Appeasement

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APPEASEMENT.

DEFINING APPEASEMENT
FINAL ATTEMPTS AT APPEASEMENT
APPEASEMENT ABANDONED
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appeasement is a label used to describe the foreign policy of the British and French governments during the 1930s toward the aggressor nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The rise of Adolf Hitler saw Germany begin to challenge the rulings of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), while Japanese expansionism in China from 1931 threatened British and French imperial interests, and the Italians proved an ever-increasing threat in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Military chiefs in both Britain and France gloomily warned their political masters that they were in no position to fight a war on three fronts and this, as the British foreign secretary Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959), conceded, placed a heavy burden on diplomacy while rearmament took place.

Appeasement has become synonymous with surrender, something apparently epitomized by the Munich agreement of September 1938. It was a view that quickly took hold from 1940 and, when coupled with the successes of the Axis war machine, encouraged a presumption that Hitler had planned and prepared for war, making the assumptions of British and French governments that the dictators could be bought off with concessions all the more foolish. The left-wing booklet by the pseudonymous Cato, Guilty Men (1940), published shortly after the Dunkirk Evacuation, ridiculed the British political establishment for its failure to foresee the dangers presented by the dictators and for failing to adequately rearm Britain. This "Guilty Men" thesis has proved itself to be enduring in the popular memory and forever tarnished the reputations of prime ministers Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) and Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940). That France collapsed so quickly before the advancing German forces in May 1940 also ensured that French Third Republic's prewar diplomacy has been tarred with the brush of complacency and decadence.

Yet prior to these events, for many contemporaries appeasement was equated with realism. Britain showed a willingness to attempt to reach a general settlement for Europe during the mid-1930s. Although the specific details of a settlement differed from time to time, the main platform for such an agreement would involve a revision of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), a series of security pacts, and possibly limitations upon rearmament. The expectation was that by settling the outstanding grievances of the dictators they could be brought back into the international fold. In reality, Germany, while prepared for economic discussions and happy to make imprecise demands for a colonial deal alongside a desire to resolve issues in Eastern Europe, would not be drawn into an agreement.

DEFINING APPEASEMENT

Historians have debated about the nature of appeasement. Some have seen it as a policy specific to the period of the 1937–1939 Chamberlain government, where the personal quest of the prime minister to seek peace combined with a plethora of structural issues obliged Britain to seek a form of understanding with the fascist powers, Germany and Italy. Appeasement, it could be argued, was based upon apparently sound strategic reasons. Yet among the policy makers there was no unanimity about how to secure this understanding. Some, like foreign secretary Sir Anthony Eden (1897–1977), favored negotiations with Germany but were unwilling to sanction such discussions with the Italians. It would appear from Chamberlain's view that his motivations were driven by a belief that war with one or other of the dictators would cause the demise of the British Empire and allow Europe to be dominated by the Soviet Union.

Other historians have argued that appeasement was a broader phenomenon of the interwar era, arising from a need to seek to implement and sustain the Versailles peace settlement. Some, though, have questioned whether in actuality it was a form of traditional British foreign policy dating from the mid-nineteenth century—the idea of aiming to maintain the balance of power in Europe by negotiation because it was recognized that Britain was too weak both financially and militarily to intervene. The historical debate has been framed by the corresponding post-1945 Cold War and political climate: the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Czech Uprising of 1968, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since 1940 the British Conservative party, which Chamberlain led until shortly before his death, has sought to disassociate itself from appeasement. This occurred not least because many of the subsequent party leaders from Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965) to Edward Heath (1916–2005) had established their reputations as internal opponents of Chamberlain's foreign policy.

Historical revisionism only began in the late 1960s, helped in part by the official release of governmental records. The revisionists began to argue that the inability of the democracies to resist the advances of the dictator nations was the inevitable result of various constraints: military and economic weakness, world and public opinion, and the realization that war would prove too costly for the democracies and their empires. They also began to debate as to whether Hitler intended to provoke war. It was a long-held view that French foreign policy during the 1930s was a mere appendage of London's appeasement. In the last decades of the twentieth century, this assumption was challenged. The idea that France's Third Republic was moribund and in the final stages of a long decline has been dismissed and instead a more subtle appreciation of French civil-military relations has emerged that stresses the limitations that political, economic, and strategic considerations placed on the policy makers. The French are portrayed as seeking to pursue their own foreign policy objectives after September 1938, which included enticing the British into a continental commitment so they could face the dictators together.

Appeasement was as much a state of mind as a specific strategic policy, which sought concession in preference to conflict as the democracies tried increasingly unsuccessfully to sustain the flawed Versailles settlement with rhetoric about collective security and self-determination. Sir Nevile Henderson (1882–1942), British Ambassador to Berlin 1937 to 1940, described appeasement as: "the search for just solutions by negotiation in light of higher reason instead of by the resort to force." The weight of scholarship in the area has shown that appeasement cannot be solely considered as a diplomatic experience, but needs to be examined in conjunction with the military, strategic, intelligence, domestic, and global perspectives. It has meant that historians have been warned to avoid using the term appeasement because it has been so all-embracing and subsequently too generalized. Central to the revisionist argument is that there was no alternative policy available; however, some historians have begun to question this assumption. The apparent task now for the counter-revisionists is, if they are to successfully undermine the argument that appeasement was the only option possible, to establish that there was a credible and viable alternative.

FINAL ATTEMPTS AT APPEASEMENT

The path toward war was conducted within the context of an impotent League of Nations, an isolationist United States, and a Bolshevik-run Soviet Union. The League clearly showed its failings by its inability to act over the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Its mortality was confirmed by its inability to press the Italians into ending their invasion of Abyssinia in 1935–1936. Hitler came to power in 1933, and by the end of the year had already left the Geneva disarmament conference and the League of Nations. By 1934 German rearmament had recommenced.

The British response was to initiate a rearmament program in March 1935; however, it was conducted on the presumption that it must not jeopardize the long-term economic recovery of Britain or interfere with normal trade. The economy was the fourth arm of defense, a view widely subscribed to in Britain and France that economic strength would be essential to victory in any future conflict. Anglo-French-Italian cooperation had ensured that Austria had been safeguarded from Hitler's advances in 1934, but the Italian invasion of Abyssinia destroyed the Stresa front (a coalition between Britain, France, and Italy formed in 1935) and weakened Anglo-French relations. Hitler seized his opportunity and in March 1936 reoccupied the Rhineland, flouting both the Versailles and the Locarno treaties. The descent of Spain into civil war in 1936 saw the British and French attempt to isolate this to a regional conflict through a policy of nonintervention, which essentially meant turning a blind eye to the involvement of the Germans and Italians on the side of Francisco Franco (1892–1975).

Meanwhile, the Japanese were in full-scaleconflict with the Chinese and threatening British interests in Shanghai. All this gave encouragement to those who felt it was necessary for the British to use diplomacy to detach the Germans and Italians. Attempts to resolve the concerns of Germany for a navy were made with the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement, while sanctions were lifted from Italy in late 1936. During 1936 and 1937 the British increasingly felt that Germany might be pacified by a deal over the former German colonies confiscated at the end of World War I, but Hitler showed little real desire to reach a deal, and in reality was more interested in Eastern Europe, something the British and French were slow to appreciate. In March 1938 Germany sent troops into Austria. Although this action was condemned, many senior British figures felt that even at this stage Germany was merely seeking to resolve the inequities of the Treaty of Versailles. Similarly, too, the demands to absorb the Sudenten Germans into Germany provoked the Munich agreement of September 1938: the high point of appeasement. For the French, who had defense treaty obligations to the Czechoslovaks, this was a humiliating experience, and only thereafter did the threat from Hitler take precedence over France's internal problems in the making of policy.

APPEASEMENT ABANDONED

When in March 1939 German troops crossed the Sudeten border and violated the Munich agreement, Britain was obliged to abandon appeasement. A combination of parliamentary and public opinion forced Chamberlain's hand. The Territorial Army was doubled in size and conscription was introduced for the first time to enable Britain to send a field force to continental Europe. On 31 March 1939, Chamberlain broke with the traditions of recent foreign policy and offered a guarantee to the Polish nation. At the same time Anglo-French negotiationswere begun, although reluctantly, with the Soviets about the possibility of a grand alliance against the dictators. Some contemporaries and historians are suspicious about whether Britain and France really abandoned appeasement in March. When it appeared that Britain might delay its declaration of war in September following the German attack on Poland, rumors spread that Chamberlain planned a second Munich. The reality could not be further from the truth. Chamberlain recognized in March 1939 that Britain had to prepare for the inevitability of war, no matter how horrid the prospect was. There were elements within the British government, in minor positions, like Richard Austen ("Rab") Butler (1902–1982) at the Foreign Office, who entertained hopes that perhaps Germany could be bought off with an economic deal; there was also a faction within the French government, centered around Georges Etienne Bonnet (1889–1973), that hoped to avoid war by further concessions, but neither group was in any position of significant influence. As soon as the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (also known as the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact) was announced on 23 August 1939, Chamberlain began preparing the personnel who would form the British war cabinet. The delay in declaring war was less about securing a new Munich than ensuring that the British went to war simultaneously with their ally, the French.

Since 1940 the perception of appeasement as an ill-conceived diplomatic policy has meant that the label has become entrenched in the political vocabulary of the world as a dirty word. Politicians, policy makers, and commentators have widely used it to criticize, or justify, political responses to diplomatic crises around the world: from Suez (1956) to the Vietnam War (1955–1975), to the Falklands Islands War (1982), to the First and Second Gulf Wars (1990–1991; 2003–).