The need for building peace together

We are bound to one another by a single fate.

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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.”

That is why the British government recently chose to mark the centenary of the pact in the Foreign Office, with representatives of several countries involved in the original negotiations gathering in the same historic rooms where the treaties were signed. But as we commemorated the events of a hundred years ago, it was impossible to ignore the acute conflicts that haunt our world today, the humanitarian crises they are causing, and the wider regional and global risks to security and stability they pose.

And in so many of those cases, from the Middle East and Sudan to Ukraine, we know it will take that same Locarno spirit—of countries working together in partnership—to overcome our shared challenges, rather than letting them divide and defeat us.