An Insightful Look at the Politics of “Appeasement”

On March 29, 2024, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Europe is in a "pre-war era"; war was "no longer a concept from the past.” No history could be timelier than that in this book, looking back at another pre-war era when hopes that war in Europe would remain a “concept from the past” through negotiations with Hitler proved horribly mistaken.

If there is anyone that doubts the importance of making the effort to study and understand history, George C. Peden’s Churchill, Chamberlain and Appeasement is a powerful corrective. History provides insights to deal with emerging crises, yet it remains that the perceived lessons from the events covered in this book were instrumental in formulating and implementing policies that proved disastrous for Britain in the 1956 Suez crisis and the United States in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s, to cite but two examples. Decision-makers saw themselves as Churchill, not Chamberlain and their opponents as home-grown Hitlers. Churchill’s post-1945 belief that Hitler could have been deterred and effectively countered in the 1930s short of a world war has provided guidance for decades, in situations far different from the original.

History’s power and the dangers inherent in its misuse have been demonstrated many times, but seldom with more consequence than when dealing with this book’s subject matter. Churchill, Chamberlain and Appeasement is tightly focused, with some 320 pages of text, 52 of notes and 25 of bibliography, a compact treatment of a consequential subject. The author’s previous works have covered British national security and its decision-making, especially as it reflected economic and political realities. Here, he looks at broader issues through the two main characters – personally very different and politically divided despite belonging to the same party -- and the concept of appeasement that divided them until the crisis of May 1940. Yet appeasement – what it constituted and when it was required – would be central to the decisions that both made. For Chamberlain, first Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Prime Minister, the decisions were much more consequential than they were for Churchill, a back-bencher with few parliamentary allies until September 1939.

Some writers consider the concept of appeasement to have lost its meaning through decades of having been applied to a broad – and not necessarily coherent – range of policies and so lacks value as a description. Here, the author strongly disagrees. He presents what appeasement meant for Britain and its government throughout the 1930s and into the opening year of the Second World War, an economy of force measure in statecraft, mandated by decades of under-investment and non-productive politics. While the popular version of these events tends to focus on the 1938 Sudetenland crisis and the subsequent Munich agreement, identifying Chamberlain as a practitioner of appeasement, with Churchill as a stalwart personifying opposing Hitler. Indeed, Churchill’s own postwar writings – which earned him his Nobel Prize for literature – were instrumental in enabling him to claim the high ground as the opponent of a failed appeasement policy while Chamberlain, striving for peace, instead got the war Hitler had always looked towards. Chamberlain – who supported Churchill when he became prime minister in the spring of 1940 – died soon after and, even at his best, lacked Churchill’s skill as a communicator and, above all else, a mobilizer.

Yet, the author points out, Churchill could, like Chamberlain, be an advocate and practitioner of appeasement, especially in Britain’s relations with Italy and Japan, where he did not see them as the potentially existential threat as was posed by Hitler’s Germany. The willingness to use policies to compensate for military and diplomatic weakness – especially the years of inability to turn relations with the US and the Soviet Union into what became an alliance – did not end when Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. The temporary closure of the Burma Road to China under Japanese pressure in 1941 showed appeasement’s persistence.

While he did not have the responsibilities of governing, Churchill, like Chamberlain, had to deal with the same objective factors of 1930s Britian, political, military and, especially, economic. The book provides some 20 tables and figures to examine the context and constraints that shaped the thinking of those that have been presented by history (or themselves) as anti-appeasers or appeasers alike. The author points out that not only were both Chamberlain and Churchill shaped by the same facts and political and economic realities, they shared many of the same views on the issues of rearmament and diplomacy. Where they agreed is interesting, where they differed proved, in retrospect, to have been vital.

The author has used the extensive published literature – the historiography of appeasement and anti-appeasement is a book in itself – as well as archival and primary sources to present a comprehensive picture. The text highlights where there are divergent or contradictory interpretations by historians, pointing out the diverse current views about the use of appeasement and the “low dishonest decade” of 1930s Britain, which effectively starts with Chamberlain becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1931 and did not end even as the smoke rose from Warsaw in September 1939.

Even as the author maintains the tight focus described by his title, he effectively places characters and concept alike, each in their broader, 1930s-wide context. While this is a history about British politics and policies, the author never loses track of the fact that the impact of the decisions being made in Britain were, of necessity, global in scope.

The book’s concluding chapter, on counterfactuals and conclusions, reminds the reader that the “what-ifs” of appeasement go beyond the potential for the Second World War starting in 1938 with a German invasion of Czechoslovakia. The author raises questions of how the ultimate scope of the war would have been shaped. Would it have made the United States and the Soviet Union more or less willing to join in an alliance against Hitler? Would the British electorate have rallied behind a decision to go to war in 1938? What about Canada? South Africa? India? Would the German military have moved against Hitler in a way that would have been more effective than what happened during the war? There is a much broader set of questions to be considered than the relative capabilities of the forces that might have fought over the Sudetenland.

This book will not be the last word in the assessment and reassessment of appeasement and appeasers, nor will it prevent lessons of the 1930s from again being weaponized for political or polemic objectives. But it does give a thorough and often convincing picture of what is known and alerts the reader to multiple differing viewpoints. A willingness to address counterfactuals -- and where they may lead -- makes this compelling history.

Note: Churchill, Chamberlain and Appeasement is also available in e-editions.

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