Tripartite Agreement

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The Tripartite Agreement was an informal agreement made in September 1936 by the USA , England and France to stop willfully disrupting currency relations in order to stabilize them and thus to maintain peace , to bring order to international economic relations and prosperity to increase. On September 25, 1936, the three states published largely identical declarations. It ended the currency war of the 1930s . The Netherlands , Belgium and Switzerland joined shortly afterwards.

The agreement

The 1933 World Economic Conference , the most important topic of which was currency stabilization , had Franklin D. Roosevelt abandoned his rejection of the proposals for currency stabilization. In the fall of 1935, the US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau took the initiative for the agreement. American efforts intensified in March 1936. The breakthrough came in June 1936, when the British authorities were ready to negotiate international currency stabilization.

A further devaluation of the French franc was accepted without the effect being negated by a devaluation of the pound and the dollar . Other states were invited to join the memorandum of understanding. Although France devalued its currency several times, the agreement held.

rating

The American historian John Morton Blum sees the agreement as an “early reaction to fascism”; Morgenthau wanted to prevent France from following the “path of fascism”. For Morgenthau, the agreement was "the real turning point for world peace". According to French historians, the French government hoped to achieve a homecoming of the fled capital and to win money for rearmament ; she saw the agreement as the starting point for political cooperation between the states against the German threat.

literature

  • Karl J. Mayer: Between Crisis and War. France in the US foreign economic policy between the Great Depression and World War II . Stuttgart 1999, pp. 70-85.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Morton Blum: From the Morgenthau Diaries. Years of Crisis, 1928-1938 . Boston 1959, p. 170 ff. Quoted from Mayer, p. 82.

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