Prehistory: the ‘near miss’ of the Ruhr occupation

The Realist argument appears all the more persuasive in relation to the events which immediately preceded the détente. In January 1923 France and Belgium (also a democracy) occupied the Ruhr to break German resistance to delivering the reparations due under the Versailles Treaty. This was not war under the definitions used in democratic peace theory but it was not exactly peace between democracies either.Footnote ¹⁰ Forty five thousand French and 2,500 Belgian soldiers were deployed in the occupation. Unable to offer military resistance, the German government responded by declaring ‘passive resistance’, a general strike supported by government funds. The occupiers in turn expelled some 5,000 German civil servants and railway-men who refused to co-operate, together with their families, and a further 31,850 from the other zones of the Rhineland which were already under military occupation under the Treaty. Between 130,000 and 147,000 people were expelled in all and, in addition, some 300,000 children were evacuated because of food shortages and disease. Apart from passive resistance, there was also an active German campaign of sabotage and reprisals against the separatist movements which were sporadically encouraged by the French and Belgian authorities. The German government connived at these acts of resistance and in some instances supported them directly. Inevitably there were casualties. According to the French High Command in the Ruhr in the first twelve months 76 Germans and 20 French and Belgian soldiers were killed in direct conflicts and a further 300 Germans were killed by their own countrymen for breaches of passive resistance.Footnote ¹¹

At the same time, on Germany's eastern frontier preparations were made to resist a possible threat from Poland, at this date also a democratic Republic with free elections and a competitive party system, though one facing the problem of large ethnic minorities including a German population in the former Prussian provinces used to being a ruling class and hostile to the Polish state. Polish attempts to pre-empt the new frontiers were resisted by force. Volunteer German paramilitary units (the Freikorps) were used against Polish insurgents in Upper Silesia in 1921; subsequently the German military authorities assisted in training various right wing organisations in breach of the Versailles Treaty. The Social Democrat dominated Prussian government, in whose provinces this activity took place, tried to get it stopped but the Reich Minister of Defence and also the Reich President – at that time the Social Democrat, Friedrich Ebert – protected the army. This shows how Republicans were divided by the imperatives of national defence, with some prepared to allow even the arming of anti-Republican groups for the purpose.Footnote ¹² In this early post-war period there was not much evidence on either the Polish or the German side of democratic norms working towards a peaceful solution to a bitter frontier dispute.

The period of acute conflict short of war was transformed in the three years that followed with the Dawes Plan providing in 1924 a provisional solution to the reparations issue leading to French and Belgian evacuation of the Ruhr, the Locarno pact and associated treaties in 1925, and Germany's entry into the League of Nations with a seat on the Council in 1926 and the détente continued, though not at the same pace, to 1929 when the Hague Conference saw a supposedly final settlement of reparations with German acceptance of the Young Plan and agreement by France to evacuate the last of the occupied Rhineland zones in 1930, five years ahead of the date set by the Versailles Treaty. What explains this dramatic turnaround and does it provide support for democratic peace theory? It may be objected that the theory is concerned only with war avoidance not degrees of peacefulness and therefore the Locarno détente is not relevant. But that is a pedantic objection. If ‘near misses’ are part of the argument then so too should be the process of retreating from confrontation into more stable relationships. The Locarno Pact was explicitly a pact for war avoidance.

The immediate explanation for the recovery from the Ruhr conflict is that both sides had been badly damaged by it and both were therefore open to new ideas. The depth of the crisis helped to create the opportunity for change. Germany was the more obviously damaged. Support for the general strike (and loss of revenues from the Ruhr) gave a savage twist to inflation leading to the final collapse of the mark. An alternative currency could be stabilised only by abandoning passive resistance, which itself put the future of all the occupied territories – Rhine and Ruhr – at risk, leaving them to make the best terms they could with the occupiers. The abandonment of passive resistance in September provided the pretext for right-radical groups to try to overthrow the Republic, culminating in the Hitler putsch in Munich in November. At the same time in the central German states of Saxony and Thuringia, where there were Communist-Socialist coalition governments, there was loose talk of and some preparations for a Communist rising. The army under its ambitious commanding officer, General von Seeckt, meanwhile wanted to use the crisis to force the resignation of the elected government and replace it with an authoritarian directorate effectively under military control. It looked in the Autumn of 1923 as though the Weimar Republic might break up in chaos.

Though in less dramatic fashion, France too suffered from what was at best a pyrrhic victory. Its major miscalculation had been to underestimate the reaction of the German working class which supported the general strike and rallied to the mine-owners against the occupiers. The French and Belgians fell back on coercion and support of the generally weak and unrepresentative separatist movements but this only made the occupation more difficult. Although in October 1923 the mine-owners were forced to resume production to avoid bankruptcy, mass unemployment and starvation, the French still had no viable political strategy. Would a French Republic be able to rule an unwilling German population of some ten millions – taking the occupied territories as a whole – indefinitely as a kind of European colony? That was a problem clearly related to the constraints that operate on democratic governments and consistent with the claim that democratic norms favour negotiation over the use of force.Footnote ¹³ In addition, France found itself isolated from its wartime allies. Britain and the US initially adopted a neutral attitude but in August the British government declared the occupation illegal and by October both governments were increasingly concerned at the direction of French policy.Footnote ¹⁴ They did not want to see a French dominated Western Europe any more than they had a German one. Nor did they think that such a violation of the rights of millions of Germans would be stable. At the end of October the head of the French government, Raymond Poincaré agreed to allow an inter-allied commission to investigate Germany's ability to pay reparations. Thereafter his position weakened. In January 1924 there was a fall in the value of the franc and in elections in May Poincaré's Bloc National lost power and was succeeded by a government of the so-called Cartel des Gauches. In August at a conference in London, the powers involved in reparations accepted the Dawes Plan for (mainly) American loans to Germany to enable it to make annual payments pending a final settlement, and France agreed to evacuate the Ruhr within a year.

The French attempt at unilateral enforcement of the Treaty was over. It had failed because it lacked a viable political strategy as to how one democracy was to rule over part of another and because its action alienated its two most important allies, themselves democracies, which viewed with alarm the prospect of Germany breaking up with unforeseeable political and economic consequences. For its part, Germany having been brought to the brink of collapse endorsed a solution which restored its territorial integrity at the price of agreeing to a schedule of reparations payments and accepting a degree of international control over its economy. The settlement was a compound of Realist calculations and democratic values. Had France been an authoritarian state, it might more easily have imposed direct rule on the occupied territories. Had Germany been an authoritarian state, France might have found greater acceptance for its actions both at home and from the US and Britain. As it was, none of the powers had a viable alternative to a settlement which served the interests of the existing political order, economic recovery and peace. That order was based on respect for national self-determination and the importance of Germany to the international economy.Footnote ¹⁵ If it was a Realist settlement, it was influenced by democratic values. The episode of the Ruhr occupation was indeed a ‘near miss’, illustrating in the way it started limits on democratic peace theory but in the way it was concluded the influence of democratic norms.

The Locarno pact

How far can the same analysis be applied to the Locarno Pact which followed in October 1925? The mutual security guarantee of the Rhineland frontier meant that the Rhineland states, Germany, France and Belgium, renounced altering the frontier by force, in effect Germany accepted the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and France gave up the aim of detaching the left bank of the Rhine. In addition, Britain and Italy agreed to act as external guarantors contracting to come to the aid of either side in the event of a violation of the pact.

Again, the Realist interpretation is a strong one – each of the powers involved stood to gain from it.Footnote ¹⁶ For Germany, in addition to security on its western frontier, the pact offered an end to the isolation of the post-war period, averting the danger of a new Anglo-French alliance, and opening the way to membership of the League of Nations in 1926 with a seat on the Council as part of the club of great powers. Germany also avoided giving a specific guarantee of its eastern frontiers in arbitration treaties it concluded at the same time with Poland and Czechoslovakia. It thus left itself free to pursue frontier revision in the east albeit, given its commitments to the League of Nations, by peaceful means. Germany also requested and received from the other powers at Locarno an interpretation of Article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant which in effect released it from participating in military sanctions in view of its disarmed status. That, in turn, enabled Germany to renew its 1922 Rapallo neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, which had feared that as, a consequence of Locarno, Germany might be drawn into League sanctions against it. By the Treaty of Berlin in April 1926, both sides undertook to remain neutral in the event of either becoming involved in war with a third party ‘despite peaceful behaviour’.Footnote ¹⁷ One effect of the Treaty of Berlin was to maintain the pressure on Poland for frontier revision since both Germany and the Soviet Union claimed Polish territory. Defending German policy in these terms, the Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, wrote in July 1925 to the German ambassador to the US: ‘Our policy over the security pact offer was undoubtedly right, secures the Rhineland from the consequences of a French policy of persecution, has burst the entente apart and opens new possibilities for the East.’Footnote ¹⁸

For France too the pact made sense in terms of national interest. After the failure of the Ruhr occupation, it offered the best security available. By agreeing to Locarno, France helped to restore relations with Britain and the British guarantee of the Rhineland frontier against aggression from either side – though less than an Anglo-French alliance – was nevertheless a significant gain. In addition, France retained its military preponderance and its alliance system in Eastern Europe, despite Polish resentment at what it saw as a weakening of the French commitment.

Britain, for its part, could also be seen as having gained in security. It had assisted in the stabilisation of Western Europe which was important in itself and particularly for an overstretched imperial power. In return, it had guaranteed the Rhineland frontier. That was a serious step, not a mere gesture, though since the guarantee applied equally to both sides it did not entail the military preparations of an alliance.Footnote ¹⁹ The Pact would further the three principles of European stability outlined by the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, to the Committee of Imperial Defence in July 1925: to make it impossible for Germany to overrun Europe, to induce France to adopt a more friendly and reasonable attitude towards Germany and to prevent German-Soviet understanding against the rest of Europe.Footnote ²⁰ At the same time Britain had limited its commitment, refusing to guarantee frontiers in Eastern Europe where British interests were less directly affected and where the German argument for revision, particularly of the Polish frontier, was viewed sympathetically.Footnote ²¹

The US administration was content to allow Britain to take the lead, given the domestic constraints against any form of political commitment to Europe but it too had an interest in European stability. American diplomats and the Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong, played an important supporting role in making it clear to the French and German governments that the continued flow of American credit to Europe depended on the successful conclusion of the Rhineland pact. The policy initiated by the Dawes loan of promoting stability by financial means was now made to serve the specific interests of the security pact.Footnote ²²

Italy's role at Locarno offers an interesting perspective, as it was the only non-democratic power involved.Footnote ²³ Mussolini was antipathetic to the whole process – he disliked international conferences, he disliked any association with the League of Nations and he disliked the fact that the Brenner frontier (between Italy and Austria) was not to receive the same status as the Rhineland. He agreed to Italian participation only at a late stage, partly under pressure from professional diplomats in the Italian Foreign Ministry, partly to please Austen Chamberlain with whom he had established a rapport and partly for prestige. But he had no interest in promoting stability in Europe, rather the reverse. Fascist Italy was already supporting like-minded paramilitary organisations in Germany and similar activities were soon mounted in the Balkans. The attempt by the democracies, Britain and France, to recruit Italy for the Locarno détente in anything more than name was doomed to failure for reasons which sit well with democratic peace theory.

The smaller powers involved in Locarno – Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia – had no alternative but to accept the settlement negotiated by the major powers. For Belgium, as for France, the Locarno Pact represented an alternative means of security after the failed Ruhr occupation. Czechoslovakia, like Poland, was a potential loser from the implicit downgrading of its frontiers, compared to the new status conferred on the Rhineland frontier, though in fact German governments during the Weimar Republic showed no interest in revision of the Czech frontier. Poland felt with some justification that it was the real loser by Locarno as Germany made no secret of its desire to revise that frontier. No German Government could have accepted the frontier; the feeling against it in all parties – including the Social Democrats – was too strong. On the other hand, so long as the Weimar Republic was in existence, Germany was committed to purely peaceful methods of revision through its membership of the League of Nations. And, it may be asked, could there be any guarantee of security for Poland – incidentally itself no longer a democracy after economic paralysis had led to the establishment of an authoritarian regime under Marshal Piłsudski in 1926 – if German democracy failed?Footnote ²⁴

What conclusions may we draw about the interests of the various powers involved in the Locarno Pact? As with the resolution of the Ruhr crisis, the Realist interpretation is a strong one. The Pact served the security interests of each of the powers with the possible exception of Poland which had no alternative but to accept the outcome. But, again, the democratic values of the major states (apart from Italy) affected the way their interests were perceived by their leaders: the Pact aimed at a solution to the Rhineland frontier that would be accepted as having democratic legitimacy.Footnote ²⁵ In terms of a recent contribution to the democratic peace debate, Locarno as a mutual pact could be regarded – with the exception of Italy – as an early attempt at an inter-democratic security institution.Footnote ²⁶

We will now examine in more detail the values and structural factors involved and the way they interacted both to promote and limit the détente that followed.

Shared assumptions

Chamberlain, Stresemann and the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, were politicians who were used to operating in the dangerous world of power politics from before and during the First World War. They would not willingly compromise the security interests of their states. In that they followed the first rule of Realism. But, in contrast to Mussolini, they shared fundamental assumptions about the values of peace and democracy which made agreement between them possible and helped to sustain the détente, despite periods of tension, until it broke down after 1929.

The most important of these assumptions was a commitment to peace.Footnote ²⁷ Briand was deeply affected by having been head of the French government from 1915 to 1917 during the siege of Verdun when over 160,000 French soldiers were killed in a few months.Footnote ²⁸ The famous peroration to his speech welcoming Germany as a member of the League of Nations in September 1926 – ‘Away with the rifles, machine guns, cannon! Clear the way for conciliation, arbitration, peace’ – should be seen against that background.Footnote ²⁹ Stresemann despite starting with the resentments of a defeated and humiliated power also became increasingly convinced that a new war ‘would mean that the old Europe […] would inevitably tear itself to pieces’ and ‘[t]his destruction would be above all Germany's destruction.’Footnote ³⁰ In a speech to Heidelberg university – where nationalist groups were strongly represented among the student body – he explained that ‘The preservation of peace and the attempts to achieve it are not weakness, are not timidity, they are the realistic recognition of our own national interests.’Footnote ³¹ Chamberlain, for his part, later dismissed allegations that Briand had been duped by Stresemann in words which reflected the priority each attached to peace: ‘There was neither knave nor dupe, but a great German and a great Frenchman, who, from amidst the blood-soaked ruins of the past, sought to raise a new temple of peace.’Footnote ³² It is easy to take such sentiments for granted as no more than the conventional courtesies of inter-state relations but in a period which saw them repudiated by Mussolini and Hitler, among others, they were not mere rhetoric.

Another shared value was suspicion of the Soviet Union. Stresemann maintained, as we have seen, the link with Soviet Russia but he gave priority to relations with the Western powers. In drastic language, he warned those German elites who promoted a Soviet alliance against ‘the utopia of flirting with Bolshevism’ since, he added, Russia would gladly spread world revolution to the Elbe and leave the rest of Germany to the French.Footnote ³³ He was outraged at a Comintern attempt to assassinate the King of Bulgaria and other leading figures in April 1925, telling the Reichstag Foreign Affairs Committee that if the Soviet Union wanted good relations with Germany, it would have to observe the norms customary ‘between civilized states’.Footnote ³⁴ For Briand and Chamberlain a shared motive for Locarno was the desire to reorient German foreign policy away from the Soviet embrace symbolised by the Rapallo Treaty. Briand had warned Stresemann at Locarno that it was not possible for Germany ‘to stand with one foot in the League of Nations and with the other, or at least the tip of the toe, in another camp’.Footnote ³⁵ And when Briand was slow to reduce the number of occupation troops in the Rhineland, a concession which had been promised at Locarno, Chamberlain reminded him that they were ‘battling with Soviet Russia for the soul of Germany’.Footnote ³⁶

An associated value held in common was belief in the market economy and the promotion of foreign trade. For Germany exports were essential to enable it to repay reparations and that could only be achieved – without damaging the interests of its trading partners – by expansion of the international economy. Germany alone among the major powers consistently supported measures of trade liberalisation at the League of Nations.Footnote ³⁷ There were also important bilateral and collective agreements. A comprehensive trade treaty was concluded between France and Germany in August 1927.Footnote ³⁸ With the encouragement of their governments, international cartels were also established between industries in a number of important sectors. The most striking was the International Steel Community concluded in July 1926 by France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg but others followed for aluminum and in the chemical industry for dyes and nitrogen.Footnote ³⁹ Despite the hopes of democratic politicians, including Stresemann and Briand, that these developments would lead to further economic integration which would in turn underpin the détente, they never acquired that momentum for reasons we will examine below. Nevertheless they represented a common aspiration in line with the tradition in democratic peace theory that emphasises economic interdependence.

A shared strategy

Once the Locarno Pact had been concluded, Stresemann, Briand and Chamberlain had a common interest in seeing it succeed. Their careers became linked in a joint enterprise to achieve European security. In terms of one strand of democratic peace theory, their rational calculations as democratic statesmen led them to promote peace and stability. On that argument alternative leaders would have followed similar strategies and that is broadly persuasive. However, it would be a mistake to discount the role of particular leaders and there is a strong argument for thinking that these three added value to the détente as they worked together over the six years of its development. The quarterly meetings of the League of Nations Council, on which they represented the most significant powers, provided regular opportunities for discussion of common problems. Despite disappointments and periods of coolness between them, there were also instances of support and understanding for the problems of the others. In this way the common values of the practitioners of the democratic peace produced a degree of solidarity across borders strengthening the détente. Equally tensions between them had the opposite effect.

Each of the three understood how to use their appearances at League meetings to enhance their reputations as servants of peace. Briand used the rhetoric of peace to reclaim for France the moral authority of a European mission which was part of the French Republican tradition. Stresemann stressed the importance of what Bismarck had called ‘the imponderables of politics’, in other words the significance of the Locarno Pact in winning over international opinion.Footnote ⁴⁰ Chamberlain claimed famously that the Pact marked ‘the real dividing line between the years of war and the years of peace.’Footnote ⁴¹

At Locarno, Briand impressed Stresemann by drawing a parallel between the opposition each faced which Stresemann later described as ‘very witty and imaginative’.Footnote ⁴² Briand said he knew that the great majority of Germans wanted peace but that there were also a large number who, though they did not want war, believed that in some mystical way one day Germany's situation would change and that in the meantime there was no need to make any concessions. But, Briand said, he equally faced similar fantasists like Poincaré who believed that he had left France in an immensely strong position, that they should have maintained their hold on the left bank of the Rhine and that in comparison Locarno was a poor bargain.

The strength of the leaders' commitment to the détente was tested the following year when a crisis arose over the terms of Germany's admission to the League. Briand, with Chamberlain's support, pressed for Poland to become a member of the Council of great powers at the same time. That was unacceptable to Germany as it would give Poland a veto over frontier revision. During a week of fraught meetings in March 1926 no compromise seemed possible and both Chamberlain and Briand threatened resignation with Chamberlain declaring that Locarno would be destroyed.Footnote ⁴³ The situation was saved by Germany accepting that Poland could become one of the non-permanent members of the Council though, as a result of other difficulties, Germany's admission had to be postponed in any case to the next meeting in September. The crisis illustrated the way in which the reputations of the leaders were already involved with the success of the détente policy.

In the following years, as well as periods of tension, there were also instances of cooperation. Stresemann for a time hesitated to press the demand for Rhineland evacuation for fear that it would weaken Briand's position. Briand, for his part, did eventually agree under British and German pressure at the Hague Conference to withdraw French troops from the last of the Rhineland zones in June 1930, five years ahead of the date fixed by the Versailles Treaty. Stresemann had made it clear to him in writing that without this concession he would not be able to continue the policy.Footnote ⁴⁴ The remark Briand is reported as making on hearing of Stresemann's death, ‘Order a coffin for two. We have two deaths to lament’, shows the way in which their careers had become linked in the public mind.Footnote ⁴⁵

Despite these assets of common perceptions of interests, shared assumptions and shared strategies, the Locarno détente faced a number of critical limits, which we will now examine.

Structural instability

The first limit to the détente was structural – the basic fact that Germany's economic and demographic potential was greater than that of France. French fears for its future security were compounded by doubts about the reliability of the British and Italian guarantees of the Locarno Pact and about the stability of the Weimar Republic. French governments, with Poincaré again as head from 1926 and Briand remaining as Foreign Minister, therefore pursued a dual policy of negotiations to maintain the détente (and satisfy British pressure on them to be accommodating towards Germany) while preserving military superiority, their alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the occupation of part of the Rhineland until 1930.Footnote ⁴⁶ German governments on the other hand needed to be able to demonstrate that the Pact was a viable instrument for revising the Versailles Treaty. Stresemann hoped that at the least it would lead to early evacuation of the Rhineland and bringing forward the plebiscite due in 1935 to determine the future of the Saar (which had been made subject to League of Nations control until the plebiscite). The gap between French fears and German expectations led to tensions. In January 1928 Stresemann described French demands for security as containing ‘an element of hypocrisy’ while Briand pointed out that given the strength of nationalist opinion in Germany, France had to be prepared for a change in political circumstances.Footnote ⁴⁷ Each tried to outsmart the other in the negotiations with the US which led to the Kellogg pact to outlaw war, Briand by trying to conclude a bilateral pact, Stresemann by immediately responding to Kellogg's offer of a multilateral pact.Footnote ⁴⁸ Given the structural problems – essentially France's security dilemma without a NATO type guarantee – it is possible that the détente had already reached the limits of what it could achieve before the depression cut it short.Footnote ⁴⁹

With the continuing tension over the Rhineland frontier there was no chance that the Locarno Pact would be extended and complemented by an ‘Eastern Locarno’. Hopes that it would be possible to achieve modest revision of Poland's frontiers followed by a Locarno type guarantee of those frontiers, possibly to include the Baltic States and the Soviet Union as well in a pan-European security system remained stillborn.Footnote ⁵⁰ In October 1928 the German cabinet, under a Social Democrat Chancellor, approved a four-year rearmament budget to provide equipment and ammunition for an army of sixteen divisions, breaching the Versailles Treaty limit of ten divisions. The rationale was to maintain frontier defence against superior Polish forces, showing that the arbitration treaty signed between Germany and Poland at Locarno was not seen as giving the frontier stability.Footnote ⁵¹

The political consequences of the Locarno pact were therefore mixed. In both France and Germany it provided an alternative to the confrontation that had escalated into the Ruhr crisis. But in neither was it able to achieve unquestioning support. Fear in France and resentment in Germany remained a potential threat to the détente limiting its development until it was undermined by the depression.

Limits to economic and financial co-operation

The structural problems which limited political co-operation also worked against economic integration and financial co-operation, preventing them from furthering the détente.Footnote ⁵² Plans in January 1924 for an exchange of French and German industrial shares as a way out of the Ruhr impasse came to nothing.Footnote ⁵³ The International Steel Community and similar arrangements for other industries referred to above lacked a supranational authority, unlike the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951. Rather than steps towards a common market, they were cartels to divide the market by negotiating quotas which would protect domestic industries. In the process they allowed the French government, faced by more powerful German competition, to maintain domestic industries of military value.Footnote ⁵⁴ More far-reaching ideas for European political and economic union advanced by Briand in 1929–30 were stillborn, partly because they were intended to achieve Germany's implicit recognition of its eastern frontiers. Stresemann responded positively to the idea of economic union in his last speech to the League of Nations, referring to the internal tariff barriers which had existed in pre-unification Germany and which now seemed laughable. Where he asked rhetorically ‘is the European currency, the European postage stamp?’Footnote ⁵⁵ But given the value that still attached to national sovereignty among industrial as well as political elites, such sentiments were unlikely to find a positive response outside the debates of the League Assembly.

Even the limited growth in economic cooperation between France, Germany and their neighbours was sometimes justified by Realist rather than peace building arguments. There was already a perception in some quarters in France that European economic integration was necessary to resist the American challenge. The situation of Germany was more complicated because of German dependence on the flow of American loans and its need for American and British support for revision of the Versailles Treaty.Footnote ⁵⁶ Divisions within the democratic world also helped to block the scheme, discussed between Briand and Stresemann in 1926, for raising the capital value of Germany's reparations debt from American investors to allow early repayment to France in return for evacuation of the Rhineland and return of the Saar. An immediate breakthrough of that kind might have popularised Locarno within Germany in a way which piecemeal concessions over the next three years failed to do. The US, however, was not willing to see funds made available until France had ratified an agreement on war debts. The French government, for its part, did not dare to put ratification to the National Assembly because feeling there ran so high that its debt had already been paid in war dead. The British Treasury was also opposed to a separate Franco-German settlement as threatening the repayment of French debts to Britain and undermining the British policy of postponing a final reparations settlement until it could be linked to allied war debts in general. American administrations naturally did not view with favour European ideas for parallel reductions in both war debts and reparations.Footnote ⁵⁷ Conflicts of interest between the democracies therefore prevented the détente acquiring new impetus from economic or financial cooperation.

Democratisation

Without a solution to the structural problem, uncertainty about German democracy became a critical weakness. Since the distribution of power among the participants did not guarantee compliance with the Pact, it was essential that confidence be maintained in other ways. Had Germany been a consolidated democracy committed to purely peaceful revision of the Versailles Treaty – that might have compensated for the structural imbalance. But the process of democratisation meant that Republican governments had to contend with elites displaced by the revolution and in denial about Germany's defeat in the First World War.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Versailles Treaty gave them ample ammunition. Something like a third of the electorate consistently voted for right-wing nationalist parties even before the Nazis succeeded in capturing and extending that vote during the depression. The permanent threat to the Locarno policy from the German right made it harder for the French to make concessions. And because of French caution, the Locarno détente failed to deliver the results rapidly enough to popularise it within Germany and help to consolidate Weimar democracy. Democratisation fuelled nationalism which in turn limited the freedom of external powers to make concessions which in turn weakened democratic governments and helped to destabilise the system. The process of democratisation contained dangers in itself which were reinforced by the way they interacted with Germany's external relations. The special problem of democratisation for democratic peace theory is thus confirmed and extended by the Locarno example.

There was also a secondary process at work. As Mansfield and Snyder argue, as well as the problem of displaced elites trying to regain power by exploiting nationalist feelings, new elites may also use nationalism in self-defence and as a means of mobilising new allies.Footnote ⁵⁹ A process of this kind can be seen in the Weimar Republic. Governments used foreign policy as a way of maintaining support from parties which were divided by their domestic agendas but agreed on the priority of revision of the Versailles Treaty. Foreign policy thus acted as a bridge which extended from the Social Democrats (SPD) on the left to the right of centre German People's Party (DVP) led by Stresemann.Footnote ⁶⁰ That provided a majority for a consistent foreign policy even when the SPD was out of government from 1924 to 1928. However, this foreign policy was distinct from that of the right wing nationalists. It appealed to patriotism but it was a policy of peaceful revision of the Treaty. So long as the policy was seen to be successful, it became a means – contrary to the Mansfield and Snyder argument – of stabilising democracy as well as peace and it enjoyed majority support. That synergy, however, weakened as the policy appeared to be reaching the limits of what it could achieve even before the depression took hold. One of the essential partners in Republican government, the Catholic Centre Party, was already critical of what its spokesman called ‘the undeniable failures and the undeniable stagnation of German foreign policy’ in the Reichstag debates of 1928.Footnote ⁶¹ Stresemann was able to maintain the course until his death in October 1929 by emphasising the priority of securing agreements on reparations and Rhineland evacuation at the Hague Conference in 1929. Once that goal had been achieved, however, and as the electoral tide moved to the right under the impact of the depression, his policy became increasingly contested and the nationalism of the radical right began to set the agenda in the way in which Mansfield and Snyder suggest.

There is a further important consideration for the connection between democracy and peace. The First World War had ended in German defeat and revolution. Republican governments in the 1920s were committed to peaceful revision, partly from conviction after the enormity of the First World War, and partly because they knew that Germany was in no position to fight another war. However, beyond these two considerations, there was also the danger that another war would again polarise German society, ending in civil war and dictatorship whether of the right or the left. Either way democracy would be destroyed. The policy of peaceful revision became thus for Stresemann not only a requirement of Germany's external relations, nor only a way to manage coalition government; it was also in his view a condition for the survival of democracy itself. To a student audience in 1926 he argued that even a successful war, which was in any case impossible, would not bring stability: only an era of European peace would allow Germany to heal the wounds that the war had inflicted. He later predicted that the course adopted by the new extreme leader of the German National People's Party from 1928, Alfred Hugenberg, would lead to civil war.Footnote ⁶² The commitment to peace was on this view not simply a necessity imposed on Weimar Germany from outside but also a precondition of its most basic need for stability in the process of democratisation. This represents therefore an important counter-example to the idea that in new democracies leaders may adopt bellicose foreign policies to legitimise the domestic order.Footnote ⁶³

Epilogue

The way the Locarno détente ended is also of interest in assessing how far it corresponded to a democratic peace. The early death of Stresemann in October 1929 removed the politician who had done most in Germany to bring it about, a reminder of the roles of both agency and contingency in historical events. But even Stresemann in full health would have found his freedom of manoeuvre constrained by the growth of radical nationalism. The rise of the Nazi Party from 1930–1932 polarised the electorate between the Socialist-Communist and right-wing nationalist camps with only the Catholic Centre Party retaining a significant position between the two. The minority government of the Centre Party Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, was still committed to peaceful revision. It adopted deflation as its economic strategy hoping to speed the cancellation of reparations and it also looked for other concessions including recognition of Germany's right to be treated equally in the League of Nations Disarmament Conference. It was not, however, prepared to respond positively to Briand's plan for European Union. Brüning spoke in cabinet of Germany's need for ‘sufficient, natural living space’ and his government promoted an alternative scheme for an Austro-German customs union.Footnote ⁶⁴ That was an implied threat to Austria's status as an independent state, which had been laid down by the Versailles Treaty. As such it was a breach of the détente, an attempt to bring about a significant change in Europe without prior consultation with France or Britain. In fact, the proposal had to be abandoned as the price of international loans to stave off the banking crisis which engulfed Austria at the same time and spread to Germany. But it was evidence of a change of direction in German foreign policy towards unilateralism and away from the conventions of the democratic peace that had developed since Locarno.

That did not yet mean war. No one in cabinet and no responsible military leader thought that Germany was in a position to launch a war. However, in 1932 a new rearmament programme was adopted for a 21 division field army by 1938.Footnote ⁶⁵ Its rationale was still defence on the eastern frontier but the possibility of using it for offence under favourable international conditions was not ruled out among military planners. German governments were still aware of their highly constrained options but there had been a subtle change from the policy of détente to a more competitive relationship. The values of the democratic peace were weakened by the perception that peaceful revision was no longer delivering results, by the depression which reinforced the view that Germany could not rely on the international economy but needed its own empire or ‘living space’ and by the electoral shift to the right with the Nazis and their Nationalist allies taking over 40 per cent of the vote in July 1932. Some 36 per cent continued to vote for the Communists or Social Democrats (though compared to the 1928 elections the Communists gained 4 per cent and the Social Democrats lost 8 per cent), and the Catholic vote remained steady at about 16 per cent. A majority therefore continued to reject the Nazi dominated right but neither democracy nor peace could be safe against 40 per cent of the electorate.Footnote ⁶⁶

The final act of the détente when Hitler ordered the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in direct violation of the Locarno Pact in March 1936 is also of interest. Hitler's action is a clear example of the violation of international law and the willingness to risk war which as democratic peace theory predicts are more likely to characterise dictatorships than democracies.Footnote ⁶⁷ Mussolini, supposedly with Britain one of the guarantors of the Pact, sided with Germany, again confirming the theory. The reaction of the democracies, France and Belgium directly affected and Britain a guarantor, was weak, again supporting the idea that democracies may be in general war averse – not only towards other democracies.Footnote ⁶⁸

The specific influences on the democracies' decisions are also of interest for the theory. The failure of the Ruhr occupation in 1923 acted as a warning from recent history of the difficulty of maintaining an occupation of foreign territory. The French had already been developing a way of defending the frontier through the Maginot Line instead of the Rhineland occupation.Footnote ⁶⁹ The British government had also been considering an alternative, namely allowing Germany to remilitarise the Rhineland in return for an agreement to limit German air power. When the crisis broke there was a strong feeling in Britain that public opinion would not support military action – in the words of the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden's taxi driver ‘I suppose Jerry can do what he likes in his own back garden, can't he?’Footnote ⁷⁰ Instead of enforcing the Locarno Pact the British Government decided to manage the crisis by taking up Hitler's spurious suggestions for alternatives to Locarno, including that Germany might rejoin the League of Nations (which it had left in October 1933 in protest against the failure of the Disarmament Conference to meet its demands).Footnote ⁷¹ The desire to maintain public confidence that peace would be preserved was stronger than the will to uphold the Pact. The French government was less persuaded of the utility of such an approach but it was a caretaker government awaiting elections; it was divided, unprepared to act alone and after some prevarication acquiesced in the British lead. The Belgian government also favoured a negotiated solution and looked to Britain to provide a lead; subsequently, after the ruling coalition had been unsettled by losses to extreme parties in elections in May, Belgium withdrew from its Locarno commitments to a policy of independence and neutrality.Footnote ⁷² In all the democracies the will to peace remained stronger than suspicion and dislike of the Hitler regime. Even in Germany where Hitler's coup was seen as a triumph that was partly because it was accomplished peacefully. There is good evidence that German public opinion too was divided and fearful at the prospect of war.Footnote ⁷³ Responding to this mood at home and abroad, Hitler was careful to present himself as committed to peace. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the democracies turned from Locarno to appeasement, essentially an attempt to maintain the Locarno détente without Locarno, to maintain a democratic peace with a non-democratic regime.