One hundred years ago in Locarno, Switzerland, negotiations concluded that were formalized in the so-called Locarno Pact. These were a series of agreements of such significance that they gave their name to the spirit of concord that came to animate inter-European relations in the latter half of the 1920s, contributing to the building of an encouraging expectation of peace, which subsequent events confirmed as illusory.

The Locarno Pact, signed by Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy, is set against the turbulent state of relations between European powers, primarily between France and Germany following World War I, due to the harsh provisions that the Treaty of Versailles had imposed on the already defunct Second Reich.

The fragile Weimar Republic, led by Gustav Stresemann for a short time, seemed to understand—surely in terms of Realpolitik—the need to approach France, to accept its demands, and to re-establish Germany as a negotiating partner within the European powers. As a digression, it is sufficient to recall that a similar path, with greater success, had been taken just over 100 years earlier by the shrewd Talleyrand to reposition France, defeated after the Napoleonic Wars, a state that only 3 years after Waterloo already occupied its place within the European Pentarchy that guided the destinies of the Concert of Europe for decades.

Returning to the Roaring Twenties, and on the French side, the return of Aristide Briand to the Quai d'Orsay marked a change in attitude compared to the previous administration, which clearly also resulted in an intention to get closer to their former enemy.

In this regard, the issue of war reparations was central. Germany's difficulties in honoring the commitments (read: impositions) of Versailles and subsequent conferences regarding reparations disrupted the entire international payment system, affecting its main creditors, primarily France and Great Britain, but also the latter two's major creditor, the United States, which saw the collection of war debts threatened by Germany's non-compliance.

Precisely the notice from Berlin regarding the impossibility of paying the amount owed led France and Belgium to occupy the German Ruhr region in January 1923, and to seize the revenues from the production of that crucial German industrial zone. This event shows how, despite the end of the great war in 1918, its consequences continued to condition the relationship between states, and also hinted at the differences that existed between France, on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxon powers, on the other, regarding the treatment to be given to Germany, which by 1922 had already returned to pre-1914 industrial production levels.

As agreed in the Swiss city of Locarno in October 1925, and formalized in London on December 1st of that year, Germany's western borders, meaning those it shared with France and Belgium, were finalized. These borders had undergone adjustments due to the Treaty of Versailles, especially regarding the symbolic value – and not so much – that the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine held for France, territories that had been seized by Prussia as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. This western border had the peculiarity that the Rhineland region had become a demilitarized zone after Versailles, a safeguard that France had demanded within the framework of those peace ‘negotiations’.

Following this article, these three concerned states mutually commit not to attack or invade each other's territories, and furthermore, to resort to peaceful means to settle their differences and to submit them to the Council of the League of Nations should they be unable to resolve them by those means.

The Treaties of Locarno, designed to ensure the maintenance of peace, and is in conformity with the Covenant of the League of Nations,¹ is completed with separate arbitration agreements between Germany and Belgium, Germany and France, Germany and Poland, and Germany and Czechoslovakia.

The momentum for peace that the Locarno Pact and its spirit helped create was underpinned by other legal instruments and political gestures or actions, such as the Briand-Kellogg Pact, which for the first time outlawed the use of war as a means of settling differences between states.² , the withdrawal of France from the Ruhr, and Germany's own admission to the League of Nations in 1926, which confirmed its exit from the ostracism it had endured at the end of the Great War. The correlation between these aforementioned events and the attempts to resolve or unblock the issue of reparations owed by Germany through separate refinancing plans led by the United States (the Dawes and Young Plans), which aimed to help revitalize the war debt and reparations payment system, should not be overlooked.

The loose end left unresolved by Locarno, namely the status of Germany's eastern borders, was precisely the gap through which Nazism expanded and which lit the fuse for another world war. These eastern borders, defined according to Versailles, were successively violated by the Third Reich starting in 1938, to be used as an object of negotiation in the Nazi-Soviet pact that defined a (new) division of Poland, which definitively shifted the post-1945 Polish eastern border, coinciding with the line proposed by Lord Curzon in 1920. Applying something akin to Archimedes' principle, history presents itself to us again, even when it seems submerged, in this case, in the depths of time.

The economic and political events of the 1930s shook the foundations of democratic institutions that had attempted to gain strength in the previous decade. The wave of totalitarianism and military expansionism challenged the League of Nations, exposing it as ineffectual and paralyzed, thereby undermining the illusion of collective security that the Treaty of Locarno had inaugurated.

100 years later, the circularity of history, or rather, the realization that the human race learns little from its mistakes, places us back in a state where the community is once again normalizing the drift that began to cast a shadow over the world in the 1930s. The rise of challenges to democratic institutions and their value, the growth of long-standing and more recent populisms, with the identification of “scapegoats,” the crossing of once-red lines, and surely the absence of leaders up to these challenges, drag us back to that landscape which left little room for optimism.

After the conclusion of the short 20th century (according to Hobsbawm), international relations post-1991 did not prove to have been steered by the coordinates that Locarno and so many other pacts tried unsuccessfully to impose.