The year 1930 marked a turning point in European, and also British politics after the First World War. Within a few months, the spirit which had been decisive for the post-Locarno era faded away, after two of the main guarantors of peace and of increasing conciliation between the former victors and vanquished had left the political stage. Austen Chamberlain was forced out of office when the Conservatives lost the general election on 30 May 1929. Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, died on 3 October 1929. Only the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, continued, in the new Tardieu government which was formed in October 1929, but he had far more difficult counterparts in Arthur Henderson, the new British Labour foreign secretary, and Julius Curtius, the German foreign minister in the government of Reichskanzler Heinrich Brüning.

Also the general political and economic outlook rapidly changed for the worse. The consequences of theWall Street crash of October 1929 were soon felt in Europe, destroying all efforts made during the 1920s to restore the pre-war international and commercial system. After a successful first six months, Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government got into severe political trouble following the economic crisis and was forced to form a national government in the summer of 1931.

On the foreign policy agenda of the Labour government, disarmament was one of the major issues, as was the search for a solution to Germany’s loudly voiced request for equality. The Young plan, agreed upon at the first Hague conference, which ended Germany’s reparation payments, was a further step in this direction. But The Hague had also revealed that Anglo-French relations would continue less smoothly under a Labour government than during the Briand–Chamberlain era. Labour had been a longstanding critic of the ‘excessive’ French security requirements, and was generally more inclined to concede further modifications of the Versailles treaty to Germany. Yet prime minister MacDonald and foreign secretary Henderson differed on this matter, and MacDonald defeated Henderson’s efforts to satisfy French demands for military assistance. The two men’s opinions on the role of the League of Nations also differed sharply. MacDonald’s conviction that the League was no more than a world forum, was more in line with the traditions of British foreign policy than Henderson’s faith in the Geneva body as an embryonic super-state.