The Economic and Financial Conference was a formal conclave of representatives from 34 European countries held in the ancient Palazzo San Giorgio of Genoa, Italy, from 10 April to 19 May 1922. Unlike the previous international economic conference in Brussels (1920), the Genoa conference was attended by heads of government and not only experts, which enhanced its authority but also the risks of politicization and grandstanding, at a time of contention on the unresolved issue of German war reparations. The conference was intended by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to resolve the major economic and political issues facing Europe and to address the pariah status of Germany and the Soviet Union, both of which had been excluded from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The conference was particularly intended to develop a strategy to rebuild a defeated Germany, as well as the states of both Central Europe and Eastern Europe, and to negotiate a relationship between European capitalist economies and the Bolshevik regime in Moscow. Germany and the Soviet Union predictably expressed loud dissent and stole the limelight by negotiating a separate bilateral agreement on the conference's sidelines, the Treaty of Rapallo. Even so, the conference further cemented the policy consensus on principles formed at the Brussels gathering two years before. The Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations (EFO) presented a report to the conference, which provided the first official articulation of the gold exchange standard, and also tackled novel fields for international financial cooperation such as capital flight, tax evasion, and double taxation. The conference also found agreement on the principle that financial stability must come first before trade restrictions could be beneficially lifted, even though no convergence was achieved on trade liberalization measures as the EFO had recommended.
Background
The idea for a general economic and financial conference of European nations had roots in a January 1922 session of the Supreme War Council, held in Cannes. With Europe facing an economic catastrophe brought about by the half-decade First World War, marked by millions of deaths, shattered infrastructure and vast sums of squandered economic resources, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George sought an authoritative international gathering to set Europe's political and financial house in order and to establish his leadership firmly at home. The formal proposal was made at Cannes on 6 January 1922 in the form of a draft resolution calling for such a conference that was presented by Lloyd George and was approved unanimously the same date. Lloyd George told the British Parliament that the primary intent of the conference was to provide for the "reconstruction of economic Europe, devastated and broken into fragments by the desolating agency of war". The economy of Europe was at the point of collapse, as Lloyd George noted:
If European countries had gathered together their mobile wealth accumulated by centuries of industry and thrift on to one pyramid and then set fire to it, the result could hardly have been more complete. International trade has been disorganized through and through. The recognized medium of commerce, exchange based upon currency, has become almost worthless and unworkable; vast areas, upon which Europe has hitherto depended for a large proportion of its food supplies and its raw material, completely destroyed for all purposes of commerce; nations, instead of cooperating to restore, broken up by suspicions and creating difficulties and new artificial restrictions; great armies ready to march, and nations already overburdened with taxation having to bear the additional taxation which the maintenance of these huge armaments to avoid suspected dangers renders necessary. Lloyd George controversially sought the inclusion of Germany and Soviet Russia to the international conference as equal members, which was met by particular opposition of France, which sought to neutralise and to isolate the two pariah nations of Europe by including them only in an inferior capacity. Any softening in the hardline stance towards Germany was perceived by France as a weakening of the Treaty of Versailles of which France was a prime beneficiary and to which it was immutably committed.
Reparations and recognition
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