Locarno Treaties - Background

Background

The Locarno discussion arose from exchanges of notes between the British Empire, France and Germany over the summer of 1925 following German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann's 9 February proposal for a reciprocal of his country's western frontiers as established under the unfavourable 1919 Treaty of Versailles, as a means of facilitating Germany's diplomatic rehabilitation among the Western Powers.

At least one of the main reasons Britain promoted the Locarno Pact of 1925, besides to promote Franco-German reconciliation, was because of the understanding that if Franco-German relations improved, France would gradually abandon the Cordon sanitaire, as the French alliance system in Eastern Europe was known between the wars. Once France had abandoned its allies in Eastern Europe, thereby creating a situation where the Poles and Czechoslovaks having no Great Power to protect them from Germany, would be forced to adjust to German demands, and hence in the British viewpoint would peacefully hand over the territories claimed by Germany such as the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor, and the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland). In this way, promoting territorial revisionism in Eastern Europe in Germany’s favor was one of the principal British objects of Locarno, making Locarno an early instance of appeasement.

However, the treaty was, in some ways, a bluff by Austen Chamberlain. He announced publicly that Britain's defensive frontier was no longer the English Channel but on the Rhine. However, British Chiefs of Staff privately informed him that Britain did not have sufficient military power to back up the treaty.