The Locarno Treaties and the Transformation of International Politics

0:17 Today, we are commemorating a moment in history that still resonates a century later, the Locarno Treatise of 1925, which are actually held in the Archives here at Geneva. This October, Switzerland and Europe are marking the centenary of those negotiations, held in a small Swiss town on Lake Maggiore, a moment that came to be known as the Spirit of Locarno.

0:37 It was hailed at the time as a turning point for reconciliation and peace in Europe after the trauma of the First World War. Yet the peace that followed was never truly finished, an argument that our special guest today highlighted in the title of his first of a trilogy of works. In this episode, we'll be discovering more about the Lucano Treaties in a much broader perspective.

1:00 Patrick O'Cohrs is Professor of International History at the University of Florence and is the author of The Unfinished Peace After World War I, which he followed with a second book, The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics. which won the 2023 Prose Award in World History.

1:19 A third and final volume on the transformation of the modern Atlantic and global order, which will cover the second half of the long 20th century, is on the way. So, Professor Cohrs, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. We're delighted that you joined us and joined us now at the very time when we're about to commemorate the Locarno Treaties.

1:45 We've mentioned your series of books, and I wondered whether we could start with you explaining a little bit more about what you mean by the long 20th century and why it's important to take this long periodization. Yes. Well, I think the underlying idea has been to try to see how can we best understand the great transformations that really changed the world, also the international system, ideas about diplomacy and international politics in the 20th century.

2:18 And for a long time, there's been quite a dominant interpretation of the short 20th century. Eric Hobsbawm proposed it, and it's very much centered around the Cold War. And everything seems to sort of culminate in the Cold War. This short 20th century would start in 1917 and then end in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union.

2:39 And I thought that this is an interesting framework, but to understand the origins of the great wars, the great transformations of the 20th century, we need to look at an even bigger picture. And so I thought, when would the long 20th century that I envisage begin? It begins in the era of beginning high imperialism, when really two globalizations are beginning to transform the world.

3:06 That of capitalist competition that Karl Marx and others were looking at, but also especially what we might call the globalization of power politics, which leads to the emergence of very mobilized power states in Europe, the United States rising, also Japan unifying in a new way in the 1860s, roughly.

3:30 And these are the processes that lead to all kinds of global changes that unfortunately also entail the formation of antagonistic alliances and the constellation that leads us into the First World War. So then this will be the beginning of it. So to explain why was there this world war and how far could one then build?

3:59 And this is the big task of the long 20th century, a legitimate and functioning world order for this highly dynamic and mobilized world. And in my view, this leads us to consider the big conflicts of the 20th century, but also the kind of learning that went on to try to cope with war, the economic, the political, the social problems that went with them.

4:25 And the great crises like the Great Depression and others. And so I see the long 20th century as a process in which this was then done in a more ambitious way after the Second World War, but also under the constraints of the Cold War. So we've never had then an international order for all the world, but rather a division between a Euro-Atlantic order based on NATO and the Marshall Plan, a more communist kind of order, quote-unquote, in the Soviet sphere, and then the global Cold War that scholars like Odd Arne Westad and others have shown us.

5:03 Nonetheless, after 1989, the great hope was that through the UN and with other sort of ways, we might now finally form and build a world order for one world. And as we have seen, we might now be at the end of those hopes and the need to look again at what kind of more destructive impulses have also been with us in the long 20th century.

5:30 So this might be the end of this long 20th century of going from crisis to new order, or it might be the time when we can renew international order. And we might talk about the question what we might learn from the Locarno process to this end. Yes. Absolutely. And it's just such a fascinating global perspective that you bring to this.

5:58 It really is quite monumental. And yeah, I'm so also glad that you mentioned Hobsbawm, because I'd remembered from school, I think, you know, he'd spoken about the 19th century as a long one. You're really bringing a new perspective here. And it's absolutely fascinating, I find, this framework that you bring as the 20th century as a learning process, around also finding legitimate political processes through which international order is transformed or was transformed.

6:30 I believe at one point you write that the First World War was a sort of crucible of the long 20th century, both for the transatlantic and world order. Could you explain a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, one might say that on the eve of the Great War, as it came to be known, you had sort of prevailing ideas of order, of hierarchy that were very hierarchical indeed.

6:59 The idea that there was something like a civilizational Darwinism going on, where the great powers, the so-called most civilized powers, had certain rules that only applied to them. And anyone who was not part of their club, and Japan was going into this club, the European powers were still dominating it, and the United States was sort of a new aspiring world power, would be sort of dominated in different forms or outright colonized.

7:30 This applied to the very malfunctioning Chinese empire, of course, applied to the peoples and territories of Africa and elsewhere. So you have these great empires, so-called imperial systems emerging, but there is a strict hierarchy and clearly there are not rules for one world in 1914. But there is a great sort of deal of confidence that this can be perpetuated and that the best way to preserve peace is to have a functioning somehow balance of power between different military states and alliances.

8:05 And these ideas are blown up by the First World War. So in 1914, there is no mechanism akin to what still had existed in the earlier 19th century, the so-called Congress of Vienna system with a European concert where the powers at least were trying to resolve conflicts without going to war, without military means.

8:28 This concept was still mentioned by the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1914 as a mechanism to solve the Balkan and spiraling crisis, the July Crisis. But it had really been hollowed out. So it could not be used anymore. At the same time, before the First World War, you had many liberals but also socialists who were warning that these kinds of power politics, strongmen power politics, would carry great dangers of ending in a massive war whose consequences nobody could foresee.

9:05 And they were proposing something like a League of Nations or other, a new world order of socialist states. These ideas had emerged, but only through the catastrophe of the war did they gain new currency. So they were now championed by many activists, also transnational associations. League of Nations Union and others.

9:27 And they were eventually also espoused by leading policy and decision makers like Woodrow Wilson famously, also Lloyd George and others. So in this sense, the First World War is a big, also a political and ideological war, which opened up, seemed to open up new possibilities of really reforming the international order.

9:49 At the same time, though, it's still a very hierarchical period. So we might say, for whom were the new ideas of the League of Nations, of national sovereignty, of rights in the international sphere? To whom were they really applying? Who was deemed in a position to determine their own fate, self-determination?

10:12 And all of these actors from the West, especially Wilson, had very hierarchical, also patronizing views of who was ready for this and who wasn't. This was criticized at the time by the young Gandhi and others, saying, well, it would be nice to have universal self-determination, but this has not happened yet.

10:32 Nonetheless, the war ended the former kind of dominance of the European powers on a global stage. And of course, it shattered the entire European international system. At the same time, it brought up the United States as a power that was now playing a leading role in determining the peace after this great war, especially after it had entered it in 1917.

10:57 But it was very unprepared for it. And so was Wilson. So, as I see it, the First World War is a catalyst for intense learning, but also it shows the limits of what could be learned in that period. And this, of course, we then see, especially at the Paris Peace Conference. And if I may just maybe add a thought on that.

11:22 So this is the most ambitious, the most intensive peace and ordering process in modern history. So the whole world was supposed to be reordered under very complex circumstances, with the victors congregating with the neutrals and many others, but also facing gigantic expectations. So the idea that after this gruesome war, you could make a peace to end all war, to banish war, to democratize, to liberalize, and to do this on a global scale.

11:57 These were expectations that had been sort of nourished by the rhetoric of Wilson and of others. Now they had to face gigantic tasks of ordering, what to do with the defeated powers, the German Empire that was now undergoing a change becoming the Weimar Republic and wanted to have a say and a voice in this process.

12:19 If we think of Eastern and Central Europe, where we formerly had the empire, especially the Austro-Hungarian empire, now collapsed. The Russian empire collapsed. Civil war in Russia. Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the move, also demanding a radically new order. So this is really part of this wider crucible, one could say, in which the first attempt, in my view, was made to create a more modern international order with a meaningful role also for the American Republic.

12:52 Nonetheless, this could only be accomplished in a very limited way. In a limited way. And we might talk a little bit about what the consequences of this unfinished peacemaking of 1919 have to do with the Locarno Treaties, obviously, which come after that. You really bring it alive very well. And it's very exciting listening to you about all these ideas forming in this crucible.

13:22 I wondered, on a more almost personal level of a learning process, your first book came out in 2006, I think was published. And I wondered, since you began writing, how your conception of this long century has evolved for you over the past couple of decades, almost, that you've been, couple of decades that you have been writing.

13:48 That's a big question. And I should begin by saying that when I started writing about what the book that then became the unfinished piece, I didn't have the conception of a long 20th century. I found very interesting Hobsbawm, also the Jürgen Osterhammel's conception of a long 19th century from the revolutions of the French and the American all the way towards the First World War.

14:10 But I was already very interested in trying to understand what possibilities there were to create a new world order after a major war. So how far catastrophe and learning from crisis can really engender deeper learning or where these become, where's the difference between just rhetoric and claiming that you learn something while really persisting with the old ways, the old hierarchical ideas.

14:40 And originally I had clearly a more Euro, I would say Eurocentric and Transatlantocentric view, one could say. I was very interested in seeing, trying to understand how the new presence of this very unexperienced American power with all its financial and political power and ideas had an impact in Europe and how different actors adapted.

15:07 And the other very underlying question is that what makes for a durable and also legitimate international system and peace? If we talk about a modern peace, what does it take? What does it require? And so... Out of this grew an engagement with the idea that peace can be begun and order can be first begun to be established at peace conferences right after massive wars.

15:41 But because these wars engender so many changes, there's so much sacrifice, propaganda, heightened nationalism, all kinds of forces that don't make for reconciliation, don't make for peace, but rather for the opposite, for an ongoing war of some kind. And so I began to think about longer term ordering and peacemaking processes that can happen after wars.

16:11 And so this led me to my interest in the 1920s as a decade which has long been seen as one of illusions. Because we see it through the prism of the 1930s and think whatever was done there, it was bound to fail. Hitler was bound to rise. This is the thesis of the so-called 30 years war of the 20th century.

16:33 It's an ongoing struggle with this especially German problem at the center. I didn't think that this was a very illuminating way. It's a very deterministic conception. And if one looks more closely. Especially at the advances made in the 1920s, there are many ideas. The League of Nations, new ideas for peaceful settlement, minority rights protection, all kinds of things that become ever more important.

16:57 And difficult to realize that come out of this period of the 1920s so beyond that i think the interest i think for a historian can be if you want to understand the bigger picture how big does it have to be yeah and so in my in my last book on the new atlantic order i do go back also well all the way to antiquity sometimes to think about well just you know when did people even in the time of Thucydides first think about different ways of making peace.

17:29 And this led me then to this idea of the long 20th century that I explained earlier, where I think, you know, if you want to understand the longer term, the longue durée processes, also changes in mentality or real learning, you cannot focus on moments or crises. They reveal something, but you have to understand the bigger context.

17:55 So this was of ever greater interest to me. And then from then onwards, if you ask, so when were certain lessons learned? When was something actually realized? You, for example, try to understand what did the makers of the League of Nations try to learn from the mistakes before 1914? And what did then those who were trying to set up the United Nations, especially during the Second World War and then thereafter, how far did they try to.

18:25 Understand not just the League of Nations and its problems, but also the wider problems of order that the UN had to address in a more comprehensive way. We might think, for example, about human rights issues. More individual human rights issues, but also economic and social ideas that are connected with the Bretton Woods system or the idea that there should be something like an economic council within the UN.

18:50 Because one had seen the devastating consequences of the Great Depression that didn't only lead to unemployment and economic hardship, but also to the rise of fascists, national socialists, militarists, and what we might now especially call populist forces that were promising a way out of the mess. No one more, unfortunately, persuasively than Hitler in the constellation, But which attacked directly the principles of the League of Nations.

19:22 Anything like a common liberal rules for the world also attacked the very future of democracy, saying that democracy was no longer capable of dealing with the big problems of modernity. And it seems to me that these questions still ring very true and relevant nowadays. And so this then, the final interest, and this is the book I'm working on now, is to go from the 1930s to especially the post-Second World War era, the making of, let's say, the Pax Atlantica, as I describe it, within NATO and the Marshall Plan, but also new ways of trying to organize regional order in East Asia.

20:03 Of course, the UN with all its achievements, but also structural problems in the era of the Cold War and thereafter. And so this is now, this is my interest that's carried me to the other end of the long 20th century. But that's still a way to go. I really do see with you the need for this very big picture and just how complex it all is.

20:28 I would also have to say that your book is also very big. Well, it had to be to give some. I also want to try to do justice to all the different voices. If you try not just to look at the so-called big decision makers, Wilson and Lloyd George and Kenneth Saul, but also advisors, others who in civil society are trying to have an impact on international relations.

20:55 There are many strands and you have to try to put it all in the big picture, which can be sometimes a bit daunting, yes. It certainly is. It certainly is. Let's turn back to Locarno and the commemorations that are happening and you will be speaking there. For our listeners, could you just tell us a little bit about the relevance of the Locarno Treatise and what happened?

21:20 What was at stake? Who were the main actors in this? Yeah, well, in short, a lot was at stake. I go so far as to call the Locarno Treaties the first real European peace settlement, After the Great War, after the First World War, because in many ways, it was the first settlement negotiated, not just among the victors of that war, the Western powers and their allies, but between the victors and the vanquished.

21:51 And at that, between representatives of challenged but democratic states and societies, Britain and France, with all the limitations, no voting rights yet for women in France and so on. These are emerging democracies, but also the Weimar Republic. And this was a very complex and necessary thing because in many ways, both the First World War and the Paris Peace Settlement, the Versailles Treaty.

22:21 They had left a lot of problems and conflicts that were unresolved and that threatened to cast Europe again and with it the world potentially into a new major conflict. The Versailles settlement had many interesting features but in the end it was an imposed victor's peace it was not negotiated with the representatives of the fledgling Weimar Republic Brocktof, Ranzo and then foreign minister they basically just had to accept whatever the victors decreed and this led to a lack of legitimacy of this peace settlement in Germany or equally in Hungary among the defeated powers a very dangerous consequence, especially also for those that were trying to build a democracy in Germany because nationalists and then later a young agitator called Hitler could rally against the diktat,

23:19 the dictated peace and the unjust peace pursuing their propaganda. On the other hand. The war had left in the West, in Britain, well, trauma and shock. Britain had never, and the British Empire had never lost so many men, had never lost so many resources as on the fields, especially of the Western Front, but also beyond that.

23:44 And for France, this was a nightmarish war that had been won at great expense and with a lot of devastation, especially in the northeast of France. And so the search for security, security sort of for this never happening again, but also vis-a-vis the German threat, led French governments to debate between what would be the best way.

24:13 And for a long time after the war, it was seen that enforcement and just trying to limit, to contain any German power was the only and best way. But then I would say remarkable learning set in. There was a kind of post-war crisis, so-called Ruhr Crisis, when French troops occupied the main German industrial area and were really trying to force Germany to pay reparations and to exert control.

24:43 This led to almost a renewed kind of warfare-like situation in 1923. Out of this, however, the real, I would say, peacemaking after the First World War resulted. First, there was a settlement over reparations in London that was concluded in 1924. But what was still lacking was a real kind of framework for security, diplomacy and international relations that integrated both the victors, but also especially Weimar Germany, but also the new states of Eastern Europe that were recreated or newly created Poland, Czechoslovakia and others.

25:25 Now, we have three protagonists that now come onto the scene, the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, the German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, and the British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, who became something like an honest broker for this process. And so they all faced immense challenges.

25:48 They had to address certain concrete questions, namely, so after Versailles, you had a new border between France and Germany because France reclaimed Alsace and Lorraine, but it had to be accepted. It had to be made safe also by the German side, not to be a constant sort of divisive border. And of course, in Eastern Europe, we have a situation where because of the territorial reorganization, you had German minorities in the newly created states of Poland, also in the Sudeten area, and you had revisionist pressures in Germany.

26:29 So how could one deal with these questions in a common way? This was part of the core problem. And so we have different initiatives that converge here. So you have the realization of Stresemann and his advisors that one could not simply be against the West and try to wait for a new opportunity to use power or force to overturn the status quo.

27:00 But one should try to find cooperative ways of having common solutions. In France, Briand drew the lesson that France would not be in a position to enforce and to use force in perpetuity, especially when the British sort of ally that they sought was not on board with this. And from Chamberlain came the idea that one should try to resolve these issues by diplomatic means, but also to create something that he thought his predecessor, Castlereagh, had achieved after the Napoleonic Wars.

27:39 Namely to create a new kind of concert of Europe, a European concert that integrated the main powers, but also some of the smaller states and which bound them to certain rules. And these elements are then fused in the, one could say, in the agreements that were already prepared before Locarno, but then finally negotiated in this lovely spot in Switzerland.

28:06 So an agreement securing the status quo and the acceptance of Germany of the status quo in the West with France and a string of arbitration treaties. Treaties of peaceful settlement in which the Weimar German side accepted that whatever changes they would seek in Eastern Europe, they could only seek them by peaceful means.

28:30 And these were highly controversial issues. So in the political climate in Weimar, Germany, there were the nationalists who were saying, no, one could never accept this and one would always have to use whatever means available. And so it was a very difficult but also courageous act on the part of Stresemann to try to vindicate this.

28:52 For Briand, too, the idea that you, rather than containing Germany and being mistrustful of German democracy, you actually were making agreements with them, well, it had to be a courageous act. He had to make the case in the French spectrum that this was the best road forward. And for Chamberlain, there was the question, well, should Britain again play a leading role in post-war Europe?

29:21 After all the problems of the First World War, wouldn't it be better advised to concentrate on the empire and leave the mess of Europe alone? And he was, in that sense, an early Europeanist, saying it was in Britain's interest to be engaged. To set the rules rather than to deal with the consequences of misrule or conflicts erupting in Europe.

29:48 There are other actors in the wider process, also those representing the East European states. So nothing of this was easy. We might compare it to, let's say, the peace agreement brokered over Northern Ireland and so on. So you have many different interests, visions that have to be reconciled. This was the first, in my view, real negotiated peace settlement.

30:17 And it did set up something like that we might call a modern European concert, at the core of which we find Britain, France and Weimar Germany. But it was also making gestures to the neighbors in the East and other powers. And as a final point for now, it was very much interlocked with the League of Nations. So we might ask all this time, why wasn't this all done through the League of Nations?

30:46 It was there. But I think it's important to understand that the League that had been founded in 1919 was still a nucleus, was a beginning. It was a league mainly of the victors and of neutral powers. It did not yet include, for example, Weimar Germany and other defeated powers. So it could not play yet the role of being the framework, the meeting place, the negotiating framework.

31:14 This then changed because one of the consequences of Locarno was Weimar Germany's accession to the league in 1926. This did not solve everything, but this, I think, qualitatively changed the League of Nations in Europe in giving it a much more central function. It became the place where the representatives of these states met to talk about divisive issues, whatever they needed to settle, including minority issues, which was also very difficult.

31:44 Yet one of the big questions that I think we still grapple with is, how can you have effective mechanisms? So an international organization can do certain things, but sometimes you might need more flexible, more confidential ways of making diplomatic agreements. And so this was done in the 1920s through this kind of new concert.

32:10 It was using or it was seizing on the League of Nations, but it was still, it had its own validity, its own relevance within it. Yes. Absolutely. And I should mention that we do have the 1926 letter signed by Stresemann requesting the accession of Germany into the League in the archives and displayed in the museum.

32:37 That's not available at the moment, but will soon be. Yes, you explain it so well with your framework of a learning process. And I think it really does come out, all of this learning, in a very different way, the different perspectives that come together in this space. Why particularly Locarno? I mean, you've explained why not Geneva, but why Locarno?

33:06 Well, in terms of the relevance of the treaty, I mean, there was a kind of history of post-Versailles attempts at reforming the peace. There was a Genoa conference, and then Locarno is in this in 1922, but Locarno is especially important, I would say, because of the qualitative change I tried to indicate.

33:31 The big step that links Locarno, I think, with the wider history of the emergence of something like a European Union, a new framework for peace in Europe in a new global setting, is that the fundamental point would have to be that you try to create a framework which involves and integrates all the relevant parties.

33:57 Now in the 1920s, the idea that you should do that, but it also mattered of what character these states were, what their internal constitution was. There was a great hope that the advance of democracy. Of rule of law, these kinds of reforms that we find reflected in the Weimar Constitution, but also in the first constitutions of the East European states and, of course, the more established Western states, that this could overall have a peace enforcing impact.

34:32 So you would interlock a new international system with a league at its center, but also new rules applying. And you would think that this could be mutually beneficial in strengthening democracy, especially in Weimar Germany. And this, in turn, would foster a westernization, almost a Western integration of Weimar Germany and keep it away from other temptations to go communist or authoritarian, all the kinds of nightmares that we then see emerge after the Great Depression in the 1930s.

35:12 In the 1920s. This goes back to the illusion thesis. A lot of analysts looking at it later were saying, well, this was all very well, but it was so superficial and it was bound to fail. We have to realize that the time for Locarno and these new understandings and the League to take root, to show that they could do something better, actually was very limited.

35:41 We have from 1925 to 1929 and the consequences when the Great Depression was really creating such a difficult environment to pursue this further. But nonetheless, I find it very, very important to try to put ourselves in the shoes and in the minds of the actors at the time. What were their expectations? What was their freedom of action? What did they try to do?

36:09 And if you do this, there's a remarkable process of learning that goes on also after Locarno. Locano is the first instance, but then these practices of meeting in Geneva regularly. Trying to involve all the relevant parties, negotiating instead of propagandizing against one another or preparing for a new war.

36:32 This was really taking hold in the latter part of the 1920s. So there's later even a pact for perpetual peace that's being signed. So there are very, in 1928, there are still very grand expectations. But nonetheless, there's also substance to this. And this should be recognized. And by 1929, 1930, as I'm sure many people will know, this even leads Briand and Stresemann to think about something like United Europe, United States of Europe.

37:07 There are different plans being made, some more pragmatic. Stresemann's focusing on economic cooperation, still thinking, well, it might be too ambitious to think of a political, supranational framework. Work, but these ideas were being debated, not just in the governmental sphere, but also between intellectuals, activists, civil society. This is a very dynamic and fruitful period.

37:32 The young Jean Monnet and others were socialized in this period of the 1920s. And yet, of course, unfortunately, in another world war, all the devastations, other things Deeper learning processes were necessary finally to create the conditions from the late 1940s onwards to go a step further, to take steps towards what then became the European economic community and then the European community, the European Union.

38:05 There's one other aspect that I think is also important. The question, could Europeans do it on their own to create peace and order in an ever more interconnected, interdependent world? Where on the one hand, we have from the 1920s onwards, the consolidation of the Soviet Union with Stalin. But on the other, the rise of the United States as such an important economic and also political power, which in 1925 is still taking a backseat.

38:38 It wants the Europeans to sort out their own security and political problems. Then it's prepared to give economic support, but it doesn't want to make any commitments. After Wilson's defeat in the Senate, there's a new kind of isolationist feeling in that regard. And this only, of course, dramatically changed as a consequence of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War.

39:03 So the American support later through the Marshall Plan and for West European integration is qualitatively on a completely different level. And it's a very important force that Europeans have to understand that actually made European sort of progress possible. But Locarno is, I think, particularly interesting in our world as we face it now, because for Stresemann, Chamberlain, and Briand, they definitely thought they had to seize the initiative.

39:38 They could not wait for Americans or for anyone else to sort out their problems for them. And they needed to have a broader European conception. And I think this is a lesson that today's democratic leaders should take seriously. We'll talk a bit more about the rest of the world in a moment, but you've really brought alive again this sense of hope, but also the substantive things that happened there.

40:08 And we talk of, or they talked at the time even, of a spirit of Locarno. And you've talked about, you know, so much this spirit of hope that was born and the continuing learning process and the new things that were coming in, the new ways of negotiating and doing things. But at the same time, there's a paradox around Locarno and the treatise.

40:33 What would you say were really the strengths and weaknesses of it? Yeah, I think the best way of answering that is to stress how much Locarno is part of a process. So it was also called at the time the Locarno process. Again, this idea that you cannot set in stone certain agreements and then things are sorted out.

40:55 This is more about setting up certain rules and understandings and then cultivating them, abiding by them and making them come alive in some way. So the spirit of Locarno was used by critics at the time as indicating a spirit of illusion. So saying that to bank on German democracy, Germans playing by the rules was actually very dangerous because they would just do this for tactical reasons.

41:26 When they had power again and the means, they would disregard all these rules and take back their territories that they had lost in 1919 in the East and so on. There were also, of course, Stalin or the communists were ridiculing this bourgeois. Weak-kneed diplomacy of these very Western capitalist representatives pretending that they were making peace.

41:51 So these were also visions of the spirit of Lucano. But for those that were seeing it as a more hopeful beginning, I would say this is a question of real learning and mentality. So if you imagine that... Most of the actors of Locarno, let's take Stresemann and Briand, they had played very marked roles during the First World War, especially Stresemann. He was an annexationist.

42:17 He had very far-reaching war aims, was a nationalist. And so one can see with him that he really underwent a kind of reorientation process. He was questioning his earlier assumptions. He did not sort of he did not radically alter his mindset, but he thought that the only realistic way to to to create something like a new European order was through negotiation.

42:45 And and then the spirit that was instilled at Locarno is one that he, Briand and also Chamberlain, through all the difficulties with their advisors and with many others, they were actually trying to cultivate. And here we have to, I think, again, understand that this was happening in a complex, but also changing democratic environment.

43:10 If you imagine, so we are quite accustomed nowadays in the EU context to see wrangling over compromises in Brussels that somehow meet some French expectations and German and Czech and whatever is at stake. This is a kind of sort of idea and practice that we had seen before the First World War in a very almost arcane manner, where you had secret diplomacy on the whole sort of decision makers and sort of making compromises amongst themselves.

43:43 Now they had a much more difficult task. They had to find agreements that could stand between them, that were reconciling their differences on security and so on. But they also had to make them so that they could be legitimized in these domestic force fields that they were facing. So Streseman had to think of what were Briand's requirements in France, or Chamberlain's in Britain, or what were Polish representatives having to say to their constituents in Warsaw and elsewhere.

44:18 And this is also, there's a spiritual dimension to it. If you take a Trumpian approach to this, you have no empathy, you have no understanding. Yeah you, this is the opposite that's the, it's the, the absolute contrast to the spirit of Locano, yeah no, and they were all hoping that this could generate a momentum of its own.

44:43 Secondly, there is a much wider spirit, again, of hope associated with Locarno, because this, in many ways, this is the period when anything like a broader peacemaking process could begin. So if we talk about Franco-German reconciliation or wider initiatives of intellectuals, of city partnerships, all these kinds of things, they were only imaginable after a kind of overall spirit of let's try to move in a different direction could set in.

45:16 So if we are thinking about deeper peace-building initiatives of this kind. For example, also Germans looking differently at the League of Nations, not as a victor's institution, looking down on them, but as something they are a part of. This was all beginning at Locarno. It did germinate in the latter 1920s, but we must always keep in mind.

45:44 So imagine you've tried to build this new architecture, but then relatively soon thereafter, four or five years, not because of your own responsibility, but especially because of capitalist developments in the United States, you have this massive economic and political crisis, the Great Depression emerging.

46:05 It is not so surprising that this architecture was not yet robust enough. The spirit was not yet entrenched enough for them to try to stick to these rules, also in a massive crisis. Beyond that, they needed basically, and we were going to talk about the more global dimensions. One of the big tasks they had was to try to extend this European concert to a Euro-Atlantic concert because they could not deal with some of the complex reparations and economic and financial issues without an understanding with American representatives.

46:48 And here they've encountered the basic problem that the Americans had, the Republican administrations of the 1920s, they had drawn quite different lessons. They had concluded that it was very much in the interest to let the Europeans sort out the political issues and not to interfere or only very informally interfere, but to set the economic and financial sort of parameters around that.

47:14 And unfortunately, this is also something that they persisted in doing under President Hoover when the crisis escalated. So there are very few attempts at concerted common political crisis management, and this never allowed for a common approach. And so it's not surprising, again, that especially in Weimar, Germany, where democracy had just taken some route this is sort of the weakest link in this new system and so the forces you know hitler and others were then unfortunately benefiting yeah from this crisis and could attack the very principles of locano as being western and german and so on yeah but this takes us then into the into the 1930s and of course because of the 1930s the spirit of locano came to have this air of being

48:09 delusional or just wishful thinking, which it was not. You know, you've spoken so much about the capacities of the main actors, Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann in particular, to have these other perspectives, this capacity to learn, to reflect, to have empathy, to understand more deeply. And of course, Briand and Streisand were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in 1926.

48:44 So thinking about today, to what extent do you think it's important to have leaders with political vision? Well one could definitely say it's more important than ever but it's also more challenging than ever to uh to develop a vision and to to stay true to it in a in a very yeah in an environment which is so fragmented and multi-level like as the one we face today where you have yeah different kinds of visions, also manipulative visions being pursued in the so-called real world, but also, of course, in the different spheres of media that we face.

49:26 I would say that what's one of the most disconcerting developments is the lack of sort of political leaders, but also advisors sticking up for vision that I would call the vision of the achievements of the long 20th century. Which were never global enough, never universal enough. The basic idea that you try to get away from a period of hierarchy might ruling over right the strongest getting their way and no idea of common rules common understandings to fight for this and to make this into a potent vision - it's always been very demanding. So one might say it's as demanding as keeping a democracy democratic.

50:18 It is not the search for simpler solutions or the idea that you just resign and say, well, we have, it seems in this world we need more autocratic or populist ways of doing business. This is the kind of lack of counter vision that I find on the whole quite deplorable. There are exceptions, but if we think about, for example, the attitude of most European leaders vis-a-vis the Ukraine war and the relationship with the United States, this has been a real test and an opportunity where they could either show that they can concert, take responsibility.

51:03 Stand for the kinds of values that the European Union is supposed to embody, and try to make whatever is possible in terms of common arrangements with the United States. This has been done sometimes, but it's not been a very kind of continuous, sustained effort. And it is complicated because they all face, like in the 1920s, different force fields, considerations in the national sphere.

51:32 But nonetheless, this is, I think, one of the things that's been most absent and most lacking. And of course, we, well, it's not quite comparable, but imagine in 1919 and in the 1920s, first we have lots of hopes being pinned on the United States and the American president, Woodrow Wilson, to create, to be the main peacemaker for the world.

51:57 Than having to deal with the fact that this was not possible and one had to deal almost with the United States being absent in generating order. And I think we are in a phase right now where we have, as Europeans, for example, have to ask ourselves, is this an aberration that's happening in the United States or do we fundamentally have to reconsider the way in which we had conceived or for example, European as Euro-Atlantic security and overall system.

52:32 Further, how do we deal with those other regions of the world where we also, after 1989, many people had hoped that we would have the spread of, let's say, the rules and understandings of the UN, of broadly conceived Western liberal ideas. But this, what we see is a very different process. And I think this, again, it's a it's I sometimes say the deeper the crisis, the more the need, but also the potential for learning.

53:02 So if you, I think the kind of complacency that I think has characterized especially West European responses to the end of the Cold War overall and the ever sort of success story of the European Union, I mean, now is a time where a lot of these assumptions obviously have to be put on trial. And there's one overarching, I think, question from the long 20th century.

53:31 If you're interested in rules and understandings, do you really think, you know, and if you want them to be universal. Do you really, you know, have you ever done something constructive that would not give other parts of the world, other peoples, the idea that they are not quite meant on the same level, you know, that there are still a very kind of inner hierarchical thinking?

53:51 That is a very complex question, but I think this is also a period where even the word the global south, think of the global north, it tells us something about the need to have a more nuanced understanding of the diversity, the variety of actors, and to have a more global conception, a global spirit of Locarno, I might say.

54:18 Let's hope so. The opportunity there for another crucible and start of a learning process. I was also, when reading a little bit about this and talking about this, I was interested to find out that Japan had considered using the model of the Locarno Treaties for peace and security in East Asia. Tell us a little bit more about how the Locarno Treaties were perceived in East Asia and elsewhere in the world.

54:49 Yes, well, we can start with East Asia. There's not much I can say, but there was a period in the early 1920s, which we might call the more liberal period of Japanese democratization and the idea that Japan, after the First World War, when it still had acted in a very imperialist manner, seizing on possessions in China, was trying also to reorientate.

55:17 And one foreign minister, in particular Shidehara, was a representative of this new direction. And he is the one who was launching the idea of something like an East Asian Locarno. The problem or the overall challenge here was that we have new approaches also occurring in East Asia and the Pacific. But they are really pacific and global because we have the Washington Conference of 1921, 1922, where you have also United States and European powers that still have lots of interests and stakes in China, which is still under a semi-imperialist, colonialist regime, trying to find a first kind of path towards Chinese sovereignty in the future.

56:10 But we are not we are far from that yet this was also interlinked with the question of naval power relations you know Japan making agreements with Britain and the United States in particular so there was this kind of framework already for something like a new collective approach on a more. Regional scale. Imagine that up to this point, I mean, you had all these revolutionary changes in Europe, but in East Asia, you had a sustained period of Japanese imperialism affecting Korea in particular, affecting Manchuria, parts of China.

56:48 And there are the preconditions for something like an equal process of Japan interacting with its neighbors on an equal footing mentally and in terms of the political sphere is not there. It might be a first aspiration, but this is something that is not a realistic perspective. Nonetheless, the 1920s offer a first.

57:15 This is when Japanese more sort of internationalist intellectuals and also then eventually politicians are trying to deal with the fallout of the Second World War. They also look back to the 1920s as the beginning of their attempt to build a more democratic, liberal Japan within and to reorientate the relations with its neighbors.

57:40 But this is a much more drawn out process. And similar things can be said about other parts of the world. I mean, there are, you know, most, I think, very interesting is the Euro, again, Euro-Atlantic or transatlantic dimension. There were some attempts by Woodrow Wilson and others to have a Pan-American pact during the First World War, showing that the world that are in the Americas, different relations are being handled very peacefully.

58:08 But the United States was still behaving as a kind of semi-imperialist policeman. It was intervening in Mexico and other parts. So this fell apart between the rhetoric and the action. There was still a wide gap. Now, in the 1920s, you have scholars and activists like James Shotwell writing articles calling for an American Locarno and for America to gravitate to the spirit of Locarno and to the League of Nations.

58:38 So to embrace the idea that it should actually be committed to an international institution, as I mentioned before, because of the Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, this also meant that the United States never entered the League of Nations, the organization that Wilson had played such an important part in creating.

58:59 And you have more internationally minded Americans in the 1920s, they found the Council on Foreign Relations and other pressure groups trying to change the debate. But this is also still, it's only the beginning of a process. After the shockwaves of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal, you have a much more entrenched isolationism, trying to stay away from European problems, East Asian problems, and only the massive new sort of setting that comes out of the Second World War, the Pearl Harbor attack and all the rest.

59:36 That brings the change towards more committed engagement. And then the United States, of course, is absolutely the most important power if we ask, how did the UN ever come into being? We might like to think that it was a wonderful global and grassroots effort. And there were many champions of it, but the actual mechanics of how at Dumberton Oaks and then later the UN was founded, And this had much more to do with the topmost decision of the Roosevelt administration and the State Department negotiating this with Britain and also with integrating Stalin and the Soviet Union.

1:00:16 So we can still see this reflected in the architecture of the security council, obviously. So nonetheless, Locano is part of a much more drawn out process where it gave some impulses and it was seen as exemplary. But this was still a very fledgling development. So finally, how should we remember these experiments, this spirit of hope around the Locarno Treatise? Where are we in the learning process today?

1:00:52 And can history help us have a better understanding? To start at the end I do hope so but I think it is in some ways more possible but also more challenging than ever also because of the yeah the super abundance of wonderful ways in which everyone nowadays in the world can engage with history with historical topics and all the.

1:01:18 Problematic manipulated shallow nationalistic ways in which this is being done it calls for even more work to develop something like historical judgment, to tell delusory or propaganda from fact or more sustained interpretation. But I think this is possible and this is something that it's a task for educators, for professors of history, despite all the problems that are being created in our schools and in our universities for making this sometimes ever harder. to fulfill this mission.

1:01:58 As for Locarno, I do think the spirit of Locarno is something one should look at again, but even more so the very hard work that learning is. If you imagine you've been through a massive, grueling, costly war, with so many people losing their lives on all sides. You've seen a tremendous but also flawed first attempt at Paris in 1919 to create order out of all of this.

1:02:29 And you're in societies that are reeling from the impact of this war and this catastrophe. So just imagine the kind of strength and conviction it takes then to embark on a process of reaching out across the divides, the victors and the vanquished, or the different nationalisms that had clashed before, and to try to solve some concrete problems.

1:02:57 We mentioned the Franco-German border, but also especially to think about initiating a process, And maybe creating a new concert, a new mechanism that you think can prevent Europe and the world from succumbing again to another world war, to an even greater catastrophe. And this is never linear and easy.

1:03:22 So if I talk about it, all these protagonists, they had doubts. They were trying things that then didn't work out, but they stuck with it. And also when it got difficult, they stuck with it. So we should think of them not just as having a nice boat trip on Locarno and enjoying the fruits of their labor, but in constant work and engagement with one another and their publics and the wider world in the years after Locarno.

1:03:53 And I think that in that way, they set an example that we can see again, if we think of the founding generation of the European community and many others who've made it their mission time and again to work for something beyond the short term, beyond just fixing a tactical problem or staying in power.

1:04:14 And I think this is very sorely needed nowadays, where one sometimes gets the feeling that either becoming an authoritarian leader or just having the highest scoring social media profile, that that is the utmost human aspiration we should have. And I beg to disagree. And I think this is where I would invoke the spirit of Locarno for our century.

1:04:40 Professor Cohrs, thank you so much for bringing this alive in such an exciting way and for really highlighting this learning process and making it so relevant to today. Thank you so much for joining us, for your time. Thank you very much.