page_title: Genoa Conference (1922)
section_title: Reparations and recognition
hierarchical_section_title: Genoa Conference (1922) / Reparations and recognition
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Aristide Briand
context_page_description: The Genoa Economic and Financial Conference was a formal conclave of 34 nations held in Genoa, Italy from 10 April to 19 May 1922. It was planned by British prime minister David Lloyd George to resolve the major economic and political issues facing Europe, and to deal with the pariah states of Germany and Russia, both of which had been excluded from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The conference was particularly interested in developing a strategy to rebuild a defeated Germany, as well as central and eastern European states, and to negotiate a relationship between European capitalist economies and the new Bolshevik regime in Soviet Russia. However, Russia and Germany signed a separate agreement at Rapallo and the result at Genoa was a fiasco with few positive results. The conference did come up with a proposal for resuming the gold standard that was largely put in place by major countries.
context_section_description: Two great issues lay as impediments to convocation of a multilateral convention to plan the economic reconstruction of Europe. One was the issue of reparations, regarded as the primary matter of contention between the Triple Entente powers of France and Great Britain in the postwar era. At issue was whether the terms of economic reparations in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, were to be enforced or amended. On the one hand was the British view that massive reconstruction costs laid upon Germany would undermine European economic recovery and thereby the market for British exports of manufactured goods. The French, on the other hand, believed that if Germany were allowed to skirt the severe financial obligations detailed in the peace treaty, its economic rise would be massively accelerated and its political and military hegemony on the European continent rapidly restored.
  France, among the main battlegrounds of the European conflagration, was particularly hard-hit and in need of external funds for reconstruction; Germany, on the other hand, was seen as having largely escaped the destruction of infrastructure and economic capacity during the war and currently engaged in systematic underestimation of their ability to pay. The political and economic weakness of Germany was emphasized by its new Weimar government, which effectively made the argument that it would be unable to maintain the specified payment schedule.
  Germany's position came to be regarded as an axiomatic truth  by political decision-makers in London and Washington, DC, as well as elsewhere throughout, despite quiet indications from some German authorities themselves that some substantial portion of the reparations bill could be safely managed. German politicians sought to minimize the country's tax burden through the acquisition of foreign loans and the reduction of the overall reparations bill. British, American, and Swiss bankers were for their own part adamant that necessary loans would not be available until a final, achievable reparations bill and repayment schedule could be agreed upon by all main parties in the dispute.
  In the meantime, German authorities attempted to raise the foreign currency necessary for reparations by dumping paper currency unbacked by gold on the market, triggering a hyperinflation paralyzing the country's economy, which had a desired subsidiary effect of helping make the case that the current schedule of reparations was untenable. It was hoped by Germany, Britain, and the United States and feared by France that the Genoa Conference would provide an opportunity for downward revision of the reparations schedule set forth by treaty.
  The apparent softening the economic terms of the peace, which had taken place at Cannes, had led to the toppling of the government of the prime minister of France, Aristide Briand and left his successor, Raymond Poincaré, with little appetite for participation, which threatened the conference. It was only through a dedicated diplomatic offensive by Lloyd George towards the French government during February 1922 that its participation at the April conference, under terms previously agreed to by the Briand government, was won. Although antagonism between France and Britain had festered in the months immediately after the war, France found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to submit to British desires on the matter of an economic conference, as without its support, France would have had little chance of collecting reparations from Germany or entering into any potential strategic military alliance.
  The second potential hurdle to holding the Genoa Conference surrounded participation of the new Bolshevik-led government of Russia, as the United States and most nations of Europe did not maintain formal diplomatic relations with the regime and harbored economic claims against it. This inconvenient situation had been effectively set aside by the Supreme Council itself, which approved a formal resolution at its meeting of 10 January 1922 that invited Soviet participation and calling up
caption: French Prime Minister Aristide Briand (1862-1932), whose government fell shortly before convocation of the Genoa Conference.
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