The peace settlement at the end of World War I had tried
to fulfill the nineteenth-century dream of nationalism by
creating new boundaries and new states. From the outset,
however, the settlement had left nations unhappy. Conflicts
over disputed border regions between Germany and
Poland, Poland and Lithuania, Poland and Czechoslovakia,
Austria and Hungary, and Italy and Yugoslavia poisoned
mutual relations in eastern Europe for years. Many
Germans viewed the peace of Versailles as a dictated
peace and vowed to seek its revision.
To its supporters, the League of Nations was the place
to resolve such problems. The League, however, proved
ineffectual in maintaining the peace. The failure of the
United States to join the League (partially a consequence
of public disillusionment with disputes at the Versailles
conference) undermined the effectiveness of the League
right from the start. Moreover, the League could use only
economic sanctions to halt aggression. The French attempt
to strengthen the League’s effectiveness as an instrument
of collective security by creating a peacekeeping
force was rejected by nations that feared giving up any of
their sovereignty to a larger international body.
The weakness of the League of Nations and the failure
of both the United States and Great Britain to honor
their defensive military alliances with France led the latter
to insist on a strict enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles.
This tough policy toward Germany began with the
issue of reparations—the payments that the Germans
were supposed to make to compensate for the “damage
done to the civilian population of the Allied and Associated
Powers and to their property,” as the treaty asserted.
In April 1921, the Allied Reparations Commission
settled on a sum of 132 billion marks ($33 billion)
for German reparations, payable in annual installments
of 2.5 billion (gold) marks. Allied threats to occupy the
Ruhr valley, Germany’s chief industrial and mining center,
induced the new German republic to accept the reparations
settlement and to make its first payment in 1921.
By the following year, however, facing rising inflation,
domestic turmoil, and lack of revenues because of low
tax rates, the German government announced that it was
unable to pay more. Outraged by what they considered to
be Germany’s violation of one aspect of the peace settlement,
the French government sent troops to occupy the
Ruhr valley. If the Germans would not pay reparations,
the French would collect reparations in kind by operating
and using the Ruhr mines and factories.
French occupation of the Ruhr seriously undermined
the fragile German economy. The German government
adopted a policy of passive resistance to French occupation
that was largely financed by printing more paper
money, thus intensifying the inflationary pressures that
had already begun at the end of the war. The German
mark became worthless. Economic disaster fueled political
upheavals as Communists staged uprisings in October
and Adolf Hitler’s band of Nazis attempted to seize
power in Munich in 1923. The following year, a new conference
of experts was convened to reassess the reparations
problem.
The formation of liberal-socialist governments in both
Great Britain and France opened the door to conciliatory
approaches to Germany and the reparations problem. At
the same time, a new German government led by Gustav
Stresemann (1878–1929) ended the policy of passive resistance
and committed Germany to carry out the provisions
of the Versailles Treaty while seeking a new settlement
of the reparations question.
In August 1924, an international commission produced
a new plan for reparations. Named the Dawes Plan
after the American banker who chaired the commission,
it reduced reparations and stabilized Germany’s payments
on the basis of its ability to pay. The Dawes Plan also
granted an initial $200 million loan for German recovery,
which opened the door to heavy American investments
in Europe that helped create a new era of European prosperity
between 1924 and 1929.
A new approach to European diplomacy accompanied
the new economic stability. A spirit of international
cooperation was fostered by the foreign ministers of
Germany and France, Gustav Stresemann and Aristide
Briand (1862–1932), who concluded the Treaty of Locarno
in 1925. This treaty guaranteed Germany’s new
western borders with France and Belgium. Although Germany’s
new eastern borders with Poland were conspicuously
absent from the agreement, the Locarno pact was
viewed by many as the beginning of a new era of European
peace. On the day after the pact was concluded, the
headline in the New York Times read “France and Germany
Ban War Forever,” and the London Times declared
“Peace at Last.” 3
Germany’s entry into the League of Nations in March
1926 soon reinforced the spirit of conciliation engendered
at Locarno. Two years later, similar optimistic attitudes
prevailed in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, drafted by
U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign
Minister Briand. Sixty-three nations signed this accord,
in which they pledged “to renounce war as an instrument
of national policy.” Nothing was said, however,
about what would be done if anyone violated the treaty.
The spirit of Locarno was based on little real substance.
Germany lacked the military power to alter its
western borders even if it wanted to. Pious promises to renounce
war without mechanisms to enforce them were
virtually worthless. And the issue of disarmament soon
proved that even the spirit of Locarno could not bring
nations to cut back on their weapons. The League of Nations
Covenant had recommended the “reduction of
national armaments to the lowest point consistent with
national safety.” Numerous disarmament conferences,
however, failed to achieve anything substantial as states
proved unwilling to trust their security to anyone but
their own military forces. By the time the World Disarmament
Conference finally met in Geneva in 1932, the
issue was already dead.
World History
