Appeasement

Because the term has highly negative connotations, it is difficult to cite many historical examples which are widely regarded as appeasement. The one historical situation in which the term is universally applied to is British (especially that of Neville Chamberlain's) policy toward Nazi Germany before World War II.

Different Views on Appeasement

The meaning of the term "appeasement" has changed throughout the years. According to Paul Kennedy in his Strategy and Diplomacy, 1983, appeasement is "the policy of settling international quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negociation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody and possibly dangerous."

Further Quotes:

"At bottom, the old appeasement was a mood of hope, Victorian in its optimism, Burkean in its belief that societies evolved from bad to good and that progress could only be for the better. The new appeasement was a mood of fear, Hobbesian in its insistence upon swallowing the bad in order to preserve some remnant of the good, pessimistic in its belief that Nazism was there to stay and, however horrible it might be, should be accepted as a way of life with which Britain ought to deal." Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement, 1968

To appease: "to try to conciliate or bribe (a potential aggressor) by making concessions, frequently with implication of sacrifice of principles" Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1963 edition

"Each course brought its share of disadvantages: there was only a choice of evils. The crisis in the British global position by this time was such that it was, in the last resort, insoluble, in the sense that there was no good or proper solution." Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1983

"The word in its normal meaning connotes the pacific settlement of disputes; in the meaning usually applied to the period of Chamberlain's premiership, it has come to indicate something sinister, the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else's expense." D.N. DIlks, Appeasement Revisited, Journal of Contemporary History, 1972

Appeasement of Hitler

By far the most well-known case of appeasement is one which ultimately failed - the appeasement of Adolf Hitler's Germany by United Kingdom Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain's government in the late 1930s. The Munich Agreement in particular stands as a major example of appeasement. There is, however, a large historiographical debate about appeasement.

Reasons why the British government appeased Hitler

• Memories of the First World War - The United Kingdom and especially France were extremely reluctant to fight due to the psychological trauma resulting from having witnessed the mass deaths of vast numbers of young people. For example, many British urban centres lost up to 40% of all young men; many families lost all their sons and most young male relatives. King George V famously said that he would rather abdicate and stand in Trafalgar Square in central London, singing The Red Flag (the socialist and communist anthem) than allow his country go through another war like 1914-1918.

• Fear of strategic bombing - In 1934 the British MP Stanley Baldwin declared that "I think it is well for the man on the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed.........the bomber will always get through." Bombers were widely viewed as invincible superweapons capable of laying waste to whole countries - comparable to how nuclear ICBMs are viewed today. This fear was stoked by apocalyptic visions such as those in the H. G. Wells book The Shape of Things to Come, and its movie adaptation Things to Come.

• The flaws of the Treaty of Versailles - The Treaty of Versailles imposed many restrictions on internal German affairs, which were later on widely viewed by the Allied nations as being unfair to Germany. Many people, especially on the left of the political spectrum, argued that German re-armament, the re-occupation of the Rhineland and the acquisition of the Saarland were merely examples of the Germans taking back what was rightfully theirs. They also believed that since Versailles had created the states of Poland and Czechoslovakia on the basis of self-determination, it was unjust to deny the opportunity of Austrians and Sudetenlanders to join Germany if they so wished. Because Hitler had not taken any obviously non-German territory as of 1938, a war launched by the Allies at this stage would have been a war launched merely on the basis of suspicion, in which Britain would be deeply divided. This could have been fatal if the war had gone badly for the Allies - as indeed happened in 1940. By 1939 Hitler had annexed the very non-German city of Prague - meaning that self-determination could no longer be used to justify his actions. This made a decision to go to war in 1939 far easier than in 1938.

• The Communist threat - Conservative politicians had to worry not only about the threat posed by Hitler's Germany, but also about the threat posed by the Stalinist Soviet Union - as the Holocaust had not yet occurred, they mostly regarded Stalin as the greater of the two totalitarian evils. The fact that the United States was at the time in an extremely isolationist phase made the situation even more difficult. They feared that as Britain and France were busy fighting Germany in the West, the Soviets would invade Poland and then eastern Germany. After the "War of German Suppression" Germans and Allies alike would be at the mercy of the Soviet Union, essentially "1945 without the United States or the atomic bomb".

• Failure to recognize the evil of Nazism - It was not immediately obvious that the Nazi regime in Germany was worse than the other dictatorships which ruled Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Even Winston Churchill, while recognizing the military threat posed by a re-armed Germany, was slow to recognize the inherent evil of Nazism itself. As late as 1938 he wrote to The Times that "I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back to our rightful place among nations". Even if a 1938 war against Germany was won, the most likely regime to replace the Nazis would be a military dictatorship - not an obvious improvement on the Nazi regime, as far as could be ascertained at the time. Alternatively, a post-Nazi Germany could have swung leftward, forcing the Western democracies to fight a German-Soviet alliance.

• Support for the League of Nations - The League of Nations was designed to prevent future wars. If there were no wars to be fought then there would be no need to maintain armaments, and any disagreements could be settled by the League of Nations. The Peace Ballot of 1935, conducted by the League of Nations Union (a political pressure group of the time) showed support for the League, although it should be noted that this was a select group that voted and not a national referendum. When asked "should Britain remain a member of the League of Nations?", 97% voted in favour of staying in the League. When asked "Do you consider that, if a nation insists on attacking another, the other nations should combine to stop it by economic and non-military measures?", 94.1% voted in favour. However, there was greater division over whether force should be used to stop an aggressive nation, only 74.2% voted in favour, showing a greater division over the use of force.

• The Economic Impact of World War I - The national debt of Britain increased tenfold during the war, and the increase of British government debt to foreign governments during WWI, mainly to America, led to a high interest rate being charged. The British government therefore had to try to cut back on spending, and the public would not stomach cutting back on domestic spending. The Geddes Committee of 1921-22 recommended that the armed forces and weapons be reduced, but this would eventually lead to a time delay when it came to rearmament during the 1930s. The price of rearming would have a crippling effect on the British government, and so the avoidance of war was a sound economic policy.
  

  "Peace in our Time"

Chamberlain rearming

However many of those that had been in government during the First World War were haunted by its effect and determined to avoid any war in the future, deeming all war 'futile', Chamberlain himself and his ministers were also aware of the lack of military capacity at their disposal. Part of that was the result of the belief subscribed to by many governing elites in the 1920s and early 1930s that war would no longer be an option and that military budgets could be tailored accordingly. The European cycle of wars which in the previous seventy years had produced two massive conflicts, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the First World War (or Great War as it was often called) was thought to mark the end of old-style European conflicts. This was partly due to the horrors of 1914-1918 that were thought to haunt all Europeans; partly due to the disappearance of old militarist monarchies like the Hohenzollern monarchy of Prussia and Germany and the old system of secretive military alliances (the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance); partly due to the apparent democratisation of Europe which it was thought would mean that war could not be waged without the will of the people, and after 1918 that will would no longer be there; and partly as a result of the financial burdens fighting the Great War and rebuilding states afterwards had imposed on individual exchequers. In addition the appearance of the League of Nations raised hoped that there would now be other ways of resolving interstate disputes than military might. Because of this the old cycle of rearming for the next revenge conflict was thought to be broken. In addition, the Wall Street Collapse of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression had forced governments to rein in expenditures and provide for the increasing poverty that was hitting states. In such circumstances, a heavily funded military was thought neither politically possible nor financially viable. However, the growing instability in Weimar Germany with the rapid collapse in governments and the growing reliance on President Paul von Hindenburg's presidential decrees raised fears among some that however unpopular and financially difficult, increased military expenditure was becoming unavoidable.

Faced with the growing political and economic instability in Europe, the rise in Nazism and the increased irrelevance of the League of Nations as a means to deal with disputes, Chamberlain as British Prime Minister oversaw one of the most massive military buildups in modern history and instituted a peacetime draft. He also compromised with Hitler over the Sudetenland, largely after being advised by his generals that the United Kingdom was in no military position to fight Hitler. Although Churchill is credited with having fought the war against Hitler, it was Chamberlain's rebuilding of the depleted British military that gave Churchill an army, navy and air force capable of fighting, although popular myth continues to see Chamberlain as just an appeaser.

It is also worth noting that after Chamberlain's death, Churchill's eulogy spoke movingly and positively of Chamberlain's desire for peace.

The fear of war after the experiences of 1914-1918 and their own inadequate military capacity also led many European leaders and peoples to appease the Fascist regimes of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Francisco Franco in Spain, again in the belief that war under any cost was undesirable and wrong.

Appeasement's effect on the Second World War

It has been argued that if an overly bellicose war-enthusiasm had produced the mass slaughter of World War I, then the resulting determination to avoid war at all costs in the 1930s proved equally counterproductive, with Europe's failure to oppose Hitler leading the German Führer to believe that he could do as he pleased and no-one would threaten war in response. In this view the delay caused by appeasement increased the number of people killed when war ultimately became unavoidable. Another view argues that there were elements within the German Army who would have removed Hitler from power if he had backed down in the face of Allied opposition. Finally, some have argued that had the Allies put a hard line on Czechoslovakia, Germany would have had less time to rearm and the resulting war would have been less destructive.

However, these views are not without critics. It has also been argued that a strong stand by Britain and France would not have caused Hitler to back down, and that in the Sudeten crisis, Hitler was fully intent on going to war with Britain and France and seizing control of Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, the idea that an early war would have prevented a general war has also been criticized. Long before the Czech crisis, Hitler had revealed his intent to become master of Europe if not the world, and many historians feel that it is unlikely that a strong stand over Czechoslovakia would have caused him to permanently renounce such ambitions. In addition, it has been pointed out that there were some in the German Army who detested Hitler and were actively looking for an excuse for a coup (for example General Beck), there is no reason to believe that a loss of face over Czechoslovakia would have triggered a coup or that a coup would have been successful. Finally, it has been argued that there is no reason to believe that a war over Czechoslovakia would have been less destructive than the war over Poland. Both Britain and France, although bound by their respective military alliances with Poland to start a major air and land offensive agains Germany within 15 days of the outbreak of the war, again followed their appeasement policy and engaged in the phony war instead. This, after the collapse of the Polish army, only gave Germany several additional months to rearm and pick their convenient timing to invade next countries.

Another example of appeasement could be American and British position in Teheran Conference
and later in Yalta conference, where both Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly accepted all Stalin's demands even if there was not any immediate risk of confrontation. Later, Winston Churchill considered that it might well have been worthwhile to continue World War II after VE Day by fighting the Soviet army. The move by Western consensus to draw the line at this possibility was perceived by some as appeasement by the West towards Josef Stalin which led to the Cold War.

The Theme of Appeasement in Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy

In the writings of U.S. neoconservativess such Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Boot, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, William Bennett, Michael Johns, Peter Rodman, and others influential in forging the foreign policy doctrines of the Bush administration, the history of appeasement with Hitler at Munich in 1938 and the Cold War's policies of Détente and containment (rather than rollback) with the Soviet Union and China, which they consider tantamount to appeasement at Munich, are constant themes.

Many of these neoconservatives see moral undertones in America's foreign policy imperatives. They supported Ronald Reagan's claim that the former Soviet Union was an evil empire, and they see the post-September 11 world as one of good (the United States) versus evil. They argue that the post-September 11 war will be a long and arduous one and a turning point for global civilization, and that all nations will be called upon to choose sides.

The modern resurrection of Churchillian rhetoric--labeling pacificism and isolationism "appeasement"--has been a driving and very influential force in modern American foreign policy, starting in the 1980s and continuing to the present day. Numerous examples exist:

• The Heritage Foundation's Michael Johns, in 1987, urged Ronald Reagan to use the Iran-Contra scandal as an opportunity to explain why the use of force (U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras) was necessary to drive the former Soviet Union from the American hemisphere. In "Peace in Our Time: The Spirit of Munich Lives On," published in the 10th Anniversary issue of Policy Review, Johns wrote: "Up against the ropes in the Iran-Contra affair, Ronald Reagan should have come out swinging, announcing clearly that this government carries itself in the tradition of the Marquis de Lafayette, that freedom fighters will no longer be left to die in the jungle, like Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs."

• In his well-publicized piece, "The Case for American Empire," in the conservative Weekly Standard, Max Boot argued that "The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role." He countered sentiments that the "United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchanan's phrase, 'a republic, not an empire'" arguing that "In fact this analysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation."

• Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential conservative think tank in Washington, in his AEI piece "The Underpinnings of the Bush doctrine" argued, "In other words, the fundamental premise of the Bush Doctrine is true: The United States possesses the means--economic, military, diplomatic--to realize its expansive geopolitical purposes. Further, and especially in light of the domestic political reaction to the attacks of September 11, the victory in Afghanistan and the remarkable skill demonstrated by President Bush in focusing national attention, it is equally true that Americans possess the requisite political willpower to pursue an expansive strategy."

Following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the Bush Administration has made proclamations affirming these aggressive stances.

The Bush Doctrine is a proclamation of the right of the United States to wage pre-emptive war should it be threatened by terrorists or rogue states that are engaged in the production of weapons of mass destruction such as Iraq is alleged to have done, thus permitting pre-emptive strikes against developing threats can be seen as a change from focusing on the doctrine of deterrence (in the Cold War through mutually assured destruction) as the primary means of self-defense. There is some opinion that pre-emptive strikes have long been a part of international practice and indeed of American practice, as exemplified, for example, by the unilateral US blockade and boarding of Cuban shipping during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The doctrine also states that the United States "will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." This is designed to create a deterrence to countries that seek to use military might to oppose the United States' policy.

This was in contrast to other foreign policy experts who argued that Iraq could be restrained by enforcing No-Fly Zoness and by a policy of inspection by United Nations inspectors to restrict his ability to possess chemical or nuclear weapons, neoconservatives attacked this policy direction as appeasement of Saddam Hussein. Proponents of war sought to compare their war to Churchill's war against Hitler, with speakers like United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld comparing Saddam to Hitler, while comparing the toleration shown to Saddam to the 1930s appeasement of Hitler.

External links

• Eulogy for Neville Chamberlain by Winston Churchill

Useful Textbooks (Especially A-Level Orientated)

• British Foreign and Imperial Affairs, 1919-39 - Alan Farmer (2nd Ed.)
• British Foreign Policy 1919-39 - Paul W Doerr
• British Appeasement in the 1930s - William R Rock
• Churchill - Roy Jenkins
• Baldwin - Roy Jenkins
• Anthony Eden: A Life and Reputation - D Dutton
• Eden - D.R. Thorpe
• Europe and the Czechs - Penguin Books Shiela Grant Duff, Sep 1938
• The Parting of Ways - A Personal Account of the Thirties. Peter Owen, 1982, ISBN 0-7206-0586-5