The Ruhr Crisis of 1923 and the International Transition in Europe after the WWI

Magadeev Iskander Eduardovich ORCID: 0000-0002-6521-2202 PhD in History Associate Professor of the Department of European and American Studies of the Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations (MGIMO University) (Russian Federation) 76 Prospekt Vernadskogo str., office 2175, Moscow, 119454, Russia iskander2017@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The Ruhr crisis of 1923, initiated by the entry of Franco-Belgian troops into the Ruhr on January 11 as a kind of sanction for the failure of reparations payments by the German authorities, became one of the "turning points" in the development of international relations in Europe after the end of the First World War ^[1]. If we use the term "Versailles order" to characterize the international configuration that developed in the Old World following the peace treaties of 1919-1920 ^{[2, pp. 18-19]}, then we can say that the Ruhr crisis launched the process of its serious transformation. This feeling was already present among the contemporaries of the events. As noted in a note dated December 27, 1923, at the final stage of the crisis, the head of the Department of Trade Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Third Republic, J. Seydoux, France could no longer treat Germany "as a winner with the defeated" ^{[3, p. 707]}.

The purpose of the article is to identify the significance and role of the Ruhr crisis in the transformation of the Versailles order in the period from the conclusion of the Versailles Peace Treaty of June 28, 1919 to the signing of the Locarno Agreements on December 1, 1925. If the peace treaty was largely based on the logic of opposing Germany, as a losing power, to the Entente led by London and Paris, then the Locarno Agreements assumed the reintegration of the Weimar Republic into a "European concert" consisting of three leading Western European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany) ^[4-7].

In recent foreign historiography, increased attention is paid to the international political transformations associated with the results of the London (1924) and Locarno Conferences (1925). Thus, according to the concept of the American historian P.O. Kors, these conferences brought the "first genuine peace" to Europe after the end of the First World War. Its basis, as the author believes, was a kind of Anglo-American "management" or management of the Franco-German conflict, which took place both in the financial and economic sphere, where American private capital played an increased role, and in the political sphere, where the main influence was exerted by the official diplomacy of Great Britain ^{[8, 9]}. From the point of view of the British historian P. Jackson, who focused on the foreign policy of another important power, France, the basis of the "international turn" of 1924-1925 was the conceptual transformation and reorientation of ideas about world politics that the leaders of leading European countries had. From the policy of "balance of power", they increasingly moved to the implementation of multilateral diplomatic strategies based on the League of Nations, tried to build interstate relations on the basis of political, diplomatic and legal settlement of disputes in order to avoid new armed conflicts and wars ^{[10, 11]}.

The role of the "reorientation" of French security policy in 1924-1926 was previously written by the German historian K. Wurm ^[12]. The role of 1924, marked by the adoption of the Dawes reparative plan, which was based on Anglo-American ideas about the stabilization of post-war Europe, was also emphasized by the American historian S. Shuker. He saw in the events of that time "the end of French domination in Europe" ^[13]. Finally, the British researcher Z. Steiner also noted that the French authorities failed to gain serious financial and economic advantages as a result of the Ruhr crisis, and Paris was eventually forced to agree to "accept Anglo-American conditions" ^{[14, p. 245-246]}.

At the same time, the direct relationship between the "international turn" of 1924-1925 and the effect of the Ruhr crisis is not always traced in historiography. Often, the events of 1923 remain rather in the "background" of a research analysis focused specifically on the vicissitudes of the London and Locarno conferences, as well as discussions within the framework of the League of Nations. In this sense, there is a certain conceptual and thematic "gap" between the diverse and large-scale studies of the "international turn", on the one hand, and the analysis of the Ruhr crisis proper, on the other.

At the same time, the literature on the events of 1923 in the Ruhr is also quite extensive. In foreign historiography, this problem is revealed to a more complete extent than in the domestic one. There are both generalizing studies on the history of the Ruhr crisis (and its dating is often given as 1923-1924) ^[15] and its individual aspects. Among the latter are the following: the impact of the crisis on the economy of post-war Germany ^[16]; its role in the development of the German communist and labor movements ^[17]; the place of the crisis in the foreign policy courses and strategies of the Weimar Republic ^[18-21], France ^[22-25], Great Britain ^[26-28], Italy ^[29-31], Poland and Czechoslovakia ^[32-35]. The significance of the events of 1923 in the development of post-war cycles of violence in Europe is also mentioned ^[36] and in the history of military occupations of the 20th century as a whole ^[37].

Despite the lag in the number and variability of works, there is a definite tendency in modern Russian historiography to increase the attention of researchers to the Ruhr crisis. If in the Soviet period the events of 1923 were studied by Russian historians mainly in the context of the history of the communist and labor movements in Germany and other countries ^[38-40], then at the present stage their consideration dominates in the context of the history of international relations and foreign policy of individual countries. The article analyzes both the general impact of the crisis on the Versailles order ^{[2, pp. 316-351]}; ^{[41, pp. 123-127]}, and its significance in the development of foreign policy courses in Germany ^[42-43], France ^[44], Great Britain ^[45], the USSR (especially in the light of the hopes of the Soviet leadership for a revolution in the Weimar Republic – the so-called German October) ^[46-49], Czechoslovakia ^[50-51] and Poland ^[52].

This article aims to demonstrate the relationship between the Ruhr crisis and the subsequent "international turn" by reducing the historiographical "gap" indicated above between the study of the events of 1923, on the one hand, and the London and Locarno conferences, on the other. The study, without pretending to reveal in detail the history of the crisis itself, is primarily aimed at identifying its structural and meaningful role in the subsequent transformation of international interactions in the Old World. This is its novelty, as well as the attraction of a number of little-known documents from British and French archives. The aggravation of crisis trends in modern international relations determines the relevance of the analysis of the role that crises played in the past. The centenary of the events of 1923 serves as an additional argument in favor of addressing these issues.

Methodologically, the author strives to combine developments from the field of history and theory of international relations. When studying the patterns of development of system models in the XX century. The Ruhr crisis, as one of the turning points in the development of the Versailles order or, according to a number of authors, the Versailles (Versailles–Washington) system model, received significantly less attention than the 1962 Caribbean crisis in relation to the bipolar system model of the Cold War. At the same time, a comparative analysis of the impact that the two crises had on the development of the respective configurations of international relations seems fruitful from a scientific point of view. If we use the periodization proposed by A.S. Manykin, then the Caribbean crisis became a milestone in the consolidation of the bipolar system model ^{[53, pp. 62-64]}. A short answer to the question: "Did the Ruhr crisis play a similar role in the development of the Versailles order?" is also included in the problem field of the proposed article.

The Ruhr crisis as a "shadow" of the First World War

The figurative characterization of the Ruhr crisis as a "shadow of the First World War", given at the time by German historians ^[54], seems quite appropriate as a starting point for analyzing its international influence. The events of 1923 reflected in a peculiar way those strategic dilemmas that largely stemmed from the specifics of the course and end of the "Great War". According to the thesis of the British historian H. According to Strona, "many of the problems characteristic of the interwar period stemmed not so much from the way the world was made in 1919, but from the way the war was waged in 1914-1918" ^{[55, p. 12]}.

The First World War, which actually ended on the western borders of Germany, despite the fact that German troops continued to occupy a number of territories in Eastern Europe for a long time ^[56], in many ways did not eliminate those strategic problems that arose from the situation of German "semi-hegemony" in the Old World. This situation, according to a number of authors, arose after the formation of a single German state in 1871 ^[57]. According to the assessment of the Canadian researcher R. Boyce, the war of 1914-1918 "seriously weakened France and strengthened Germany, in no small part due to the fact that Russia fell out of the European system of states, and France now had to rely on a strip of weak, politically unstable and economically vulnerable countries of Eastern Europe" ^{[58, p. 15]}.

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-1920 and after it, the leadership of the Third Republic repeatedly appealed to the fact that even after the defeat in World War I, Germany, based on fundamental indicators of power (economy, demography), remained a more powerful power than France. Official Paris sought to use such an argument in order to detach the left bank of the Rhine from Germany, a territory that is extremely important strategically and economically ^[59]. Summarizing a posteriori the discussions of the period of preparation of the Versailles Peace Treaty, the expert of the British Foreign Ministry on historical issues J. Hedlem-Morley, in a note dated August 10, 1922, stressed that "the French military-political line was to ensure the separation of the left bank of the Rhine and the permanent occupation of the Rhine, while the British and Americans were against the occupation, offering in return conditions for the disarmament of [Germany] and the conclusion of guarantee agreements [with France]". In London, they were sure that Paris had not abandoned its past plans and continued to make efforts to implement them ^[60].

The goal of separating (in one form or another) the left bank of the Rhine from Germany, along with ensuring long-term supplies of German coal at low prices for the French metallurgy and/or obtaining a share in Ruhr coal companies (at the expense of reparations), indeed, remained extremely important for the French authorities during the Ruhr crisis. At the same time, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Third Republic, R. Poincare, was inclined to hesitate, without clearly setting the priorities of Paris in 1923 ^[61]. Nevertheless, the deployment of troops to the Ruhr became for Poincare an attempt to use the temporary military and political superiority of France over Germany in order to change the long-term "balance of power" between the two countries and at least partially offset the French lag behind the "neighbor on the Rhine" ^{[62, p. 44]}. If we look at the situation from the point of view of Paris, then in a sense it was about the desire to finally "complete" the work of the First World War and get what could not be achieved by the results of the peace conference in 1919-1920. As the German historian G.A. Winkler emphasized, "if France had managed to put under its control the most important industrial region of Germany with its large coal reserves, it could have hoped to achieve what the Anglo-Saxons denied it in 1919: the separation of the Rhineland from Germany" ^{[63, p. 226]}.

In a specific way, the Ruhr crisis bore the "shadow" of the war of 1914-1918, as well as its consequences in other respects. Having demonstrated the current superiority of France over Germany in Western Europe, the events of 1923 once again revealed the precariousness of the security architecture in the East of the continent. Both the further intensification of military and political ties between official Moscow and Berlin, which had a common confrontation with Warsaw, and the "export of the revolution" to the West in the event of an internal collapse of the Weimar Republic, could be disastrous for the construction of the Versailles order.

Seydoux's concerns, expressed in a note to the leadership of the French Foreign Ministry dated February 16, 1923, were not accidental. From the diplomat's point of view, "the existence of Poland, in its current form, is hardly compatible with a situation when Germany and Russia will regain their strength and power" ^{[64, p. 247]}. Since the beginning of the Ruhr crisis, the French Foreign Ministry and the War Ministry have repeatedly received alarming information about the alleged concentration of Soviet troops on the border with Poland and about the possibility of joint actions by Moscow and Berlin against Warsaw ^{[64, p. 86, 109-110]}.

The French fears were not completely unfounded. As demonstrated, for example, by the Soviet-German military talks in Moscow, held in February 1923, the parties by no means ruled out an imminent major war in Europe, "perhaps no later than the middle of summer this year." At the same time, the German military expressed interest in the "joint and simultaneous performance" of Germany and the USSR and were interested in "what forces Russia can put up in general and by periods of war in particular" ^{[65, pp. 110, 113]}. No less risky for the fate of the Versailles order was the option of Soviet assistance not to the official authorities of the Weimar Republic, but to the potential German Revolution, which Moscow seriously counted on in the autumn of 1923. During the discussions in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) on establishing communications with Germany through the Baltic States, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) I.V. Stalin proceeded from the prospect of an eventual war against Poland in the near future. In a note dated October 18, he emphasized: "The Poles must be isolated, they will have to be fought" ^{[66, p. 208]}.

Having once again demonstrated the vulnerability of the Eastern European states in the event of the formation of a Soviet-German combination, the Ruhr crisis simultaneously revealed the relative weakness of ties between France and those states East of Germany that were considered its partners and "allies" (primarily Poland and Czechoslovakia). On the important issue for Paris of preventing coal from Poland and Czechoslovakia to the Weimar Republic, which was experiencing a coal shortage under the occupation of the Ruhr, certain successes were observed ^{[64, p. 106-107]}. However, there were more difficulties in securing full-fledged political support for French actions in the Ruhr. Thus, "recognizing France's indisputable rights to German reparations and considering the occupation of the Ruhr as an extreme measure, Prague nevertheless distanced itself from the Franco-Belgian action, taking a position of neutrality towards Germany" ^{[50, p. 202]}.

Thus, the Ruhr crisis bore the imprint of the First World War in several ways at once. The French authorities hoped to use force against the Weimar Republic to "complete" the case of 1914-1918 and neutralize (to one degree or another) the long-term advantages of Germany. On the contrary, Moscow and Berlin did not rule out that the events of the Ruhr crisis would allow them to "replay" the results of the First World War in a certain way, either due to the sharp weakening of Poland – "the pillar of the entire Versailles Treaty", according to V.I. Lenin ^{[66, p. 63]} – or due to the "export of the revolution" to Western Europe which the Kremlin continued to hope for.

The Ruhr crisis: regional and global dimensions

The very content of the Ruhr crisis, associated with the occupation of the Ruhr mainly by French troops (their number in May 1923 amounted to 165 thousand people) ^[67], logically led to its perception by contemporaries and descendants mainly as a Franco-German conflict. On January 3, on the eve of the entry of Franco-Belgian soldiers into the Ruhr, Poincare sought to convince British diplomacy that Paris, by its harsh actions, was trying to prevent the formation of "German hegemony in Europe, which the war was supposed to destroy..." ^{[64, p. 18]}. On the contrary, German diplomacy sought to prove that the entry of French troops into the Ruhr reflected the hegemonic claims of France and went beyond the limits indicated by the Versailles Peace Treaty (such, for example, was the message of the note of the Charge d'affaires of Germany in France, L. von Gesch, dated May 2, 1923) ^{[68, p. 7]}. The perception of the history of the crisis through the prism of Franco-German interaction (first of all, the "passive resistance" of the Ruhr population to the occupation) is still present today. For example, it was reflected in a special exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of these events, which was opened in January 2023 at the Ruhr Museum in Essen ^[69].

At the same time, the Ruhr crisis was by no means limited to the Franco-German confrontation. As demonstrated by the growth of turbulence and tension in Central and Eastern Europe in 1923, the security situation in the West and East of the continent remained de facto indivisible, and large-scale perturbations in one part of the Old World would inevitably affect the other. In Moscow, building bold plans to help the revolution in Germany, they did not rule out that in the end such a development of events could lead to a war against France. This was one of the messages of the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern G.E. Zinoviev in the theses "The coming German Revolution and the tasks of the RCP", approved by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) on September 23, 1923 ^{[66, p. 196]}.

However, the scale of the events of 1923 was not limited even to the whole of continental Europe due to the growing influence of Great Britain and the United States on the course and results of the Ruhr crisis. The British and American authorities, as well as large private businesses, de facto faced the problem of managing the Franco-German conflict in a way that would minimize its potential risks and negative consequences, and, on the contrary, maximize various kinds of dividends from a possible settlement.

The risks, if you look at them from London and partly from Washington, were really great. The full realization of Paris' ambitious goals threatened to create a situation reminiscent of "French hegemony" in continental Europe. Back on June 22, 1921, speaking to the participants of the Imperial Conference, which brought together representatives of Great Britain and the British dominions, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the United Kingdom, Lord J.N. Curzon, said that France, possessing Lorraine, having the Saar mines at its disposal and occupying the Ruhr, would become "the mistress of Europe in relation to coal, iron and they became, and together with the countries under her military command, [she will become] the military monarch of [the continent]" ^{[70, p. 8]}. During the Ruhr crisis itself, on August 6, former British Prime Minister D. Lloyd George expressed the view in the press that Poincare's France could act "following the example of Napoleon." The politician did not rule out that "Germany may become exhausted, it may even temporarily collapse" ^{[71, p. 110]}. Finally, the British science fiction writer G. Wells in the book "The Year of Predictions" (1924) wrote about the imminent onset of the "French millennium", when "nothing will remain on the continent except victorious France, its defeated and broken opponents and servile and unreliable allies - peasant states" ^{[72, p. 725]}.

If London was alarmed by the possible French hegemony in Europe, then the opposite point of view was voiced in closed discussions: if Germany emerged as the obvious winner from the Ruhr crisis, then this could result in the collapse of the Versailles political and diplomatic structure. In a report dated January 22, 1923, the British representative to the High Allied Commission for Rhenish Affairs (Rhenish Commission), which played an important role in the management of the occupied (according to the peace treaty) left bank of the Rhine, Lord W. Kilmarnock urged the British Foreign Ministry not to take a pronounced anti-French position: "The most important factor, from my point of view, is That the French should not be allowed to be defeated… There will be no other real means of pressure left, and Germany will be able to actually abandon further implementation of the treaty" ^{[73, p. 52]}. Strangely enough, there were similar sentiments in Washington. In a report dated February 26, the British Ambassador to the United States, O. Geddes, reported "of course, the widespread, although rarely openly expressed belief that, since Germany understands only force, the resolution of the important issue of paying France's debts to the United States is due to the fact that the French will be successful in the Ruhr..." ^{[73, p 126]}.

However, it was by no means necessary to talk about the real solidarity of Great Britain and the United States with France in 1923. Rather, it was about an unspoken attempt by British and American elites (both in government and in private business) By indirectly managing the Franco-German conflict, achieve a set of interrelated goals: to prevent French hegemony; to weaken Germany and force it to agree to a new reparative plan, while preventing the collapse of the country. At the same time, it was necessary to avoid a major war or revolutionary upheavals in Europe.

The latter scenario threatened not only unpredictable consequences in itself, but would almost inevitably hit the interests of the United States and Great Britain. The United States could finally lose the prospect of recovering loans issued to European countries during the First World War, and Great Britain would be required to intervene in an eventual war on the continent, which was associated with inevitable human and financial and economic losses. Reflecting in February 1925 on ways to settle Franco-German relations, British Finance Minister W. Churchill continued to emphasize one of the imperatives of British action: "We want to save ourselves from being involved in a new Armageddon, the damage in which victory will be almost the same as in defeat."^[74]

To a certain extent, France, pursuing its own interests, acted as a "battering ram" in imposing on the German leadership the understanding that it would have to accept the fulfillment of a number of reparative conditions of the Versailles Treaty, since the alternative to this, as demonstrated by the Ruhr crisis, could be the financial and economic collapse and political collapse of the Weimar Republic. It is no coincidence that the American banker and statesman Ch. Dawes, by whose name the new reparations plan adopted following the crisis was named, in one of the conversations with the French ambassador to the United States, J. In December 1923, Jusseran even verbally approved the French actions in the Ruhr: "The Germans did not want to understand other arguments, it was necessary to resort to this" ^{[75, p. 86]}.

To a large extent, this logic worked. As the researchers emphasize, the defeat in the Ruhr was regarded by German public opinion "as a second lost war" ^{[76, p. 84]}, and the fact of defeat paved the way for the subsequent "Dawes plan", finally approved at the London Conference of 1924. According to German historian M. Berg, "without the collapse of illusions during the Ruhr crisis, neither the Germans neither the French, apparently, would accept an agreement so strongly dictated by American interests" ^{[77, p. 91]}.

Thus, the Ruhr crisis, a manifestation of the acute Franco-German conflict, actually became a necessary prerequisite for American and British mediation, which, in turn, launched the mechanism for resolving the reparation issue at the London Conference and the mechanism for partially solving security problems in Western Europe at the Locarno Conference. In its own way, the remarkable fate of two essentially similar Washington mediation proposals became so different for characterizing the role of the crisis. They discussed the convening of a committee of experts to resolve the reparations issue. If the first such proposal, voiced by the US Secretary of State Ch. According to Lloyd George, it remained "unnoticed by politicians" ^{[71, p. 63]}, then a similar initiative by U.S. President J.K. Coolidge, formulated in a speech on October 9, 1923, had a much more serious significance and became the prologue of the subsequent "Dawes plan".

Curzon, who had made his own unsuccessful attempts at mediation in the earlier stages of the Ruhr crisis ^{[78, 79]}, seized on this proposal from Washington, seeing in it a chance to get out of the current situation. In correspondence with the British Charge d'affaires in Washington, G. Chilton, Curzon pointed out that London did not want to create a feeling of joint Anglo-American pressure in Paris, but considered "cooperation with the United States government one of the key conditions for any progress towards a settlement [of the situation in Europe]" ^[80]. A similar position, the essence of which was reduced to an appeal to the British authorities to actively cooperate with Washington in resolving the Ruhr crisis, was voiced at the Imperial Conference on October 8, 1923 ^[81].

Although the degree of solidarity between the United Kingdom and the United States, separated by numerous contradictions (including on naval issues) ^[82], should not be absolutized, nevertheless, representatives of the political leadership and the financial world of the two countries shared a number of basic goals outlined above to stabilize Europe according to their own rules. It is noteworthy that if the dynamics of the Ruhr crisis aggravated the Franco-German confrontation and alienated Great Britain and some other states from France (for example, Italy and Belgium), then Anglo-American solidarity, on the contrary, increased.

A milestone on this path was the signing on June 18, 1923, of a bilateral agreement regulating the payment of British war debts to the United States (947 million pounds over 62 years). Its basic conditions were agreed upon during the visit of British Finance Minister S. Baldwin (the future Prime Minister) to Washington, which took place in January of the same year ^{[83, p. 79-80]}. The attention of the American Ambassador to France, M. Herrick, did not escape the fact that there was, among other things, political logic behind London's financial diplomacy. On February 28, Herrick informed Hughes that Great Britain, which felt isolated at the beginning of the Ruhr crisis, "hoped sooner or later to intervene in affairs on the continent, but with the full support of the United States and with a common program that European states would find difficult or impossible to resist. The settlement of the debt issue in a sense separated Great Britain from its continental allies" ^{[84, p. 99]}.

Thus, the Ruhr crisis, the "core" of which was the Franco-German conflict, had not only a subregional or regional significance, but also influenced transatlantic international relations. London and Washington, carrying out tacit management of the confrontation between Paris and Berlin and keeping it within the framework that met British and American interests, managed to use the situation that arose following the crisis to implement a profitable option for financial, economic and military-political stabilization of Europe in 1924-1925.

The Ruhr crisis and the transformation of the mechanisms of functioning of the Versailles Order

If we assume that one of the basic "supporting structures" of the Versailles order after 1919 was the Anglo-French Entente ^{[2, p. 317]}, then the Ruhr crisis is considered by a number of researchers as an event that led to its end ^[85]. The Entente (Cordial Accord) of the sample after the end of the First World War was a format of bilateral (primarily Anglo–French) and multilateral cooperation (within the framework of meetings of the Supreme Council of the Entente with the participation of Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Japan), which was no longer identical to a military alliance. Contemporaries recorded this difference, noting at the same time some "blurring" of the nature of obligations within the framework of the post-war Entente. On June 2, 1921, the Deputy British High Commissioner to the Rhine Commission, A. Robertson, reporting to London about a recent conversation with the French Minister of War, L. Barthou, who visited the Rhineland, wrote that Barthou "and his colleagues are extremely interested in the Cordial Agreement being transformed into an alliance. The Entente is an indefinite thing, the meaning of which remains unclear neither for those who enter it, nor for those who oppose it" ^{[58, p. 108]}. In practice, the Entente functioned in the early 1920s as a certain political and diplomatic mechanism for developing a common policy of the victorious countries, united by the task of implementing (and in fact imposing) peace treaties. She was a kind of "motor" that was supposed to launch the existence of the Versailles order.

For all the Anglo-French contradictions that existed in the early 1920s, pragmatically minded politicians and diplomats in both London and Paris understood that a complete gap between their countries would lead to the formation of such a "vacuum of forces" in Versailles Europe, which Germany and Soviet Russia could well fill ^{[9, p. 41]}. However, such a scenario was considered catastrophic. In August 1920, under the conditions of the Red Army's offensive on Warsaw, which revealed a number of contradictions between Great Britain and France, Curzon nevertheless called on Paris for solidarity. He warned the leadership of the Third Republic that otherwise there might be "a state of affairs that seems terrible to the French even more than to us, namely, a combination of Russia and Germany, an education that would be fatal to hopes for peace and for the fulfillment of the Treaty of Versailles" ^[86].

In the context of the Ruhr crisis, which re-actualized the issue of the Soviet-German combination in one form or another, the situation partially repeated itself. Poincare, who rose in the autumn of 1923, faced a difficult choice – to more actively support the Rhenish separatist movement in Germany with the hope of separating the left bank of the Rhine, which threatened to break with Great Britain, or to maintain interaction with London – after a number of hesitations chose the latter. The weakness of the Rhenish separatists played a role, as well as the French authorities' own miscalculations when working with the autonomist and separatist movements. On December 22, 1923, the chairman of the Rhine Commission, Frenchman P. Tirard, summoned one of the separatist leaders H. Dorten went to Koblenz and told him about France's commitment to Great Britain to put an end to Rhenish separatism (if necessary, by force) ^{[87, p. 67]}. A similar argument – the need not to break with Great Britain – was then put forward by Poincare himself in response to plans in the French leadership to conclude a bilateral treaty with Germany without waiting for an inter-allied decision on reparations ^{[14, p. 234-235]}.

Nevertheless, despite Poincare's intentions, the Ruhr crisis de facto destroyed the Entente as a mechanism for preliminary and privileged coordination of decisions between London and Paris. Already in the initial stages of the crisis, the British leadership took a position of "benevolent neutrality." Although such "neutrality" was benevolent towards France, which was manifested, for example, in the passage of French troops through the Cologne occupation zone on the Rhine occupied by the British army ^[88], this position indicated a certain distance from Paris and a rejection of the logic of the functioning of the Entente. In British diplomatic circles, even the option of withdrawing British troops from the left bank of the Rhine was discussed, but in the end it was decided to abandon it, including as a step that had an obvious anti-French orientation and also reduced the tools of British influence to resolve the crisis ^[89].

Just as the violent clash between France and Germany in the conditions of the Ruhr crisis opened up certain opportunities for Anglo-American mediation, so the collapse of the Entente in 1923 became the prologue for the formation of a new configuration of the countries-leaders of the Versailles order. Representatives of official British diplomacy, represented by Foreign Minister O. Chamberlain and American financial capital, represented by the Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York B. Strong, acted as important mediators on the way from the Entente to the "European concert" system, fixed at the Locarno Conference. Summarizing the logic of British mediation in a note dated March 19, 1925, Chamberlain noted: "I believe that at the moment it is in the UK's power to bring peace to Europe. Two things are necessary to achieve this goal: 1. We must eliminate or mitigate French fears; 2. We must bring Germany back to the European concert. Both things are equally important. None of them is sufficient in itself, and the first is necessary in order to implement the second" ^{[7, p. 45]}. In a different plane, but in a similar direction, Strong acted, who made an important visit to Berlin in mid-July 1925. In conversations with the head of the Reichsbank, I At the same time, he stressed that financial assistance to Germany from American banks would not follow until the political situation in Europe stabilizes on the basis of the Lokarna Agreements being prepared ^{[90, p. 498]}.

The Ruhr crisis and the patterns of consolidation of systemic models of international relations in the 20th century

Thus, the Ruhr crisis became a prologue and, in its own way, a necessary condition for the "international turn" of 1924-1925, after which the development of the Versailles order passed into a stage of consolidation. A similar role in relation to the bipolar system model was played by the Caribbean crisis of 1962, which actually overlapped with the Second Berlin Crisis, which began in 1958. Is it possible to trace any similarities between these crises and the role they played in the development of two system models of the twentieth century?

Despite all the specific historical differences, if we are talking about the functional significance and structural role of the two crisis interactions (the Ruhr, on the one hand, the Second Berlin + Caribbean crisis, on the other), then there are certain parallels between them. Both sets of crises were associated with the specifics of the end of the last "great war", bore its peculiar imprint and "shadow". In the case of the events of 1923, it was about the relative nature of Germany's defeat in World War I and the continued French ambitions for a long–term weakening of the "neighbor on the Rhine", in the case of the crises of 1958-1962. - about the situation in Berlin, which directly followed from the specifics of the end of World War II and the complex of agreements reached then between the Allies (protocol of 12 September 1944, agreement of July 26, 1945) ^[91]. Such historical examples allow us to note the presence of a long "echo" of major wars that produce serious changes in international relations ^[92]. Their settlement, as a rule, is not limited to a conditional "peace conference" immediately after the war, but actually stretches over a longer period. There is also a possibility of some kind of "aftershocks" – repeated "aftershocks" associated with the consequences of the last "great war", but separated from it by a chronological interval.

In the cases of both crisis interactions under consideration, the risk of new armed clashes was high, and the end of the crises, on the contrary, opened the way to a decrease in military and political tension: to the "international turn" of 1924-1925 and to the processes of detente of the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. The events of 1923, on the one hand, and 1958-1962, on the other, also played an important role in the transformation of the leading grouping (groupings) of the system model, in the evolution of its "core" ("cores"). If we talk about the consequences of the Ruhr crisis, the Entente, led by Great Britain and France, transformed into a "European concert" with the participation of Germany, if we talk about the results of the Berlin and Caribbean crises, they intensified the processes of partial erosion of American and Soviet leadership within their blocs. For example, some researchers see a relationship between the identified in 1958-1962, a certain divergence of interests between France and Germany, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, and the subsequent "crisis of confidence" in NATO ^[93] and attempts to strengthen the European "pole of power" ^{[94, ch. 3]}. Partially similar processes were observed in the "socialist bloc": the events of the Caribbean crisis aggravated the existing Soviet-Chinese contradictions (Beijing believed that Moscow made excessive concessions during the crisis, and tried to strengthen Sino-Cuban ties) ^[95].

In addition, the very situation of acute crises, which distracted the attention of the leading powers, created certain opportunities for intensifying foreign policy actions on the part of other countries less involved in the crisis. For example, the immersion of London and Paris in the Ruhr crisis contributed to an increase in assertiveness in the Mediterranean on the part of Rome, which eventually led to the Corfus crisis of 1923 in relations with Greece ^[96]; Beijing, in the context of the Caribbean crisis, tried to implement its long-standing demands regarding the border with India, which resulted in a serious border conflict (of course, we are not talking about any direct comparison of Italian and Chinese foreign policy steps) ^[97].

Conclusion

Summing up the article, it can be stated that the Ruhr crisis, becoming an expression of the acute and in a certain sense unresolved Franco-German conflict of the First World War, launched a number of international processes that went far beyond the relations between Paris and Berlin. The events of 1923, having fixed the French attempt to reverse the long-term "balance of power" in relations with the "neighbor on the Rhine" and use the current military and political superiority of the Third Republic, led to an increase in tension in Eastern Europe and demonstrated the geographical asymmetry of the Versailles order: to the East of Germany it was less durable than in the West. The crisis, which required France and Germany to involve large-scale political and financial resources, opened up opportunities for Anglo-American mediation in its resolution on terms that generally met the interests of London and Washington. Having managed to impose on Berlin an agreement with a number of reparations regulations, the French leadership, at the same time, could not fully take advantage of the fruits of its seemingly accomplished "victory" in the Ruhr.

The crisis of 1923, fraught with high risks of a new war in Europe and revolutionary upheavals, nevertheless played a major role in consolidating the Versailles order. As a result, conditions were created for the "international turn" of 1924-1925, including the formation of the "European concert" of Great Britain, France and Germany as a new "supporting structure" of the Versailles order to replace the disintegrated Entente. According to a number of components and features of the structural role he played, the impact of the Ruhr crisis on the Versailles order can be compared with the impact of the Berlin and Caribbean crises on the bipolar system model, however, this hypothesis requires additional elaboration in further research.