Pacte de l'Est
Pacte de l'Est , also Pacte oriental , ( German about Pact of the East ) was a foreign policy initiative of the Republic of France in Europe in the last decade of the interwar period before the outbreak of war . It was created in 1934 on the Quai d'Orsay under Foreign Minister Louis Barthou and failed that same year.
After the seizure of power of the Nazis in January 1933 and the German withdrawal from the League of Nations and the Geneva Disarmament Conference in October of the same year it was clear that France needed new means against the German Reich and its blatant contract revisionism to fight back.
Therefore, in April 1934, the French Foreign Ministry drew up a concept for a treaty system that could be used to control Germany. The basic idea was to create an "Eastern Locarno ", that is, a security alliance similar to this 1925 treaty system for Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to France and Germany, the Soviet Union and the states of East Central Europe from the Republic of Finland to Estonia , Lithuania and Latvia to Poland and Czechoslovakia were envisaged as partner nations . Admittedly, the admission of the Soviet Union to the League of Nations in 1934 seemed to offer an opportunity for such a pact, but Poland, which had been enemies with its eastern neighbor since the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921), delayed negotiations ever further. Germany flatly refused to participate. According to the French historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle , the Pacte de l'Est e was "practically dead" by the end of September 1934. From then on, Barthou relied on a Mediterranean pact that was to include fascist Italy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia . After Barthou's assassination on October 9, 1934, his successor, Pierre Laval , continued the attempt, albeit limited, to bring about an alliance system against Nazi Germany.
literature
- Matthieu Boisdron: Le projet de pacte oriental; (février 1934 - may 1935) , in: Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains ; 55 (2005), 220, pp. 23-43 ISSN 0755-1584 ; online [not used here]
- Piotr S. Wandycz : The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 1926-1936: French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland . Princeton: PUP, 1988, pp. 356-408 [not used here]
- Lisanne Radice : The Eastern Pact, 1933–1935: A Last Attempt at European Co-operation , in: The Slavonic and East European Review ; Vol. 55, no. 1 (Jan. 1977), pp. 45-64; JSTOR 4207386 [not used here]
Individual evidence
- ^ Jean-Baptiste Duroselle: Politique extérieure de la France. La decadence (1932-1939). Imprimerie nationale, Paris 1979, pp. 92–112 (here the quote); Raymond Poidevin and Jacques Bariéty: France and Germany. The history of their relationships 1815–1975. CH Beck, Munich 1982, p. 382 ff.
- ^ Jan Karski : The Great Powers and Poland: From Versailles to Yalta. Rowman & Littlefield. Lanham, 2014 (first 1985), p. 139 f. ISBN 978-1-4422-2664-7 .