Role Theory and the Cognitive Architecture of British Appeasement Decisions

Symbolic and Strategic Interaction in World Politics

Stephen G. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135055738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Appeasement is a controversial strategy of conflict management and resolution in world politics. Its reputation is sullied by foreign policy failures ending in war or defeat in which the appeasing state suffers diplomatic and military losses by making costly concessions to other states. Britain's appeasement policies toward Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s are perhaps the most notorious examples of the patterns of failure associated with this strategy. Is appeasement's reputation deserved or is this strategy simply misunderstood and perhaps improperly applied?

Role theory offers a general theoretical solution to the appeasement puzzle that addresses these questions, and the answers should be interesting to political scientists, historians, students, and practitioners of cooperation and conflict strategies in world politics. As a social-psychological theory of human behavior, role theory has the capacity to unite the insights of various existing theories of agency and structure in the domain of world politics. Demonstrating this claim is the methodological aim in this book and its main contribution to breaking new ground in international relations theory.

Part I
Role Theory: The Puzzle of Britain's Appeasement Decisions in the 1930s

1 The Appeasement Puzzle in World Politics

Introduction

Appeasement is a controversial strategy of conflict management and resolution in world politics. Its reputation is sullied by foreign policy failures ending in war or defeat in which the appeasing state suffers diplomatic and military losses by making costly concessions to other states. Britain’s appeasement policies toward Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s are perhaps the most notorious examples of the patterns of failure associated with this strategy. What were the sources of Britain’s appeasement strategy in the 1930s? Would a more skillful leader than British prime minister Neville Chamberlain have managed to implement the strategy of appeasement and avoid war with the Axis powers? More generally, is appeasement’s reputation deserved or is this strategy of conflict simply misunderstood? Are there different appeasement strategies? Are there scope conditions under which appeasement is a successful strategy and perhaps even superior to other strategies of conflict management and resolution?

These questions articulate the puzzles that are the focus in this book, and the answers that constitute the solutions continue to interest historians, political scientists, students, and practitioners of cooperation and conflict strategies in world politics. The analyses that address these questions can take two forms: the particular chronological models associated with historical narratives of the British case and the general models that characterize theoretical narratives across historical cases. Both forms of analysis are employed extensively in this book to investigate and solve the puzzle posed by the British strategy of appeasement. The strategy of appeasement is often characterized both historically and theoretically as making concessions in order to achieve a variety of goals.¹ Historically, the British appeasement puzzle has two dimensions: one is the set of British actions toward the Axis powers in the 1930s; the other is the thoughts of individual British leaders regarding their foreign policy decisions to appease Germany, Italy, and Japan. A cogent theoretical solution to the British appeasement puzzle would cover these historical dimensions separately as well as their interactions with one another.

Role theory offers a general analytical solution to the appeasement puzzle that covers both its historical dimensions and theoretical characteristics. It is a social-psychological theory that also has the capacity to unite the insights of various existing theories of agency and structure in the domain of world politics. Demonstrating this latter claim is the principal aim in this book and the main reason that its contents should interest international relations theorists in the academic community. This chapter establishes the basis for making this claim by reviewing a representative sample of previous historical and theoretical analyses of Britain’s appeasement strategy. The next chapter introduces the logic of binary role theory as a model for reaching a deeper historical and theoretical understanding of the appeasement strategy in world politics.

A historical understanding of British foreign policy in the 1930s is difficult to separate from historical analyses of the occurrence of World War II. While Germany receives the primary blame for its occurrence, Britain’s appeasement policy becomes at least a permissive cause in most accounts of the war’s origins by allowing Hitler to rearm Germany after 1933, consolidate German western frontiers in 1936, and expand without effective opposition toward the east into Czechoslovakia and Poland between 1937 and 1939. Britain failed to stop Germany from occupying the Rhineland in March 1936 and merely protested the German annexation of Austria in March 1938. Six months after the Anschluss, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain accepted the cessation of the Czech Sudetenland to Germany at Munich. Finally, after Hitler conquered the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the British guaranteed the territorial integrity of Poland. When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, the British government and its French ally came to Poland’s defense.

The puzzle posed by this pattern of events is why did Britain persist for so long with an appeasement policy and wait until 1939 to oppose Germany with force? The following accounts of the solutions offered by historians and political scientists to the puzzle of British appeasement share some common features, but they also differ in several ways. The explanations by historians and political scientists overlap in their coverage of important causes and consequences of the strategy of appeasement toward Germany, Italy, and Japan. Although a focus on individual, domestic, and international sources of appeasement is common in the work of both historians and political scientists, there are also traditional divisions within and across the two disciplines regarding the kinds of evidence, the methods of analysis, and the intellectual architecture that any satisfactory explanation should employ.²

The historian values evidence that is often inaccessible to the political scientist, studying voluminous private sources that the political scientist often cannot obtain from the relatively sparse public record. There is also a disagreement over the use of quantitative methods that has two dimensions. One divergence regards the level of measurement while the other concerns the number of cases. The historian tends to analyze relevant characteristics of a single case with qualitative assessments while the political scientist favors the analysis of a large number of cases with quantitative indices. In turn, these differences reflect differences in the architecture of explanation across the two disciplines. The design of the ideal historical study follows idiographic lines in which the goal is the construction of a unique explanation-in-detail for a single case. The design of the ideal political study is a nomothetic blueprint in which the goal is to test a general explanation-in-principle that applies to several cases.³

The different kinds of research designs generate different requirements for evidence and different methods of analysis. An explanation-in-detail requires ipso facto more evidence for all of the remote and immediate causes leading to the explanation of a single case. An explanation-in-principle needs less evidence as a general explanation that focuses only on the most important causes, defined as those that explain more rather than fewer cases. With more cases also comes an opportunity to make more errors in the collection of evidence and with it a corresponding incentive to standardize and quantify observations to insure reliability and comparability across cases.

Upon further examination these traditional differences turn out to be matters of degree rather than kind. The single case can be parsed into several cases as in the present study, which identifies the case of British appeasement policy and then divides it into a series of appeasement decisions extending over an entire decade directed toward three states. The distinctions between methods of analysis are also porous, as the logic of scaling links the qualitative exercise of naming and ranking characteristics with the quantitative indexing of characteristics into valences, intervals, and ratios.⁴

There are also parallels in the architecture of explanation with the statement of the main causes in a historian’s thesis taking the same logical form as the statement of the main independent variables in a political scientist’s theory: if (X1, X2. . . . Xn), then Y where X is a cause or series of causes and Y is the effect. Whether a historian’s thesis statement is also a theoretical statement depends ultimately on an empirical question: Does the causal statement extend to more than one case? The answer depends on the elastic meaning of “case,” which completes the circular argument between historians and political scientists about traditional differences between their disciplines.⁵

Historical Analyses

Why did the British wait until 1939 to oppose Hitler with force?⁶ Some historians suggest that British policy did not take sufficient account of Hitler’s personality. They believe that Hitler was either a madman or a revolutionary, or both, but certainly not an orthodox political leader. British decision makers, on the other hand, were reasonable men and expected Hitler to be reasonable and satiable in his demands, an unrealistic expectation according to this interpretation. The British failure to see that Hitler was unappeasable until after the Prague coup, therefore, accounts for the duration of the appeasement policy.⁷

A second group of historians argues that the British government realized Hitler’s unreasonable designs but was incapable of stopping him. They contend that the principal restraints upon the British elite were domestic political considerations and relative military capabilities. British public and parliamentary opinion would not support the measures necessary to stop Hitler before 1939. Painful memories of World War I and similar visions of World War II made it difficult for British leaders to justify policies of rapid rearmament, alliances, and military intervention when a policy of negotiations existed as an alternative. The futility of negotiations did not become completely clear until after the Czech coup.⁸ One variant of this interpretation asserts that the British elite were unwilling to ally with the USSR and, therefore, were unable to stop Hitler. For ideological reasons the British elite feared Bolshevism more than Nazism and preferred German expansion to the east and a debilitating war between Germany and Russia. Another variant argues that the British elite pursued a peaceful foreign policy in order to maintain the domestic status quo; the expense of rapid rearmament would exacerbate the threat posed by the Depression to the sociopolitical fabric of British society.⁹

A third group of historians emphasizes the international constraints on British diplomacy imposed by extensive global commitments. They contend that in the 1930s the Royal Navy could no longer defend British interests in Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Far East against simultaneous encroachments. During the 1930s, moreover, simultaneous threats did arise from Germany in Europe, Italy in Africa and the Mediterranean, and Japan in the Far East. In this context the British government’s appeasement policy becomes a realistic strategy that was dictated by geopolitical circumstances.¹⁰

A fourth group of historians traces the origins of the appeasement policy to two secular trends, the increase in British global commitments and the relative decline in British military power, both of which antedated the 1930s period.¹¹ By the end of the nineteenth century the gap between British imperial obligations and military power had become great enough for the strategy of appeasement to become the cornerstone of British diplomacy. The object of British diplomacy after World War I was summed up in a Foreign Office memorandum of 1926: “We have got all that we want—perhaps more. Our sole object is to keep what we have and to live in peace.”¹² In the face of simultaneous grievances from Irish, Indian, Egyptian, and Palestinian nationalists, demands for more autonomy from the Dominions, and provocations from Germany, Italy, and Japan, an overextended and underequipped British government attempted to “muddle through” by protecting British possessions and appeasing the aspirations of others.¹³

Finally, a fifth group of historians contends that the naïveté of British leaders and constraints at home and abroad explain British appeasement only up through the Munich crisis. In its aftermath, public and elite opinion shifted away from appeasement, leaving only Prime Minister Chamberlain as a true believer in its efficacy. He rearmed reluctantly, was pessimistic about alliance prospects with Russia and the United States, and attempted to find a way not to honor the military guarantee to Poland after March 1939 even when Germany attacked the Poles in September 1939. With this assessment the latest wave of historical explanations comes full circle back to a focus on British leaders as the agents of appeasement. However, this new analysis indicts Chamberlain as arrogant and hardheaded rather than naïve. In the words of one historian, “It seemed impossible for him [Chamberlain] to think himself mistaken.”¹⁴

Theoretical Analyses

In contrast, analyses by political scientists have tended to emphasize structural theories as more important. There are three families of structural international relations theories that offer solutions to the appeasement puzzle and the outbreak of World War II: balance of power theories, hegemonic stability theories, and dyadic theories. The solutions offered by these realist ¹⁵ theories revolve around the distribution of power in the international system and Britain’s position in world politics. The explanation offered by balance of power theories assumes an anarchical system of several great powers in which it is rational for these states to form a coalition against any one of them who appears to challenge the existing power distribution by becoming a hegemon who threatens the security and independence of the others.¹⁶ Hegemonic stability theories assume an international system in which the existing power distribution is hierarchical with a hegemon as the most powerful state whose role is to supply order and defeat challenges by others to its hegemonic position in the system.¹⁷ Dyadic theories assume that changes in the relative power positions of pairs of states in the international system create conditions...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Part I Role Theory: The Puzzle of Britain's Appeasement Decisions in the 1930s
• Part II Role Demands: Substantive Rationality and Structural Adaptation
• Part III Role Conceptions: Bounded Rationality and Experiential Learning
• Part IV Role Enactments: Communicative Rationality and Altercasting
• Index