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Appeasement Revisited
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 WESLEY K. WARK

Review Article:
Appeasement Revisited

R. A. C. PARKER. Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of

the Second World War. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pp. v, 388. £35.00;
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GAINES POST, JR. Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense, 1934-
1937. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. $48.50 (us);
R. J. Q. ADAMS. British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement,
1935-39. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pp. xii, 192. £40.00;

MICHAEL J. COHEN and MARTIN KOLINSKY, eds. Britain and the Middle East in
the 1930s: Security Problems, 1935-1939. London: Macmillan, 1992. Pp. xvii,
231. £40.00;

BENNY MORRIS. The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi
Germany during the 1930s. London: Frank Cass, 1992. Pp. 212. $40.00 (us);
GERARD J. D E GROOT. Liberal Crusader: The Life of Sir Archibald Sinclair. N e w
York: New York University Press, 1993. Pp. xi, 266. $35.00 (us);

CLEMENT LEIBOVITZ. The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal. Edmonton, Alberta: Les

Éditions Duval Inc., 1993. Pp. viii, 544. N o Price Available.

ERE IS A septet of books, a magpie's feast. There is something ordered,

H and something random about them as a group. They have in common a
treatment of British foreign policy in the 1930s, but are as variegated in size,
quality, and approach as you might wish. T h e feast contains a biography, a
study of the press, a collection of essays focused on the Middle East, a
conspiracy theory, a self-proclaimed macro-history, a high-politics investiga­
tion, and a study of British strategy. They all stand on the lee side of works
published on the fiftieth anniversary of 1939, a surprisingly small outpouring
dominated by Donald Cameron Watt's study of the role of personalities in
statecraft, The Road to War.1 All are firmly (though usually invisibly) en-

1 Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1936-9
(London, 1989). Other significant books published on the fiftieth anniversary of 1939 included
Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War, ed. Robert Boyce and Esmonde
Robertson (London, 1989); and Richard Overy with Andrew Wheatcroft, The Road to War

The International History Review, XVII, 3, August 1995, pp. 441-660.

CN ISSN 0707-5332 © The International History Review. All Rights Reserved.
 546 Wesley K. Wark

meshed in the long historiography of appeasement. They are as representative

a way as any to test the ongoing vitality of one of the largest historical
literatures on international crisis. They also stand as a counterweight to A. J.
P. Taylor's perverse prophecy that the history of 1939 and the origins of
European war would soon fade away in the face of the brighter promise
offered by the history of 1941 and the events that led to world war. 1
Appeasement continues to enjoy mythic status as a foreign policy of cata­
strophic failure - out of the folly of appeasement came the destruction of the
Second World War, the loss of Britain's superpower status, and the end of
empire. The failure of appeasement has spawned a massive literature with its
own perpetual-motion engines of controversy and Scheherazadean narrative
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dynamic. Foreigners, especially Americans, with critical views have some­

times been warned off2 It is a historiography studded with obsessive ideas and
landmark treatments. The keys to it are reducible to three: the scapegoat
mythology, which took early root in the Dunkirk summer of 1940 with the
publication of the pamphlet, Guilty Men; Winston Churchill's post-war
translation of his own oppositional politics into oppositional history, in the
shape of the argument that the Second World War was the 'most unnecessary
war'; and the deliberately provocative thesis of the early 1960s of A. J. P.
Taylor, which argued that the war was merely a typical accident in the war-
strewn annals of international diplomacy. 3 According to Taylor, it was an
accident that owed more to the fumbling of Western (especially British)
diplomacy than it did to the desires of Adolf Hider, depicted in Taylor's book
as an ordinary German statesman with no particular appetite for war. The
literature, faithful to its roots, has shown an inordinate interest in high
politics, and in the European dimension of diplomacy; it has shouldered the
(Churchillian) burden of counter-factual history; and it has been forced to
cope with the legacy of polemic and moralizing. Every writer on the history
of appeasement has had, for the last fifty yean, to negotiate a way through,
around, or (often) to, one or more of these positions.
# # #

(London, 1989).
1 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 2nd éd., 1963), 'Second
Thoughts' preface.
2 Most famously by Taylor who said, 'What right have American historians especially to criticize
me when their own country would never have entered the war if Hitler had not casually
declared war on it?' Quoted in The Origins of the Second World War: A.J. P. Taylor and His Critics,
éd. Wm. Roger Louis (New York, 1972), 2. A distant echo of this thinking appears in Watt,
How War Came, 623.
3 'Cato' [Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard], Guilty Men (London, 1940). Churchill
states in the first volume of his account of the Second World War that 'there never was a war
more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous
struggle': Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston, 1948), iv.
 Appeasement Revisited 547
Several of the books under review take the reader back to the literature's fans
et origo. In the beginning was Guilty Men, the polemic written in haste by
three Beaverbrook journalists and published in the summer of 1940 to explain
the Dunkirk disaster.1 The authors had no difficulty in identifying the causes
of it: a regime of ineffectual and mendacious politicians and bureaucrats had
brought Britain to its knees and robbed the British Expeditionary Force
[BEF] of the weapons that it required to fight the Nazi onslaught. The hold
that Guilty Men and its progeny still exert on our understanding of British
policy in the 1930s can be seen in the work of R . A. C. Parker. Parker finds
himself compelled, in his fluent introductory chapter, to counter the popular
portrait of British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, as weak, befuddled,
and hopelessly little-Englander in outlook. At the conclusion of his book, we
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are told that his is a counter-revisionist argument, a phrase likely to confuse

all but specialists and addicts of the literature on British foreign policy in the
1930s. What does Parker mean? He wishes to position himself at some
distance from the reductive portrait on offer in Guilty Men, but at the same
time to argue against those w h o have delighted in trying to resurrect
Chamberlain as a far-sighted politician intent on the defence of British
conservative values and Britain's national security, a position represented at its
most extreme by the hagiographical portrait offered up by the conservative
historian John Charmley. 2 It is easy enough to appreciate the careful
positioning of Parker's study and there is much else to commend it besides.
But two questions need to be asked at the outset. First, why continue to
work in the vein established so long ago by Guilty Men? Why, that is, write a
history of British foreign policy based primarily on a study of the political
leadership? Readers will search in vain for an answer to this question in
Parker's book. The second question also concerns the distance that we have
travelled since Guilty Men. But to answer it, we need to travel back to the
summer of 1940.

The portrait of Chamberlain that emerges in Guilty Men is curiously tame,

even respectful. Chamberlain is by no means the most guilty — the laurels go
to Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and a host of lesser ministers.
Chamberlain, to be sure, is pilloried for failing to make good his public
promises on British rearmament. He is depicted as a politician ensnared in the
coils of the Whitehall bureaucracy — ensnared in an early and tragic episode of

1 The best study is Sidney Aster, '"Guilty Men": The Case of Neville Chamberlain', in Paths to
War. Aster concludes that the historiography of appeasement has gone astray, especially owing to
specialization, and needs to be returned firmly to its roots. He also argues that Guilty Men offered
a fundamentally correct appraisal of Chamberlain. Both conclusions seem to me to be
overdrawn.
2 See John Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (London, 1989), where he attempts to draw
a portrait of Chamberlain as a 'realist'.
 548 Wesley K. Wark

Yes, Minister. His eminence grise is Sir Horace Wilson, who, according to the
authors of Guilty Men, 'established an ascendancy over Mr Chamberlain
which will take its place in history' (pp. 99-100). Yet the central Chamberlain
trait highlighted by the authors is his great store of self-confidence. In
acknowledging Chamberlain's tragic flaw, we are told that 'it would be a mis­
take to ridicule this attitude of mind as that of a vain and foolish old gende-
man.' Chamberlain was, rather, 'a person of immense experience' (p. 68).
N o less than in Guilty Men, overweening confidence reappears as the tragic
flaw in Parker's story of Chamberlain's conduct of foreign policy. Such
confidence is evident both in Chamberlain's actions and in the letters he
wrote to his sisters, preserved at the University of Birmingham Library. Of
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the letters, Parker writes 'vanity, touchiness and obstinacy recur. These
defects brought the tragedy of complete failure in foreign policy and have
caused him posthumous derision' (p. 11). Parker is good throughout in calling
our attention to Chamberlain's faults as a statesman. In fact, reading Parker
induced in me a feeling akin to riding in an imaginary Bentley, of being
transported with aplomb and extraordinary smoothness to a familiar destina­
tion, the author in the driver's seat providing the occasional very British
anecdote (the Aga Khan's horse-racing successes, Lord Halifax as sportsman,
disquisitions on the qualities of British tailoring, and so on) and the odd piece
of wonderful character assassination — my favourite being his description of
the British ambassador at Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, as having the
appearance of a 'modish bounder'.
Yet, for all its beguiling qualities, Parker's account begs the question: why
did Chamberlain believe the things that he did? Without an answer, it is im­
possible to appreciate fully the nature of the faith that Chamberlain brought
to his own judgement and impossible to accept the vision of Chamberlain's
tragic flaw as impelling a national security disaster. What specifically do we
need to know? Here is my own list of questions: why did Chamberlain
possess an 'obstinate belief in Hitler as a "moderate" among Nazis'? (p. 75);
why did Chamberlain believe that Mussolini was, also, a closet moderate?
why did Chamberlain pursue so enthusiastically the project for colonial
appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1937-8, surely one of the most ill-
conceived of his diplomatic ideas? why did Chamberlain think that his so-
called 'double-policy' of combining limited rearmament with negotiations
with the dictators would work? why did Chamberlain resist so strongly the
notion of an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1939? how did Chamberlain
think strategically? and what did he understand by the concept of deterrence?
Parker has been publishing major studies of appeasement for over twenty
years. H e is as well placed as any scholar to tackle such questions. But his
failure to do so means that his counter-revisionist portrait of Chamberlain can
only appeal on the basis of its portrait of action, rather than of mentality and
 Appeasement Revisited 549
rationale. In this one crucial dimension, we are really not very far from our
starting place in Guilty Men.
If Parker's book were simply a superficial portrait of Chamberlain, there
would be reason for disappointment. But while it cannot or will not investi­
gate the wellsprings of Chamberlain's beliefs, it does many other things
superbly. For one thing, Parker's book is a masterful survey of British foreign
policy in the 1930s, which covers the major crises from Manchuria at the
outset to Danzig at the close. With respect to the outcome of both the
Abyssinian crisis and the RJiineland affair, Parker stresses the complexities of
British decision-making in the context of Anglo-French relations. The
Spanish Civil War is curiously treated as a 'side-show', its most important
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feature seen as its function in setting the stage for a bitter and divisive contest
between Chamberlain and his domestic political opponents. The chronology
continues to unfold as Parker gives close and acute attention to the relation­
ship between Chamberlain and his successive foreign ministers, Anthony
Eden and Lord Halifax. In forcing Eden out of the government, Parker notes
that Chamberlain was, characteristically, staking his personal reputation on
success in peace talks with Germany and Italy. With Halifax newly installed at
his right hand, Chamberlain was liberated from the constraints of cabinet
opposition and even the misgivings of the foreign office to push ahead with
appeasement. The high point of Chamberlain's personal conduct of British
foreign policy, comes, of course, with the implementation of his now
infamous Plan Z — taking Chamberlain airborne to meet Hitler to solve the
Czech dispute.
The genesis of Plan Z is more revealing of Chamberlain's style and outlook
than Parker credits, and he loses thereby an opportunity to connect the prime
minister's streak of missionary self-confidence to the conduct of policy. But
Parker rightly notes that things were never the same for Chamberlain after
the defection of his foreign secretary, Halifax, from the true faith in the midst
of the Munich crisis. Thanks to the diary-keeping tradition of senior White­
hall officials, we can trace that defection in the commentary of the permanent
under-secretary at the foreign office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, w h o was
himself instrumental in altering Halifax's outlook. 1
The outcome of the Munich crisis shook the nation and, after September
1938, British foreign policy was no longer (if it ever had been) the policy of
Chamberlain alone. For one thing, British policy was increasingly reactive;
for another, the spreading hostility to appeasement, both within the cabinet
and throughout British society, placed limits on the conduct of policy.
Increasingly one sees a government propelled to take unprecedented decisions

1 The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938-45, ed. David Dilks (New York, 1972). The originals
are available for consultation in the Churchill College Archives, Cambridge.
 550 Wesley K. Wark

— not least the guarantee to Poland of 31 March 1939, which Parker rightly
sees as designed to prevent either a Polish collapse or a Polish-German
alliance. So, too, was the government propelled in the direction of a Soviet
alliance, in order to firm-up the nebulous strategic prospect of an 'Eastern
front' against Hitler. Although Chamberlain did not see the value of the
alliance, and resisted it, foreign policy was no longer dictated by his ap­
preciation. Parker goes out on a limb in arguing that 'it is probable that
Chamberlain destroyed this hope [of a Soviet alliance]' (p. 245). The hope of
an alliance was destroyed by the Soviet leadership, who abandoned their
policy of collective security at the moment when the Western powers were
finally moving to embrace it. As Parker notes, we still do not know why
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Stalin opted for the Nazi-Soviet pact; at least one mystery remains in the
story of the origins of the Second World War.
Although Parker's account focuses on Europe, it does not neglect the
global dimension of British security. Chapter 12 contains a model discussion
of the Tientsin crisis, which led to a dangerous confrontation between Britain
and Japan in China during the summer of 1939. A combination of British
concessions and Japanese shock over the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact
allowed the crisis to cool. Then, on 7 August, a still-confident Chamberlain
went on holiday to Caithness in Scodand to, as Parker puts it, 'attack salmon'.
His holiday was short, the salmon spared; in the penultimate chapter, we are
treated to a microscopic analysis of the last days of peace and the British
declaration of war, one of the best short accounts in the literature. But before
the reader is conducted to this destination, there is an interlude. In three
chapters (13-15), Parker surveys British rearmament and grand strategy; the
nature of the British economy; and aspects of domestic politics, viewed from
the angle of the opposition. All three chapters are worthwhile; that on the
economy reprises Parker's notable essays published between 1975 and 1983.'
Parker seems weakest on British grand strategy. There is no account of the
work of the Defence Requirements Committee in 1933-4, ar>d no sustained
study of the attitudes and plans of the chiefs of staff. Parker notes
Chamberlain's belief in the power of air deterrence and the support that he
gave to air rearmament programmes, but he has nothing to say about
Chamberlain's idiosyncratic views on naval power - the other significant arm
of British strategy - and he misunderstands the nature of the British decision
in 1938 to concentrate on the production of fighter aircraft. Parker's one-time
colleague at Oxford, N . H. Gibbs, in his official history of British rearmament

1 R. A. C. Parker, 'Economics, Rearmament, and Foreign Policy: The United Kingdom before
1939 - A Preliminary Study', Journal of Contemporary History, x (197s), 637-47; 'British
Rearmament, 1936-9: Treasury, Trade Unions, and Skilled Labour', English Historical Review,
xcvi (1981), 306-43; 'The Pound Sterling, The American Treasury, and British Preparations for
War, 1938-1939', English Historical Review, xcviii (1983), 261-79.
 Appeasement Revisited 551

in the 1930s, provided the first insight into that decision. 1 Not only was it
impelled by the realities of mass-production (fighters rather than four-engined
bombers), but also a perceived gap had opened up between German and
British air-defence strengths, which implied a German 'knock-out blow'.
Thus, the switch to fighters was not merely defensive, it was also designed to
shore up British deterrent strategy.2
British deterrent strategy remains elusive in Parker's account. Chamberlain
spoke often of his 'double policy' of rearmament and negotiation, but how he
envisaged its working is never fully analysed by Parker, although he assumes
that Chamberlain tilted the balance by promoting negotiation at the expense
of deterrence. Indeed, the penultimate line of the book reads, 'Led by
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Chamberlain, the government rejected effective deterrence.' This leads to the

final attribution of guilt: 'Chamberlain's powerful, obstinate personality and
his skills in debate probably stifled serious chances of preventing the Second
World War (p. 347).
* * *

In order to understand the British doctrine of deterrence, and how it failed,

one turns to Gaines Post, Jr.'s remarkable work, which combines an explana­
tion of the evolution of British thinking about deterrence with an appraisal of
the machinery of policy-making, which has beguiled generations of historians
with its traditions and neat, Whitehall record-keeping.
Post puts his cards on the table at the outset. He identifies the problems of
British policy-making in the crucial mid-i930s as an 'inchoate' strategy of
deterrence and an indecisive machinery of government. The former charge is
more novel than the latter, but both are developed to an extent never before
attempted. Post is aided by his willingness - unlike the other authors
reviewed here — to apply theoretical concepts from the social sciences,
especially on the nature of deterrence and of bureaucratic politics.
Post begins his study with an examination of the Defence Requirements
Committee's [DRC] report of 1934, which marked the first stage in the
evolution of a British strategy for the 1930s. He identifies the signs of
inchoateness in the endorsement given by the D R C to three different
military strategies, reflected in three different rearmament plans (for the navy,
air force, and army). The sounds of sand in the works and of ill-fitting cogs
were noticeable in the government's response, as ministerial interests and
personalities (not least Neville Chamberlain as chancellor of the exchequer)
clashed on key issues, especially the danger from Germany and Japan, the
time-horizon for security, and the return on different kinds of arms spending.

1 N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy: I: Rearmament Policy (London, 1976).

2 On this issue, see Wesley Wark, 'The Air Defence Gap: British Air Doctrine and Intelligence
Warnings in the 1930s', in Airpower in World War Two, ed. Horst Boog (Oxford, 1992), 511-26.
 552 Wesley K. Wark

What the government had in place when the first of many unexpected
European crises occurred — the Italian attack on Abyssinia — was a muddled
doctrine of deterrence reflected in an impracticable double policy of concilia­
tion and coercion. Benito Mussolini's conquest was not halted; collective
security through the League of Nations was not upheld; Abyssinia was not
saved; and the anti-German Stresa front was not patched up. Worst of all, the
British undertook a major military commitment in the Mediterranean, which
skewed their rearmament, and began (albeit slowly) to think of Italy as a
possible third enemy. Failure on such a scale should teach lessons, but the
British government tried to reflect not on a policy that failed but on a lack of
policy. As Post writes: 'Never having developed a clear concept of deterrence
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or coercive diplomacy in this instance, the Government nonetheless began to

draw some lessons from having futilely tried' (p. 132).
What emerged was a policy of appeasement in which the foreign office was
expected to buy time for satisfactory rearmament (though no departmental
agreement emerged on what might be satisfactory). This buying of time
weighed heavily on the mind of the permanent under-secretary at the foreign
office, Sir Robert Vansittart, a fascinating man whom Parker treats with too
much condescension. Post, more respectful of Vansittart's abilities, is able to
place him within the complex and grid-locked map of Whitehall bureaucratic
politics that became clearer as the Rhineland crisis of March 1936 took its
additional toll on British strategic policy. T w o warring groups emerged. One
group (which included the war office and Vansittart and his group at the
foreign office) fought for what Post calls 'extended, conventional deterrence',
requiring rearmament in breadth by all three services and a broadly defined
set of British security interests throughout the world.
Time pressed hard for this group - 1939 was the last date at which peace
could be assumed. In opposition, but soon in command, was a second group
(the air ministry, on occasion the navy, and, most important, Chamberlain),
with a narrow conception of deterrence based largely on air power, and a
definition of British interests geared to the security of Britain and the empire,
economic stability, and financial normalcy. This restricted definition of the
national interest allowed greater scope for diplomacy, and slowed the ticking
of the war clock. As Post reminds us (and as a senior treasury official, Edward
Bridges, once unfortunately said), 1939 held no 'magic' for this group.
The Rhineland crisis caught the government in the midst of this un­
resolved debate, and stole its initiative in foreign affairs. Thereafter, policy
floundered and cabinet-level policy deliberations were shared among four
committees whose work rarely meshed. 1 W h e n he finally became prime

1 These committees were the Foreign Policy Committee, the Defence Policy Requirements
Committee, the Committee of Imperial Defence, and the Defence Plans (Policy) Committee.
 Appeasement Revisited 553

minister in May 1937, Chamberlain was determined to impose order and his
own strategic vision on the Whitehall bureaucracy. In Post's words: 'Cham­
berlain upheld financial premises against what he viewed as the "interested"
biases of other departments. Because of Britain's limited resources, he would
preserve the doctrine of normal trade, reduce the number of potential
enemies through conciliation accompanied by sufficient rearmament to get
their attention without provoking them, concentrate on air power, expect
the Foreign Office to manufacture time past 1939 and use deterrence as an
instrument of self-defence rather than coercive diplomacy and European
security' (p. 296). Although the limits to Post's insight into Chamberlain's
thinking show in a remark near the end of the book that Chamberlain's
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tenacity 'could only be inspired by faith - that war would not come to pass'
(p. 313), his detailed account of the evolution of British strategy helps one to
understand why Chamberlain thought as he did — that he acted within a
system of bureaucratic politics and that he held to a coherent doctrine of
deterrence.
We still lack, however, a convincing explanation of Chamberlain as leader,
because Post's work ends effectively in 1937, despite a coda taking us to 1939.
Yet it was the years 1938-9 that most dramatically tested the British, forced
them to develop a new doctrine of deterrence (based on the Eastern front and
long war), and saw its failure. It is not to detract from Post's fine study to
argue that it is incomplete. It is to be hoped that someone will take up the
challenge and produce an equally detailed and well-researched study of
British deterrence and strategy in the final years of peace, 1 one paying as close
attention as Post does to the role of intelligence.
* * *
The books by Parker and Post establish benchmarks against which other new
work can be measured. Against these two, R . J. Q. Adams flexes his muscles
in vain. Adams's book has an annoying preface, claiming it to be an exercise
in macro-history which looks at the big questions and is intended, in the
author's foolishly inflated language, to 'light a way for the next generation'; a
claim belied by its predictability. Honesty compels Adams to note at the out­
set that his is an 'unashamedly traditional' study of high politics. What he
does not say is why. Although no shame need be attached to traditional
historical studies, to be unashamed is not to offer a lucid defence of one's
methodology, one needed when it comes to writing a survey drawn from the
vast literature on appeasement.

The semantic jungle is a suggestive facet emphasized by Post.

1 One frequently cited study remains unconvincing, Alex AlexandrofF and Richard Rosecrance,
'Deterrence in 1939', World Politics, xxix (1977), 404-24. See also Robert Jervis, 'Deterrence and
Perception', International Security, vii (1983), 3-30.
 554 Wesley K. Wark

Beyond the preface, the reader can settle in to a fluent and comprehensible
account of British foreign policy. It would make an acceptable, if dull, intro­
ductory textbook. The rhythm of its story rises to a predictable crescendo
during the Munich crisis, and descends to an equally predictable denouement
in its coverage of the events of 1939. Although Chamberlain is at the centre
of the account, and Adams provides a good pen-portrait, it is a pen-portrait
only: no new insight is offered into his self-confidence and poor judgement.
N o r does Adams have anything new to say about Halifax, beyond quoting
Beaverbrook's lovely shot - 'a sort of Jesus in long boots'. Yet it was Halifax's
conversion to the need for a deterrent posture against the Third Reich during
1938-9 that marked the beginning of the end of appeasement.
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Adams prefers the commonplace explanation. Thus, the outcome of the

Abyssinian crisis was the worst of all possible results for Britain; the decision
not to oppose Hitler's march into the Rhineland was 'short-sighted', even
though Adams does not pause to suggest the implications of an alternative
policy. W h e n he comes to the Munich crisis, he offers a generally accurate
chronicle, but fudges the issue of what exactly Hitler wished for, and why he
was deterred from war. The effect of Czech, French, and British mobilization
after 24 September is not mentioned. It is more interesting to think of
Munich as a defeat for Hitler than as a case-study in high appeasement policy,
a point made by Watt in How War Came. In the 'afterwords' chapter, where
Adams tries his hand most conspicuously at macro-history, the analysis is dis­
appointing. The appeasers, we are told, were not weak or cowardly or stupid
or wicked; they were simply 'wrong'. Not much of a beacon there!
* # #

A macro-history with little new to say whets one's appetite for something
more specialized that might offer a new viewpoint. Both Parker and Post
dwell on the significance of the failure of Britain's policy during the Abys­
sinian crisis. T h e essays collected by Michael Cohen and Martin Kolinsky
take us beyond the immediate impact of Abyssinia to investigate the shock
waves that followed in the Middle East. The individual pieces in the
collection are of mysterious provenance (a conference?). Some of them are
drawn from or summarized from work previously published by the dis­
tinguished (seven Israeli scholars, three British, two American) contributors;
others represent work in progress. All have a thoroughly professional feel.
The book tries to cover three distinct facets of the Middle East crisis of
1936-9: its international, regional, and domestic components. Crisis there
clearly was in this period. In part the difficulties stemmed, for Britain, from
the now familiar problem of imperial oventretch, as Mussolini's Italy began in
Abyssinia to translate the rhetoric of imperial expansion into action. If the
emergence of Italy as a 'third' potential enemy was not trouble enough,
 Appeasement Revisited 555

Britain also had to contend with problems over its control of Egypt. In
addition, Palestine erupted into violence in 1936 over the issue of Jewish
immigration, and never really calmed down again until the eve of war in
1939; strong anti-British feeling, developing under the surface in Iraq, would
lead in 1941 to the short-lived campaign against the British garrison; and even
Saudi Arabia under Ibn Saud (and his amanuensis, St John Philby) was
causing trouble in the Persian Gulf. Altogether, the British imperial structure
in the Middle East, put together in the aftermath of the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire, was being buffeted from many directions. Testy diplomats
on the spot, such as Sir Miles Lampson in Cairo (labelled 'overbearing' by
Cohen) warned of political turmoil and frontier threats. T h e military
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authorities in Jerusalem (including a parade of the army's best talent - John

Dill, Bernard Montgomery, Archibald Wavell) blamed the unrest in Palestine
on the timidity of the high commissioner and pleaded for martial law and
more troops. Eventually, they had their way, but the long-term effect of the
revolt, and the response of the Haganah, was to weaken the British hold on
Palestine by alienating both Arab and Jewish opinion, and to add to Britain's
defence burden at a time when fear of war in Europe was rising.
Although more might have been made of the connection between Britain's
Palestinian troubles and the Munich crisis, the volume does make the import­
ant point that Britain's problems really began when the successful Italian
challenge over Abyssinia encouraged the region's political aspirants, from
R o m e to Jedda, from palace to tribal plotters and revolutionary nationalists,
to wonder whether Britain was weakening.
Whereas the authors who write about Britain's dealings with individual
Middle Eastern regimes suggest that the British were incompetent and hide­
bound, those who write about the entire region tend to be less judgemental,
and stress the difficulty of Britain's strategic position. A meeting of minds
would have helped here.
The value of the book for scholars and students wishing to familiarize
themselves with the multilayered problems of the region, make it worthwhile
to comment briefly on the individual essays. Part I of the volume consists of
essays by David Omissi, Michael Cohen, Meir Michaelis, and Paul Harris
devoted to strategic issues. Omissi does not do enough to trace the origins of
the short-lived, aggressive 'Italy first' strategy that emerged in the spring and
summer of 1939. Similarly, Cohen's conclusion, that 'on the eve of the
Second World War there was still no coherent British strategy for the Middle
East' (p. 34), is misplaced. Although British strategy was less incoherent than
volatile, by September 1939 it was based in the Mediterranean on an effort to
keep Italy neutral by non-provocation in the Mediterranean without allowing
the blockade against Germany to be relaxed too far, a difficult and ulti­
mately futile balancing act. Michaelis offers a welcome survey of Italy's
 556 Wesley K. Wark

Mediterranean strategy, even if it is based on secondary sources. His themes

are the continuity of the Fascist regime's interest in imperial expansion, and
the eventual tilt of Mussolini's policy towards an alliance with Hitler, owing
to Mussolini's assessment of the democracies as 'decadent demoplutocracies'.
Harris rounds off Part I with a more narrowly focused study of British
defence plans for Egypt, based on the chiefs of staff records. He concludes
that, during the late 1930s, the plans were credible, and that Lampson in
Cairo was guilty of crying wolf, to the exasperation of the military author­
ities. The argument strikes me as a little too favourable to the military,
particularly if one examines their plans in detail (during the Munich crisis, for
example), and if one asks how imaginative was defence planning. Attention
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to 'force multipliers' such as intelligence and deception, unorthodox warfare,

and the potential for creating trouble behind Italian lines in Libya by 'raising
the tribes' did not receive much attention until Wavell arrived, in the Middle
East as commander-in-chief in the summer of 1939. This takes us into the
realm of personalities and command, of which Harris might have said more.
Part T w o explains the 'regional context,' with essays by James Jankowski,
Haggai Erlich, Liora Lukitz, and Joseph Kostiner. Much of the material
covered is likely to be unfamiliar to international historians, and while the
findings of Jankowski and Erlich, for example, on aspects of the internal and
regional politics of Egypt, are far from momentous, they provide a useful
introduction. Lukitz and Kostiner examine developments in Iran and Saudi
Arabia respectively. What emerges clearly is the impact of what was perceived
regionally as the challenge by Italy to British imperial control; the ways in
which that challenge stimulated new departures in the politics of the Middle
East, pushing established regimes to act with greater autonomy and exciting
nationalist movements with the vision of imminent independence (pre­
figuring decolonization well before the war); and how the British authorities
were generally complacent in the face of these 'winds of change'.
Part Three is a cluster of essays on the Palestine problem, inevitable given
the significance of the revolt of 1936-9 and the Israeli scholars writing the
essays. Kolinsky ably recounts the events of the Palestine revolt, and the
efforts on the part of the British to restore order. His parting remark about
the episode underlies the fact that the Arab uprising had burnt itself out
before the publication of the White Paper in 1939, and that the policy
recommendations it contained served less to satisfy Arab aspirations than to
stoke Jewish determination to oust the British. Joseph Nevo and Meir Pail
look at Arab and Jewish activism during the period, which saw both
communities setting up their military organizations and choosing their tactics.
Nevo credits Qassam's 'Black Hand' movement with the style of Arab
Palestinian guerrilla warfare, while Pail makes the now familiar point that the
Haganah began to develop an effective and centralized military command
 Appeasement Revisited 557

structure during this period, owing to its role as auxiliary to the British in the
suppression of the Arab revolt. In the last essay in the volume, Ronald Zweig
explains that the British government's shift to a policy of appeasing Arab
opinion in the Middle East through concessions in Palestine and Egypt
represented, in fact, an early exercise in decolonization. Officials in Whitehall
were operating, however, with the short-term situation in mind, and few had
any more intention than did Churchill himself of presiding over the
dismantling of the British Empire.
While many of the book's conclusions are well known, there are useful
pointers to further work, especially on Italian imperialism in the Middle East
and the nature of both local and British imperial responses. Mussolini's
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Abyssinian adventure, whatever its motives, let a powerful genie out of the
Middle East bottle.
* * *
A genie of a different sort, also uncorked by the Abyssinian crisis, was British
public opinion. As Mussolini pushed ahead with his imperial campaign in
East Africa, British policy-makers found their diplomatic manoeuvrability
severely restricted by a public opinion committed, as the Peace Ballot
showed, to the League of Nations and the defence of international law. Secret
diplomacy in the old, grand manner - the Hoare-Laval pact - had to be
jettisoned in the face of public displeasure. The foreign office admitted that it
had been taken by surprise and set about, ineffectually, to study and to
influence public opinion. Another, and more powerful, outburst of popular
feeling would make itself felt in 1939 in opposition to further acts of
appeasement. Taylor, who described the phenomenon as an 'underground
explosion', 1 probably drew the image from one of Churchill's syndicated
columns, in which he wrote: 'a veritable revolution in feeling and opinion
has occurred in Britain and reverberates through all the self-governing
Dominions ... It was not an explosion, but the kindling of a fire which rose
steadily, hour by hour, to an intense furnace heat of inward conviction ... All
are united in resolve to meet the awful danger which threatens the civilisation
of the world.' 2 Perhaps in reaction to such stirring prose, Taylor did warn
that the upsurge of public feeling was something that the historian 'cannot
trace in precise terms', 3 and it seems that historians have taken his warning
too much to heart. There are studies of the British press, and detailed case-
studies of opinion during particular episodes, but nothing synoptic and little
that deals with the most significant period - from September 1938 to

1 Taylor, Origins, 251.

2 Reprinted from a 24 March 1939 column in Winston S. Churchill, Step by Step, 1936-9
(London, 1939), 328.
3 Taylor, Origins, 251.
 558 Wesley K. Wark

September 1939.1 And there is almost no work on the attitudes of women to

foreign policy.
This is all the more reason to welcome Benny Morris's work. Morris is a
newcomer to the study of appeasement. In choosing to examine in detail the
British weekly press's account of Nazi Germany, he has hit on a potential
building-block for the more ambitious project of a full-scale study of British
public opinion during the 1930s of foreign policy.
Morris's study analyses the content of the British weekly press. Some
fourteen journals and papers were studied, some long-lived, others that have
disappeared from circulation and memory. Examples of the former are the
Spectator, Economist, Observer, Sunday Times, and Listener, of the latter are Time
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and Tide, Truth, British Weekly, Week-End Review, and Saturday Review. To my
mind, his study, though narrowly conceived and supported by an insufficient
bibHography, makes three important points. First, the weekly press, like its
readers, filtered events through a vague but potent liberal ideology that made
it difficult, short of irrefutable evidence, to comprehend the militarism, ra­
cism, and sheer menace of the Nazi regime. Second, the weekly press
followed a common path in their attitude to Anglo-German relations.
According to Morris, despite differences in politics, style, editorship, and
readership, they were united in support of appeasement from 1935 to the
Munich crisis. After Munich, support for appeasement was eroded, and
Morris sees the weeklies slowly moving towards support for resistance to the
Third Reich. The common thread running through their attitude towards
appeasement is their assessment of the air threat. Morris argues — his third
significant theme — that fear of air attack governed the weeklies' outlook
down to 1939, when it began to lift. It is an interesting thought, but needs
more fleshing out, given the secrecy that surrounded key aspects of British
air-defence systems (both radar and command and control systems), and the
public's scepticism about the government's claims to be rearming (a perennial
feature of official announcements after 1935). Moreover, Morris's claim that
the fear of ak attack has not been studied can only be explained by lack of
fàrniliarity with the work of a fellow Israeli, Uri Bialer.2
Morris's work is compromised by its methodology. Opting for content
analysis, he is forced to assert both the influence of the weekly press on
government, and its significance as a mirror of élite attitudes. Although, as

1 See, for example, Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-9 (London, 1971);
Brigitte Granzow, A Mirror of Nazism: British Opinion and the Emergence of Hitler, 1919-33
(London, 1964); Daniel Waley, British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War, 1935-6 (London,
1975); K. W. Watkins, Britain Divided: The Effect of the Spanish Civil War on British Public Opinion
(London, 1963). See also the list of works on this subject in Sidney Aster, British Foreign Policy,
1918-45: A Guide to Research and Research Materials, rev. ed. (Wilmington, Del., 1991), 211-19.
2 Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932-9 (London,
1980).
 Appeasement Revisited 559
generalizations, there is nothing objectionable here, Morris makes no effort to
study the context of production and reception of the weeklies. In particular,
he does not discuss the issue of political control of the press during the
1930s.1
* * *
Given the focus on personalities and high-politics that has dominated the
study of appeasement, the lack of pertinent biographies is surprising, despite
the fact that Sidney Aster's British Foreign Policy, igi8-45: A Guide to Research
and Research Materials (1990) devotes twenty-four pages to a list of biographies
of British worthies. W e still lack a full biographical study of Chamberlain in
the 1930s;2 the lives of key cabinet ministers, including men close to Cham­
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berlain, such as Hoare and Simon, deserve closer scrutiny; and Vansittart,
despite the appearance of Norman Rose's biography, remains an enigma, as
does Sir Horace Wilson. 3 Most of the key military leaders of the day lack a
biography (including Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, two of the three chiefs of
the Imperial General Staff, and all of their Royal Air Force counterparts), as
do most of the senior ambassadors, including Henderson at Berlin, Sir Eric
Phipps at Paris, and the earl of Perth at R o m e . In the midst of this relative
dearth, the biography of a political leader w h o was, at least for a time, a
prominent anti-appeaser is welcome.
Gerald J. de Groot's biography of Sir Archibald Sinclair was begun before,
but finished after, his better-known study of Field Marshal the Earl Haig. It is
a dutiful biography, commissioned by the family and, in an age of
blockbusters, mercifully brief. Regrettably, it adds little to our understanding
of politics in inter-war Britain. Sinclair began his life in politics in 1918 by
winning a seat as a Coalition Liberal for Caithness and Sutherland, a Scottish
Highlands constituency in which Sinclair was the laird, thanks to a baronetcy
and an estate inherited in 1911. He remained M P for his Highlands seat until
1945, rising to become leader of one wing of the fractured Liberal party in
1935. As head of the 'Samuelite' liberals in parliament and the country,
Sinclair devoted himself to international issues, but without any trace of
political genius.
Sinclair was a firm believer in the League of Nations, and consequently
attacked the Hoare-Laval pact. He came grudgingly to support the Conser-

1 See Richard Cockett, Twilight of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the Manipulation of the
Press (London, 1989); rev. ante, xii (1990), 111-24.
2 David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain: I: Pioneering and Reform, 1869-1929 (Cambridge, 1984), will, I
hope, be followed by a second volume.
3 Norman Rose, Vansittart: Study of a Diplomat (London, 1978). We also have, on Sir Warren
Fisher, Eunan O'Halpin, Head of the Civil Service: A Study of Sir Warren Fisher (London, 1989) and
on Sir Maurice Hankey, the studies by Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets (London, 1972,
1974) and John F. Naylor, A Man and an Institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat, and
the Custody of Cabinet Secrecy (London, 1984).
 Wesley K. Wark

vative government's rearmament programme, while attacking its foreign

policy. His greatest moment in the era of appeasement was undoubtedly his
opposition to the Munich agreement. He was one of a handful of MPs to
speak out against it in the famous Commons debate on 3 October 1938. De
Groot treats this episode all too briefly, being content largely to quote
snippets from Sinclair's speech which fell, like much else in Sinclair's life,
under the larger shadow of Churchill. Perhaps the most surprising thing that
De Groot has to tell us about the appeasement period is that Chamberlain had
Sinclair's home telephone tapped, apparently because he doubted his loyalty.
When Chamberlain tried, however, to rebuke Sinclair after the tap revealed
an indiscretion about the plans to retreat from Norway in May 1940, Sinclair
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called Chamberlain's bluff and threatened him with a parliamentary enquiry.

He went on to become Churchill's minister for air from 1940 to 1945,
surviving bruising fights with, among others, Sir Hugh Dowding and Lord
Beaverbrook. Many years later, Beaverbrook paid him the high compliment
of calling him 'one of the unremembered heroes of the war'. This is a claim
that De Groot cautiously, and no doubt wisely, backs away from.
De Groot, however, fails to provide a deep tap of his own into Sinclair's
liberalism or his political skills; his portrait is a monochromatic one wholly
without innovation in its design, perhaps mirroring its subject. Instead, De
Groot chooses to march dutifully from birth to death, without pausing to
examine the function of a biography of a minor political actor. The best that
can be said is that, in so doing, he leaves untested the proposition that
biographies might offer a new route to the exploration of appeasement.

Last, and least, comes the conspiracy theory of Clement Leibovitz. It is a

tribute, in a way, to the continuing vitality of appeasement studies, and to the
significance of the issues raised, that conspiracy theories should continue from
time to time to rear their heads. Leibovitz offers an old one, between the
covers of a vanity press publication, in a mere 544 pages of small type (with a
foreword by British Labour MP Tony Benn). Leibovitz is concerned to
establish the fact (usually it appears as The Fact) that Chamberlain made a deal
with Hitler to give him 'a free hand to pursue his aggressive ambitions in
Eastern Europe'. This notion is a wee bit dificult to square with the policies
of a government that issued unprecedented guarantees to Poland, Romania,
Greece, and Turkey in the spring and summer of 1939, but no matter. And it
does seem a matter of fact that it was Stalin, not Chamberlain, who made a
deal with Hitler, but again no matter. Leibovitz suggests, in his obscurely
written preface, that the reader need only to consult Chapter I to witness the
validity of The Fact. So I took him at his word and read no further. The
chapter makes no plausible case for a deal with Hitler, stops at Munich, bases
 Appeasement Revisited 561

its findings solely on excerpts from Documents on British Foreign Policy, and
introduces the phenomenon of appeasement 'knowese', apparently a special
language used by appeasers to cloak their true intentions. It is all madcap. And
therein lies the pity of it: a new study of British conservative attitudes to the
Soviet Union, to Eastern Europe, and to Hitler's notion of kbensraum would
be welcome. In particular, such a study would need to explore British
attitudes to race and to racial doctrine as elements of national strength. Those
who have read widely in British government documents will no doubt have
come across the occasional allusions to Nazi 'indigestion' should the Third
Reich attempt to swallow too many populations to the East. It was a phrase
used repeatedly by Admiral Sir Ernie Chatfield, for example, and might just
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provide a clue to the issue of British policy towards Eastern Europe and the
meandering efforts to define British national interests in the region.
* * *
Of the seven books reviewed here, four, at least, are of value. Reflecting on
them, can one say anything helpful about the historiographical future?
Specialization and synthesis are now more likely to proceed in parallel than
has been the case in the last two decades. Broad surveys of the international
relations of the 1930s, of the 1920s, and of the entire inter-war period are still
required. Many more specialized topics require greater elucidation. Valuable
studies suggested by the works reviewed here would include the role of
public opinion; concepts of deterrence in a variety of European states; the
influence of government structures on the conduct of foreign policy; the
impact outside Europe of international crises; and the mentalities that under­
lay foreign policy decision-making. Soviet foreign policy, especially in 1938-
9, remains to be written from the archival record, should it become available
to scholars. Lasdy, interesting work remains to be done on gender politics and
the role of women in the debate on foreign policy between the wan.
T w o requirements pointed up by all the works under discussion are the
need for greater attention to the international system itself— without it, the
siren call of Guilty Men will continue to be heard — and an inter-disciplinary
approach similar to the best work in 'cultural studies,' 1 evidenced here only
by Post. Great men performed their scripts; we have studied their parts for a
half-century. W e now have their characters in hand; we know their parts.
What we need is a better understanding of the intellectual arena in which
they brooded, strutted, declaimed, and laboured to such terrible effect. As
long ago as 1939, E. H. Carr, in his classic study of The Twenty Years Crisis,
drew attention to what he considered 'the glaring and dangerous defect of
nearly all thinking, both academic and popular, about international politics in

1 SeeJ. L. Richardson, ' N e w Perspectives on Appeasement: Some Implications for International

Relations', World Politics, xl (1988), 289-316.
 5 62 Wesley K. Wark

English-speaking countries from 1919 to 1939 - the almost total neglect of

p o w e r ' . 1 This is the launching-pad for Carr's critique of both Utopian
thinking and its realist counterpart. Fifty years later, it might be feasible to
suggest that uneasiness with power as the dominant fact of international
politics persists. Although scholars, as the works reviewed here show, have
long sought to integrate power — political, economic, and military - into
their analyses, they have tended to treat it discretely, as a function of the
exercise of high politics. N o w we need less emphasis on material power,
more on the perception of power, 2 not just of the perceptions of individual
statesmen, but equally important, of the perceptions built into systems of
thinking and structures of government. It may help to explain both Cham­
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berlain's self-confidence and the despondency of so much of the professional

advice in the 1930s, especially that of the military and the intelligence
authorities.
Yet Carr went further, by suggesting that discussion of power requires
prescription. The continuing stream of books on appeasement is evidence
that the catastrophic failure of British foreign policy will never become (as
Taylor supposed) a mere historical curiosity. One reason is that it continues
to be used as a source of political metaphor, at least in Anglo-American
discourse. The 'Munich' or 'appeasement' analogy, which flourished naturally
in the cold war and which argued essentially that 1939 had shown the folly of
attempting to negotiate with dictator states that denied the universal
principles of the liberal world order, seems almost impervious to scholarly
revision, even in the post-cold war era. 3 It certainly showed its strength as
recendy as 1990 during the Gulf War. 4

University of Toronto

1 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, igig-yç (London, 2nd éd., 1946), preface.
2 Witness the effort by Brian McKercher to assert Britain's 'pre-eminent' power in the 1930s.
Such discussions, it seems to me, need to take account of a more complex definition of 'power'
and engage with the significance of contemporary perceptions of such power, both nationally
and internationally, in terms of'net assessment'. See B. J. C. McKercher, ' "Our Most Dangerous
Enemy": Great Britain Pre-Eminent in the 1930s', International History Review, xiii (1991).
McKercher's essay is part of a special issue devoted to the subject of British power. On British
net assessment in the 1930s, see the valuable essay by Paul Kennedy, 'British "Net Assessment"
and the Coming of the Second World War', in Calculations: Net Assessment and the Coming of
World War II, ed. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett (New York, 1992).
3 A classic study of the appeasement analogy is Ernest R. May, 'Lessons' of the Past: The Use and
Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York, 1973). David Hackett Fischer discusses the
weaknesses of argument by analogy in Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought
(New York, 1970), ch. 9.
* For example: William Safire, 'The Hitler Analogy', New York Times, 24 Aug. 1990; 'Who will
Stop Saddam?', The Economist, 4 Aug. 1990; John Simpson, 'Saddam Hussein's Sudetenland',
Spectator, II Aug. 1990.