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Negotations between Gustav Stresemann, (Joseph) Austen Chamberlain, and Aristide Briand in Locarno (October 1925)
Foreign ministers Gustav Stresemann, (Joseph) Austen Chamberlain, and Aristide Briand each received the Nobel Peace Prize (though in different years) for the agreements they reached in Locarno in October 1925. Still, what came to be known as the “spirit of Locarno” meant something slightly different for each of them. For Stresemann, who had secured guarantees regarding Germany’s western frontiers from the five Western powers while keeping open the issue of its eastern borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia, Locarno was a step toward Germany’s return to full soverignity and great power status. For Briand, it ended fears of French isolation and vulnerability by a formal British guarantee of defense and the opening of a path toward Franco-German economic cooperation. For Chamberlain, who called it “the real dividing line between the years of war and the years of peace,” Locarno promised a path toward peaceful change on the continent at minimal cost to Britian.