On 10 April 1922, delegates from across the world crowded into the opulent, 12th century Palazzo San Giorgio in the Italian port city of Genoa for a conference aimed at stabilising a nascent and unsteady European order in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Standing to address the delegates at the opening session, the architect of the conference, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, urged a meeting of ‘equals’ to achieve a ‘peace, a real peace’ at Genoa.

Lloyd George initially conceived a conference of European economic reconstruction as a way to stabilise the Soviet Union’s economy and to bring it back into the Western fold. Britain had contributed some 50,000 soldiers to the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, but Lloyd George believed a rapprochement with Russia to be necessary to construct a lasting European peace – much to the dismay of Conservative colleagues in his fraying Coalition government.

Soviet Russia was experiencing a period of profound change. In addition to the Allied intervention in the north, it had seen off challenges from assorted White Armies, an opportunist Polish attack from the west and a slew of uprisings elsewhere. With the civil war coming to an end, Soviet Russia faced famine, popular discontent and a country in dire need of modernisation. Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s market-oriented New Economic Policy was beginning to reverse shortfalls in food and raw materials, but was drawing charges from political rivals – notably Leon Trotsky – that it was un-Communist. Lenin was playing a delicate game, however, as it was exactly this criticism that he hoped could be leveraged to attract desperately needed Western investment.

It was not just Russia that threatened the stability of regional order. Europe as a whole was still living with the consequences of four years of total war. Germany was struggling to make its reparations payments and on the verge of bankruptcy. To raise money for reparations, Joseph Wirth’s minority government implemented cuts to food subsidies and raised taxes, which further polarised the political landscape. In Paris, the central aim of the government since the end of the war was to achieve a security pact with Britain against Germany. But French leaders made little progress on this, owing in large part to the British public’s aversion to any form of European entanglement. The failure to achieve this pact meant that France continued to push hard on the payment of reparations and resist any form of disarmament. To the southeast, Italy wanted to ensure that it was included in any Anglo-French arrangement, but faced a succession of political crises. A weak coalition government saw political power flow from Rome to Fascist and Communist parties based in the cities and countryside.

Across the Atlantic, the administration of Warren G. Harding – despite providing famine relief in 1921 – remained fiercely opposed to any policy that might end Russia’s isolation. The United States, which was the power best equipped to help in the reconstruction of Europe, would ultimately decline the invitation to Genoa on account of Soviet attendance.

Even in the face of these political realities, Lloyd George hoped to solve Europe’s problems in one fell swoop. If a rapprochement between Soviet Russia and the Western powers could be achieved, Western recognition of the Russian regime would be exchanged for Moscow’s assurance of property rights and the repayment of outstanding and future public debts. This would then encourage nervous Western investors to fund modernisation projects in Russia. A revival of economic prospects in the east would then stimulate an export boom with one of its nearest trading partners: Germany. This would give Berlin desperately needed hard currency that would allow it to pay its war reparations, thus restoring France’s creditworthiness with the United States. German compliance with the reparations regime would, in turn, soothe tensions between Berlin and Paris, reducing the pressure on London to make a military pact with Paris. The kind of reconstruction that Lloyd George envisaged would see Europe stabilised on a rising tide of collective prosperity and a virtuous cycle of economic entanglement.

Even before the conference began, however, achieving the grand ambition of Lloyd George’s plan looked difficult – in no small part due to Lloyd George himself. When Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Aristide Briand met at Cannes on 6 January 1922, the British Prime Minister was domineering and over-confident. They had intended to discuss several items, including an Anglo-French pact, and the approach to Germany and Russia in advance of a touted economic conference. Yet Lloyd George dangled a half-hearted commitment to exploring a pact and then pressed Briand for the adoption of a series of principles for the reestablishment of economic and political ties with Soviet Russia. These principles were largely the concoction of Lloyd George but Briand felt compelled to accept them if he hoped to walk away with even tentative progress on the security front. But Lloyd George kept pushing. As an added slight, Lloyd George offered up Italy as a host for the upcoming economic conference and even invited German delegates to attend the Anglo-French talks.

The British leader had pushed Briand too far. On 11 January, Briand hastily rushed back to Paris without explanation and the world quickly found out why. The next day, Briand stood up in the Chamber of Deputies to defend the adoption of the Cannes principles, before declaring: ‘I have done what I could for my country. Another may do better.’ He dramatically resigned on the spot after pressure from his cabinet. Briand’s successor Raymond Poincaré would not make the same mistakes. He refused to attend the upcoming conference, sending his Vice-Premier Louis Barthou in his stead, and continued to press for an Anglo-French alliance and Russia’s payment of wartime interallied debts from the sidelines. On this, Lloyd George, the aspiring architect of a new European order, had critically misjudged the fragility of the French political situation and immediately alienated a key partner at Genoa.

When the conference met on 10 April 1922, Lloyd George took his seat to rapturous applause. The Italian Prime Minister and chair of the conference, Luigi Facta, promptly called the conference to order and welcomed opening remarks. Lloyd George confidently remarked that he hoped the conference at Genoa – the birthplace of Christopher Columbus – ‘might now rediscover Europe for the Americans’. The 23-year-old correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway, tasked with covering the conference, was particularly drawn to the British statesman, writing that ‘only one of all the statesmen who had come out… had brought any magic with him – and that was Lloyd  George’. Barthou next cautioned against ‘vain words’, in a veiled jab at the British Prime Minister, while Joseph Wirth, in a rambling address that followed, explained Germany’s economic difficulties.

It was Georgy Chicherin, the obsessive leader of the Soviet delegation, however, who stole the show. Switching between French and English, he said that Russia accepted the principles of the Cannes Resolutions, but that European reconstruction would be moot as long as the spectre of ‘new wars’ hung over the continent. He called for limitations on armaments, the establishment of a ‘League of Peoples’ and a redistribution of the world’s resources. The conference hall fell silent. An apoplectic Barthou leapt to his feet and chastised Chicherin for exceeding the limits of the conference, before Facta barred him from speaking and immediately divided the conference into sub-commissions.

But the technocratic sub-commissions only made things worse as they quickly isolated Germany and Russia. France pressed for the immediate removal of the two countries from the Financial Commission and was only blocked by a combined Anglo-Italian-German action. Frustrated, Barthou made clear that Wirth’s appeals for the inclusion of reparations on the agenda were to be ignored. German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau’s personal appeal to Lloyd George to include the issue was quickly dismissed by the British leader. France only returned to the ranks of its wartime allies, Britain and Italy, to demand that the Soviet Union accept a version of the Cannes principles, particularly on the recognition of its past debts and any future debt. Fearing an unpleasant choice of being pressed into an agreement that would make maintaining communism untenable or being forced to abandon the conference, the Soviet delegation set about trying to split the Western powers.

‘Regardless of what they have or have not accomplished, the hardest working delegation at Genoa is the Russian’, Hemingway wrote. Chicherin, a chronic workaholic, pushed delegation members Maxim Litvinov and Karl Radek well into the early morning preparing tactics for the day’s sessions. Chicherin had hoped to get a favourable arrangement with the Western powers, but the unity of Britain, France and Italy on their approach to Russia made splitting off any one of these powers difficult. Instead, it was Germany that seemed the best prospect. Chicherin, in particular, regarded Germany as a natural partner for Soviet Russia and remained encouraged by informal talks between the two powers earlier in the year.

The German delegation, too, had reservations about imposing any proposal resembling the Anglo-French-Italian formula on Soviet Russia. But these reservations would go unheard. They quickly discovered that the informal talks in which the approach to Russia was discussed had already taken place without their knowledge. When Walther Rathenau confronted the Italian official Francesco Giannini about Germany’s exclusion, Giannini fell silent. Rathenau exploded with anger, threatening that Germany would make its own agreement with the Russians. French threats, British and Italian intransigence and Germany’s relegation to a secondary status made a German Ostpolitik one of the best cards Rathenau had left to play.

In the early hours of 16 April, a member of the German delegation was awoken by a call from the Russians inviting them for talks in their suite at the Hotel Imperiale on the outskirts of Genoa. Roused from their sleep, Wirth, Rathenau and other members of the delegation discussed the invitation into the morning, before communicating their acceptance. At noon, the tired and dishevelled members of the German delegation arrived at the Hotel Imperiale and immediately entered into talks with Chicherin. By 6:30pm, Russia and Germany signed what became known as the Treaty of Rapallo. The agreement included provisions on the immediate establishment of diplomatic relations, de facto German recognition of Soviet Russia’s authority over federated republics (like Ukraine), a repudiation of all financial claims stemming from the war or outlined in the Treaty of Versailles and a waiver of all claims of German citizens’ property rights in Russia. While the agreement was weighted in favour of Soviet Russia, it was the beginning of a complicated relationship between two of the most threatening opponents of a post-Versailles European order.

The conference back in Genoa laboured on until the middle of May, but it was clear that a mealy-mouthed statement committing to a reset of the Western powers’ relationship with Soviet Russia fell far short of Lloyd George’s grand scheme to reconstruct Europe. In Lloyd George’s desperate bid to stabilise a precarious order, he inadvertently created the conditions for a rapprochement between two dangerous and discontented powers, laying the seeds for an even more unstable order in the decades to come. The Locarno Treaties signed three years later would help to ease some of the problems left outstanding after the end of the First World War. But the taint of Genoa and the revisionist challenge from Russia and Germany it unintentionally created, however, would persist until Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Despite the faltering progress of peace talks, at some point the war in Ukraine will end and with it will come another opportunity to refashion the European order – maybe even under the aegis of economic reconstruction. The EU Council president has called for Europe to develop a ‘new security architecture’, following calls from national capitals to think about how peace can be ensured after the war. European powers are once again in a position in which they will have the opportunity to refashion the regional system after a major conflict, potentially with a less involved United States. The Genoa Conference should therefore serve as a timely warning of both the difficulties and dangers of trying to refashion the European order, even if it is necessary.

Anything that could go wrong at a conference aimed at stabilising a precarious regional system went wrong at Genoa. Procedural questions about who should get a seat at the table and who would chair the conference, while logical in design, were bungled on delivery, as shown by Lloyd George’s indelicate nomination of Italy to be the host of the conference. At the same time, the need to keep the domestic public on side – in the midst of cost of living crises and stubbornly high inflation – fundamentally tied the hands of negotiators from every nation. This informed France’s need to get a security pact against Germany at any cost and Russia’s move to split the Western powers. With every participating country facing reduced room for manoeuvre, the question of how to create incentives for continued engagement with collective efforts at the expense of narrow national interest became all the more urgent.

Crucially, the Western European powers at Genoa thought they could railroad Germany and Russia into an agreement that demanded sweeping domestic reforms in exchange for lukewarm offers of diplomatic normalisation, and a promise of investment that lacked any serious guarantees. This stood in stark relief to the more successful Washington Naval Conference the previous year. On the very first day of that conference, the US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes shocked delegates with a unilateral offer to scrap all US capital ships under construction as a show of faith in support of his naval arms limitation proposal. At Genoa, however, the lack of incentives from the Western European powers and the progressive isolation of Russia and Germany during the course of the conference, made their half-hearted participation and a bilateral side-deal between them highly likely.

The most important lesson of the conference is the necessity and difficulty of selling a vision of a reorganised regional order. Lloyd George was the last of the major peacemakers who represented their country at the Paris Peace Conference, which established a hard-won but incomplete idea of European peace. He was a gifted communicator and had a reasonable plan for addressing the shortfalls of the postwar order. But good plans do not necessarily lead to good outcomes. Lloyd George failed to convince participating powers that engagement with his plan advanced – or was even compatible with – their own ideas of national interest. Ironically, it would be the very issues he meant to fix that were so exacerbated by what happened in the Italian port city. One can only hope the ghost of Genoa will not hang over Europe’s next attempt at re-ordering.