Conclusion

Abstract

Even the most cursory study of inter-war diplomacy suggests that the continuities with the pre-war system were as striking as the changes. The diplomatic structures and mentalities familiar in Europe before 1914 were profoundly affected by the First World War’ but they were not destroyed by it. Many of the attitudes and practices which were evident during the negotiation of the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 would not have seemed out of place 20 years earlier. The creation of the League of Nations and the rise of Geneva as a central location for diplomatic discourse did not signal the end of traditional means for managing inter-state conflict; rather they provided a new language and institutional framework in which conventional practices and attitudes continued to flourish. As E.H. Carr argued in The Twenty Years’ Crisis’ many of the problems and uncertainties that plagued Europe in the 1920s and 1930s stemmed from the existence of two competing systems of diplomacy’ each of which undermined the logic and coherence of the other.