I may be accused of "bait-and-switch" advertising with this post, on two counts: first, of course, this "anti-appeasement" argument was trotted out, incorrectly, to justify the invasion of Iraq, because Saddam was apparently going to take over the entire Middle East. Secondly, because it's unclear which danger we're talking about: the danger of the Holocaust, or of his aggressive war?
As to the ways in which Saddam is unlike Hitler, I'll assume that that's been well addressed in DailyKos; I KNOW it's been well addressed somewhere, in any case.
As to the question of which danger I mean: if it's the danger that translated into the horrors of the Holocaust, that is not what I am addressing here. There has been great debate among historians over whether Hitler planned the Holocaust, or whether events or personalities around him dictated it. I'll leave that question as academic, because of the larger question under which preventing the Holocaust and preventing Hitler's warmaking both fall: could Hitler's future as a murderer have been foreseen?
It was. "Appeasement," as recent scholarship has shown, meant nothing at all like "we'll be nice to Hitler and hope he doesn't hurt us"; it meant "we need to buy time, while we rearm."
(NOTE: Given that this is a blog entry, I hope any irregularities with the regular citation format will be forgiven. I've made no attempt at strict regularity or adherence to usual standards with format, only to provide the pertinent information for the citations.)
THE POPULAR MYTH
The doctrine of appeasement is popularly cast, completely erroneously, as Neville Chamberlain's idea that Britain should offer Hitler concessions, in the hope that Hitler would be pleased and wouldn't harm anyone further. This is credited with the sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, when Chamberlain returned from Munich, triumphantly waving his paper showing Hitler's agreement, and announcing that this meant "peace in our time."
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This casts appeasement as a simple "hawks versus doves" problem, of letting someone bully the innocent. This simplistic view of appeasement is lately used to justify every single war we ever indulge in, whether it makes sense or not (famously, the Iraq War). It is summed up neatly by history books, as in the following quote from a history of Europe, which blames Germany's sympathizers (though of course these did exist) in British society for the policy. Crediting also a British desire for a continental foil against communism, and a "naive" tendency of Chamberlain's, it says:
If Great Britain showed Hitler goodwill by a number of concessions, [Chamberlain] assumed, Hitler would be willing to cooperate with Britain in maintaining peace. With such misconceptions, Neville Chamberlain embarked hopefully on a policy of appeasement.
(1)
More damningly, the cowardice or stupidity supposedly inherent in appeasement is blasted in another quote, by a different author: "Appeasement may result from weakness or ignorance, either from an inability to fight or a misconception of the effects on vital interests."(2) Appeasement is for cowards, or for the naif.
THE EARLIER CRITIQUES OF THE MYTH
But if this view is wrong, then why haven't historians weighed in? Well, they have, and some time ago now. The source of the latter quote above is an article by a J. L. Richardson, in World Politics, published by the Cambridge University Press. The article was written as early as 1988, and informs us that "by 1935, the need for rearmament came to be recognized" by Britain, but that "its scale was limited by the dangers to the economic recovery and to Britain's external financial position."(3) This article quotes another author, Paul Kennedy, as saying "the demands of military security and economic security were not merely in competition with one another, but were mutually incompatible."(4)
My GOD! the myth perpetuator might say. You're letting FINANCIAL CONCERNS get in the way? This is HITLER'S MENACE we're talking about!!! The man who would murder millions with his fascistic henchmen in Japan and Italy! Don't you see that?
(NOTE: For the purposes of this argument, I should note here, I am leaving out the question of whether Hitler planned the Holocaust, and addressing only his plan for the conquest of Europe; the former question has been the subject of so much heated debate that it cannot be summarized here, and it is in any case rendered academic by the assertions in this diary.)
In the first place, as historian Andrew Crozier says:
The ultimate virtue... in limiting expenditure on arms was to be found in the concept of finance as the 'fourth arm' in Britain's defence in addition to the three armed services. [...] Such a war [as one with Germany] was likely to be a long war of attrition in which the economic and financial strength of the British Empire could prove decisive against a German economy it was assumed was incapable of lasting the course.
(5)
Therefore, Britain's overseas trade and its financial system were crucial to lasting out a long war with Germany. Rearming to the extent that our modern deficit-spenders would demand was thought likely to ruin this "fourth arm," along with the Navy, Army and Air Force.
Also, no, they DIDN'T know right away that Germany would present a united front with fascist Italy and Japan. "What the? But all the fascist powers were united, right from the start! Weren't they?"
No! Austria, which would later unite with Germany in the Anschluss, is described by Crozier (convincingly, in light of some of 1930s Austria's domestic policies) as being ruled by a "clerical-fascist regime."(6) And when Nazi operatives assassinated Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria in 1934, who became alarmed enough to move troops until Hitler stood down his threat of invasion? None other than Mussolini, whose Latin-speaking forebears gave the world the term fascism, and whose government made the term famous.(7)
So, if Hitler was having fellow fascist leaders assassinated, and Mussolini was moving troops to stop Hitler, when WAS it all made clear?
Crozier places the change during the winter of 1935-36, especially following the Italian invasion of Abyssinia.(8) Following this, according to Crozier, we finally have a united front of Hitler and Mussolini.
"Well then!", our myth perpetuator might say. "Surely, then, people should have figured out the danger of Hitler's conquests after that?" And... no, unfortunately, they didn't.
They figured it out YEARS before.
THE NEWER DATA
In a great article in the International Security quarterly of Fall, 2008, authors Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy searched diplomatic records for the British governments of the 1930s, and found something very interesting. That is that in fact, British politicians, even including Chamberlain himself, had a perfectly sensible apprehension of Hitler's threat, from the time of Hitler's accession to virtually complete power in 1933.(9)
"Well why, then, didn't they act?"
They did, in fact; the Ripsman and Levy article shows how. In a table, they show Britain spending more in a rearmament program, beginning in 1935, and accelerating in 1936 (though the article credits Germany's reoccupation of the Rhineland more than the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the timeline is the same). Throughout the period from 1930-1935, their table shows that defense spending was between 12% and 15% of total government expenditures; but in 1936, it became 21%; in 1937, 26%. In 1938, after the Anschluss (Germany's union with Austria), Chamberlain pushed the earlier economic concerns to the side(10), this figure became 38%, and by 1939, defense spending was 48% of all government spending. Half.
"Peace in our time"?
Didn't Chamberlain sell out Czechoslovakia, though? In the words of Ripsman and Levy, "[t]hey [the Chamberlain government] were not starry-eyed idealists who believed that Hitler's intentions were benign."(11) Rather, they simply knew that Britain and France were not yet strong enough for war; also, now that Hitler had Austria, he had Czechoslovakia surrounded, and "Poland and Romania would not allow Soviet troops to cross their territory to aid the Czechs; and Poland was unlikely to intervene."(12) Unless they'd bulled through another sovereign nation's territory, risking an international incident at a time when they were still weak, the Allies simply couldn't help Czechoslovakia.
CONCLUSION
The myth was so attractive to hawks: appeasement was simply cowardice, naivete, or stupidity. It was so wrong. Ripsman and Levy aren't making a stretched analysis; their figures, along with pages of quotes from the principal British actors, show that British policies were, as Crozier and those quoted in the Richardson article suggested, undertaken with the economy and finance as a "fourth arm of service" in mind. They also show nicely (especially considering the huge increase in defense spending through the war's start) the authors' assertion, that appeasement was really simply a process of biding time, until Germany could be faced down.
Is this a simple-minded failing on the part of the historians who fed the myth? This may be unfair. For the articles and books that don't feed the myth, such as the Ripsman and Levy article, the Crozier text, and the Richardson article, contain a huge amount of information that repeats what one of the other sources asserts, though it's independently arrived at. Some of the myth-perpetuating histories were written years after the myth-busting texts were written. Why haven't any of these people read one another's work? It is a problem peculiar to Second World War histories: that is, that there is so much work devoted to the subject, that it is impossible to read all the work on even one facet of it. So it might be unfair to indict a historian for failing to be conversant with one such current of thought, though there are many articles and books treating it; it is certainly unfair to indict someone for failing to have read a particular article.
However, there is no excuse for perpetuating the myth, once one has read the debunking of it.
- The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, Felix Gilbert with David Clay Large (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 291-2.
- "New Perspectives on Appeasement: Some Implications for International Relations," J. L. Richardson, World Politics, vol. 40, no. 3 (Cambridge University Press, April, 1988), 291.
- Ibid., 296.
- Ibid.
- The Causes of the Second World War, Andrew J. Crozier (Oxford, England and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 114-15.
- Ibid., 104.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 105-6.
- "Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? The Policy of British Appeasement in the 1930s," Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy, International Security, (MIT Press, Fall, 2008), 159-61.
- Ibid., 169.
- Ibid., 173.
- Ibid., 169.