LOCARNO IN DIPLOMACY 'The Great War ended in November 1918. The Great Peace did not begin until Oct. 1925.' Letter from Lord ~four to Austen Chamberlain, 16 December, 1925
Locamo once symbolised detente in Europe. The presence in October 1925 of leading statesmen from seven European countries in the Swiss lakeside resort and the accords which resulted from their deliberations seemed to represent a shift away from an uneasy period of confrontation, in which Franco-German relations had been dominated by differences and disputes arising from the application of the Treaty of Versailles, towards an era in which the politicians and diplomats of western Europe were more actively engaged in promoting reconciliation and reconstruction. France's quest for security and Germany's pursuit of treaty revision appeared all too briefly to coalesce. The spirit of Locamo, subsequently celebrated in the formal signing of the Conference treaties in London, became synonymous with international cooperation and the pursuit of what a fonner British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, described as the 'general appeasement of Europe'--a term then understood as applying, not to the buying off of would-be aggressors with territorial and other concessions, but to the removal of potential sources of conflict through negotiation and the promotion of peaceful change. Of the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, the diplomatic instrument with which the Conference is chiefly associated, the historian A.J.P. Taylor aptly observed: 'Its signature ended the first World War; its repudiation eleven years later marked the prelude to the second.'
Guarantees and Security, 1919-24 'The aim of British foreign 'policy since the aimistice has been to reconcile and medi.ate ... aDd the Imga- Europe coritinues in a ,state of economic' nightmare, dominated by.the ftuctuatims'offear and revenge, the more our bus~ess .suffi:rs.' , Foreign Office meinorandmn, 9 May, 1922
The full significance of the Locamo Conference can only be appreciated in the context of the peace settlement negotiated six years earlier in Paris. French participation in a victorious military alliance had then allowed France the opportunity to reverse some of the consequences of Prussia's triumph in 187071. And with their long-term security in mind, the French had endeavoured to right what they perceived as a latent imbalance of power between themselves and a defeated, but more populous and prosperous, Germany. They sought a treaty which would reduce Germany's size and resources, limit its capacity to wage or threaten war, and provide France with the means both to enforce the new settlement and to ensure that any future Franco-Gennan war would be fought on German rather than French soil. At the same time the French tried to
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