International History of the 20th Century PDF

March 1917 April 1917 June 1917 October 1917 November December January 1918 1917 1917 Timeline Tsar Nicholas II United States Greece declares First...

March 1917 April 1917 June 1917 October 1917 November December January 1918 1917 1917 Timeline Tsar Nicholas II United States Greece declares First Battle of Bolshevik US declares war President Wilson abdicates declares war war on Central Passchendaele Revolution in on Austria- outlines his on Germany Powers Russia Hungary Fourteen Points CHApTER TWO CONTENTS Introduction 35 The ‘new diplomacy’ 36 The armistice 41 The Paris peace settlement 43 The Paris peace settlement in The search for Central and Eastern Europe 48 European stability, The implementation of the peace 49 The Locarno era 53 1917–29 Conclusion 57 Recommended reading 59 z Introduction Peace is not merely the absence of war. An end to the fighting does not necessarily mean that the antagonisms that originally provoked war and the new ones thrown up by war are resolved. An armistice signifies that an absolute resolution by force is unnecessary because one belligerent has attained undisputed military dominance, but translating battlefield verdicts into political settlements is the task of diplomacy. Bridging the gap between an armistice and peace has proved one of the greatest challenges of modern statesmanship. There is no ultimate recipe for peace. Peace may be founded on hegemony and deterrence or it may come with the formation of a stable security community of states which share common values and goals. Most stable international systems combine these features. 35  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y March 1918 November June 1919 September November November June 1920 1918 1919 1919 1919 Timeline Treaty of Brest- Armistice Treaty of Treaty of Saint- US Senate Treaty of Neuilly Treaty of Litovsk Versailles signed Germain rejects Treaty of Trianon Versailles Concert of Europe For much of the nineteenth century, the Concert of Europe resembled the latter The nineteenth-century form of peace. The outbreak of the First World War, however, discredited the ‘old’ European system of regulation of international affairs by the diplomatic instruments for maintaining international order: military alliances, secret Great Powers. Although much treaties and balance-of-power politics. Some concluded that order needed stronger of the historical literature international laws and a world court to enforce them, while others demanded an end argues that the system was to the system of international competition and sovereign states altogether. The successful in keeping the general peace of Europe radical solution was nothing less than a transformation of old social, economic and because it was based on a political structures to found a global brotherhood of working people. Precisely ‘balance of power’, more because the triple deadlock on the military, diplomatic and home fronts propelled recent work has stressed the the engine of war forward, and because the Europeans could not bring the war to a importance of shared rules of conduct, values, goals and decisive end, the advocates of ‘new diplomacy’ found millions of ready converts to diplomatic practices in their cause in 1917. The voices of change came from the great continental powers, relations between the Great the United States and Russia. After the October 1917 Revolution, Lenin, the leader Powers. of the minority revolutionary wing of the Russian Communist Party known as the Bolsheviks Bolsheviks, became the chief proponent of the revolutionary solution to inter­ Originally in 1903 a faction national anarchy. President Woodrow Wilson shared with Lenin the conviction that led by Lenin within the Russian Social Democratic the ill effects of inter-state competition had to be alleviated. Old diplomacy had been Party, over time the Bolsheviks the practice of autocrats and exclusive ruling elites who suppressed their own peoples became a separate party and as well as minority national groups. The American president therefore advocated a led the October 1917 more open diplomatic system, based on the rule of law, composed of free and inde- revolution in Russia. After this ‘Bolsheviks’ was used as a pendent nation-states and guided by the ‘organized moral force of mankind’. shorthand to refer to the The aim of this chapter is to examine the process of peacemaking and European Soviet government and reconstruction from the armistice in 1918 to the end of 1929. It considers the communists in general. influence of Lenin and especially Wilson on the resolution of the First World War. Broadly, it attempts to answer the question of why the Paris peace settlement failed to lay down the foundations for a lasting European peace. Did responsibility rest on the shoulders of the Paris peacemakers, or with those who later attempted to operate the European system they created? Why did the Allied coalition that had won the war in 1918 fall apart so quickly after victory? What does the period from the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1923 to the Locarno treaties of 1925 tell us about the structural problems associated with peacemaking? Was the European détente of 1925–29 a tragically brief but stable start on the road to peace, or a false dawn? z The ‘new diplomacy’ The starting point for this analysis is the breakdown of the diplomatic, military and domestic political stalemate in 1917 and the coming of the Western armistice 36  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y August 1920 March 1921 April 1921 April 1922 October 1922 January 1923 July 1923 Treaty of Sèvres Treaty of Riga Reparations Treaty of Rapallo Mussolini comes French and Treaty of Commission sets to power in Italy Belgium troops Lausanne German occupy the Ruhr payments at 132 industrial region billion gold marks of Germany in November 1918. The first break in the triple stalemate came on the home front in war-exhausted tsarist Russia. The refusal in March 1917 of the Petrograd (St Petersburg) garrison to fire on strikers and food demonstrators triggered the abdication of Nicholas II. A ‘dual’ authority replaced the tsarist regime, shared between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Both centres of political power remained committed to the war, but not equally so. The Provisional Government hoped to remobilize Russia’s demoralized armies in order to pursue imperial Russia’s original war aims. The Petrograd Soviet, in contrast, expressed the longing on the streets, in factories and on the front line for peace – though not peace at any price. In April 1917, when the Provisional Government reaffirmed Russia’s interest in Constantinople and the Straits, the Petrograd Soviet called for peace without annexations or indemnities, and a frontier settlement based on the principle of national self- self-determination determination. Although the Petrograd Soviet’s call for a non-imperialist peace The idea that each national energized Europe’s socialist and left-wing opposition parties, the official war aims group has the right to establish its own national state. It is of the leading Powers in both coalitions remained unchanged. An attempt by the most often associated with the international socialist movement to revive itself by holding an international tenets of Wilsonian conference on peace in Stockholm was thwarted by the Allies. Worse still for internationalism and became a Russia, the offensives launched in June and July in the name of the new head of key driving force in the struggle to end imperialism. the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, ended in utter disaster. Russia desperately needed peace. The Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 with the slogan of ‘peace, land and bread’ initiated Russia’s exit from the war. According to Lenin, the expansionist impulses of monopoly capitalism had caused the war and these inherently self-destructive forces would lead to the ruin of capitalism itself. A great wave of workers’ revolutions, so the Bolsheviks believed, would sweep away the bourgeois ruling classes, thus creating an enduring peace within a new international solidarity of workers’ states that would replace the pre-1914 world of imperial competition. In the same way that war had destroyed tsardom, it was hoped that the war would soon spark more proletarian revolutions across Europe. To ignite the revolutionary spark, the Bolsheviks issued a Decree on Peace in November 1917, which called for a general three-month armistice and a final peace settlement without annexations or indemnities. At the same time, in a bid to mobilize public opinion, they exposed the annexationist war aims of the Entente by publishing secret inter-Allied agreements on war aims. This appeal to the streets for revolutions fell flat. After the armistice on the eastern front was concluded, the Bolsheviks presented the Central Powers with a six-point peace plan, once again rejecting annexations and indemnities and now calling for the application of national 37  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y August 1924 September September October April 1926 September May 1927 1924 1925 1925 1926 Timeline Allied and German Dawes Plan French Premier Rhineland Pact Treaty of Germany joins World delegates at London Briand proposes signed at Berlin League of Economic conference sign protocol a European Locarno Nations Conference ending Ruhr crisis federation in Geneva self-determination inside and outside Europe. The Central Powers accepted on condition that the Allies concurred too. As they anticipated, the Allies refused. When negotiations resumed in January 1918, the Central Powers made clear their resolve to impose a punitive peace by force. The first blow to the Bolsheviks was the treaty of 9 February 1918 between the Central Powers and now-independent Ukraine. L. D. Trotsky, Lenin’s commissar for foreign affairs, stalled brilliantly, walking away from the talks declaring ‘no war, no peace’, but the Germans called his bluff and resumed their advance. Confronted with a choice between the survival of his regime and total defeat, Lenin chose survival. The resulting Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) stripped Russia of its see Map 2.1 Great Power assets. The Bolsheviks surrendered Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Finland and the Caucasus, nominally as ‘independent’ states, but in fact as German satellites. Russia lost sovereignty over a third of the former empire’s population, a third of its agricultural land and nearly 80 per cent of its iron and coal industry. These terms represented a triumph for the German high command and the fulfilment of the dreams of German imperialists. Lenin, however, regarded the treaty as a temporary measure. Once Russia had recovered, the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk would be reversed. In the meantime, peace with the Central Powers caused tension with Russia’s former Allies. As war developed inside Russia between counter-revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks, the Allies dispatched forces to intervene, at first to prevent stockpiles of Entente arms falling into German hands, and later to help bring down the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s was not the only ideological voice to be heard. The American entry into the war in 1917 had a similar impact. The Russian Revolution and the American entry sharpened the distinction between liberal and autocratic Powers. A common anti-imperialist streak ran through Lenin’s ‘Decree on Peace’ and President Wilson’s cry of ‘peace without victory’. However, Lenin pulled out of the war first to save his regime and then later to reshape world politics through workers’ revolutions from below; Wilson aimed to reform the international system through the exercise of American power at the top. Wilson’s ‘new diplomacy’ combined realism and idealism (though, as we shall see, not always in equal measures). According to the president, the war had been caused by an anarchical and lawless system of states, which had brought about a frantic search for security through the stockpiling of armaments. As the war progressed, American economic policies had steadily favoured the Entente, while Wilson had labelled Germany an almost irremediably militaristic state. If Germany and its allies won, he had reasoned, the United States would be forced to transform itself into a heavily armed garrison state in which liberties would be crushed by militarization. The need to defeat 38  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y June 1927 August 1928 August 1929 October 1929 Geneva Naval Kellogg–Briand Young Plan New York Stock Conference Pact Market crash opens FINLAND Boundaries of German, NORWAY Russian, and Austro- Hungarian empires in 1914 SWEDEN Leningrad Stockholm Demilitarized zone (St Petersburg) North ESTONIA Sea Areas lost by Austro- IRELAND Hungarian Empire LATVIA DENMARK Baltic Areas lost by Russia Sea LITHUANIA Danzig GREAT NETHERLANDS Kiel Areas lost by Germany BRITAIN El be SH R EAST LI IDO PRUSSIA Amsterdam PO RR O Areas lost by Bulgaria R. Berlin C POLAND RUHR GERMANY Vi s t Warsaw Brussels ula Atlantic Cologne Weimar BELGIUM Ocean Frankfurt Paris LUX.. Prague Kiev SOVIET UNION GALICIA R Versailles LORRAINE CZEC H OSLO ine Strasbourg VAKIA Dni es Rh ALSACE te Vienna r FRANCE Budapest R. SWITZ. AUSTRIA S HUNGARY Geneva TYROL Trieste Zagreb ROMANIA Milan Venice BESSARABIA CROATIA Fiume Bucharest AL G Belgrade Black Sea U YUGOSLAVIA RT ITALY SERBIA PO SPAIN BULGARIA CORSICA Sofia Rome MONTENEGRO (To (to Yugoslavia, Istanbu Istanbul (Constantinople) (Constantinople) 1921) Naples SARDINIA TURKEY Mediterranean Sea ALBANIA GREECE Athens SICILY 0 km 750 CRETE CYPRUS Map 2.1 Territorial changes in Europe after the First World War Source: After William R. Keylor, The Legacy of the Great War: Peacemaking 1919 (New York, Houghton Mifflin: 1998) Germany and the American ambition to build a better world thus drove Washington into the Entente coalition. The US declaration of war on 6 April 1917 was not immediately decisive. To be sure, American maritime power and finance rescued Britain and France from Germany’s U-boats and probable economic collapse, but the Americans had only U-boat (English abbreviation 80,000 troops in Europe by October 1917. By 1919, the number would rise to of Unterseeboot) A German submarine. two million. In the meantime, Wilson played a waiting game. He affirmed his self-appointed role of mediator – America was an ‘associated’ Power, not an 39  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y Fourteen Points Entente ally – and hoped that with Germany defeated and France and Britain A speech made by the reliant on American men, matériel and money, he would be able to impose a American president Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918 in liberal peace on all the belligerents. His vision was embodied in his famous which he set out his vision of Fourteen Points of 8 January 1918. The Fourteen Points were a reformist reply the post-war world. It to the Bolsheviks’ peace manifesto and a notice to the Entente that their secret included references to open agreements on war aims and spoils would have to be revised. Collective security diplomacy, self-determination and a post-war international and self-determination were Wilson’s binding themes. He called for ‘open organization. covenants openly arrived at’, ‘freedom of the seas’, the removal of economic barriers, the reduction of armaments and the foundation of a League of Nations. collective security Belgium would be restored; Poland made independent; Alsace-Lorraine returned The principle of maintaining to France; and Italy’s frontiers redrawn along national lines. German forces would peace between states by also have to withdraw from Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman mobilizing international opinion to condemn empires would be forced to grant autonomy to their subject peoples. aggression. It is commonly Wilson’s ‘new diplomacy’ confounded the battle-scarred British and French as seen as one of the chief much as Lenin’s; the difference was that the Western Europeans now needed purposes of international ‘Uncle Sam’ to win the war. The disasters they had suffered in 1917 had driven organizations such as the League of Nations and the this point home. Russia had been knocked out of the war. Romania was reduced United Nations. to a German satellite. French and British offensives were halted with horrific casualties. French troops had even mutinied. The Italians were routed at Caporetto. League of Nations German U-boats played havoc with Allied shipping. In fact, the need for troops, An international organization supplies and credit from the United States very quickly raised questions about the established in 1919 by the potential impact of American dominance. One French statesman worried: peace treaties that ended the First World War. Its purpose was to promote international that before Germany has been thoroughly beaten she may propose terms peace through collective which President Wilson may consider acceptable, but which would not be security and to organize acceptable at all to France and England, and President Wilson may put conferences on economic and disarmament issues. It was pressure on the Entente Allies to accept them. formally dissolved in 1946. At the end of 1917 a co-ordinating conference initiated close inter-Allied co-operation on the strategic and economic matters, but, inauspiciously, a joint political response to the Bolshevik Decree on Peace could not be hammered out. Wilson’s insistence that Americans would not fight for ‘selfish aims’, ‘with the possible exception of Alsace-Lorraine’, offered Georges Clemenceau, the French premier, very cold comfort. Moreover, Wilson’s reference to ‘freedom of the seas’, ‘impartial adjustment of all colonial claims’ and the removal of economic barriers caused David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister, equal unease. The Entente, of course, was not a perfect alliance. Paris and London bickered over Eastern Europe and their designs on the Ottoman Empire clashed. But, judging from Wilson’s public statements, what united them was the craving for peace with victory. Wisely, before the Central Powers capitulated, the Europeans played down their differences with the president to ensure unity. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, Wilson’s Fourteen Points helped to spark strikes and demands from the opposition parties for a non-annexationist peace. Yet, despite desperate war-weariness, labour strife and food shortages, the domestic balance against a negotiated settlement held firm. In Berlin the ascendancy of Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich von Ludendorff over the civilian 40  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y leadership was confirmed by Bethmann Hollweg’s replacement by an uninspiring civil servant, George Michaelis, who was amenable to the high command’s wishes. When in July 1917 the liberal-left majority in the Reichstag called for political Reichstag reform and a ‘peace of understanding’, the new chancellor replied that he accepted The lower house of the German parliament during the Reichstag’s Peace Resolution ‘as I understand it’. Austria-Hungary grew ever the Wilhelmine and Weimar more reliant on Germany as the empire fell to its knees under the burden of war. periods. Its leadership considered a negotiated settlement, but its contacts with Britain and France made no headway, for Italy’s plans to make gains at Austria’s expense blocked any deal. In any case, Vienna really wanted a general peace, not a separate one. This could come only if Berlin moderated its war aims – something beyond Vienna’s power to achieve. In the end, the opportunity presented by Russia’s collapse locked the Central Powers into one last desperate gamble on battlefield victory, while the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk hardened Allied attitudes towards their foes. z The armistice In 1917 the German army in the west remained on the defensive. Attacking British and French divisions suffered severe casualties, but help from across the Atlantic was on its way. With the reserves now freed from the Russian front, Ludendorff launched offensives in spring 1918 aimed at punching a series of holes in the Allied front lines, in one last desperate attempt to force the Entente to the peace table before American troops arrived in strength and tilted the balance. His reinforced mobile storm divisions achieved some operational successes, but a war- winning breakthrough was beyond their reach. From July 1918 onwards Allied counter-attacks and the growing American army reversed the military situation. Germany’s armies retreated. In October the smallest of the Central Powers, Bulgaria, requested an armistice. Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey soon followed the Bulgarian lead. The German request for an armistice meant that the political struggle over the coming peace now began in earnest. In an attempt to split their foes and obtain moderate peace terms based on the Fourteen Points, the German government approached President Wilson directly for an armistice. The president, as the Germans had calculated, excluded his Allies from the armistice talks. ‘Have you ever been asked by President Wilson whether you accept the Fourteen Points?’ Clemenceau inquired: ‘I have not been asked.’ Lloyd George replied no. Disagreements about the shape of the post-war settlement, suppressed before for the sake of Allied unity, now surfaced. The British and the Americans quarrelled over ‘freedom of the seas’, and the Allies split on reparations. Wilson wanted Germany to make ‘restoration’ for civilian damage caused by the aggression of German forces on land, air and sea; Clemenceau and Lloyd George wished to make it clear that Germany was responsible for the wider costs of waging war. Fortunately for Allied unity, the president’s peace programme remained ambiguous enough to be open to future interpretation and negotiation. Unfortunately for 41  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y post-war stability, the reparations question and exactly what Germany had agreed to in the pre-armistice agreement also remained ambiguous and was later reinterpreted. In the meantime, while Washington insisted that the Fourteen Points should set the agenda for the peace conference, Paris and London seized the initiative in setting out the military and naval clauses of the armistice, which left Germany militarily helpless. On 11 November 1918 the armistice was finally concluded. Victory caught the Allies by surprise. Military planners had expected another year of war in the west. Consequently, French and British policies on war termination were as fluid as American ones. As a result, the Europeans may have accepted peace far too soon. Arguably, the psychological impact of an Allied invasion of German soil would have made the German people more agreeable to the Versailles settlement. Did the politicians make the wrong strategic choice? While the retrospective case for a ‘missed opportunity’ has great merit, we need to see the situation as it appeared to the policy-makers of 1918. Certainly, the Republicans in the US Congress had called for Germany’s unconditional surrender, but European statesmen were wise to place a huge question mark beside President Wilson’s readiness to storm the German frontier. More importantly, Lloyd George and Clemenceau believed that they could get what they wanted from their enemies without more bloodshed. Nonetheless, a tantalizing ‘might have been’ lingers. If the British and French intelligence services had known just how close Germany was to disintegration, then the politicians in London and Paris might have made the decision to ignore the Americans and advanced into Germany. As David French has speculated, ‘that might have had incalculable results for the subsequent history of Europe’. One of the results might have been a more stable German democracy. To stamp out ‘Prussian militarism’, the Allies agreed that German constitutional reform was a precondition for peace. This was well understood in Berlin. When Ludendorff recognized that defeat was imminent, a new government, supported by the centre- left, was formed to negotiate the peace under the moderate-liberal Chancellor Prince Max. Of course, the German high command did not have a sudden conversion to the merits of democratic reform, but instead turned to constitutional change as a ploy to win a moderate, Wilsonian peace from the Allies, and also to saddle the civilian politicians who would follow them with the responsibility for Germany’s defeat and humiliation. Unfortunately, the ploy worked rather well. To many Germans, it appeared that internal revolution had preceded the military collapse. A mutiny of German sailors started the process that finally led to the abdication of the kaiser and the foundation of a republic. Its first chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, arrived at an accommodation with the generals, whom he needed Weimar Republic to safeguard the republic from revolutionaries. Obligingly, Ebert greeted returning The German parliamentary democracy that existed German soldiers as ‘unconquered’ heroes. Of course, the legend that the army was between November 1918 and defeated not on the western front but at home by socialists, pacifists and Jews (the January 1933. Attacked from so-called stab-in-the-back legend), which right-wing propagandists later exploited both the Right and the Left of to vilify the Weimar Republic, did not ‘doom’ German democracy. Of greater the political spectrum, it never won the loyalty of the majority significance was the close connection in the minds of many between democracy, of Germans. defeat and the Paris peace. 42  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y z The Paris peace settlement In January 1919, when the representatives of more than 30 Allied and associated nations assembled for the start of the Paris Peace Conference, the First World War had claimed ten million combatant deaths and twice that number maimed. The destruction in Europe and beyond, not to mention the spent wealth, lost trade and squandered production, defied definitive calculation. Meanwhile, along the borderlands of the Habsburg, tsarist and Ottoman empires, formerly subject peoples took up arms, while the Bolsheviks fought counter-revolutionaries (half-heartedly backed by the Western Powers) and Allied intervention forces. Despite the enormity and urgency of the task, and a great deal of preparation, the opening proceedings of the Paris Conference were marked by administrative chaos and organizational improvisation. A functioning decision-making process, supported by expert committees and commissions, took some time to develop. At first, the Council of Ten dominated. It was composed of two members each from the major Allied Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the United States). The Council of Ten, however, proved unwieldy. From March to June 1919, the Council of Four (consisting of Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and, with the least influence, the Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando) dominated and made the key decisions concerning the peace treaty with Germany (signed at Versailles on 28 June 1919). From July 1919 to 1923, the lesser peace treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey were left to government officials and inter-Allied agencies to negotiate through regular diplomatic channels. Critics at the time and since have charged that the Paris peace fell well short of the just settlement promised by Wilson’s magnificent slogans ‘peace without victory’ and ‘a war to make the world safe for democracy’. The ‘Big Three’ – Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George – missed an opportunity to fashion a new and legitimate order, so the usual argument runs, because the Europeans pursued narrow selfish interests, and because Clemenceau and Lloyd George either bamboozled Wilson or the whole exercise was one of supreme cynicism. In reality, it was much easier for a few men in 1914 to destroy the world than for their successors to replace it with something better. After the most destructive war in history, there were limits to the peacemakers’ capacity to refashion Europe. They had little real power to control the pace of events in Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau did not share a common vision of the post-war order. The Paris settlement represented a series of trade-offs and compromises between the victorious Allies (most notably in the application of the principle of self-determination). More difficult still, the growing threat of anarchy and revolution in 1919–20 placed a premium on timely rather than optimal solutions. Each solution needs to be examined in its own context to be fully understood. Take, for example, the foundation of the League of Nations. To achieve his great mission of international reform, Wilson made this task his top priority. Many agreed with the president that unbridled military competition and balance- of-power politics had made war in 1914 inevitable. Some suggested that had a 43  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y Plate 2.1 Versailles Peace Conference attendees, France, 1919. Seated left to right: Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau and US President Woodrow Wilson Source: US Army Signal Corps/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images permanent machinery for ‘crisis management’ and arbitration existed, then the First World War might have been prevented. Opinions varied, but a standing organization for Great Power co-operation and consultation was seen as the key innovation for future international politics. Radicals demanded the democratic control of foreign policy and a powerful world government; conservatives looked to some refinement of the old Concert of Europe. Wilson publicly championed the radicals, who took his promises of ‘open covenants openly arrived at’ more religiously than he did. Revelling in the role of Europe’s saviour, the president personally took the chair of the conference’s commission on the question of a new international organization in order to see his vision of a league to enforce peace through the exercise of world opinion come into being. The French, in contrast, wanted a Société des Nations, backed by its own troops, to perpetuate the wartime alliance against Germany. Not only was there enthusiasm for a League of Nations inside and outside British officialdom, but Lloyd George also calculated that by backing the president he would ease American pressure on more contentious points, such as freedom of the seas. The strategy worked. The Covenant (or constitution) of the League of Nations was based on an Anglo-American draft. It described a system of Great Power management and made gestures towards Wilson’s ideals. To promote open diplomacy, the League, based in Geneva, would consist of a Council and an Assembly, supported by a permanent secretariat. The Covenant obliged signatories 44  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y to observe the rule of law in international affairs, to reduce armaments and to preserve the territorial integrity and independence of member states. Members undertook to consider collective action against covenant-breakers. To prevent another 1914, international disputes would be subject to a three-month period of arbitration. This would allow time for cool-headed diplomacy and for ‘the public opinion of the world’ to mobilize for peace. War-weary people everywhere regarded the League as a break from the unscrupulous practices of the ‘old diplomacy’. In reality, it was a workable compromise between the aspirations of liberal internationalists like Wilson and the inescapable limitations of any voluntary association of sovereign states. It was not a world government, nor did any of its makers wish it to be one. As a result, the Covenant contained ambiguities and contradictions: the League would deter war by threatening covenant-breakers with universal war; all members were equal, but the Great Powers would call the shots; and, to function, the League required member states to abide by the Covenant without any binding obligation on them to do so, especially in disputes between the Great Powers. If the League was the idealistic dimension of the peace, the German settlement was the punitive one. Germany was not dismembered – and so remained a potential Great Power – but it did lose some 27,000 square miles of territory, 6.5–7 million inhabitants and 13.5 per cent of its economic potential. In the west, see Map 2.1 France gained Alsace-Lorraine, a small border district (Eupen-Malmédy) was handed over to Belgium, and Denmark took Northern Schleswig. To compensate France for the sabotage of its coal mines by the retreating German troops, the Saar valley was placed under League administration for 15 years and its mines under French ownership for at least that period. The Saar’s fate would ultimately be decided by plebiscite. The Rhineland would also be demilitarized and occupied by the Allies, who would also control the Rhine bridges. The eventual three-stage, 15-year evacuation of occupation forces was tied to Germany’s treaty compliance. In the east, Germany ceded Posen and much of West Prussia to Poland (the ‘Polish corridor’), and the German port of Danzig was designated a free city under the Danzig, Free City of League, though under Polish customs and foreign policy control. Lithuania seized (Polish: Gdansk) A historically and commercially important the German port of Memel. Berlin also surrendered its colonies, overseas invest- port city on the Baltic Sea. In ments and much of its merchant fleet. The German navy was allowed a few 1919 the Paris peacemakers obsolete ships; the army was denied heavy weapons and aircraft, and its official made Danzig politically strength was limited to only 100,000 men. independent as a ‘free city’ under the League of Nations On reparations, the peacemakers deferred the difficult decisions. Everyone in order to give the new state agreed that Germany should pay something. The real questions were: how much of Poland free access to the sea. should Germany pay; how much could it pay; what form should payment take However, the vast majority of (money, goods or both); and over how long a period should the instalments be the city’s inhabitants were Germans. The return of scheduled? The Council of Four recognized that there was an enormous gap Danzig to German sovereignty between the entire cost of the war and Germany’s capacity to pay reparations. was thus a key issue for Indeed, what constituted the ‘entire cost of the war’ was a major issue. There were German nationalists between also serious technical limitations on transferring wealth from one nation to the wars. Hitler exploited the Danzig question as a pretext another. Consequently, in order to address Germany’s theoretical responsibility for his attack on Poland in for the entire cost of the war while in practice limiting its financial liability, the 1939. peacemakers inserted two Articles, 231 and 232. In the first, later misleadingly 45  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y dubbed the ‘war guilt’ clause, Germany and its allies accepted responsibility for the ‘aggression’ of 1914 and its consequences, while the second required Germany to provide compensation for specified civilian damages. Ironically, therefore, the original purpose of Articles 231 and 232 was to protect Germany from the economic ruin of making good on war costs (see Document 2.1). Finally, instead Versailles Treaty of fixing a final figure in 1919, the Versailles Treaty only demanded an interim The treaty that ended the payment of 20 billion gold marks before 1 May 1921 (to pay for the Allied Allied state of hostilities with Germany in 1919. It included occupation), the date by which the inter-Allied Reparations Commission was to German territorial losses, determine a total. disarmament, a so-called war guilt clause and a demand that reparations be paid to the Document 2.1 victors. Extracts from the Treaty of Versailles Article 231 The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies. Article 232 The Allied and Associated Governments recognise that the resources of Germany are not adequate, after taking into account permanent diminutions of such resources which will result from other provisions of the present Treaty, to make complete reparation for all such loss and damage. The severity of Versailles cannot be blamed on any one Power. All the peace­ makers combined policies of conciliation and punishment. For Clemenceau, French security was paramount, and that could only come in one of three ways. The first was by permanently weakening Germany. The second was by seeking a lasting and mutually beneficial Franco-German accommodation. The third was by way of a security alliance with the United States and Britain. The French tried all three with- out much success. Despite secret overtures to Berlin proposing a German commit- ment to treaty compliance in return for a promise of future treaty revision, there was no chance of such a deal flourishing in the poisonous air of 1919. It was feared in French circles that the Treaty of Versailles would only temporarily strengthen France and cripple Germany. General Foch, the Allied supreme commander, therefore proposed a more permanent solution: France should hold on to the Rhineland as a strategic buffer. Fearful of creating ‘an Alsace-Lorraine in reverse’ and mindful of self-determination, Lloyd George and Wilson refused. Instead of a detached Rhineland, France was offered Anglo-American Treaties of Guarantee against unprovoked German aggression. Clemenceau, who would not have otherwise relented, regarded the guarantees as the ‘keystone of European peace’. Unfortunately, the guarantees fell through when the American Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919, and British adherence was conditional on American. The collapse of the Anglo-American guarantees epitomized France’s frustration at the hands of its wartime Allies. It was typical of Lloyd George’s opportunism 46  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y that the British treaty would only come into force if the American one did. His double-dealing would not have mattered had London not pursued a balance-of- power policy – that is, with France cast in the role as the next European hegemon. With Germany’s navy sunk and its overseas possessions confiscated, the British cabinet could safely regard its former enemy as the counterweight to what it wrongly perceived as an aggressive France bent on mastery of the European continent. Britain should stand back from Europe, and allow the free play of inter-state rivalry to give rise to a new equilibrium. Balance-of-power calculations such as this blocked British strategic empathy with France. British officials could not see that French security and Franco-German reconciliation were essential to peace, and that France needed Britain in order to feel secure against Germany. Lloyd George’s handling of reparations was also questionable. Because Britain had suffered little direct civilian damage from the war, the prime minister insisted that pensions payable to servicemen and their dependants should be included to increase Britain’s share of reparations. Even if this blatant violation of the pre- armistice agreement had little impact on the total sum claimed by the Allies, there is no doubt that it helped to undermine the moral authority of the whole settlement. Moreover, fearing a backlash in Parliament if the total for reparations was too moderate, Lloyd George pressed his fellow peacemakers to postpone the painful decisions for two years. Ironically, French officials, who are often portrayed as the villains on reparations, at first proposed very moderate sums based on civilian war damages in accordance with the pre-armistice agreement. They also considered partnership with Germany on iron and steel production as an alternative means of taming the economic might of their former enemy. Wilson, like Lloyd George, must also take responsibility for the post-war blight of reparations. Although the United States emerged in 1919 as the world’s largest creditor nation, the American government refused to combine inter-Allied war debts, reparations and reconstruction into one big package. According to Marc Trachtenberg, an American cancellation of war debts and a contribution to reconstruction would have resulted in moderation on reparations. In striking contrast to the generosity of the Marshall Plan in 1947, American ‘tight- Marshall Plan fistedness’ in 1919 ensured that the Allies burdened the Weimar Republic with Officially known as the European Recovery reparations. American policy stemmed more from Wilson’s moralistic approach Programme (ERP). Initiated to international politics than from any narrow American financial interests. by American Secretary of State Germany had started the war and so the Germans must pay as an act of penance. George C. Marshall’s 5 June Until justice had been done, Wilson reasoned, Germany must be treated as a 1947 speech and administered by the Economic Co-operation moral inferior and barred from the League of Nations. The conviction that Administration (ECA). Under Germany had to be punished before it could be rehabilitated, however, could not the ERP the participating be squared with Wilson’s reluctance to commit the American might to peace countries (Austria, Belgium, enforcement. For precisely the opposite reason to Lloyd George – namely, the Denmark, France, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Italy, president’s hostility to balance-of-power politics – Wilson in like manner failed Luxembourg, the Netherlands, to understand the French position. What France needed was American and British Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, backing to promote a sense of security and reconciliation with Germany; instead, Turkey and West Germany) France was largely stranded with an inherently more powerful neighbour, whose received more than $12 billion between 1948 and 1951. hostility was compounded by an indemnity and ‘war guilt’, both of which were contained in a treaty that presupposed Germany’s voluntary compliance. france was left alone due to the punitive side of the versaille treaty 47  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y z The Paris peace settlement in Central and Eastern Europe The Treaty of Versailles, of course, preoccupied the Big Three – Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George – but the Paris peace settlement entailed more than the German problem. ‘All the races of Central Europe and the Balkans’, wrote one American delegate, ‘are actually fighting or about to fight with one another... the Great War seems to have split up into a lot of little wars.’ The peacemakers knew that stamping out these little wars and preventing the spread of Lenin’s revolution (which at moments threatened to take hold in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and, especially, in Budapest, under the Bolshevik Béla Kun) was essential to peace. During the war all the belligerents had courted subject nationalities with promises of greater post-war autonomy in order to destabilize the opposing camp. The collapse of the three eastern empires propelled the nation-founding process cordone sanitare: france granted a security forward in 1918, as the Allies quickly adjusted their policies to the new map. The agreement to those free state in order to guarantee a barrier in case of a possible expansion of Soviet Americans and the British, after all, had supported the principle of self- Russia cordonne sanitariie: soart of previous iron curtain determination, while the French looked to the new Czechoslovakia, Poland and against Russia Yugoslavia as future allies in the containment of Germany and as a cordon sanitaire beneficiaries: Serbia, Romania, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia against Soviet Russia. Consequently, the Poles, Czechs and the Entente Allies – Serbia, Romania and Greece – were all beneficiaries; the losers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. Four treaties modelled on Versailles, including similar clauses on disarmament, reparations and ‘war guilt’, confirmed the new territorial arrangement: the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (4 June 1920), the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (27 November 1919) and the Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey (10 August 1920). Significantly, in contrast to Versailles, each of these lesser treaties included see Chapter 22 provisions for the protection of ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities. The Treaty of Saint-Germain also prohibited the union (Anschluss) of Austria and Anschluss Germany. In Poland’s case, its western frontier was drawn at Germany’s expense, The political union of and then, after defeating the Red Army in 1920, it agreed its eastern border with Germany and Austria. Russia in the 1921 Treaty of Riga. Czechoslovakia, which like Poland benefited Anschluss was specifically prohibited under the Versailles from astute lobbying and well-placed sympathizers among the peacemakers, Treaty, but was carried out by declared its independence in October 1918. To make the Czech-dominated union Hitler in March 1938 without with the Slovaks economically and strategically viable, the Sudetenland (the any resistance from the victors border area between the historic kingdom of Bohemia and Germany, which of the First World War. included three million German-speaking inhabitants) remained within it. Yugoslavia emerged as a voluntary amalgamation of former Austro-Hungarian Sudetenland territories around the pre-war Serbia. Romania more than doubled its territory The geographical area in Bohemia mainly inhabited by and population, taking Russian Bessarabia and Austrian Bukovina. Greece ethnic Germans. In 1919 it obtained Eastern Thrace from Turkey and, in April 1920, Western Thrace from was placed on the Czech side Bulgaria. Soviet Russia, free of Brest-Litovsk, now lost control over much of what of the German–Czech border it had turned over to the Central Powers in 1918, including Poland, the Baltic and in 1938 led to an international crisis ending in States and Finland. the infamous Munich Despite reducing by half the number of people living under alien rule, self- Agreement. determination, as put into practice by the Paris Peace Conference, generated yet 48  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y more ethnic strife and national conflict – but it is impossible to see how this might have been otherwise. No matter how sharp the pencil or small scale the map, the peacemakers’ careful lines cut across the ethnographic patchwork of Eastern Europe, leaving about 30 million people on the wrong side of contestable frontiers. Even natural status quo allies such as Poland and Czechoslovakia fell out over their disentegration of emipire came up as several mutual borders. Rather than seeing it as a tool for peaceful national integration, microconflic that undermined the stability of europe the small Powers regarded minority protection arbitrated by the League of Nations see Chapter 22 as a Great Power imposition on their newly won national sovereignty. In the German case, self-determination had to give way to strategic considerations: the victors could not reinforce their one-time enemy by permitting an Anschluss, nor would they enfeeble Poland by denying the small state ‘secure access to the sea’ or cripple Czechoslovakia by withholding the Sudetenland. At the same time, because they conflicted with self-determination, some of the promises made to principle of self-preservation was enforced when it came the Italy in 1915 went unfulfilled. Thus, while Italy absorbed part of the frontier with case to chose which territories belonged to yugoslavia and Austria (South Tyrol), Wilson stubbornly resisted Orlando’s claim to territory which one to italy, there were strategic reasons and a new along the coast of the Adriatic. The Italian premier stormed out of the Council political landscape that influenced the behaviour of of Four to force concessions from his fellow peacemakers, but caved in upon his mutilated victory humiliating return. Even so, the small Adriatic port of Fiume remained a source of tension between Italians and Yugoslavs, and Rome sulked about what many Italians regarded as their ‘mutilated peace’. z The implementation of the peace For all its flaws, the Paris peace does not deserve the often-cited verdict that it amounted only to ‘an armistice for twenty years’. To be sure, the imperfect solutions to the German problem and Europe as a whole certainly set out the battle lines for the future. Too many important states were left dissatisfied and looked to the future for the revision rather than the defence of the status quo. Germany and Russia, still potential Great Powers, would revive and the fate of Eastern Europe would depend on whether they regarded the successor states as useful buffers or potential spoils. Nevertheless, historians must not draw straight lines between 1919 and 1939. Diplomacy is an open-ended process. Adjustments to the settlement – at first on the margins, later in some of the essentials – were inevitable. Whether this process would end in another general European war or smaller-scale conflicts depended on what followed. In David Stevenson’s view, the failures of the 1930s might have been averted by a combination of leniency over reparations and the strict enforcement of the security clauses of the Versailles Treaty. This approach required continuing co-operation among the Allies and the survival of moderate revisionism in Germany. Unfortunately, the first victim of the peace was inter-Allied solidarity. America’s withdrawal from the settlement, occasioned by the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919 and again in March 1920, was the most tragic. Wilson had raised expectations for a new era of world politics so high that he was bound to disappoint (disillusioned Wilsonians rushed to print stinging criticisms 49  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y of their former hero). As in most tragic plots, this downfall was of the protagonist’s own making. Although Wilson worked to the point of exhaustion and suffered a stroke during the treaty fight, he obstinately refused to placate the Republican majority to win ratification of the German peace. Wilson had also ensured the rejection of the League of Nations by his earlier insistence that the League’s Covenant form an integral part of the Versailles Treaty. In 1921 the Americans signed a separate peace with Germany, but remained outside the League of Nations – the centrepiece of Wilson’s peace project. The great American mission to liberalize the world had come to an end, at least for now. Indeed, American public opinion in the late 1920s and 1930s became even more averse to entanglements abroad. Of course, the Americans did not entirely retreat from the international stage; for example, in 1921–22 Washington hosted a see Chapter 3 multilateral conference on naval disarmament and East Asia. Moreover, America’s economic status as the world’s largest creditor meant that it could not entirely cut isolationism itself off from the outside world. Even the most ‘isolationist’ Republican The policy or doctrine of administrations of the 1920s did not shy away from pulling the financial levers isolating one’s country by avoiding foreign to promote stability in Europe. However, the exercise of financial muscle could entanglements and not compensate for the lack of a concrete American security commitment to the responsibilities. Popular in the post-war peace. United States during the inter- The Soviet Union likewise remained isolated. Despite some sparks in Germany war years. and Hungary, Lenin’s world revolution failed to materialize. Moreover, the experience of civil war, Allied intervention, the Red Army’s defeat at the hands of the Poles, and the loss of Finland, Bessarabia and the Baltic States all warned of the dangers of survival in a world system dominated by the twin forces of capitalism and imperialism. Soviet Russia was vulnerable. The tension between the need to spread revolution (the source of the regime’s legitimacy and identity) and the need to strengthen the regime generated a dual-track policy: the Soviet Union would promote the overthrow of capitalism by supporting the international communist movement and, at the same time, build ‘socialism in one country’ in order to provide itself with security. Thus, Georgi Chicherin, the Soviet foreign minister, plotted a careful course between hostility to the status quo and peaceful co-existence with it. Moscow renounced its debts, denounced the 1919 settlement and the League of Nations, but at the same time turned to diplomacy and trade agreements to forestall any anti-Soviet coalition. The result of this diplomatic posture was a rapallo treaty: signed btw weimar republic and rapprochement with the other potential Great Power alienated from the Paris soivet russia to increse the economic cooperation peace: Weimar Germany. In April 1922 the two pariah states agreed at Rapallo to btw the 2 countires + provide help to germany to evade deamrament establish diplomatic contact and expand economic co-operation. Secret military the 2 countires that were most weakened by the end of WW1, they signed a treaty of mutualc co-operation increased: Russia helped Germany evade disarmament and Germany cooperation that ended up to be mutually beneficiacial for both countire d provided Russia with technical know-how. The great bogey of a revisionist alignment (reaffirmed in the 1926 Treaty of Berlin), and, moreover, the spread of communism in China and to the European empires, reinforced the deep antipathy felt in London and Paris towards the Soviets. The French took the ideological transformation of their one-time eastern ally very hard indeed. French officials had clamoured the loudest to turn the limited Allied intervention in civil-war Russia into a crusade to topple Lenin’s regime, and when this failed, Poland became the obvious substitute eastern ally. 50  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y it occured when the senate rejected the treaty of versaille When the Anglo-American security guarantees fell through, Clemenceau hoped Lloyd George would make good his promise anyway. Negotiations towards a security pact in 1921–22, however, made no progress. Some British officials recognized the French need for British reassurance. Many more, especially the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, believed that the French harboured ambitions of Napoleonic proportions. Balance-of-power rhetoric provided a high- sounding rationale for what was really a turning away by Britain from Europe’s problems, motivated by a deep and understandable aversion to another military commitment on the scale of 1914–18. At the same time, J. M. Keynes, in his best-selling study of the peace, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), undermined the legitimacy of Versailles in British (and American) minds by attacking reparations as both vindictive and ruinous. The more Britain backed away from Europe, the more France sought to convert its temporary supremacy on the continent into a lasting one. By doing so, they confirmed British the uniity btw the allied forces was unroubled by the strategic reasons of the different countries misconceptions and prejudices. Friction in the Middle East between the two request of reparation from germany split the empires compounded the mistrust. A successful Turkish challenge to the Treaty allliance with germany of Sèvres precipitated the most spectacular rupture. In October 1921 the French germany had to pay war damages (132 billion gold made a deal with Kemal Atatürk, the nationalist president who had modernized marks), germnay actually paid 15 million marks GB the army and state, under which the Allies would withdraw from Anatolia. The pact nullified Sèvres and salvaged French interests at the expense of Greece, Italy and Britain. At the Dardanelles town of Chanak a year later, the French once again dealt bilaterally with the Turks and deserted the British. this was a signal that the alliance btw the allies could be or had already been undermined Just like the Treaty of Sèvres, the Treaty of Versailles was not self-enforcing. The split in the Entente provided Germany with the opportunity to challenge the peace in the same fashion as the Turks. Indeed, any defeated Power faced with such a coalition would have done so. France after the Napoleonic Wars and Russia after the Crimean War had sought to reverse their defeats. What was different about Germany between the wars was the intensity of hatred towards the ‘Versailles Diktat’. The explanation for this lay in the mismatch between what was expected from a peace based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the terms the Weimar’s socialist coalition was forced to accept unconditionally in June 1919. The Allies, fearful that their unity would unravel if talks with the Germans were opened, refused to bargain, leaving the German delegates indignant, humiliated and scornful. In Germany, an overpowering sense that a great injustice had been done and the popular myth that the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield made for a heady cocktail and a widespread determination to undermine Versailles took hold. In the 1920s the publication of pre- 1914 German diplomatic documents provided German scholars and liberal revisionists in the English-speaking world with ammunition to dispute the official Allied doctrine that Germany and its allies were responsible for 1914. To drive wedges between the Allies, Weimar foreign policy swung between shades of defiance and fulfilment. By defiance, possibly in alliance with the Soviet Union, some hoped to alienate Britain from France by confronting both with the unpleasant realities of treaty enforcement. With compliance, others hoped to play on British guilt over Versailles and prove that the treaty’s economic terms were impossible to fulfil. 51  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y The principal battlefield was reparations. As Sally Marks has argued, nothing less than the verdict of 1918 was at stake. The danger for the Europeans, especially France, was that the cost of reconstruction would ruin their economies and leave Germany, which had suffered less physical damage, economically dominant. American debt forgiveness would have eliminated this prospect and might have encouraged a Franco-German economic reconciliation. Instead, the Europeans were left to choose between ruining themselves or their former foe. The electorates had been promised that it would be Germany. On 27 April 1921 the Reparations Commission set payments at 132 billion gold marks in cash and goods. This sum was set to appease public expectations and as a bargaining chip in debt negotia- tions with the Americans. German politicians pleaded that 132 billion gold marks was impossible to pay and (arguably) they plunged the German economy into an inflationary spiral to prove it. The real figure of 50 billion gold marks over 36 years, buried in the complex technical details, though still substantial and burdensome, probably fell within Germany’s capacity to pay, had it tried. Indeed, the way both sides exploited the 132 billion figure to send different messages to their electorates instead of facing the unpalatable truths (for the Germans, defeat; for the Allies, the pitfalls of a settlement premised on Germany’s voluntary com- pliance) illustrates that the struggle over reparations was primarily a political one. As Berlin anticipated, the battle over reparations generated friction within the Entente. The British began to regret their decisions over reparations, and vented their frustration at what they saw as French vindictiveness. French officials, in turn, were exasperated by the British, who had no compunction about taking possession of 1,653,000 tons of German shipping, but dragged their feet over the coal, timber and cash due to France. Paris insisted on enforcement before leniency; London pressed for leniency in the hope that a German economic recovery would fuel a European one and revive British markets. In the winter of 1921–22 security talks between Lloyd George and the French premier, Aristide Briand, ran up against the usual obstacle: Briand asked for a military alliance to deter Germany, Lloyd George offered only a one-sided guarantee against ‘unprovoked’ attack. The way to break the impasse was to erect a comprehensive international security and economic structure within which the European antagonists could be reconciled, and concerted action to promote economic prosperity could take place. Lloyd George had something like this in mind when he called for an economic conference at Genoa in 1922. The countries invited included Soviet Russia and the United States, but the conference failed for the same reasons that had hampered diplomacy ever since 1919. The Americans stayed home. Without British backing, the new French premier, Raymond Poincaré, who was less amenable than Briand, declined to attend and refused to agree to reparations being on the agenda, while Chicherin and Rathenau, the Russian and German foreign ministers, left for Rapallo to cut their own bilateral deal. So the disputes over reparations continued. British willingness to grant Germany a six-month moratorium ran up against the French condition that Berlin turn over its Ruhr mines as ‘productive guarantees’ in exchange for the suspension of payments. At this point, the French were ready to try their own 52  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y solution. On 26 December 1922 the Reparations Commission in a three (France, Belgium and Italy) to one (Britain) vote declared Germany in default of reparation as result of the non-compliance when it came to payments. On 11 January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the the reparation causes Rhineland. As Lloyd George had been forced to resign in October 1922, this crisis in Anglo-French relations fell on the shoulders of the new prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law. Any German hopes that the British might block or obstruct the French were quickly dashed. Bonar Law’s cabinet issued only diplomatic protests. The British would wait and see. On the question of what Poincaré hoped to achieve, historians are divided and the evidence is ambiguous. Some believe that the occupation was really a bid to support Rhenish separatism and detach the Rhineland. Others criticize the French premier for the lack of any clear strategy at all. Perhaps in his own mind he lurched back and forth from a policy of straightforward treaty enforcement to one of initiating Germany’s breakup? Whatever Poincaré’s goals, pursuing them proved a grim task. Occupation troops met with widespread passive resistance that sometimes had to be overcome with bayonets. In Berlin, Chancellor Cuno printed marks to pay striking workers. Hyper-inflation was the result. By the end of 1923, however, the French had successfully imposed their will. The mines produced coal and freight trains moved across the frontier. In September, the new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, called an end to resistance. French victory came at a very great price. The occupation further alienated Anglo-American opinion. Anyone who had previously entertained suspicions of a Napoleonic thirst for mastery now appeared to have had their suspicions confirmed. Britain from this point onwards firmly planted itself between France and Germany as a mediator, and not as a French ally. Poincaré, who should have first explored the possibility of a bilateral deal with Germany, instead turned to the Anglo-American Powers to rescue the German mark and the rapidly falling French franc. In 1924, as a result of the plan devised by an expert committee headed by the American banker Charles Dawes, reparations were scaled down and the Reichsbank was reorganized. An American loan financed German reparations payments on a new, lighter schedule. American and British loans to France were france could obtain loans only if it abandoned the reiehenland conditional on the acceptance of the Dawes Plan and the evacuation of the Rhineland. The powers of the French-dominated Reparations Commission were also curtailed. Independent treaty enforcement, which in any case had been beyond France’s reach, was no longer an option. z The Locarno era by the american banker charles dawes 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, isolationist attitude of the usa's administration, america prefered to create dollar diplomacy to guarantee stabilization in Europe minus the Russians. The outlines of the structure came into focus in europe rather than actively participate 1924–25 in talks between London and Paris. A Franco-German détente was the centrepiece. France would end the 1923 occupation and slowly surrender other 53  T H E SE A R C H F O R E U R O P E A N STA B I L I T Y 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. 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 Locarno treaties allies. The Locarno treaties marked a turning point in international affairs. One The series of treaties British statesman wrote that ‘the Great War ended in November 1918. The Great concluded at Locarno in Switzerland in October 1925. Peace did not begin until October 1925’. Its makers, Briand, Stresemann and the The most important was the new British foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, shared the Nobel Peace Prize Rhineland Pact, signed by for their achievement. Historians, with the benefit of hindsight, frequently deride France, Germany and Belgium the so-called ‘Spirit of Locarno’ or ‘Locarno honeymoon’ as just one among many and guaranteed by Britain and Italy, which affirmed the other illusions of inter-war international security. There is substance to this view. inviolability of the Franco- Locarno was more the product of a French policy defeat rather than a change of German and Belgo-German heart; German nationalists of all shades had not given up the goal of overturning borders and the the Paris peace settlement. If anything, the British Locarno ‘guarantee’ was more demilitarization of the Rhineland. In addition, limited than anything offered previously to France by successive British cabinets, Germany signed arbitration and confirmed Britain’s detachment from the continent. Germany offered no treaties with France, Belgium, assurances about fulfilling its disarmament commitments, and Stresemann did Poland and Czechoslovakia. 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 advan