Locarno Treaties
The Locarno Treaties, signed in Switzerland in October 1925 and formally concluded in London in December, represented the high-water mark of Weimar diplomacy and the most hopeful moment in European international relations since 1914. Germany, France, and Belgium mutually guaranteed their existing borders; Britain and Italy acted as guarantors, committing to come to the aid of any party attacked. Germany voluntarily and permanently renounced any claim to Alsace-Lorraine and accepted the demilitarised Rhineland. In September 1926, Germany joined the League of Nations. The foreign ministers who negotiated the treaties — Gustav Stresemann for Germany, Aristide Briand for France, and Austen Chamberlain for Britain — all received Nobel Peace Prizes. The 'Locarno spirit' created a brief era of European optimism sometimes called the 'Golden Twenties' of diplomacy: Franco-German reconciliation seemed achievable, and public intellectuals spoke of a generation of peace. But Locarno contained a structural flaw that Hitler would later exploit precisely: the treaties guaranteed Germany's western borders with France and Belgium as permanent, but made no corresponding guarantee of Germany's eastern borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Germany's eastern revisionism — recovery of the Danzig corridor, possibly more — was implicitly left open. When Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland in 1936, violating Locarno directly, Britain and France did not invoke the guarantee clause.
- Year: 1925 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
