ABSTRACT
Power politics were discredited in the later 1920s, but never vanished: Locarno was founded only on agreement between the major states. At Geneva, their representatives held their own private meetings during the Assembly, and these 'Locarno tea-parties' (as they were called) were a little like the old 'Concert of Europe', in which large states settled Europe's affairs over the heads of smaller ones. The growing international security of the years before 1930 was therefore something of a façade. A coincidence of interests among the major states and personal ties between their statesmen were safety-valves for the antagonisms of international life, but they were fragile and temporary safeguards. German revisionism had been appeased at Locarno but remained as alive as that of Hungary or Italy. Russia might take part in the practical work of the League, but she stayed outside it. Anglo-French antagonism was always liable to break out when disarmament negotiations revealed the inevitable differences of interests between a continental state which faced her only likely enemy across a land frontier, and the insular centre of a worldwide empire, increasingly vulnerable to air attack and dependent on sea communications. Finally, however many non-European states might join the League, the United States did not.
