Chapter 23 shows how in the wake of the Ruhr crisis a further transformation of European and transatlantic politics was initiated, which led to significant reforms of the Versailles system and the construction of a more sustainable Atlantic peace system in the mid-1920s. It brings out that this system came to be premised on the watershed settlements of the London reparations conference of 1924 and the Locarno security pact of 1925. And it argues that what made these advances possible were constructive learning processes both on the part of the victors and on the part of the vanquished of the Great War. It highlights that these processes gave rise to the formation of a novel European concert, which began to integrate Weimar Germany in a reconfigured Atlantic order, supported by an informal American hegemon, that began to stabilise not only western but also eastern Europe.

Chapter 7 examines the DNVP’s reaction to the stabilization of Germany’s republican system under the auspices of a new government formed by the Center Party’s Wilhelm Marx in January 1924. In the campaign for the May 1924 Reichstag elections, the DNVP not only did its best to dissociate itself from the anti-social consequences of stabilization, but moved racism and antisemitism to the forefront of its campaign in an attempt to preempt attacks from the racists that had bolted the party in 1922. The result was a stunning victory at the polls that made its delegation the largest in the Reichstag. But with success comes responsibility, and the DNVP was suddenly faced with the task of voting for the Dawes Plan, a plan that in the campaign it had denounced as a “second Versailles.” In the decisive vote in August 1924, the Nationalist delegation to the Reichstag split right down the middle in a dramatic turn of events that only highlighted how deeply divided the DNVP was as it faced the prospect of governmental responsibility.