Locarno Pacts

Background

By 1925 the Dawes Plan had stabilized German reparations and the franc–mark exchange rates; the Ruhr was evacuated; and the diplomatic question shifted from financial settlement to political security. France wanted a continuation of the wartime Anglo-French alliance; Germany under Gustav Stresemann wanted both a guarantee against another Ruhr-style coercion and admission to the League of Nations; Britain wanted to disengage from any continental military commitment while preserving the Versailles framework.

Quigley locates the policy initiative inside the Milner Group. In AAE he names the British Foreign Office circle — Austen Chamberlain as Foreign Secretary, but with the policy substance shaped by Group members in the Foreign Office and at All Souls — and notes that General Smuts 'played a chief role' in the inter-state negotiation, although in a private capacity (T&H 305; AAE 220). The German-side counterpart, Stresemann, had cultivated the Round Table circle through journalists and through informal contacts at Chatham House meetings.

The Pacts themselves

Locarno was not a single document but a complex of seven treaties. The central agreement — the Rhine Pact — mutually guaranteed the Franco-German and Belgo-German frontiers as final, with Britain and Italy as guarantors. Two arbitration treaties bound Germany to settle disputes with France and Belgium peacefully. Two further arbitration treaties bound Germany to do the same with Poland and Czechoslovakia — but Britain conspicuously did not guarantee these eastern arbitrations, a fact Quigley flags as critical (T&H 305).

The diplomatic genius and the diplomatic deceit of Locarno, in Quigley's reading, were identical: the agreements appeared to guarantee European borders while in fact guaranteeing only the western ones. 'On the face of it, these agreements appeared to guarantee the Rhine frontiers, to provide peaceful procedures for all disputes between Germany and her neighbors, and to admit Germany to the League of Nations on a basis of equality with the Great Powers' (T&H 305). 'In reality the agreements gave France nothing, while they gave Britain a very great deal — including a free hand in regard to the eastern frontiers of Germany' (AAE 220).

The asymmetry is the key to Quigley's reading. France obtained a British guarantee of its own frontier — which Britain would in any case have had to defend in a German attack westward, so the 'guarantee' added no commitment Britain did not already have. Germany obtained: (1) parity-of-status admission to the League; (2) British recognition that its eastern frontiers were open to revision; and (3) a structural diplomatic platform for the peaceful destruction of Versailles in the east. Britain obtained: (1) a release from any continental commitment beyond what Versailles already required; (2) the role of Europe's senior arbiter; and (3) a Germany channeled eastward, away from French and toward Soviet borders (AAE 220–230).

Quigley's framing — the Milner Group's design

Quigley's most polemical argument about Locarno is that the design was the Milner Group's own. The policy of channeling German expansion east — making Germany the bulwark against the Soviet Union, treating the Polish Corridor and Sudetenland as expendable — is the through-line that connects Locarno (1925) to Munich (1938). 'The Locarno agreements guaranteed the frontier of Germany with France and Belgium with the power of these three states plus Britain and Italy. In reality the agreements gave France nothing, while they gave Britain a very great deal' (AAE 220).

The mechanism Quigley identifies is technical. The arbitration treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia made these states formally equal to France in their relationship to Germany. But because Britain refused to guarantee those eastern arbitrations, the practical effect was to upgrade the western frontier to a guaranteed status while downgrading the eastern frontier to an unguaranteed one — exactly the bifurcation a policy of channeling German expansion eastward required (T&H 305; AAE 220).

Quigley reads the Group's involvement at every level: 'Conceived in the same London circles which had been opposing France, supporting Germany, and sabotaging the League, the Locarno Pacts were the result of a complicated international intrigue in which General Smuts played a chief role' (T&H 305). The reference to 'sabotaging the League' is to the Group's earlier moves to prevent any League collective-security mechanism that would have automatically committed Britain to enforce Versailles — moves Quigley documents in AAE through the Group's handling of the Geneva Protocol of 1924, which Chamberlain rejected in March 1925 specifically to clear the diplomatic ground for Locarno (AAE 218–222).

Immediate outcomes

Locarno was, in its time, treated as a major diplomatic triumph. Austen Chamberlain, Stresemann, and Briand shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 1925 and 1926. Germany was admitted to the League in September 1926 with a permanent Council seat. The 'spirit of Locarno' became the catchphrase for the late-1920s assumption that European stability was permanent.

Quigley regards this contemporary judgment as straightforwardly wrong. The system worked as long as Stresemann remained Foreign Minister (he died in October 1929, three weeks before the Crash) and as long as the Dawes Plan's American credit flow continued. Once Stresemann was dead and American capital had reversed, the structural emptiness of the guarantees became visible: Germany withdrew from the League in October 1933, reintroduced conscription in March 1935, reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936 (the formal moment Locarno collapsed), and absorbed Austria in March 1938 — with no Anglo-French enforcement (T&H 580–610).

The Rhineland reoccupation is, in Quigley's reading, the decisive failure: it was the one moment Britain and France could have stopped Hitler at minimal cost, and the British government — fully Milner-Group-influenced under Stanley Baldwin and Anthony Eden — chose not to act (AAE 222–230).

Consequences and legacy

The line of consequence from Locarno to the Second World War is, for Quigley, direct. The 1925 settlement built into the European order an asymmetry — western frontiers protected, eastern frontiers exposed — that Hitler between 1936 and 1939 simply executed. Munich (1938) is the moment that asymmetry became visible to public opinion; but the asymmetry was built into Locarno thirteen years earlier (AAE 220–240).

For Quigley the Pacts are also the most consequential example of his recurring claim that informal networks can write international agreements whose surface text is consensual and reassuring but whose operational meaning serves a specific faction's program. The Locarno text was unanimously hailed; Locarno's effect was, by 1939, to have produced exactly the European war it nominally guaranteed against. The pattern repeats, in his telling, in Munich, in the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, and in the Hoare–Laval Pact: each was a coherent execution of the Milner Group's eastern-channeling strategy, presented to the public as something else (AAE 220, 238).

Locarno's longer-run legacy in the corpus is its function as Quigley's clearest single case study in 'reading a diplomatic agreement correctly' — the methodological lesson that the surface terms of an international agreement are almost never the politically operative ones, and that the operative terms can be reconstructed only by attention to what the document fails to guarantee, what its guarantor states could realistically have been expected to enforce, and what the network of officials drafting it expected the result to be (AAE 220–230; T&H 299–307).