Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic negotiation policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power with intention to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy between 1935 and 1939 of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and most notably Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.Mallett, Robert (1997). "The Anglo-Italian war trade negotiations, contraband control and the failure to appease Mussolini, 1939–40." Diplomacy and Statecraft 8.1: 137–67. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.
In the early 1930s, appeasing concessions were widely seen as desirable because of the anti-war reaction to the trauma of World War I (1914–1918), second thoughts about the perceived vindictive treatment by some of Germany in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and a perception that fascism was a useful form of anti-communism. However, by the time of the Munich Agreement, which was concluded on 30 September 1938 between Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, the policy was opposed by the Labour Party and by a few Conservative dissenters such as future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War Duff Cooper, and future Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Appeasement was strongly supported by the British upper class, including royalty, big business (based in the City of London), the House of Lords, and media such as the BBC and The Times.Andrew Roberts, "'Appeasement' Review: What Were They Thinking? Britain's establishment coalesced around appeasement and bared its teeth at those who dared to oppose it", Wall Street Journal 1 Nov. 2019).
As alarm grew about the rise of fascism in Europe, Chamberlain resorted to attempts at news censorship to control public opinion.Compare: He confidently announced after Munich that he had secured "peace for our time".Hunt, The Makings of the West p. 861.
Academics, politicians and diplomats have intensely debated the 1930s appeasement policies ever since they occurred. Historians' assessments have ranged from condemnation ("Lesson of Munich") for allowing Hitler's Germany to grow too strong to the judgment that Germany was so strong that it might well win a war and that postponing a showdown was in the best interests of the West.
History Failure of collective security
Chamberlain's policy of appeasement emerged from the failure of the League of Nations and the failure of collective security. The League of Nations was set up in the aftermath of World War I in the hope that international co-operation and collective resistance to aggression might prevent another war. Members of the League were entitled to the assistance of other members if they came under attack. The policy of collective security ran in parallel with measures conducted since the early 1920s like the Washington Naval Conference to achieve international disarmament that were stepped up with the largely symbolic Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the Disarmament Conference of 1932-34, and, if possible, was to be based on economic sanctions against an aggressor.
Invasion of Manchuria
In September 1931, the Empire of Japan, a member of the League of Nations, invaded Manchuria, in northeast China, by claiming that the regional population was not only Chinese but was multi-ethnic. The Republic of China appealed to the League of Nations and to the United States for assistance. The League of Nations Council asked the parties to withdraw to their original positions to permit a peaceful settlement. The United States reminded them of their duty under the Kellogg–Briand Pact to settle matters peacefully. Japan was undeterred and went on to occupy the whole of Manchuria. The League set up the Lytton Commission, a commission of inquiry that condemned Japan, and the League duly adopted the report in February 1933. In response, Japan resigned from the League and continued its advance into China, with neither the League nor the United States taking any action. However, the U.S. issued the Stimson Doctrine and refused to recognize Japan's conquest, which played a role in shifting U.S. policy to favour China over Japan during the late 1930s. Some historians, such as David Thomson, assert that the League's "inactivity and ineffectualness in the Far East lent every encouragement to European aggressors who planned similar acts of defiance".Thomson, David (1957) Europe Since Napoleon, London: Longans Green & Co. p. 691 However it may be argued that the Lytton Commission’s report and the League’s ineffectual opposition to Japan, while not effective was also highly critical and therefore should not be taken as precedent for the appeasement of Germany in the later 1930s. World opinion never excused Japanese action in 1931-33 anywhere near the way it did German action in 1936-38.
Disarmament Conference The Disarmament Conference had come at a time when the League was still a recognised arbiter of international disputes, was still looking at the Manchurian invasion, and as world leaders tried a myopic attempt to forestall war. The German delegates argued that either other states should cut their armaments to the Versailles‑imposed German levels or Germany should be allowed to attain military parity with its neighbours. Well before Hitler came to power, Weimar politicians had backed rearmament drives such as treaties of cooperation with the other international pariah, the Soviet Union. Hitler's walking out of the Conference signalled a new form of diplomacy that did not necessarily involve the League, which arguably had been bound to fail given the exclusion of isolationist America since 1920. From then on a new exploration of this diplomacy by Britain, who did not wish to cut off Germany entirely, was directed by National Government Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare beginning with the 1934 Anglo-German Payments Agreement stabilised economic relations between Britain and Germany, guaranteeing German interest repayments on bonds arising from World War I reparations (which Hitler had stopped repaying in any case) and deepening British economic ties to Germany, particularly in the area of trade. Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to Britain, in 1938 characterised the agreement, alongside the 1935 naval agreement, as carrying "the swaying structure of foreign relations [between the UK and Germany] even in critical periods".
Anglo-German Naval Agreement The 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement had Britain permit Germany to begin rebuilding the German Navy, including its U-boats, despite Germany having repeatedly violated the Treaty of Versailles. Previously, since the Night of the Long Knives and the attempted coup against Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, a pro-Austria (then an Italian satellite) Mussolini sought a common front with Britain and France against Hitler’s revisionism, the Stresa Front.
However a similar mutual defence pact with the Soviet Union by French foreign minister Louis Barthou, killed with King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934, had been ratified anyway by the French in 1935, this driving Conservative opinion in Britain against the Stresa Front and in favour of direct dealing with Germany, hence the signing of the Agreement. This marked the first major step in a process originating from the failed Disarmament Conferences of 1933–34, which had begun optimistically, and led the British government and public opinion to seek a new European settlement treating Germany as an equal partner instead of under the Treaty of Versailles. The policy might have succeeded had German foreign policy been steered by moderate, cautious traditional right-wingers, as under Gustav Stresemann in the Weimar era, rather than by Hitler, a "va banque" gambler and megalomaniac.Kissinger, Henry Diplomacy (1994)
According to A.J.P. Taylor, the British government was a key player with agency in the non-fascist camp’s diplomatic scene of the 1930s, as the United States was still overwhelmingly isolationist following the reaction to interventionism after 1917-18, and France was paralysed by a number of successive governments of the French Third Republic, often with razor-thin political margins that they did not wish to expend it on foreign policy and so chose or were obliged to follow Britain’s lead up until September 1939.Taylor, A.J.P. The Origins of the Second World War
Abyssinia crisis
Benito Mussolini had imperial ambitions in Abyssinia. Italy was already in possession of the neighbouring Eritrea and Somalia. In December 1934, there was a clash between Royal Italian Army and Imperial Ethiopian Army troops at Walwal, near the border between British and Italian Somaliland, in which Italian troops took possession of the disputed territory, and about 150 Abyssinians and 50 Italians were killed. Italy demanded apologies and compensation from Abyssinia, which appealed to the League, with Emperor Haile Selassie famously appealing in person to the assembly in Geneva. The League persuaded both sides to seek a settlement under the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928, but Italy continued troop movements, and Abyssinia appealed to the League again. In October 1935 Mussolini launched an attack on Abyssinia. The League declared Italy to be the aggressor and imposed sanctions, but coal and oil were not included, as it was feared sanctioning them would provoke war. Albania, Austria and Hungary refused to apply sanctions, and Germany and the United States were not in the League. Nevertheless, the Italian economy suffered. Britain considered closing off the Suez Canal, which would have stopped arms to Abyssinia, but thinking that would be too harsh a measure, failed to do so.
Earlier, in April 1935, Italy had joined Britain and France in protest against German rearmament. Britain was less hostile to Germany and set the pace in imposing sanctions and moved a naval fleet into the Mediterranean, but in November 1935, British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval had secret discussions in which they agreed to concede two thirds of Abyssinia to Italy. However, the press leaked the content of the discussions, and a public outcry forced Hoare and Laval to resign. This effectively cancelled out British attempts at resuming traditional non-League diplomatic tactics to keep Italy aboard the Stresa Front, as Britain had taken with the agreements with Germany, and, by the three principal remaining guarantors of the League operating so blatantly outside the League at the expense of another member, doomed its already tottering credibility in public eyes. After Abyssinia, international crises like the Czechoslovak crisis were barely even referred to the League, with traditional diplomacy having resumed its place in international affairs. Wilsonian idealism was now definitively dead, if it had ever truly been alive.