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The Problem of Appeasement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

George A. Lanyi
George A. Lanyi
Affiliation:
Oberlin College
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Extract

An evaluation of British foreign policy towards Nazi Germany is still overlaid in England by political controversy. The two main political parties cannot deny their descent from the parties that confronted each other in the 1930's. The question of responsibility for that tragically unsuccessful foreign policy and for the ensuing war still produces heated reproaches in the political arena and equally heated debates among historians. The belief that, had Britain taken the “right line,” the war could have been prevented is still very strong. In the words of the Oxford historian, A. L. Rowse: “There was a hope then, and it did matter what line we took; during that last decade this country exercised a leading influence in Europe and still held a position of leadership in the English-speaking world. All that has changed: the real decisions are made elsewhere” (p. 4). Had Hitler been checked and the exhaustive blood-letting avoided, would the “real decisions” still be made in England? These nagging questions arise again and again on the rostrum, in the newspapers, in Senior Common Rooms. They have produced two sets of legends, of which various versions circulate. The Right asserts in Quintin Hogg's words that “the Left was never right,” and that by demagogically exploiting the public's pacifist temper it kept Britain from rearming so that the Conservative governments had no alternative to appeasement. The Left, on the other hand, developed the legend that Tories feared Soviet Russian communism more than Nazism and saw in Hitler the man who stemmed the Red tide from spreading westward. The Communist version of this goes further; it asserts that Neville Chamberlain, in true Machiavellian fashion, encouraged Hitler to expand towards the East in order to involve him in a serious conflict with Stalin.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , January 1963 , pp. 316 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1963

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References

1 The Left Was Never Right (London 1945).

2 National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, Armaments and Policy, 1919–1939 (London 1945), passim.

3 Quoted in Strang, Lord, Britain in World Affairs (London 1961), 322.Google Scholar

4 Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, House of Commons, Official Report, Vol. 310, column 1446.

5 Ibid., Vol. 339, column 552 (October 6, 1938).

6 Politics Among Nations (3rd edn., New York 1960), 64.

7 Cf. also Haas, Ernst B. and Whiting, Allen S., Dynamics of International Relations (New York 1956), 158Google Scholar; Hartmann, Frederick H., The Relations of Nations (2nd ed., New York 1962), 106–7.Google Scholar

8 Morgenthau, 66–67. The same view was also taken by the earliest and still the best historian of the Pact, Munich, Wheeler-Bennett, John W., in Munich (New York 1948), 7.Google Scholar

9 The Gathering Storm (Boston 1938), 140–41.

10 Waltz's, Kenneth “first” and “second image” in Man, the State and War (New York 1959)Google Scholar, passim; on appeasement, see 220–23.

11 Retrospect: The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Viscount Simon (London 1952), 202–3.

12 Fullness of Days (London 1957), 188–89.

13 In the Nazi Era (London 1952), 163.

14 The English edition is entitled All Souls and Appeasement: A Contribution to Contemporary History (London 1961).

15 Nine Troubled Years (London 1954).

16 My Political Life, Vol. Ill: The Unforgiving Years, 1929–1940 (London 1955).

17 The History of the Times, 1912–1948, Part II (New York 1952); and SirWrench, Evelyn, Geoffrey Dawson and Our Times (London 1955).Google Scholar

18 A Diary with Letters, 1931–1950 (London 1954).

19 Review in International Affairs, XXXVIII (January 1962), 84–85.

20 There were no French military plans for the eventuality of a German occupation of the Rhineland that was not preparatory to an immediate attack against France. Therefore, as W. F. Knapp's excellent paper proved, there was no real deterrent to keep Hitler from occupying the Rhineland. (The Decline of the Third Republic, St. Antony's Papers, No. 5 [New York 1959], 67–85.)

21 The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London 1946).

22 Old Men Forget (London 1953).

23 The Fateful Years (London 1957).