Among the most denigrated policies in international relations, few can deny the infamy of appeasement: a strategy entailing the reduction of tension between states through conceding points of contention at the root of the conflict. This reputation among scholars is largely attributed to the 1938 Munich Conference, during which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated territorial concessions in Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in exchange for peace, which failed to prevent the Third Reich from ceasing their expansion. Indeed, the powerful imagery of Chamberlain proclaiming “peace in our time” in 1938 contrasting to the violent outbreak of the Second World War with an emboldened Germany merely a year later has served to invoke aversion around the strategy. So significant was this particular failure that appeasement as a strategy has continued to be dismissed as a tool of the meek even in the United States’ contemporary foreign policy. Explaining in 2001 that the US has “learned from Munich that there is no isolation from evil. . . . the wicked must be opposed early…before they threaten us all”, George W. Bush was able to use the perceived meekness of Chamberlain’s policy as a justification for the War on Terror. With the refusal of any negotiations in favor of perpetuating one of the United States’ most costly conflicts having been legitimized by the assumption that appeasement is meritless, it is apparent that that further examination is warranted toward the strategy and its context in Munich, 1938.
Historical Background
Before one may develop an understanding of the motivations behind the Munich Conference and its subsequent condemnation, an overview of the events surrounding it is necessary. The Munich Conference and Chamberlain’s permittance of German expansionism was not an isolated incident and was one of numerous instances in which he had publicly expressed ambivalence towards the growing power of the Third Reich. During the Anschluss, an event preceding Munich by a matter of months in which Germany coerced the Austrian government into annexation, Chamberlain had expressed a refusal to intervene due to his doubt in the United Kingdom’s capacity to wage war, noting “that nothing could have arrested what has actually happened [in Austria] unless [the U.K.] ...had been prepared to use force”. Likewise, Germany’s coerced annexation of Lithuania's lucrative Memel territory was also met with a similar doubt, with Chamberlain having been willing “to give Hitler political and economic hegemony over [Memel] so long as it was accomplished peacefully”. With these sequential concessions having been repeatedly met with further German demands, there soon began to form a stigma surrounding appeasers as being “cunning but ignorant [in contrast to] the ‘anti-appeasers’, men of… principle and historical precedent”, a conflict that would only further divide British politics upon the outbreak of war. Winston Churchill, having been an outspoken opponent to appeasement during Chamberlain’s tenure, was also known to have openly condemned the cession of Austria, Memel, and the Sudetenland as “[giving] away the keys to Europe” to Germany. This denouncement of appeasement would entrench itself during the future PM’s meteoric rise to fame, following his succession of Chamberlain during WWII.
Chamberlain’s Motives and the True Purpose of Appeasement
Although this understanding of the Munich Conference might further heighten one’s sentiment that Chamberlain’s use of appeasement was cowardly, contemporary discourse has started to use this devotion of Chamberlain towards appeasement to reassess his true motives. Noting that Britain’s ability to wage a war of intervention against Germany was lacking in the years leading up to the Second World War, neoclassical realist academics Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy argue in their seminal work Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? that Chamberlain’s appeasement intended not to prevent conflict but rather hinder German expansion and allow the UK time to mobilize. Indeed, Chamberlain’s own words prior to the Munich Conference substantiate this, having stated that appeasement would not just be pursued to “remove the causes which are delaying the return of confidence in Europe” as per our current notions of appeasement, but also to "continue [the U.K.’s] program of the reestablishment of [their] defence forces”. In light of the “air-raid phobia” phenomena exhibited by the British people during the early 1930s, referring to the common “[perception] that the German Air Force clearly overwhelmed the British Air Force in the number and quality of its machines” and fear of German land invasion, it is unsurprising that Chamberlain would have chosen to repeatedly make concessions in exchange for the opportunity to restore faith in Britain’s military capabilities. While there have been critics who have argued that “[appeasement] also gave Germany just as much time to arm”, it was this restoration not just in Britain’s military capabilities, but also their own confidence in their ability to fight another war, that gave the nation the relative advantage it needed.
In addition to its facilitation of Britain’s spiritual and logistical rearmament, Chamberlain’s use of appeasement was also effective in that it appeared to ultimately hamper Germany’s ability to expand in a timely manner before the eventual outbreak of war. Through taking the initiative to establish treaties such as the Munich Agreement, the United Kingdom had effectively taken control of the rate in which German expansion would take place. This was due to the fact that, if Germany “misbehaved and abrogated [such pacts] the world would witness [its] duplicity”, effectively forcing them to accept the stipulations of such a deal to maintain some semblance of legitimacy before choosing to expand once more. The irony of Munich being the most infamous instance of appeasement is that it was, in reality, the most effective of Chamberlain’s appeasement to these ends. The leader of Germany at the time, Adolf Hitler himself, is known to have confessed to Nazi Party minister Martin Bormann in 1945 that they “ought to have attacked [Czechoslovakia] in 1938” due to it offering Germany “the last chance [it] had of localizing the war”, believing that the prolongation of his territorial ambitions through lengthy negotiations and justifications had cheated him out of “a short war”.
Lessons In Modern Appeasement
With ample evidence to argue that the most infamous instance of appeasement— Chamberlain’s concessions at Munich—was in fact justified, it is apparent that there are instances where appeasement is far from a fruitless strategy for the meek. That being said, it is apparent that appeasement has its time and place, as Chamberlain’s strategy of appeasement hinged both on the assumption that conflict was an eventuality and that the United Kingdom possessed a latent military superiority that could be fulfilled in a timely manner. The United States, however, would have most definitely stood to gain from contemplating appeasement as a valid strategy following the 9/11 attacks as opposed to Bush’s denigration of the strategy in favor of launching the War on Terror immediately. It was apparent that the Afghan War was doomed to fail due to a lack of foresight, with Deputy National Security Advisor Doug Lute having infamously admitted in the leaked Afghanistan Papers that the U.S. was “devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan [and] didn’t know what [they] were doing”. In this regard, it is apparent that the United States would have greatly benefited from appeasing Al-Qaeda through their lack of retaliation until the U.S. reached a point in which it possessed a thorough understanding of its goals in Afghanistan in a manner that could best utilize its military capabilities with minimal losses. There is little doubt that the US did not have the necessary expertise to develop such a doctrine in a timely manner, with the publication of a dedicated counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, having overtaken the conflict-focused “shock and awe” doctrine only 5 years following the initial outbreak of the War on Terror. Though the prospect of appeasing insurgents might initially seem counterintuitive due to the framing of global insurgency and terrorism as an existential threat to the free world, if there exists any lesson to be taught from Munich it is that one needs to know when to forgo smaller victories when better terms exist on the horizon, even when faced with one of the greatest threats to democracy the world has ever known.