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Locarno Pact: The Treaty that Won the Nobel Peace Prize

The Locarno Pact, actually a group of seven treaties (hence its other name: the Locarno Treaties), was signed on 1 December 1925 with the aim that peace continued in Europe despite the German government's disapproval of the Treaty of Versailles, which formally concluded the First World War (1914-18). The pact is named after the Swiss town of Locarno, where the delegates from seven European nations met.

The main points covered by the Locarno Pact included treaties of mutual guarantee to protect existing borders in Western Europe and a promise both not to use war as a tool of foreign policy and to resolve disputes by diplomacy. Significantly, the treaties did not resolve the issue of Germany's eastern borders, particularly with Poland. The Locarno Pact did ensure peace for 11 years, but it was irreversibly broken when Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, invaded the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936, a breach that was followed by a series of other more serious acts of aggression, which eventually led to the Second World War in 1939.

The Treaty of Versailles

Germany lost WWI, and the Paris Peace Conference, which drew up the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, decided its new borders. The treaty had also stated that Germany was to blame for the war, must make reparations to the victors, and its armed forces would be restricted both in numbers and in the types of weapons it could have. There had been wide public outrage in Germany at the terms of the Versailles treaty, but by the 1920s, this had died down, and the only simmering point of real discontent was Germany's redrawn borders.

Germany had been obliged to give back to France the regions of Alsace and Lorraine, it lost control of coal-rich Saar region and Danzig (Gdańsk), and the Rhineland was demilitarised. Belgium received Eupen-Malmedy, and Denmark gained Northern Schleswig. Germany lost all of its colonies. The issues of most contention from a German point of view were Poland's gain of the industrial region of Upper Silesia and a corridor of territory that led to the Baltic coast (the 'Polish Corridor'). This corridor cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany. In total, the Allies had shrunk German territory by around 13% compared to its pre-war state.

To settle these issues, several delegations of European states met in the Swiss lakeside town of Locarno in 1925. Germany no longer had a monarchy (ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II had shouldered much of the blame for WWI as an inveterate warmonger) but was then a constitutional republic, its economy was recovering, and it was paying its war reparations. Now, it seemed to WWI's victors, was the time to show a little leniency over what many regarded as the rather too harsh Treaty of Versailles.

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