Thanks to Patrick Crozier for pointing me to this essay by Paul Kennedy. I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are a couple of paragraphs that stuck in my mind:
Like it or not, American policy makers, pundits, strategists and high-level military officers cannot avoid the Appeasement story. Frankly, the tale of Britain’s dilemma during the 1930s is still far too close. Here was and is the world’s hegemon, with commitments all over the globe but also with pressing financial and social needs at home, with armed forces being worn out by continuous combat, with an array of evolving types of enemies, yet also facing recognizable and expanding newer nations bearing lots of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. So, what do you do: Appease, or not appease? Appease here, but not there? Declare some parts of the globe no longer of vital interest?
And, yes, there comes a time when you have to stand and fight; to draw a line in the sand; to say that you will not step backward. As did Great Britain in September 1939. But those British and Commonwealth citizens fought the war with such fortitude and gallantry because, one suspects, they knew that their successive administrations had tried, so often, to preserve the peace, to avoid another vast slaughter and to offer fair compromises. After the German attack on Poland, appeasement vanished. And rightly so. Now the gloves were off.
As Kennedy says, it is sometimes smart to back down, to make a concession, to buy time and avoid bloodshed if at all possible. Interestingly, he brings up a number of rows between Britain and the United States in the late 19th Century, around issues such as control of the Panama Canal and other territorial issues in the Caribbean basin. Fascinating.
The other point worth mentioning, particularly to those who argued that Britain could and should have stayed out of any conflict with Germany/Japan indefinitely, is that Western governments clearly did agonise for a long time before the eventual decision to fight was taken.
Compared to the sometimes piddling issues that our politicians talk about these days, I find this whole issue rather more interesting.
Yes, but surely the ultimate question should be that of future price to be paid for the temporary avoidance of bloodshed – unless one can reasonably expect such avoidance not to be temporary.
Alisa, absolutely. The judgement call is always going to be: do we save more by acting now or later? That applies not just to geo-politics, but to business strategy. Consider some of the decisions that firms take about how to handle competition, new markets, etc.
Neville Chamberlain and the other ministers of the 1930s often get a bad rap for appeasement, but it could and can be reasonably argued that they realised that Britain’s air defence, for example, was simply not up to purpose until the end of 1939, and even then, as Britain found in the air war of 1940, it was still a damn close call. If Britain had threatened war against Germany in 1938-39, we might not have been in a position to win or hold out. By 1940, Churchill and his advisors knew that Britain had a pretty effective fighter force with radar, good logistics, etc.
Hindsight is often dangerous. Exhibit A: much of the anti-war commentary about the invasion of Iraq since 2003.
For me what is interesting in the “appeasement” question is what were the motives for and against it at the time
Were we the real targets of Hitlers aggression? There is the argument that Hitler was a maniac and would his megolomania would not have stopped until the world was under his jackboot. However there is the counter argument that as per all of his published thinking, jewry, bolshevism and USSR were always his main targets and if we had continued to appease him we would have ended up as a basically meaningless bystander in a cold war between a eurasian bloc and the US…not much different to what happened anyway.
So in fact the reasons we ended appeasement were not really cold hard geo-political analysis but rather a point was reached where it became unsustainably morally to yield to an absolutist tyrannical regime. Churchills lone voice against Hitler to which everyone else slowly began to listen was not motivated because he necessarily thought that Britains geo-political interests were best served by war but rather that we had a moral imperative to prevent Hitlers “philosophy” from expanding unhindered.
Do we face the same moral imperative when it comes to Islamism or should we continue our appeasement of that absolutist and tyrannical philosophy as well
Surely there is a vast difference between declaring war and signing documents that encourages and legitimises.
Chamberlain fed the wolf IMHO.
Yes, our defences were not up to it in ’38, but that does not mean you embolden the other side, reducing the time before conflict.
I would take issue with the idea that the American military is “being worn out by continuous combat”. Their equipment if anything is improving with combat experience, as are their methods. Their retention numbers, last I checked, were up. The battle experience gained in Iraq and Afghanistan is invaluable to the future leaders and policy makers in the military.
It is the public will to fight that is failing, not the military.
Mr. Black, the public will to fight is indeed failing, and the soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are indeed doing their jobs very well, but I think you are incorrect in denying that they are “being worn out by continuous combat.” Far too many of those troops are reservists called up to active duty, often for third or even fourth tours. These are people who are willing to serve their country if there is truly a need, but reserves are essentially civilians with private lives and non-military careers which are being seriously, and serially, disrupted. We are asking far too much of them, and of their families; that is not what they signed up for. Perhaps it’s not true for the regular army, but the reserves are indeed being “worn out.” And this. as much as anything, is the reason that the public will is flagging.
“…but the reserves are indeed being “worn out.” And this. as much as anything, is the reason that the public will is flagging.”
You mean aside from the influence of the reactionary anti-war wing of the left which Obama stoked in his election campaign?
Mike, there are lots of contributing elements, but frankly I don’t think the “reactionary anti-war wing of the left” is all that much of an influence. They’re always around, but just part of the background noise. After 8 years the country is (understandably) beginning to suffer from battle fatigue, and the over-extended reservists most of all.
The appeasement wasn’t a wholly rational, cold blooded calculation: what are our military capabilities, vs. what are the chances of avoiding a war, etc. People like to believe that decision making by the leaders is entirely rational. This isn’t so. Britain was tired, mortally wounded and worn out by the Great War, same as France. It wasn’t mentally prepared for another war, it couldn’t contemplate it. There was a psychological barrier which was difficult to cross.
It declared war against Germany in 1939, after the Ruso-German pact and the invasion of Poland – not because it was better prepared, militarily, but because it finally grasped that war was inevitable. Churchill grasped this earlier, but the public didn’t.
This represents a very common and unfortunate misunderstanding of the essence of morality: the moral and the (long-term) practical aspects of our behavior are inseparable, they are two sides of the same coin – that is, if we are talking about a moral system which upholds the preservation of life as its highest value, which the Judeo-Christian tradition does. To echo Tim’s comment, the fact that feeding the lamb to the wolf is both immoral and impractical is no coincidence.
We can go further and say that the ceding of all Eastern Europe to Stalin, which turned the countries, by force, into communist satellites, and installed there inhuman and oppressive regimes was a far worse appeasement than Munich. And Stalin did it contrary to explicit commitments made at Yalta.
America and England were not ill prepared, militarily, at the time – they had The Bomb.
This appeasement was appallingly immoral.
Yet, again, it was war-weariness that caused it, not moral or practical considerations.
For some obscure reasons, Munich is associated with the word “appeasement” and not the far bigger betrayal of Eastern Europe.
As to Paul Kennedy’s essay, this clever and erudite essay is aimed at getting the US out of Afghanistan, promoting “disentanglement” there – i.e. running away.
That may be good advice, Afghanistan is not of paramount strategic importance.
Nowhere does he mention the big strategic problem the US faces – Iranian nukes which is a bigger strategic threat than the rise of China, as China is not a “revisionist” nation, while Iran is.
America’s entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan made it war-weary and unable to tackle the Iranian problem.
Kennedy wastes his erudition on a side issue.
The Paul Kennedy imperial overreach theory is largely wrong.
It may have been true that the Empire overstreached Spain in past centuries (I do not know enough about the matter to judge) – but the basic problems of the Spanish economy were caused by the vast web of internal regulations (what we still half remember when we use the term “Spanish practices” in a place of work), not the amount of money spent on defending the Empire.
Britain in the 1930s?
The costs of Empire were not the source of the economic problems, the costs were not that large (and the British economy actually performed less badly in the 1930’s than most places did – there is a lot of false propaganda pushed about Britain in the 1930’s).
The war with Germany in 1939 (which, yes indeed, distracted British military resources from protecting the Empire from the Japanese) was nothing to do with Imperal concerns – it was a traditional British (indeed English – because it is pre Britain) concern that no one power (especially an aggressive tyranny) should dominate Europe.
GEOGRAPHY dictates that such a dominance would be a mortal threat to Britain (not to the Empire – to Britiain itself).
Whether it was Phillip II, Louis XIV, the various French Revolutionary Regimes (leading to the Emperor N.) or Adolf Hitler – British self interest (British survival as an independent nation) meant that they had to be opposed.
Naught to do with Imperal Overreach.
As for America now.
I am no fan of either the Iraq war or the Afghan war.
However, the United States could pull out of both tomorrow (indeed it could ABOLISH THE ENTIRE DEFENCE DEPARTMENT – in an act of total demented pacifism) and the United States economy would still go bankrupt.
It is the out of control entitlement schemes (added to by Barack Obama) and the credit bubble financial system (made even worse by the recent “Financial Reform Act”) that are destroying America.
Paul Kennedy type thinking just misses the point.
I don’t believe that some moral level was passed so much as an economic one. Once Britain and France saw that their hegomony over Europe was going to be challenged – they acted. The Rhineland, and the Sudetenland, and Austria didn’t tip the balance. Fertile lands and oil fields Eastward under German control could not be tolerated.
Germany was late to the imperial table. France and Britain were living off the cash cows of their endeavors the previous century (it’s no coincidence that imperialism became passe once they had their consolidations in place and others just started theirs). We got WWI out of this tension. Of course it was REALLY de classe to actually have imperial ambitions on the continent itself. That was SOOOOOO 17th century, and so we got WWII.
So let’s spare ourselves the supposed moral implications in expeditionary Force. Evils have abounded around the world since the dawn of history – tyrants crushing their people, Statists refilling their treasuries at the expense of their neighbors. I have yet to see the use of Force of intervention not rooted in the economic interests of the Statists of the “moral” country. Twain was moved by the U.S.’s coming to the aid of Cuba, only to have his senses braced by the net results in the Philippines. Cloaking the economic ambitions of your own Statists in some moral fiber is to merely sell it to the street and the people who will be the necessary cannon fodder.
Hitler had no amibitions to dominate Britain. He was perplexed at why they felt the need to intervene at all. He didn’t grasp that Britain had no intention of slipping into second class status in Europe.
Brad, it is not quite that simple. Britain had, before its clash with Napoleonic France, arguably as far back as the Medieval period, always sought to prevent the continent of Europe falling under one single, totalising power (Louise XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, etc).
For those WW2 revisionists who imagined Britain could and should have kept back and watched while Hitler and Stalin got down to it, here’s(Link) Victor Davis Hanson’s demolition of Pat Buchanan on WW2.
Brad what you say is well argued – but it is from a false knowledge base.
For example, there was no “economic” reason for Britain and France to go to war in 1939 – Poland was not an “oil” country (that was Romania).
Nor was farm land a big issue to Britain and France – food was cheap in the 1930’s (“but tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union starved to death, and millions of Americans went hungry” – that, as you know, was because of BAD ECONOMIC POLICIES by the Stalin and Roosevelt governments, not because of some geopolitical thing).
Indeed farm land in Britain was dirt cheap (no need to worry about extra farm land in Poland) – you could pick up a farm for a few Pounds (no I am not making that up), but making a living out of the land was a hard struggle (a very hard struggle). Even after Britain started to put restrictions on imports after 1932.
No the war in 1939 was about a security threat (the fear that Germany would dominate Europe MILITARILY, not economically – see what JP says) and YES a MORAL point.
Having betrayed Czechslovakia (a place where there really were factories and other such of real economic value – indeed the Czech arms factories were vital for the German war effort) the British and French governments COULD NOT LOOK THEIR OWN VOTERS IN THE EYE having betrayed Poland as well.
Take the French case – the French relationship with Poland went back to the 18th century.
For reasons of geography France was the only major land power in Europe that did not get a slice of Poland during its “partitions” – so the Poles looked to France as their friend.
The CULTURAL relationship between France and Poland (in music and just about everything else) was also very strong.
Betrayal of Poland (on top of all the other betrayals) would have meant the weak coalition government of France would have fallen.
For the British government, N. Chamberlain really did believe that he had NOT betrayed the Czechs. He managed to convince himself that he had secured “Peace with Honour”.
The Germans marching into Prague was a shattering blow to Neville – he could not have faced betraying the Poles as well.
Not just because the British voters would have kicked him out if he had (the Peterhouse Cambrige school of historians are very good on how electorial considerations effected politicians in the late 1930’s), but because he also would have been unable to live with himself.
We are not dealing with cynical corrupt politicians here – Neville Chamberlain really did believe himself to be a good man. Some of his belief was based on self deception (his letters to his sister show that) – but self deception can only go so far (in a man who is not insane).
Not going to war in 1939 (after the German invasion of Poland) was just not an option – and not for “economic” reasons.
By the way – listen to the FULL Radio broadcast that N.C. made on September 3rd 1939.
This is a man who is emotionally shattered – close to total despair.
This the point about history – it is about people.
Perhaps that’s all true, Paul Marks, but in the end I think you and Brad are saying much the same thing: that nations go to war to further their own interests (or, more specifically, the interests of their ruling class), be those interests economic, strategic or merely political (i.e., retaining power). What they do not do is go to war for moral reasons, to preserve the “freedom” of their neighbors.
Not a “ruling class” Laird – and not “interests” in any commercial sense.
Of course it is in the moral “interests” of someone to keep their word, and it is the physical “interests” of someone to not allow a totalitarian regime (such as Nazi Germany) to control everything.
But thyat is not what is normally meant by the term “interests”.
Nor is World War II unusual in this – indeed I can not think of a MAJOR war that Britain has been involved in that was in “the economic interests of the ruling class” as a Marxist would put it.
By the way – nothing I say about World War II should be taken to imply any support for the Iraq war or the Afghan war.
We still tend to believe that appeasement works because we also believe our enemies, or potential enemies, do not quite mean what they say.
We routinely indulge ourselves in ‘translating’ their words and even actions into lighter flavours, interpreting threats as mere grandstanding and reckless activities as somehow temporarily misguided.
It can come as shock to find all along they meant every word.