Negotiating stragegy: the next phase

While the World Economic Conference had been in progress discussions with Finland had continued and a harassed Board of Trade had conducted preliminary talks with the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In considerable part the Baltic state negotiations represented a victory for the views of Laurence Collier, head of the Northern Department of the Foreign Office, who had first had to overcome the indifference of the Board of Trade.

Early doubts in the Board of Trade had centred on the supposed inability of British negotiators to wrest much from the Baltic states in the wake of the new restrictive bacon policy, a pessimism shared in the Economic section of the Foreign Office. Frank Ashton Gwatkin wrote of the Baltic states, ‘negotiations will start, if they ever do start, on a basis so unfavourable to them that they can hardly be expected to offer much advantage to us’. The Northern Department had different priorities. Anxious in case the historical and geographical pull of Moscow and Berlin might otherwise be reasserted over the Baltic states, particularly now that regional agreements were becoming so important, Collier wanted Britain to move quickly to tighten economic ties. The Board of Trade began to think that negotiations might be fairly easy with these countries once the main lines of policy towards Scandinavia had been settled, and was induced to give some commitment to negotiate once the other agreements were concluded.