Locarno Treaties
Germany, France and Belgium guaranteed each other's western frontiers at Locarno in 1925, and said nothing about the eastern ones. The negotiation came out of the wreckage of the Ruhr occupation. France had marched into the Ruhr in 1923 over missed reparations deliveries, Germany had answered with passive resistance and a hyperinflation that destroyed the currency, and both governments concluded that the arrangement was unsustainable. Stresemann proposed a mutual security pact. The treaties fixed the Franco-German and Belgo-German borders as permanent, with Britain and Italy as guarantors, and confirmed the demilitarisation of the Rhineland — and Germany accepted them voluntarily, which is what distinguished them from Versailles. Arbitration treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia were signed at the same time, and they contained no guarantee. That omission was noticed immediately in Warsaw and Prague and was the point: Stresemann had no intention of accepting the eastern settlement as final, and said so in private correspondence. The mood afterwards was called the spirit of Locarno. Germany joined the League of Nations in 1926, the occupation troops left the Rhineland early, and Briand, Stresemann and Chamberlain shared two Nobel Peace Prizes. Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland in March 1936 in violation of the treaty, and neither guarantor moved. The pattern is the standard one for interwar diplomacy: a genuine agreement between governments that meant it, undone by successors who did not, with no mechanism to compel anyone. The eastern silence had a name in the German foreign ministry. Stresemann called the border with Poland a wound that would have to be dealt with later, and every subsequent German government of the period, democratic or otherwise, held the same view.
- Year: 1925 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
