Locarno Treaties

• 1. Introduction

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  The Locarno Treaties were born from a contradiction. Germany, still raw from the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, sat down in October 1925 with the very nations that had defeated it and signed a set of agreements that would, for a few years at least, reshape the political mood of western Europe. The meeting took place in the Swiss town of Locarno, between the 5th and the 16th of October. Seven separate treaties and agreements emerged from those twelve days.

  What drew these nations to the table? France needed security and feared another German invasion. Britain wanted to rebuild Germany as a stable, prosperous partner. Germany's foreign minister Gustav Stresemann had his own calculations, and they were more complicated than a simple desire for peace. And for Poland and Czechoslovakia, the treaties would turn out to be something closer to a warning than a guarantee.

  The spirit those agreements created would hold for five years. Then, on the 7th of March 1936, German troops crossed into the demilitarized Rhineland, and not one of the treaty's signatories moved to stop them.

• 2. The Versailles Wound

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  Germany lost 13% of its European territory under the Treaty of Versailles and 12% of its population along with it. The largest pieces went to France, which reclaimed Alsace-Lorraine, and to a restored Poland. The territory west of the Rhine was occupied by Allied troops; all German military activity there was banned. A strip fifty kilometres east of the Rhine was demilitarized as well.

  Germany had not been invited to the negotiations that produced these terms. That exclusion fed a deep resentment that ran across the entire German political spectrum. Revising Versailles became a central goal of Weimar Republic politicians regardless of party.

  Stresemann had served as chancellor and then stayed on as foreign minister from late 1923 onward. His theory was cautious but strategic: by visibly trying to comply with Versailles, Germany could accumulate goodwill with the Allies and slowly regain its freedom of action. His list of objectives was long. He wanted to end reparations payments, remove occupying troops from the Rhineland, recover the land Germany had lost to Poland in the east, and restore Germany's standing as a great power. Stresemann understood that openly demanding revision would only harden Allied resistance. The route to those goals had to run through apparent cooperation.

• 3. The British Gamble

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  Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain held a vision for postwar Europe that put him sharply at odds with France. Britain's interwar foreign policy aimed to rebuild Germany, not contain it. Chamberlain believed that if Franco-German relations improved, France would gradually let go of the network of alliances it had built in eastern Europe.

  France had signed treaties with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, creating what it called a cordon sanitaire ringing Germany on its eastern flank. In Chamberlain's reading, those alliances were a source of instability. His preferred outcome was for France to abandon them in exchange for better relations with Germany. Once France stepped back, Poland and Czechoslovakia would be left without a great power protector and would have to accommodate German territorial demands. Chamberlain specifically named the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig as territories he expected would eventually be handed over.

  It was Britain's cautious endorsement of Stresemann's early diplomatic feelers that helped push the process forward. France followed only after Britain signaled openness, and with conditions: Belgium had to be included, and Germany had to join the League of Nations before the treaties took effect. Those conditions would shape the final agreement.

• 4. Who Sat in the Room

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  The push toward Locarno had a specific trigger. Allied inspectors had discovered serious violations of Versailles' disarmament provisions in Germany, most notably its failure to stay within the 100,000-man limit on its army. The planned withdrawal of Allied troops from the Cologne region was therefore postponed. On the 5th of January 1925, the Allies sent Germany a note citing "breaches of the disarmament clauses" of the treaty, but kept the language deliberately vague.

  Stresemann responded with secret memorandums, one to Britain in January 1925 and one to France in February, proposing a treaty that would commit all parties to settle Rhine border disputes peacefully. Germany was willing to accept the current western borders and sign an arbitration pact with France. Behind the scenes, Stresemann calculated that settling the western question would give Germany room to press Poland on its eastern frontier.

  After preliminary discussions in London in early September, the delegations gathered in Locarno. Germany sent Chancellor Hans Luther and Stresemann himself. France sent Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. Britain sent Chamberlain. Belgium sent Foreign Minister Emile Vandervelde. Italy sent Senator Vittorio Scialoja; Prime Minister Benito Mussolini attended periodically. Poland's Foreign Minister Aleksander Skrzyński and Czechoslovakia's Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš were present for the separate treaties that touched their countries.

• 5. What the Treaties Actually Said

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  The seven documents produced at Locarno fell into distinct categories with very different legal weight. The main treaty was a mutual guarantee involving Germany, France, Britain, Belgium and Italy. All five pledged to keep the borders between Germany and France and between Germany and Belgium exactly as Versailles had drawn them. They also committed to respecting the demilitarized Rhineland under Articles 42 and 43 of Versailles. Germany and France, and Germany and Belgium, promised they would not resort to war against each other, with three narrow exceptions including a breach of the Rhineland provisions.

  The arbitration agreements between Germany and France and between Germany and Belgium established five-member Permanent Conciliation Commissions to handle disputes. Each commission had one member named by Germany, one by the other party and three chosen jointly from third countries. Disputes the commissions could not resolve were to go to the Permanent Court of International Justice or to an arbitral tribunal under the Hague Convention of 1907. Either party could then escalate to the League of Nations Council if no agreement was reached within a month of the commission's work.

  The arbitration treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia looked similar on paper but carried a crucial difference. They were non-binding. More importantly, there was no guarantee of Germany's eastern borders to match the firm western guarantees. Stresemann had explicitly refused an eastern equivalent. His stated aim was to use economic pressure on Poland to open border negotiations rather than fix those borders permanently.

• 6. Poland's Bitter Reading

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  Poland left Locarno with almost nothing it wanted. The absence of an eastern guarantee mirrored the western guarantee was a clear signal about which borders Europe's great powers considered permanent and which they considered negotiable. The treaties contributed to a worsening of relations between Poland and France and weakened the Franco-Polish alliance that had been one of Poland's main security anchors.

  Polish military attache Józef Beck offered one of the sharpest summations of what the treaties meant for his country. He said that "Germany was officially asked to attack the east in return for peace in the west." Józef Piłsudski put it even more bluntly, saying that "every honest Pole spits when he hears the word Locarno."

  The treaties were a contributing factor to the fall of the Grabski cabinet on the 14th of November 1925. Poland had also been alarmed by a document attached to the main agreements, the Collective Note to Germany Regarding Article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant. Article 16 required League members to participate in sanctions or military action against an aggressor. The Collective Note said the League would consider each member's military capability when invoking Article 16. Germany interpreted this to mean it could decide for itself how to respond if the League acted against the Soviet Union for, say, attacking Poland. Proposals for an "eastern Locarno" resurfaced in 1934 but collapsed on German opposition and on Poland's demand that its own eastern borders receive a western guarantee.

• 7. The Spirit and Its Limits

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  In November 1925, Germany's Reichstag approved the Locarno Treaties by 291 votes to 174 with three abstentions. The British House of Commons passed them 375 to 13. The formal signing took place in London on the 1st of December. In Germany, approval had a political cost: it brought down the Luther government. The parties of the Right were furious at the effective acceptance of losing Alsace-Lorraine. Those on the Left feared the treaties could drag Germany into a war against the Soviet Union.

  For a period, the practical results were real. British troops withdrew from the Cologne region in January 1926. On the 10th of September 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations with a permanent seat on the Council. The Inter-Allied Commission overseeing German disarmament was disbanded in 1927. The Young Plan settling reparations was signed in 1929. The last occupying troops left the Rhineland in 1930, five years ahead of the Versailles timetable.

  But historian Sally Marks, writing in her 1976 book The Illusion of Peace, noted that "for some peace remained a desperate hope rather than an actuality" and that "the spirit of Locarno was a fragile foundation on which to build a lasting peace." Hans Mommsen, in The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, quoted Stresemann's own verdict: that Locarno represented "no more than a first step on the road to the 'gradual reacquisition of German sovereignty through a network of European treaties.'" The Nobel Peace Prize went to the lead negotiators: Chamberlain received his in 1925; Briand and Stresemann shared the prize in 1926.

• 8. The Day It Ended

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  On the 7th of March 1936, troops of Nazi Germany crossed into the demilitarized Rhineland. Adolf Hitler framed the move as a defense of German self-determination and cited the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, signed on the 2nd of May 1935, as itself a breach of the Locarno Treaties. That argument gave him a pretext, but the real reason the remilitarization succeeded without consequence was simpler: no one stopped it.

  Italy had already privately promised not to act. France lacked British support. The other signatories confined themselves to verbal condemnation. The Locarno Treaties technically remained in force on paper, but their practical life had ended the moment German soldiers entered the Rhineland unopposed. What the agreements had created was not a durable security architecture but a decade-long window; and when that window closed, the eastern borders that Stresemann had always refused to guarantee became the first sites of German revision under Hitler.