ABSTRACT
As foreign secretary from November 1924 to June 1929, Austen Chamberlain dominated British foreign policy. Central to his diplomatic strategy was the maintenance of the European balance of power and, in this circumstance, pursuit of a leadership role for Britain within the League of Nations. The foundation upon which Chamberlain based his European strategy lay with his determination to have Britain play the vital role of stabilizing relations between France and Germany, whose mutual antipathy after the Great War, compounded by the severity of the Treaty of Versailles, threatened continental security. By October 1925, his work bore fruit with the conclusion of the Locarno agreements, the most important of which was a British guarantee of the Franco-German border.2 For the remainder of his tenure at the Foreign Office, Chamberlain used Locarno-Germany’s membership in the League was part of that settlement-as the diplomatic mechanism to underwrite his strategic conception of the balance of power. Yet, despite the renaissance of historical analysis since the mid-1980s concerning Chamberlain’s time as foreign secretary, there has been virtually no consideration of his strategic ideas in the making and execution of British foreign policy.3 Indeed, the most recent-and unhelpfulexamination of his service as foreign secretary is distinguished by this failure.4 Appreciating that Austen Chamberlain defended Britain’s external position in the latter half of the 1920s with a consistent strategic vision has two benefits: it fills a major historiographical lacuna
at an important moment in the evolution of inter-war Britain; and, flowing from this appreciation, some of the serious criticisms of his diplomatic record-the success of 1925 not only forced him to support the Locarno system unflinchingly, it gave his diplomacy an inflexible quality; it undermined the efficacy of the League; and it constituted ‘a false dawn’ because its promise was not realized5-can be shown to be wide of the mark. Chamberlain became foreign secretary after a 30-year political career that had seen him hold several major Cabinet posts and the leadership of the Unionist Party. His career had foundered in October 1922 when he lost that leadership by not containing a rebellion of Unionist backbenchers and junior ministers who opposed continuing in a coalition government led by the Liberal, David Lloyd George. After two years in the political wilderness, Chamberlain was invited by the new party leader, Stanley Baldwin, to join a newly elected Conservative government as foreign secretary-the party had shed the ‘Unionist’ label and returned to its original name. His selection as foreign secretary had as much to do with Baldwin’s recognition of his ministerial talent as with elementary political reasons touching the unity of the Conservative Party. Still, the fact remains that Chamberlain had a nearly impregnable position in the Cabinet and party after November 1924 and, with this base, endeavoured to rebuild his reputation.6 For Chamberlain, although Britain stood as the only world power in the 1920s and faced global foreign policy problems deriving from the defence of its empire and the honouring of widespread treaty commitments, the European question remained the most important. A continental equilibrium remained essential when Britain faced crucial strategic problems in Europe that threatened both its security and the stability needed for its post-war revival. In this context, because almost all of the European Powers belonged to the League, British support for the international organization became the leitmotif of Chamberlain’s diplomatic strategy.
