Appeasement is among the most protean and the most controversial concepts of international politics. The word came into common currency in Britain during the era between the two world wars of the twentieth century. Those who coined it had in mind a policy of reducing tensions and averting a new war by addressing the grievances of powers dissatisfied with the status quo. From this perspective, appeasement represented the elevation of considerations of morality and justice over considerations of power. It resonated with liberal concepts of international politics that had become prominent since the mid-nineteenth century and that seemed to have been vindicated by the lessons of the war of 1914-1918. It played upon a sense of guilt over the putative harshness of the
Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Neville Chamberlain and other policy makers in Britain (and elsewhere) were conditioned by this climate of opinion.
After Chamberlain, along with French premier Édouard Daladier, endorsed the transfer of Czech territory to
Adolf Hitler's Germany at the Munich Conference of 1938, appeasement took on a quite different meaning. Now it amounted to a capitulation to threats or, more broadly, a failure to use force to combat aggression, all in a vain effort to avoid war. Critics of appeasement drew this lesson from the 1930s: efforts to appease dictators by democracies operating from a position of weakness served only to encourage further aggressive behavior and make a world war more likely.
This lesson has cast a long shadow. The desire to avoid appeasement, or charges of appeasement, cut short the Roosevelt administration's search for a modus vivendi with Japan before the attack on
Pearl Harbor in 1941. Later the charge of appeasement was leveled against
Franklin Roosevelt for the concessions that he made to
Joseph Stalin over Eastern Europe and China at the Yalta Conference in 1945. When Harry Truman made the decision to intervene in the
Korean War in 1950, he was inspired by the experience of the 1930s. When General
Douglas MacArthur heard of proposals to curtail his drive to the Yalu River in the autumn of 1950, he retorted that they were tantamount to appeasement. British prime minister Anthony Eden invoked memories of the 1930s to justify his use of force in 1956 against Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal (see
Arab-Israeli Wars). In unleashing Operation Desert Storm in the
Gulf War, President George Bush, having tried unsuccessfully to appease Saddam Hussein before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, drew an analogy between Saddam and Hitler. In 1995, seeking more effective military action in Bosnia, French president Jacques Chirac likened Western policy there to appeasement in the 1930s.
A number of scholars, meanwhile, had long since grown uneasy with the historical understanding of appeasement that informed public discourse and policy debates. Some historians pointed out that the concept had, over time, lost any precise meaning. Others suggested that Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s was not extraordinary when seen in historical perspective. A few noted that sometimes, as with British appeasement of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, concessions had led to reconciliation, not war.
Of course, the United States of William McKinley's era had virtually nothing in common with the Germany of Adolf Hitler. That is precisely the point of historical scholarship: each instance of appeasement must be judged in its own context. At any given time and place, appeasement is one diplomatic strategy that must be compared to other diplomatic and military strategies in terms of their likely risks and rewards and in light of an assessment of the intentions and capabilities of the power to be appeased or resisted. Chamberlain had many good political, economic, and military reasons to try to appease Hitler in 1938. What Chamberlain failed sufficiently to appreciate was that Hitler was determined to fight for hegemony over Europe sooner or later. Appeasement was almost certainly the worst possible policy for dealing with the German dictator, but there was probably no diplomatic or military strategy that could have deflected or deterred Hitler from the war that he so ardently desired. After
World War II, Western leaders were fortunate to have more potent instruments of deterrence and, in most cases, more deflectable adversaries.
Bradford A. Lee
Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966); Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939 (1984).
