Appeasement

10 Key excerpts on "Appeasement"

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  Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France

  • Daniel Hucker(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For the purpose of this study, Appeasement will be defined by its commonalities and by its contemporary meaning. That is, despite different conceptions of Appeasement in Britain and France (bearing in mind that the term itself was rarely, if ever, used in 1930s France), its overriding objective was the same: avoiding war by altering the Versailles system to accommodate peacefully the grievances of the revisionist powers. Moreover, although the motivations for pursuing such a policy were diverse and often country-specific, one commonality between the British and French case studies was the imperative of avoiding war. Indeed, it is this imperative that features most prominently in an analysis of public opinion. For the general public in 1938–39, Appeasement meant the avoidance of war, but also (and increasingly) the abdication of power, prestige and honour. In essence, ‘Appeasement’ was the ‘Munich policy’, a term used widely on both sides of the Channel. Hence it is this interpretation of Appeasement that will be used throughout this study.

  Whatever one’s chosen definition, the very word ‘Appeasement’ resonates with meaning. Largely negative and ignominiously symbolic, it retains a ‘mythic status as a foreign policy of catastrophic failure’, evoking the infamous Munich agreement and Chamberlain’s notorious claim of ‘peace in our time’.7 Within the discourse of contemporary international relations, Munich remains a dirty word, synonymous with diplomatic weakness, self-delusion and failure.8 Little has changed since the early days of the war, when the fervent backlash against the appeasers was first articulated. The 1940 publication, Guilty Men , castigated the British governments of the 1930s for capitulating to a dictatorial megalomaniac intent on world war. Munich is described thus: ‘Mr Chamberlain sighed with satisfaction when this distasteful scheme had, by the united efforts of himself and the French premier, been crammed down the reluctant gullet of the Czech rulers.’9 1940 also saw the publication of Cecil Melville’s Guilty Frenchmen , condemning the ‘consciously’ and ‘unconsciously’ guilty statesmen of the Third Republic.10 Three years later, the French journalist André Géraud, writing under his better-known pseudonym of ‘Pertinax’, published Les Fossoyeurs , the gravediggers in question being the French premier at the time of Munich, Édouard Daladier, the military leader Général Maurice Gamelin, the premier at the time of the 1940 defeat, Paul Reynaud, and the iconic face of the Vichy regime, Philippe Pétain.11

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  Britain in Global Politics Volume 1

  From Gladstone to Churchill

  • C. Baxter, M. Dockrill, K. Hamilton, C. Baxter, M. Dockrill, K. Hamilton, C. Baxter, M. Dockrill, K. Hamilton(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 It occurred, first, in relation to Western Europe and the security of the home islands and, then, as the expanding British Empire saw policy-makers in London defend the manifold interests of the only world Power, in key areas of the globe. Thus, Appeasement had been just one of a number of tactical alternatives in the planning and execution of British foreign policy designed to ensure the security of Britain’s national and Imperial interests. These alternatives also included working with other Powers politically or militarily in short-term arrangements or longer-term alliances, unilateral threats or the use of military action, a reliance on conference diplomacy, and more. However, after mid-1937, because of his perception that pursuing the balance of power in Europe and the Far East held danger – flowing from his belief that failure to maintain the balance had led to the Great War of 1914–1918 – Chamberlain used his position as premier to change the strategic basis of British foreign policy. In one sense, it amounted to a coldly realistic decision, reflecting the political strictures placed on British governments in the 1930s by both the electorate that wanted to avoid war and the need to buy time to allow for rearmament. In another, so Chamberlain and his supporters argued, it would bring long-term stability to Europe by meeting legitimate German territorial grievances without Berlin resorting to armed conflict to resolve them.

  Appeasement as a British foreign policy precept is a somewhat amorphous concept that changed over time and was modified by circumstance. With a historian’s lens, Paul Kennedy defined it in 1976 as ‘the policy of settling international (or, for that matter, domestic) quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly very dangerous’.2 But a range of British leaders in the past possessed subtly different views. William Ewart Gladstone, four times prime minister between 1868 and 1894, talked about seeking ‘the concord and hearty co-operation’ amongst Great Powers to establish international stability – in this case, although pathologically Russophobic, Gladstone referred to Anglo-Russian relations and the ‘Eastern Question’ after the 1878 Congress of Berlin.3 Later, before the Great War in relation to the German question, Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal foreign secretary, spoke about ‘mutual advantage & increased security’.4

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  Appeasement in International Politics

  • Stephen R. Rock(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Whether concessions are perceived as indicating an opportunity for advancing further demands or committing further acts of aggression also depends on certain other factors, including the potential costs associated with such activities at several different levels. Simply stated, Appeasement is less likely to elicit further demands or to promote further aggression in cases where the recipient of concessions has strong reasons to remain on cordial terms with the appeasing state. While these incentives may not be sufficient to cause the target state to abandon its most important objectives, they may, once these objectives have been met, dissuade it from aggressively pursuing additional aims to which it is less committed.

  LESSONS FOR POLICYMAKERS

  One of the purposes of this study is to provide guidance for policymakers contemplating a policy of Appeasement vis-à-vis a particular adversary. Beyond the propositions elaborated above, the cases suggest a few basic lessons. Most of these fall into the category of common sense, but given the failure to observe certain of them in previous situations, perhaps they bear repeating here.

  1. Know your adversary. This is by far the most important lesson. Unless one understands an opponent and his motives, one cannot know the prospects for successful Appeasement or how to devise an appropriate strategy. Failure to understand adequately the target state and its leaders contributed significantly to failed Appeasement in several cases, including British efforts to conciliate Nazi Germany and American attempts to improve relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

  2. Reevaluate policy on a regular basis. Because a target state’s motives are typically complicated and obscure, policymakers often will not be able to know their adversary as fully as they would like. A policy of Appeasement, like any other policy, should be adopted provisionally, and its effectiveness evaluated regularly.

  3. Devise tests

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  From the Treaty of Versailles to the Treaty of Maastricht

  Conflict, Carnage And Cooperation In Europe, 1918 – 1993

  • Martin Holmes(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6

  Chamberlain, Churchill and the Appeasement debate

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003260998-7

  Many scholars have argued that Appeasement was the right policy for the 1920s but the wrong policy for the 1930s once Hitler had come to power. During the Weimar Republic, it was possible to negotiate with Germany without the threat of militarisation and war. Appeasement would thus rectify the flaws of the Versailles Treaty by diplomatic means. From 1933, however, with Hitler intent on military aggression, Appeasement by definition would be doomed to failure.

  Central to British policy at the time was the preservation of peace and the avoidance of war in the long term, irrespective of diplomatic efforts to revise the Versailles Treaty by mutual agreement. After World War I, there was intense debate at the highest levels of British politics, the armed forces and business as to why World War I had been such a disaster, lasting four gruelling years rather than the anticipated four months. The vast loss of life had been accompanied by a loss of wealth. Britain had ended World War I financed by loans from American banks, calling into question the sustainability of the Empire which had been shaken to its foundations.

  Britain’s status as a great power ‒ epitomised by its navy, the largest and most commanding globally ‒ had been compromised. From the 1920s, therefore, Appeasement was tied to the preservation of the Empire. The Treasury, Britain’s finance ministry, adopted the ‘ten-year rule’ in 1922, confidently reasserted in 1932, that over the next decade, another war would be avoided, preventing the need for a massive increase in spending on rearmament. If Appeasement could guarantee peace in Europe, it would also guarantee the safety, stability and endurance of the British Empire. Appeasement, therefore, was regarded as a win–win policy in the period up to 1933.

  After Hitler came to power, the British government had to determine whether to continue the policy, modify it or abandon it. These foreign-policy options increasingly divided the Conservative Party, parliament and public opinion as the decade went on. British governments initially maintained the default position of supporting Appeasement after 1933 in the hope that Hitler would accept revision of the Versailles Treaty in return for halting his bellicose threats of military force. In this context, rearmament was downplayed and a flurry of diplomatic initiatives was undertaken to placate Hitler and, to a lesser extent, Mussolini.

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  Role Theory and the Cognitive Architecture of British Appeasement Decisions

  Symbolic and Strategic Interaction in World Politics

  • Stephen G. Walker(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

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

  1 The Appeasement Puzzle in World Politics

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203488096-2

  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

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  Princeton Studies in International History and Politics

  Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft

  • Peter Trubowitz(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  and domestic incentives. What differentiates appeasers (satisficers) from balancers or expansionists are the parameters of choice—the combination of international and domestic incentives that shape strategic choice. As I show in the next chapter, when those incentives change, so too does the type of strategy leaders prefer.

     

  1 Indeed, one of the main criticisms of Appeasement is that such concessions only whet the adversary’s appetite for additional concessions. See, for example, Mearsheimer (2001).

  2 Buckpassing and bandwagoning are other responses that cross-pressured leaders sometimes favor. In the case studies, I explain why Appeasement was preferred to buckpassing and bandwagoning.

  3 In all three cases, the U.S. faced multiple threats. I focus here on the primary challenger.

  4 See, for example, Flexner (1974); F. McDonald (1974); Ellis (2004); Harper (2004); and Henriques (2006). Some historians view Washington’s strategy as neutrality rather than Appeasement. However, given the many concessions Washington made to Britain at France’s expense, Appeasement seems more apposite. In any event, the difference is not essential for my argument. Appeasement and neutrality are both inexpensive status quo strategies that cross-pressured leaders may turn to when they have little geopolitical slack, and military expansion does not pay domestically.

  5 On the general history of the Jay Treaty, see Bemis (1962) and Coombs (1970).

  6 To many Americans, this was but the latest in a series of high-handed British economic policies since the 1783 Treaty of Paris that had given America its independence. London continued to occupy many frontier posts in U.S. territory in violation of the terms of the 1783 treaty. The British army used those posts to funnel arms from Canada to Indian tribes to slow the advance of American settlers and protect British fur-trading interests in the region.

  7

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  Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating The Mythology Of The 1930s

  • Professor Jeffrey Record(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Lucknow Books

    (Publisher)

  This is not to embrace historical determinism; rather it is simply to argue that the alignment of political, military, and psychological factors in the 1930s were never such as to offer both London and Paris simultaneously a clear appreciation of the nature and scope of the German threat, as well as the opportunity to employ military force confidently and effectively against that threat. In hindsight, it is easy to condemn Appeasement because it led to World War II, but until 1939, the record of Appeasement was one of sparing Europe from war. Chamberlain and Daladier could not know they were making pre-World War II decisions, on the contrary, they were struggling to avoid war. But not at any cost. When in 1939 Hitler violated the Munich Agreement and, in so doing, dispelled any lingering doubts in London and Paris about his real intentions in Europe, Chamberlain and Daladier committed to a policy of war by extending defense guarantees to Poland and other threatened states. WHY DID Appeasement FAIL? Anglo-French Appeasement of Hitler failed for the simple reason that Hitler was unappeasable. He wanted more, much more, than Britain or France could or would give him. Chamberlain sought to propitiate Germany within the framework of Europe’s traditional balance of power system; Hitler sought to overthrow that system. He fooled Chamberlain (and many others in Europe, including conservative German nationalists) into believing that Nazi Germany’s foreign policy ambitions, like those of the Weimar Republic, were limited to rectification of the ‘injustices” of the Versailles Treaty, and until 1939 he was careful to limit Germany’s explicit territorial demands to Germanic Europe, demands he justified in the name of national self-determination. In this regard, British policy toward Germany was consistent from 1919 on: it sought to bring “Germany back into the community of nations. .

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  Aspects of British Political History 1914-1995

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10 FOREIGN POLICY AND Appeasement 1933–9

  The politicians most directly associated with Appeasement were the three prime ministers of the 1930s: Ramsay MacDonald (1929–35), Stanley Baldwin (1935–7) and Neville Chamberlain (1937–40), along with their Foreign Secretaries: Sir John Simon (1931–5), Sir Samuel Hoare (1935), and Lord Halifax (1938–40).

  This chapter will consider the origins of Appeasement as deliberate policy and its applications over Italy, Spain and Germany. The main emphasis will be on detailed examination of the controversial policy of Chamberlain between the Munich settlement of September 1938 and the declaration of war on Germany twelve months later.

  THE ORIGINS OF Appeasement

  It is tempting to think of Appeasement as a policy which originated in the 1930s as a response to the military threat posed by the dictatorships, and as a replacement for the earlier ‘stand firm’ policy embodied in collective security. This end-on chronological view of collective security and Appeasement is, however, simplistic. There was, rather, an overlap between the two. Collective security had never, for Britain, been a total commitment and there had always been reservations and loopholes which might be seen as incipient Appeasement. These reservations rapidly increased during the 1930s. Appeasement did not, therefore, suddenly appear as an alternative to collective security. It coexisted with collective security, grew out of it and eventually replaced it.

  There had always been an undercurrent of Appeasement in Britain, stemming from the First World War, during which the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) had been established. Comprising a number of MPs and others from the Labour and Liberal parties, this played some part in preparing the British public to accept the policy of Appeasement.

  But it had little direct impact on the actual formation of that policy. This was due more to the structural defects of collective security and the

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  When Things Go Wrong

  Foreign Policy Decision Making under Adverse Feedback

  • Charles F. Hermann(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Diplomacy of Illusion. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Mommsen, Wolfgang and Lothar Kettenaker, eds. 1983. The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement. London: George Allen & Unwin.

  Newman, William J. 1968. The Balance of Power in the Interwar Years. New York: Random House.

  Nye, Joseph. 1987. “Nuclear Learning and U.S. Security Regimes.” International Organization 41(3): 371–402.

  Parker, Robert Alexander Clarke. 1993. Chamberlain and Appeasement. London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd.

  Parliamentary Debates 1937–1943. House of Commons Official Reports. London: H.M.S.O. Post, Gaines. 1992. Dilemmas of Appeasement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell.

  Robbins, Keith. 1997. Appeasement, 2nd edn. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

  Rock, Stephen R. 2000. Appeasement in International Politics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

  Rock, William R. 1977. British Appeasement in the 1930s. New York: W.W. Norton. Rokeach, Milton. 1960. The Open and Closed Mind. New York: Basic Books.

  Rokeach, Milton. 1968. Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Schafer, Mark and Stephen G. Walker. 2006a. Beliefs and Leadership in World Politics. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

  Schafer, Mark and Stephen G. Walker. 2006b. “Democratic Leaders and the Democratic Peace: The Operational Codes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.” International Studies Quarterly 50(3): 561–584.

  Schweller, Randall. 1998. Deadly Imbalances. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Schweller, Randall. 2001. “The Twenty Years’ Crisis: Why a Concert Didn’t Arise.” In Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations, ed. Colin Elman and Miriam Elman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 181–212.

  Taylor, Alan John Percivale. 1961. The Origins of the Second World War. New York: Athenaeum.

  Tetlock, Philip. 1991. “In Search of an Elusive Concept.” In Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George Breslauer and Philip Tetlock. Boulder: Westview Press, 20–61.

  Tetlock, Philip. 1998. “Social Psychology and World Politics.” In Handbook of Social Psychology

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  Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered

  • Gordon Martel(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To do so is difficult not merely because British attitudes and actions were, in Taylor’s book, integrated into the overall story of why the Second World War occurred but because our own judgments of how well-founded, say, were Whitehall’s worries about the size of the Luftwaffe will be affected by new researches on German aerial rearmament. Similarly, our assessments of British policy towards Poland, Russia and the USA in the 1930s can be placed in a different light by newly released archival materials from those countries, as well as from France, Japan and other actors. Above all, the issue of how well, or how poorly, the British understood Hitler’s real intentions can be fully analyzed only by reference to scholarship on German policy, which is outside the bounds of this particular essay. 4 Students wishing to comprehend British Appeasement will always need to understand other, non-British, perspectives as well. The enormous literature on “the meaning of Appeasement” 5 can be dealt with briefly here, since its significance for our purposes lies chiefly in the way Taylor’s revisionist work challenged a well-established orthodoxy. Although Appeasement originally was a positive concept – as in the “appeasing” of one’s appetite – the failure of Neville Chamberlain’s policies turned it into a pejorative term by 1939, a tendency which grew ever stronger as the costs of the war mounted and the full horrors of Nazi policy were gradually revealed. Since Hitler was by then regarded as the Devil incarnate, it followed that Chamberlain and Daladier’s diplomacy in the late 1930s had been hopelessly misconceived and morally wrong. 6 Instead of standing up to the führer’s manic ambitions, they had weakly appeased them. Taylor’s revisionism assaulted this orthodoxy on both the intellectual and the moral front. In his view, the restoration of Germany as a leading power, if not the leading power, in Europe was natural and inevitable

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