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Solving the appeasement puzzle: contending historical interpretations of British diplomacy during the 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Stephen G. Walker
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Extract

The historical interpretations of British diplomacy during the 1930s are difficult to separate from those interpretations that explain the occurrence of the Second World War. Historians often link them by relating the British policy of appeasement to the outbreak of the war. British policy becomes a “permissive” cause of World War II by allowing Hitler to rearm Germany, consolidate western German frontiers, and expand towards the east. First, the British failed to prevent Hitler from occupying the Rhineland in March, 1936, and then merely protested the German annexation of Austria two years later. Within six months after the Anschluss Prime Minister Chamberlain accepted the cessation of the Sudetenland to Germany at Munich. Finally, after Hitler conquered the remainder of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, the British guaranteed the territorial integrity of Poland. When Hitler attacked Poland in September, 1939, the British government, with the French as allies, came to Poland's defence. The British decision to honour this commitment belatedly but irrevocably reversed their earlier appeasement policy, which was to concede Hitler's territorial demands in an attempt to reach a peaceful European settlement with Germany.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , October 1980 , pp. 219 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1980

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References

page 219 note 1 The following division of historians into schools is somewhat arbitrary. The works cited below are approximations of ideal types of interpretations. They may not fit exactly the idealized interpretations, but they do express their general themes. Two excellent reviews of appeasement historiography include Watt, D. C., ‘Appeasement: The Rise of a Revisionist School’, The Political Quarterly, xxxvi (1965), pp. 191–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watt, D. G., ‘The Historiography of Appeasement’, in Sked, A. and Cook, C. (eds.), Crisis and Controversy: Essays in Honor A. J. P. Taylor (New York, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 220 note 1 Wolfers, A., Britain and France Between Two Wars (New York, 1966), pp. 209–211Google Scholar, 226–228, 251–253; the Wolfers volume was first published in 1940 by Harcourt, Brace, & Go. Gilbert, M. and Gott, R., The Appeasers (Boston, 1963), pp. 5–9Google Scholar; Newman, W., The Balance of Power in the Interwar Tears, 1919–1939 (New York, 1968), pp. 19–32Google Scholar; Taylor, A. J. P., Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

page 220 note 2 Churchill, W., The Gathering Storm (Boston, 1948), pp. 71—77Google Scholar, 119–123, 141–142, 340–346; Kennedy, J. F., Why England Slept (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Rowse, A. L., Appeasement (New York, 1961); pp. 14–15Google Scholar, 116–117; George, M., The Warped Vision (Pittsburgh, 1965), pp. 39–55.Google Scholar

page 220 note 3 Maisky, I., Who Helped Hitler? (London, 1964)Google Scholar; Cowling, M., The Impact of Hitler (London, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 221 note 1 Clifford, N., Retreat From China (Seattle, 1967)Google Scholar; Colvin, I., The Chamberlain Cabinet (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Middlemas, K., The Strategy of Appeasement (Chicago, 1972)Google Scholar; Thorne, C., The Limits of Foreign Policy (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Lee, B. A., Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1939 (Stanford, 1973)Google Scholar; Hardie, F., The Abyssinian Crisis (London, 1974).Google Scholar

page 221 note 2 Barnett, C., The Collapse of British Power (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Kennedy, P. M., The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Kennedy, P. M., ‘The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865–1939’, British Journal of International Studies, ii (1976), pp. 195–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Barnett (pp. 19–68) also argues that a decline in the quality of British leadership accompanied these two trends.

page 221 note 3 Kennedy, P. M., ‘The Tradition of Appeasement’Google Scholar, Ibid, p. 195. This definition is italicized in the source.

page 221 note 4 Cited from Medlicott, W. N., British Foreign Policy Since Versailles, 1919–1963 (London, 1968), p. xviGoogle Scholar, by Kennedy, Ibid. p. 205. Italics mine.

page 221 note 5 Kennedy, Ibid. pp. 205–206; P. M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, op. cit. pp. 268–298; Barnett, op. cit. Ch. V.

page 221 note 6 Wolfers, A., Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore, 1962), pp. 73–74Google Scholar, makes the distinction between possession and milieu goals: “One can distinguish goals pertaining, respectively, to national possessions and to the shape of the environment in which the nation operates. I call the former ‘possession goals’, the latter ‘milieu goals’.”

page 222 note 1 See Middlemas, op. cit.; Thome, op. cit.; Lee, op. cit.; Hardie, op. cit.

page 222 note 2 Thompson, N., The Anti-Appeasers (Ocford, 1971)Google Scholar; Gilbert and Gott, op. cit.; Colvin, I., None So Blind, (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

page 223 note 1 The inclusion of negotiations and mediation as verbal and physical non-military conflict behaviours, respectively, reflects the context in which these actions occurred. Although they are co-operative in form, they occurred under duress and can also be interpreted as subtle acts of opposition. Negotiations bought time and minimized losses, while mediation was an act of intervention to defend a small nation from domination by a larger one. Under other historical conditions, these same types of behaviours can be genuinely conciliatory. For a discussion of the importance of context in the interpretation of international behaviour, see Jervis, R., ‘The Costs of the Quantitative Study of International Relations’, in Knorr, K. and Rosenau, J. (eds,). Contending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton, 1969)Google Scholar, Gh. 10.

page 224 note 1 For a description of Cabinet operations during this period, see Daalder, H., Cabinet Reform in Britain, 1914–1963 (Stanford, 1963), pp. 66–68Google Scholar; Jennings, I., Cabinet Government, Third Edition (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 241CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 306–313.

page 225 note 1 These sources do not include direct access to the Cabinet papers and the private papers of key British decision makers; however, the results from these sources appear to be corroborated by the interpretations of historians who have had access to the Cabinet papers: Lee, op. cit.; Hardie, op. cit.; Colvin, op. cit.; Middlemas, op. cit.

page 226 note 1 Hoare, S., (Viscount Templewood), Nine Troubled Tears (London, 1954), p. 153Google Scholar. See also Eden, A. (Lord Avon), Facing the Dictators (Boston, 1962), p. 246.Google Scholar

page 226 note 2 Hoare, Ibid. p. 155.

page 226 note 3 Ibid. pp. 160–161. See also Eden, op. cit. pp. 323–325.

page 226 note 4 Hoare, Ibid.

page 227 note 1 Eden, op. ciu p. 226.

page 228 note 1 Eden, Ibid. pp. 396, 400; Clifford, op. cit. pp. 12–15; Middlemas, K. and Barnes, J., Baldwin (London, 1969), pp. 762–763Google Scholar, 769, 775; Hardie, op. cit.

page 229 note 1 Sixty of the eighty-five decisions occurred in military situations, i.e., they are accompanied by an explicit reference to British military capabilities (or lack of them) in the rationales for the conflict behaviours selected by the decision makers. The other twenty-decisions, which do not contain references to British militrary capabilities in their rationales, are excluded from Tables 5, 6, and 7.

page 232 note 1 Hoare, op. cit. p. 154; Eden, op. cit. pp. 246, 355, 527–532, 669.

page 232 note 2 Hardie, op. cit. pp. 164–200.

page 232 note 3 Hoare, op. cit. pp. 191–192. See also Churchill, op. cit. pp. 181–182.

page 232 note 4 Hoare, Ibid. p. 183. This last reason may be an afterthought to reinforce in retrospect his policy rationale.

page 232 note 5 Royal Institute of International Affairs (R.I.I.A.), Survey of International Affairs, ii (London, 1936), pp. 300–301Google Scholar; Hoare, Ibid. p. 182.

page 232 note 6 Middlemas and Barnes, op. cit. pp. 886–896.

page 233 note 1 Eden, op. ciL p. 355.

page 233 note 2 Rhineland Pact, Art. 4, Paragraph 3, cited in R.I.I.A., Survey of International Affairs, 1936 (London, 1937), p. 266. The full text of this pact is in Newman, op. cit. pp. 207–211.

page 233 note 3 Survey, 1936, Ibid. pp. 288–289; Eden, op. cit. p. 450.

page 233 note 4 Ibid.

page 234 note 1 Feiling, K., The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946), pp. 322Google Scholar, 330–339; Eden op. cit. pp. 650–671, 705–709.

page 234 note 2 Thorne, C., The Approach of War, 1938–1939 (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

page 234 note 3 Churchill, op. cit. pp. 243–249, 257–258; Churchill, W., Their Finest Hour (Boston, 1949), p. 571.Google Scholar

page 234 note 4 Colvin, The Chamberlain Cabinet, op. cit. pp. 112, 199–216, 268–269.

page 236 note 1 George, op. cit.; Gilbert and Gott, op. cit.; Rowse, op. cit.; Gilbert, M., The Roots of Appeasement (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Rock, W., Appeasement On Trial (Hamden, 1966).Google Scholar

page 236 note 2 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, op. cit. pp. 129, 336; J. F. Kennedy, op. cit. pp. 105–106, 116.

page 237 note 1 J. F. Kennedy, op. cit. pp. 127, 189, 234.

page 237 note 2 Eden, op. cit. pp. 355, 377–378, 534–535, 55O-551.

page 237 note 3 The economics of appeasement has recently begun to receive intensive security. See Wendt, B., Economic Appeasement (Düsselford, 1971)Google Scholar and N. H. Gibbs, Rearmament Policy, Vol. I of J. R. M. Butler (ed.), Grand Strategy: A History of the Second World War (London, 1976).

page 238 note 1 Churchill, W., The Grand Alliance (Boston, 1950), pp. 587–588Google Scholar, 600–601; Clifford, op. cit. p. 137–157; Eden, A., (Lord Avon), The Reckoning (Boston, 1965), pp. 361–363.Google Scholar

page 238 note 2 See the Appendix for these decisions toward France in March, 1936, May, 1938 and September, 1938, toward the Low Countries in January, 1939, and toward Poland in the spring and summer of 1939. The decisions toward France, Switzerland, and Holland are not included in Figures 2 and 3.

page 239 note 1 Sir Crowe, Eyre, ‘Memorandum’ British Documents on the Origins of the War Vol. III (London, 1928), pp. 397–420Google Scholar, especially pp. 402–403, and Albrecht-Carriere, R., A Diplomatic History of Europe Since the Congress of Vienna (New York, 1968), pp. 328–329.Google Scholar

page 239 note 2 See Annex A: Treaty of Mutual Guarantee Between Germany Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy. A text of the Locarno Pact is in Survey of International Affairs, (London, 1928), ii, pp. 439–452.

page 239 note 3 Thome, op. cit.; C. Barnett, op. cit. pp. 558–575.

page 239 note 4 Thorne, op. cit. pp. 197–202.

page 240 note 1 See the discussion of coding procedures, supra, and in the Appendix.

page 240 note 2 Compare Golvin, The Chamberlain Cabinet, op, cit. pp. 57–59ff. with Feiling, K., The of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946), pp. 347–349Google Scholar. The memoirs of Lord Halifax, Fullness of Days (New York, 1957) are uninformative.

page 240 note 3 This extension may be redundant, since in the absence of cross pressures neither Chamberlain nor the British Chiefs of Staff would necessarily have supported a policy of military intervention to defend Czechoslovakia. Gibbs, op. cit. pp. 647–648, concludes after an analysis of Committee on Imperial Defence documents and Chamberlain's private papers that the defence chiefs and the Prime Minister shared the view “…that central and eastern Europe were not directly Britain's concern…. In other words, the evidence suggests that, even had Britain's rearmament programme been much more advanced than it actually was in 1938, the British Government would still not have advised Benes differently or chosen to go to war had Benes compromised and yet been attacked”. This conclusion is consistent with the initial interpretation of evidence in this paper (see Tables 5, 6, 7 and commentary, supra) that diplomatic stakes and not cross pressures were the most important influences upon British tactics.

page 241 note 1 Barnett, op. cit.; P. M. Kennedy, ‘The Tradition of Appeasement’, op. cit.

page 241 note 2 Barnett, Ibid. pp. 592–593.

page 242 note 1 Alker, H. R. Jr., ‘Tolimetrics’, in Greenstein, F. I. and Polsby, N. W. (eds.), Strategies of Inquiry (Reading, Massachusetts, 1976), pp. 168–175Google Scholar; Zeisel, H., Say It With Figures (New York, 1968), pp. 152–199Google Scholar; Seltiz, C., et al. Research Methods in Social Relations. Revised One Volume Edition (New York, 1959), pp. 399–402.Google Scholar

page 243 note 1 For each British decision the cross pressures variable was coded as either present (yes) or absent (no), and estimates of military capabilities were coded by the author as either sufficient (high) or insufficient (low) for successful military action. The diplomatic stakes were categorized as either possession or milieu goals. The intercoder reliability score was ≥0.80 with a mean of 0.84 by three coders for the actions and stakes categories, where P = % of intercoder agreement, ra = the number of units coded by one coder, rb = the number of units coded by another coder, rab = the number of units coded by both coders, and Po = 2rab/ra + rb.