German attempts at achieving a peaceful revision of the postwar status quo were of course not limited to Franco-German relations. They also extended to eastern Europe, above all to relations with Poland. The problem of how to pave the way for a settlement of Polish–German disputes had been comparatively sidelined at Locarno to achieve a conclusion of the western security pact. But it is also worth noting again that it was at Locarno, too, that the problem of how to settle the inevitable disputes over the contested border of 1919 and the status of minorities on both sides of that border had been seriously broached for the first time since the victors had created it at Versailles. In a wider perspective, only the advances of London and Locarno created a modicum of what preconditions had to be established to embark on the up-hill trajectory of approaching a postwar accommodation between Warsaw and Berlin. And only these advances had set the stage for ultimately even envisaging an ‘eastern Locarno’ which extended the European concert to a wider security system that also regulated relations between Weimar Germany, the states situated uneasily between it and the Soviet Union – and eventually also the Soviet Union itself.

What impact did the politics of London and Locarno have on Polish–German relations in the latter 1920s? How far could these relations indeed be pacified, and how far could and did the Anglo-American powers make any contributions to this process?