British foreign policy and the Ruhr Occupation crisis 1922-1924.
This thesis provides a comprehensive examination of British policy during the Ruhr occupation crisis of 1922-1924. It addresses central questions raised in the historiography of the 1920s, shedding light both on Britain's policy and that of other powers, particularly France. Based on a thorough examination of the British archives, analysis also focuses on the process of policy-formation, revealing the significance for this of administrative and personal relationships and of domestic political constraints. The thesis begins with an analysis of Britain's role at the onset of the crisis. It evaluates the influence on Britain's policy both of the international situation and of internal factors after the collapse of the Lloyd George coalition. Britain's ambiguous position of benevolent neutrality from January to April 1923 is then analysed and its inadequacy demonstrated by revealing the contradictions involved when implementing it on the spot in the Rhineland and Ruhr. The thesis explores the search for alternatives during the summer of 1923, when policy-makers tentatively tried to encourage negotiations, but in fact simply compounded Britain's difficulties. Discussion then moves to events in the autumn of 1923. Once German passive resistance ceased the European situation became more fluid. Britain was at last able to pursue an effective policy. She distanced herself from events on the spot and played an important role both in establishing international enquiries to investigate reparations, and in ensuring that the experts' reports (particularly those of the Dawes Committee) were adopted at the London Conference in 1924. This thesis explores Britain's attitude to reparations and to broader questions of post-war European reconstruction and stability, revealing the dilemmas caused by Britain's underlying strategic and economic weakness after the war. It highlights the difficulties Britain encountered when dealing with her European neighbours and provides a valuable insight into the complexity of British foreign policy during this brief but crucial period.
Great Britain and the Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924
When French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, ostensibly as a result of Germany falling behind schedule in the reparation deliveries of timber and telegraph poles, “something as far reaching in its effects as the declaration of war in 1914 or the conclusion of the armistice in 1918” had occurred. The often acrimonious Anglo-French debate over the interpretation of the Treaty of Versailles and the role of Germany in post-war Europe had reached a decisive stage. The British government, by not participating in the occupation, at last acted on its belief that an economic restoration of Germany was of paramount importance to the revival of the European and indeed world economies, while France grimly persisted in implementing the Treaty of Versailles by securing the Ruhr as a productive pledge. The ultimate French failure to enforce her will on Germany marked the end of French hegemony in Europe and the reemergence of Germany as a great power and a “central support” of the European economic system.
The Memoirs of Cordell Hull
Cordell Hull, who set one endurance record as secretary of state, has at least come close to setting another. His term of nearly twelve years, from March 4, 1933, to November 27, 1944, far exceeded that of any of his predecessors; and now he has told the story of his life in a book of some 750,000 words, which cannot be far from the longest work of its kind ever published by any statesman in our history. More than nine tenths of it relates to the period after he became secretary of state. Only one of Hull's predecessors, John Quincy Adams, left a comparable account of his public life, and this, unlike Hull's, took the form of a diary which was not published until some years after his death and which deals extensively with other aspects of his career besides his secretaryship of state. A more direct and significant comparison can be made with the recently published quasi-autobiography of Henry L. Stimson, On Active Service in Peace and War. The two men are contemporaries (Stimson was born in 1867, Hull in 1871), and both rendered their most important public services as cabinet officers. As secretary of state for four years under Hoover, Stimson was Hull's immediate predecessor in that office, and he was Hull's colleague in Franklin Roosevelt's war cabinet. His aggregate cabinet service, including also his two terms as secretary of war (under Taft 1909-11, and Franklin Roosevelt, 1940-45), was as long as Hull's and no less important. Yet Stimson's story has been admirably told in less than one third as many words as Hull's. Nor is this the only striking difference between the two. The difference in form need not detain us long. Hull tells his whole story in the first person; -nearly all of Stimson's is told in the third person by his collaborator, McGeorge Bundy.