Academics, politicians and diplomats debated the appeasement policies of the 1930s for more than seventy years. Historians` assessments ranged from condemning Hitler`s Germany for becoming too strong to the decision that Germany was so strong that it might well win a war, and that postponing a showdown was in their country`s best interest. Historian Andrew Roberts argued in 2019: “In fact, the generally accepted view in Britain today is that they were at least right to have tried. Britain will not enter hostilities for many months, admitting that it was not ready to directly oppose Germany in the fight. She sat there watching the invasion of France and didn`t act until four years later. [8] (Compare the British role in the Battle of France in 1940.) In the post-war years, statesmen often invoked their rejection of appeasement as a justification for decisive, sometimes armed, action in international relations. Chamberlain`s policy of appeasement was born out of the failure of the League of Nations and the failure of collective security. The League of Nations was founded after the First World War in the hope that international cooperation and collective resistance to aggression could prevent another war. Members of the League were entitled to the support of other members when they were attacked. Collective security policy goes hand in hand with international disarmament measures and, if possible, should be based on economic sanctions against an aggressor. It seemed ineffective to deal with the aggression of dictators, especially the German remilitarization of the Rhineland and the invasion of Abyssinia by Italian leader Benito Mussolini. In the early 1990s, a new theory of appeasement, sometimes called “counter-revisionist,”[74] emerged when historians argued that appeasement was probably the only choice for the British government in the 1930s, but that it was poorly implemented, executed too late, and not applied strongly enough to limit Hitler. Appeasement was seen as a viable policy, given the difficulties the British Empire faced in recovering from the First World War, and Chamberlain would have pursued policies that met Britain`s cultural and political needs.
Frank McDonough is one of the main proponents of this vision of appeasement and describes his book Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War[75] as a “post-revisionist” study. [76] Appeasement was a crisis management strategy that sought a peaceful resolution of Hitler`s grievances. “Chamberlain`s worst mistake,” McDonough says, “was to believe that he could walk Hitler on the path of the yellow brick to peace, when in reality Hitler was walking very firmly on the road to war.” He criticized revisionist historians for focusing on Chamberlain`s motivations rather than how appeasement worked in practice — as “viable policies” to confront Hitler. James P. Levy opposes the open condemnation of appeasement. “Knowing what Hitler did later,” he writes, “critics of appeasement condemn the men who tried to keep the peace in the 1930s, men who couldn`t have known what was going to happen later. The political leaders responsible for appeasement have made many mistakes. They were not blameless. But what they tried to do was logical, rational and human.
[77] Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave a radio speech before leaving Arras, France, after visiting the British Expeditionary Force on December 15, 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, two days after the German invasion of Poland. The guarantees given by Britain and the France to Poland mark the end of the policy of appeasement. Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for appeasement In the United Kingdom, the Royal Navy generally preferred appeasement. During the Italian Abyssinian Crisis of 1937, she was convinced that she could easily defeat the Italian Royal Navy in open war. However, he facilitated appeasement because he did not want to use much of his naval power for the Mediterranean and thus weaken his positions vis-à-vis Germany and Japan. [39] In 1938, the Royal Navy authorized appeasement from Munich because it calculated that Britain at that time lacked the political and military resources to intervene while maintaining an imperial defensive capability. [40] [41] In the week before Munich, Churchill warned: “The division of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete capitulation of Western democracies to the threat of Nazi violence. More closely associated with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, he is now widely discredited as a policy of weakness. But at the time, it was a popular and seemingly pragmatic policy. The most famous case of appeasement is the Munich Pact, in which Britain and France, under Chamberlain`s leadership, ceded Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. The hope was that he would stop the aggression of Hitler and the Nazis, but he did not and was widely seen as a pass to Germany.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher referred to Churchill`s example during the 1982 Falklands War: “When we, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, urged her to reach a compromise with the Argentines, she suddenly banged on the table and told her insistently that this was the table where Neville Chamberlain sat in 1938 and spoke of the Czechs as a distant people, of which we know so little.” [83] The specter of appeasement was raised in discussions of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. [84] Positive views on appeasement have been shaped in part by media manipulation.