Karl Kaiser is professor of political science at Cologne University and director of the Research Institute of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik in Bonn. The author is grateful for the research assistance of Klaus Becher.
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POLITICAL history is not a sequence of incoherent and haphazard events but a chain of causes and effects. A single individual may decide from one day to the next to alter the whole course and character of his existence, to close one chapter and begin another entirely different in tone and construction. Nations cannot. They are subject to the laws of evolution, for even a revolution is generally only evolution--an explosive sequence of events crowded into a short space of time, but leaving more of the ancien régime untouched than usually is at first apparent.
For five years between 1925 and 1929, a certain portion of mankind, like those parched travelers in the desert who think they have glimpsed the oasis which will save them, believed the gate to lasting peace was at hand. This, as we now know, was only a mirage. But such a mirage had never before existed. People had never believed so fervently in the blessings of peace, or hoped so passionately that peace would be perpetual. Optimism rose to new heights. "Away with cannon and machineguns: instead, conciliation, arbitration, and peace!" At the meeting of the League of Nations on September 10, 1926, when Germany, recently defeated, was received as a member, the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand touched a new intensity of emotion with these celebrated words.
I write this article not long after my visit to France, where I spent seven eventful days of great political importance. One essential purpose of my visit was to demonstrate to the German and French peoples and, indeed, to the whole world that the reconciliation between the two neighboring peoples on both sides of the Rhine has now become a reality.
