that the obligations of this country could be more narrowly circumscribed to the vital national interest than there are in the Treaty of Locarno.’⁹

Under the terms of the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, Britain concluded a permanent peacetime military alliance and a formal commitment to come to the immediate military assistance of a European country; and did so without the Dominions and without the joint participation of the United States, something London had been unwilling to do in 1919. Britain would come to the military assistance of France in the event of unprovoked aggression, an attack on French territory or a flagrant remilitarisation of the Rhineland. It was thus committed in advance to a military response in the event of German action aimed at decisively altering the military balance of power in western Europe. Other cases were to be submitted for decision to the Council of the League of Nations before any coercive action was taken. If Germany attacked Poland, and France occupied the Rhineland and Germany responded militarily, Britain was not legally obligated to intervene. Locarno thus updated Britain's international obligations to the changes that had taken place in international politics in the almost seven years since the end of the Great War.

Without doubt, the treaty conformed almost exactly to the specific security requirements of the British Isles, as of late 1924-early 1925. ‘With the advent of the aeroplane’, Baldwin had stated in 1923,’ we ceased to be an island. Whether we like it or not, we are indissolubly bound to Europe.’ And as Maurice Hankey stated in January 1925, ‘History and economics show that isolation in present conditions spells danger, vulnerability and impotence. Geography and aeronautics show that isolation is not in our case a scientific fact.’¹⁰ As of 1925 any force of German bombers based in the Low Countries could attack Britain with significantly greater frequency and intensity than one based in Germany.¹¹ The industrial districts of the Midlands and of northern Britain were beyond the range of bombers based in Germany. Those based immediately across the Channel would have to fly only 40 miles through hostile airspace on their 120-mile flight to London. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff called the Rhine ‘the true strategic frontier of Great Britain’ and termed keeping the effects of any future military disturbance on the Continent as far as possible away from British shores ‘a fundamental strategic doctrine’.¹²

The Rhineland Pact confined German ground and air forces behind the Rhine River and denied to the enemy of the recent war advanced bases for sea and air attack. A formal agreement guaranteed the British Isles against the possible effects of contingent German rearmament. France, with the strongest army and the best air force in the world, was obligated formally to defend what was Britain's first line of defence, its natural strategic frontier, while Germany promised voluntarily not to transgress it with military force. Britain me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• DIPLOMATS AND DIPLOMACY SERIES EDITORS: PETER CATTERALL AND ERIK GOLDSTEIN
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Series Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Locarno, Britain and the Security of Europe
• 2. The Quest for a New Concert of Europe: British Pursuits of German Rehabilitation and
• 3. Austen Chamberlain and the Negotiation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928
• 4. Locarno: Early Test of Fascist Intentions
• 5. Poincaré, Briand and Locarno: Continuity in French Diplomacy in the 1920s
• 6. The Franco-Soviet Negotiations of 1924–27
• 7. Germany, Russia and Locarno: The German-Soviet Trade Treaty of 12 October 1925
• 8. Stresemann: A Mind Map
• 9. Locarno and the Irrelevance of Disarmament
• 10. Taming or Demonising an Aggressor: The British Debate on the End of Locarno
• Afterword
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Index