ABSTRACT
During the 1920s diplomacy was conducted against a background of relative international stability. The victor powers, Britain andFrance, played a dominant role, the one in Europe, the other outside it. The 1920s saw the heyday of liberal imperial politics and the peak of Franco-British influence. This reality was masked to some extent by their joint commitment to the League of Nations and the idea of collective security enshrined in the initial Covenant [Doc. 2, p. 103]. The effectiveness of the League as an instrument for genuine security was never severely tested in the 1920s, but the absence from its ranks of the United States and the Soviet Union and, until 1926, of Germany too, made the League a more fragile instrument than its architects had intended.
