The pursuit of trade agreements and the care of the Auslandsdeutsche had been interdependent objectives of Weimar governments from the end of the war. The attraction of these goals derived from their potential leverage against the restraints placed on a weakened Germany by the Versailles treaty. In that respect they were not really a substitute for foreign policy, but constituted foreign policy, enabling German governments to be ‘active’ on the international scene far earlier than was once assumed. The provisional trade agreements made between the Weimar Republic and the Baltic countries were a small but important part of a wider effort by Germany de facto to offset the one-sided restrictions imposed on its foreign trade for the first five years of peace. A series of bilateral temporary trade agreements in East Europe represented a substantial challenge to French, and indeed British, efforts to prevent a resurgence of German economic and political dominance in the ‘lands between’ Germany and Russia.

In the Baltic area Weimar policy had successfully ‘broken through’ the ring of border states round Russia by 1923, but the greatest opportunity to consolidate Germany's economic and political presence in the region came after 1924. It arose in the first instance from the Dawes plan. The new reparations scheme led to a resumption of large-scale capital movements in Europe, and in Germany it intensified the pressure for a trade expansion following the traumatic crisis of 1923. There was, it has been suggested, a ‘national necessity’ to export. It was, of course, recognized above all by Stresemann and his own party, the DVP, which has been described as the ‘spokesman of light industry’.