Genoa Conference

The Genoa Economic and Financial Conference was a formal international conclave of 34 nations held in Genoa, Italy from 10 April to 19 May 1922. The gathering was convened to plan the restoration of Europe following the economic cataclysm resulting from World War I. The conference was particularly interested in developing a strategy to rebuild central and eastern Europe and to negotiate a relationship between European capitalist economies and the new Bolshevik regime in Soviet Russia.

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 half a decade of World War, marked by millions of deaths, shattered infrastructure, and vast sums of squandered monetary resources, British Prime Minister and former Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George sought an authoritative international gathering to set Europe's political and financial house in order.

The formal proposal was made on January 6, 1922, in the form of a draft resolution presented by Lloyd George and approved unanimously that same day calling for such a conference.

Speaking to the British House of Commons in the week prior to the gathering, Lloyd George indicated that the primary intent of the conference to be held in Genoa, Italy was to provide for "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, 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."

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