LONDON ¨C ¡°We are bound to one another by a single fate. If we go down, we go down together; if we are to reach the heights, we do so not by conflict but by common effort.¡±
Those words were spoken a century ago, by a German foreign minister, standing in the British Foreign Office, having just signed a pact that sought to guarantee peace between the nations of Europe and avoid a descent into another world war. For Gustav Stresemann and the other foreign ministers who signed the Locarno Treaties, that moment of hope was short-lived: A decade and a half later, worldwide conflict erupted once more.
But the vision Stresemann and the others set out at that time has endured as a brave experiment in putting cooperation before division. At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1926, the Norwegian humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen described the ¡°Locarno spirit¡± as ¡°the almost unprecedented attempt to base politics on the principle of mutual friendship and trust.¡±
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