The Roots of Appeasement

Martin Gilbert

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780795346804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

An in-depth look at the misguided foreign policy of appeasement towards Hitler and the Third Reich during World War II—from a world renowned historian.
 
World War II and its attendant horrors arguably began in the British policy of appeasement of the Nazi rise to power between the First and Second World Wars.
 
In this compelling work, Martin Gilbert walks the reader through several decades of behavior that, in retrospect, is hard to accept. Gilbert's incisive focus on primary sources uncovers the real reasons for the appeasement policy, from the search for a just peace to attempts to avoid another war at all costs—illuminating the historical underpinnings of a fatally flawed policy and its tragic consequences for the Jewish people.
 
This book also contains a chronology of appeasement policy as well as five specially drawn maps and five appendices—including a transcript of British statesman and politician David Lloyd George's conversation with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1936.

CHAPTER 1

The Challenge of War

For a hundred and fifty years the English public accepted war as a part of the natural order of events. From Marlborough’s victories against France at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean war, the conflict in arms was accepted as both inevitable and expedient. By war, danger was averted, empire extended, and prestige enhanced. By war, reputation was maintained. Nor was this process considered a particularly ugly one. Armies were small, the devastation they caused was mostly limited to a narrow line of march and to battlefields which one man could survey at a glance.

For Englishmen, the impact of a hundred and fifty years of frequent wars was small. Those living on the verge of starvation suffered, particularly during the Napoleonic wars; but society, which provided the politicians and filled the salons with chatter, was hardly touched. Jane Austen’s novels, written at the height of a prolonged war, give no indication of anguish or disgust. Edward Gibbon, wishing to travel from Geneva to London, could decide to go through Ostend instead of through France, because ‘the long war has rendered even that polite people somewhat peevish’.¹ War was something that affected armies, not peoples; it was a political exercise, not a social and psychological catastrophe.

Yet even between Blenheim and Sevastopol voices were raised against the easy acceptance of war as no more than an item of political behaviour, of no more lasting consequence than a rigged election or the purchase of votes through patronage. There was, though in a minority, a feeling that war stood in a category of its own, and should if possible be avoided. Walpole was the first politician of modern times to make peace his firm object, and though he was finally forced into war with Spain in 1739 by pressure of the self-styled ‘Patriots’, he had made his mark as a man determined to avert war by a wide range of means.² Burke’s judgement on Walpole is instructive, for Burke was later a leading advocate of war against revolutionary France. Of Walpole he wrote:

He never manfully put forward the entire strength of his cause. He temporized; he managed…. They who stir up the people to improper desires, whether of peace or war, will be condemned by themselves. They who weakly yield to them will be condemned by history.³

Burke’s appeal to history is important. He saw a moral issue, and the possibility of condemnation. He was concerned with posterity, and he made a distinction between just and unjust wars. His own changing views bear witness to the problem which he was among the first to recognize. In 1775 he condemned war against the American Colonies; in 1796 he demanded war against France. The arguments which he used on both occasions are the basis of the arguments used by the advocates and critics of appeasement before 1939. The theme of Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America was that:

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others; and, we chose rather to be happy citizens, than subtle disputants.⁴

Because he believed that Britain and America could be reconciled, he urged that they should be; that prolonged and strenuous efforts to procure peace were of greater value, and alone of moral value, than the politically easy resort to war.

In 1796 Burke saw no chance of reconciliation. The war against France, he insisted, was not a war of interests but of ideologies. It was morally right to take up arms against ideas which were subversive of liberty. It was a war, he wrote in his Letters on a Regicide Peace:

…not with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may veer about: not with a State which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system, which, by its essence, is inimical to all other Governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war.⁵

Such was Burke’s analysis. It was, of course, a personal one. And it continued to be a personal one in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is for the individual to decide, by means of whatever evidence is at his disposal, whether a particular war springs from a clash of interests which by better management could be shifted from the battlefield to the conference table, or from a conflict of ideologies which can only be resolved—indeed, some would say must be resolved—by war.

The personal dilemma creates a number of difficult problems. Can an individual, even a politician inside the government circle, know for certain that he has enough evidence at his disposal to make a valid judgement? Can a politician, however much evidence is at his disposal, be certain that he is not unduly influenced by personal or popular prejudice, the result, perhaps, of decades of imperceptible yet insidious propaganda? Can a man who is prepared, as Burke was in 1796, to make a definite claim for the absolute morality of his cause, be certain that later generations will not challenge the premises on which his judgement was based, and condemn the war which flowed from it?

In this context of the morality of war, it is well to remember that when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 both Neville Chamberlain, who had tried every means in his power to avoid war, and Winston Churchill, who had taken the Burkean view that Nazism and the British way of life could not co-exist, stressed in their speeches in Parliament that morality was on their side.⁶ ‘This is no war,’ said Churchill, ‘for domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain…. It is a war… to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.’ Churchill told the House of Commons that Britain’s efforts to preserve peace gave her a moral stature which would be a source of strength and energy: ‘Our hands may be active,’ he claimed, ‘but our consciences are at rest.’ Chamberlain asserted equally boldly that he had neglected no measure by which peace might have been assured.

In 1939 it was thus possible for Chamberlain, as in 1796 it had been possible for Burke, to see a particular war as morally justified; and this moral justification seemed so important that it overrode considerations of loss of life, damage to trade, the destruction of cities, bitterness between nations, and the difficulties, when war ended, of making a peace which would ensure the supremacy of the principles for which the war had been fought.

If, before every war, a nation could speak of its moral rectitude with the unanimity and conviction of a Burke or a Churchill, the problem of appeasement would never arise. If a war is just, and can, before its onset, be shown to be just, then attempts to preserve peace can have no justification, except to a pacifist who objects to all wars irrespective of their cause. But the British are not a pacifist people, and the conscientious objector has always been in a minority. How then can we explain the reluctance of the majority of Englishmen to contemplate a war in 1938 with a power which, in 1939, could be attacked, in the name of morality, with a unanimity of conviction probably unique in British history? The answer lies in the widespread doubt as to the morality of such a war; a doubt which led people to insist upon every possible effort being made to reconcile Britain and Germany. Appeasement was the instrument by which all doubts were to be allayed. If reconciliation were possible, it would be achieved. Appeasement was a search, by every means that politicians and even private people could find, to create a relationship between Britain and Germany other than that of war. It sprang from a belief, not that war itself was immoral, but that a war between Britain and Germany would be immoral. But in 1939 no grounds for such doubts remained.

This concern with the morality of any particular war had an imposing pedigree. The alarm bell which Walpole and Burke had rung, albeit in a minority, in the eighteenth century, was rung with increasing clamour in the nineteenth. In 1800 Charles James Fox had demanded peace with France, on the grounds that the war could no longer be upheld on moral grounds; indeed, he argued that British provocation had been as responsible for the outbreak of the war as French wickedness. We used morality as an excuse for war, not as the reason, he claimed, for when our allies had partitioned Poland, an act of ‘infamy and disgrace’, Britain had acquiesced. Fox urged the government to see the French viewpoint, to realize that the war was unjustified, and to end it. ‘Is peace a rash system?’ he thundered. ‘Is it dangerous for nations to live in amity with each other?’⁷

Fox failed in 1800; the thought that a war might be immoral did not excite strong passions. Half a century later, John Bright succeeded where Fox failed. His denunciation of the Crimean War laid a firm foundation for subsequent doubt. A hundred and fifty years of easily accepted war was over; a hundred years of anguish and doubt were about to begin. The age when war was romantic, when alliances were skilfully manipulated for sudden gain, and patriotism was the ability to cheer on soldiers from the sideline—that age was dying. The age of conciliation and reconciliation, compromise and barter, realizing one’s own faults, seeing both sides of any dispute, giving as well as taking, conceding as well as demanding—that age, the age of appeasement, had begun.

Bright began his political career, like his colleague Cobden, fighting domestic issues. Both he and Cobden became involved in foreign affairs as critics of particular policies. Bright was not a pacifist: he believed rather that the Crimean War was unjustified. ‘Force is no remedy’ he insisted; and, with Cobden, sought an improvement in international affairs through discussion and disarmament. Both men believed that all international change should be peaceful change; both believed that the balance of power was a phrase, in Bright’s words, ‘to be brought in on every occasion to stimulate this country to war’ and that we ought ‘to drive it from our minds’.⁸ Bright stressed the flimsy reasons for which men would go to war, and their ignorance of the sufferings, economic and social as well as personal, which war would entail. His voice was prophetic as far as the First World War was concerned:

It is a painful and terrible thing to think how easy it is to stir up a nation to war… and you will find that wars are always supported by a class of arguments which, after the war is over, the people find were arguments they should not have listened to.⁹

Bright opposed war against Russia, Cobden¹⁰ war against France, because the wars would create more problems than they could solve, more misery than they could cure, and more animosities than they could heal.

After 1854 European quarrels took on a new aspect. Wars became wars of national unity, not of conquest. It was for the liberation of Italy or the hegemony of Prussia that blood was shed. When Prussia defeated France she had not sought the wide territorial gains that marked earlier wars; she had not taken an acre of France’s large empire overseas; and even the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was caught up in Bismarck’s reluctance to create too great a sense of grievance in French minds. It was outside Europe that war continued to flourish. Imperial conquest was clothed in the fine robes of civilizing missions and the spread of Christianity. All Europe, being both civilized and Christian, could remain at peace: Africa and Asia could be the continents in which former enemies could search for glory and maintain a moral stance.

The alliance systems, which had, before 1854, been primarily preludes to war or balances intended to have a decisive influence upon the clash of armies and navies, were transformed, principally by Bismarck, into arrangements for preserving the existing frontiers, and creating a sense, not of impending conflict, but of security. Thus Prussia, Austria, and Russia co-operated, not to partition Rumania, as, in 1772 they had partitioned Poland, but to hold all existing frontiers together; not to fling the balance of armed might down upon the side of a particular combination of forces, but to make all such manipulations unnecessary. While Bismarck sought peace through a complex system of alliances, woven with the intricacy of a spider, Britain, in the age when Lord Salisbury’s influence was paramount, preserved a cautious neutrality. Invitations to combine were gently rebutted. Arbitration was offered wherever Europe seemed in danger of exploding. Compromises were reached wherever conflict threatened. Diplomacy emerged as the honest broker: sometimes its language was threatening or brusque, but always its aims were clear—settlement, not slaughter. The policy known somewhat haughtily as ‘Splendid Isolation’ was something quite different; it was ‘cautious manipulation’ or ‘subtle persuasion’.

Europe became, after 1854, more pragmatic; economic prosperity came to mean more than military might. Industrial and imperial prowess were the two criteria of a nation’s might. In the forty-four years after 1870 the European powers shunned war. Only Turkey, the ‘sick-man’ of Europe whose place was considered to be outside Europe altogether, fought a desperate series of wars to preserve its Balkan lands. But Europe was Christian, Turkey was Muslim; Europe bursting with energy and technological discovery, Turkey Asiatic and backward. The growth of industrial expertise created a club of nations who, though often suspicious of each other, reserved their weapons for those who were beyond the pale altogether.

Imperialism was a substitute for European war. At the turn of the century European armies joined together to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China and to rescue the Europeans trapped in the Legations. A German general led the force; a British general took charge of its observation balloons. Then each nation returned to pursue its own imperial aims—the Germans to suppress a rebellion in South-West Africa, the British balloon expert to lead a British force over the Himalayas and into Lhasa, the ‘forbidden city’ of Tibet.¹¹

Conscious of the need for peace in Europe, the imperial powers pursued a policy of deliberate settlement overseas. So much land was available for imperial expansion that land squabbles would clearly be an absurd reason for war in Europe. African frontiers were first discussed by conference in 1884, when Bismarck was host in Berlin to all those with African ambitions. Sometimes the public mind was roused to a frenzy by the press or a demagogue, as when, in 1897, the British man-in-the-street shouted in favour of war in order to check French expansion in West Africa, but such outbursts of war-fever were soon calmed by diplomatic compromise. It was only when a non-European power blocked imperial ambitions that serious war threatened, as when the Boer Republics challenged British hegemony in Southern Africa in 1899. Soldiers paraded in Europe, but fought in Africa or Asia. Generals inspected each other’s armies, admirals visited each other’s fleets, monarchs watched each other’s manoeuvres: then each went away and employed his forces to subdue or ‘civilize’ as he thought best.

The first fourteen years of the twentieth century saw a remarkable development in European affairs. Instead of allowing imperial rivalries to create national antagonisms sufficiently intense to lead to war, each country sought out its imperial rivals and tried to placate them. As it was becoming more and more inconceivable that war would ever again scar Europe, so non-European strife was eliminated. France and Britain, which in 1900 were snapping irritably at each other, hastened to settle all differences, and in 1904 signed the Entente Cordiale, whereby France recognized Britain’s paramountcy in Egypt, and Britain promised to give France a free hand in her conquest of Morocco. Disputes between the two in Siam and off Newfoundland were also settled. Neither power committed itself to helping the other in Europe; but all obstacles to goodwill were removed. A similar agreement was signed between Britain and Russia in 1907: all Asian quarrels, over Persia, Tibet, and Afghanistan, were resolved. Compromise was in the air; conciliation was on the wing. No agreement was sought with Germany, because there was nowhere in Asia or Africa—and indeed nowhere in Europe—where Anglo-German relations seemed to clash.

Despite the apparent lack of cause for dissension between Britain and Germany, mutual suspicion grew, and by 1912 the public and the press in both countries growled and grimaced at each other as if preparing for war. Yet diplomats on both sides of the North Sea saw no reason for alarm. They knew of no unsolvable problems between the two countries, and were confident that diplomacy, based as it was upon private, unhurried conversation and deliberate compromise, would always prevail. The circulation-boosting vitriol of the press had no place at the conference table. Sometimes an attempt was even made to staunch the flow of popular misconceptions, as when Noel Buxton, a Liberal MP, gave an interview to the Daily Chronicle in November 1912, and said:

I want to insist on the fact that there is no essential conflict of interest between the Germans and ourselves. Nowhere is there any conflict over territory…. There is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology of Appeasement
• 1 The Challenge of War
• 2 War Doubts
• 3 War Guilt
• 4 The Elusive Peace
• 5 Appeasement: The Essential Prospect
• 6 Versailles: The Nagging Doubt
• 7 The First Appeasement
• 8 No Victor, No Vanquished
• 9 Cry Havoc
• 10 The Crisis with France
• 11 The New Leader
• 12 Locarny-Blarney
• 13 The Sargent Chain
• 14 Nostra Maxima Culpa
• 15 Peace Through Prosperity
• 16 Nationalism Versus Ideology
• Other Books by Martin Gilbert
• Epilogue: Munich and the New Appeasement
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• Notes
• Select Bibliography