This is the only short study in English to survey Germany's foreign policy from a German viewpoint across the entire inter-war period. The approach, which sets Germany in her full European context, is not narrowly diplomatic; and it gives as much attention to the Weimar years of the 1920s as it gives to the more familiar story of Germany's international relations under the Third Reich. John Hiden has now thoroughly revised his text to take account of new scholarship since the book first appeared in 1977.

This classic account of interwar diplomacy examines the curious fate of the diplomat, “the honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” in the capitals of a darkening Europe. These men—ambassadors in the field and officials in the Foreign Office—worked against time in a world that witnessed the complete reorganization of the European system amid the onslaught of totalitarianism. Leading experts investigate the diplomatic history of these years through the eyes of those entrusted with the extraordinarily delicate task of conducting the fateful negotiations that effect national policy. Drawing on government archives, European memoirs, and diplomatic studies, this book is both an absorbing history of twenty years of crisis and a searching analysis of the role of diplomacy in the modern age.

The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.

'A very excellent book ... A masterpiece of balanced exposition.' Sir Harold Nicolson, Daily Telegraph