Appeasement and the Lessons of Munich
By Avi Davis

The memory of the Munich Agreement dredges up strong images and perhaps even stronger emotions. The handshake in Munich in the early hours of the morning of September 30, 1938; the ill-fated Heathrow Airport address, with an exhausted Chamberlain fluttering the Munich Agreement in the wind; the false proclamations of peace announced by British daily newspapers the next day. But the stronger images are those we associate with the aftermath: scarred battlefields, cratered cities, billowing crematoria, emaciated concentration camp victims and the newsreels revealing piles of rotting corpses.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can review the series of events that led to one of the greatest diplomatic debacles in history and ask some compelling questions: What motivated the actors in this drama? What kind of world view informed a policy that impeded any serious effort on the part of the Western democracies to confront Hitler and to abandon a democratic country with whom they were allied? And more to the point, what lessons have the Western democracies gleaned from the Munich Agreement in recognizing current threats to Western civilization?

The Meaning and History of Appeasement

“Appease(ment)”is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary alternatively as “ to bring peace, pacify, settle strife or disorder;” and “to pacify, assuage or allay anger or displeasure.” But since 1938, the word has garnered a political meaning all of its own. A third entry in the OED defines “appeasement” in a derogatory sense, “ used of the British Prime Minister’s efforts from 1937 to 1939 to stave off the threatened aggression of the Axis Powers.” Of course, for many political leaders, commentators and pundits, appeasement today signifies far more than one instance of failed diplomacy. It has come to define cowardice and irresolution in the face of aggression.

Yet the fact that the dictionary uses a historical event to give context and meaning to a word, is powerful evidence of how deeply ingrained the events and lessons of 1938 have seeped into the consciousness of the West.

But is it entirely fair? Appeasement, after all, was a function of the foreign policies of all the Great Powers in the 19th Century. It was regularly and skillfully employed by European political leaders from Metternich to Bismarck to Salisbury in order to create a balance of power that kept Europe largely at peace for 100 years. Imperial Rome had employed policies of appeasement to govern its far flung empire and so did Great Britain when its own imperial ambitions began to outgrow its reach. An example is how the U.K., confronted with the rising menace of a unified Germany, sought to strengthen its global position by appeasing the United States in the 1890s. Between 1896 and 1903 Great Britain acceded to American demands to explicitly accept the Monroe Doctrine; submitted British Guiana’s border dispute with Venezuela to international arbitration; agreed to the construction of the Panama Canal and settled a Canadian- American border dispute in the U.S’ favor. All were examples of a willingness to appease a foreign power’s demands in the interests of broader future interests.

The First World War and the various crises leading up to the commencement of hostilities in Europe in 1914, jettisoned the carefully crafted ‘concert of Europe’. The land grab of the late 19th and early 20th century in Africa and Asia, and the imperatives of empire building, brought an end to the willingness of statesmen to subordinate territorial ambition to practical diplomacy. In its place emerged muscular foreign policies which scraped and grinded against one another until they ignited the spark of an all consuming confrontation.

That some felt that the devastation of the First World War should have finally brought Europe back to its diplomatic senses, is revealed in the diaries and writings of many young British diplomats who attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Men such as Harold Nicolson and John Maynard Keynes, who were later to play important roles in the British government in the 20s and 30s, derided the Peace Treaty as a betrayal of the principles of diplomacy that they had learned from their study of the master statesmen of the 19th Century. Rather than punish Germany as the instigator of the Great War and reduce that country to penury, more judicious minds, they argued, would have rehabilitated the country and strengthened its fledgling democratic institutions. Instead, in their opinions, the Peace Treaty became an instrument of Allied retribution and a continuation of the self-oriented policies that had resulted in the unnecessary collapse of international order in the first place.

It is little wonder then, that over the next twenty years, a succession of British leaders were complicit in undoing the harshness of the Versailles Treaty. Many politicians in Britain felt that Germany, now a democracy, had been wrongfully stripped of its position among the nations of Europe and saddled with a guilt which the entire continent actually bore. The willingness to abide Germany’s resurrection was therefore not only an attempt to accept their own share of guilt for the Great War’s desolation, but a necessary policy to restore the balance in international relations which the Peace Treaty had eclipsed. This is the reason the British parliament endorsed the Anglo- German Naval Treaty of 1935 which implicitly violated the terms of the Versailles Treaty. It is the reason the Allies failed to respond to Germany’s re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 – another serious breach - and the cause for the abandonment of democratic Austria when Hitler marched his troops into Vienna in early 1938.

British policy for four hundred years had been to align itself against any rising power bent on continental domination. Therefore, an ascendant Germany needed to be thwarted by carefully constructed alliances and the application of assertive diplomacy. However, such a policy was also built upon the foundational understanding of a certain normalcy among European leaders. In Adolf Hitler, the new German authoritarian, Western leaders thought they saw a statesman who acted according to generally accepted principles of statecraft. To men such as England’s Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and France’s Leon Blum, Hitler could be dealt with as an equal, because they believed that ultimately he would both think and act like them.

This was the Allies’ most consequential mistake. For Adolf Hilter was not a modern day statesman at all - but rather a throwback to the tribal leadership of the Germanic tribes who had destroyed Rome. Adolf Hitler could neither be deterred by appeals to reason, nor by appeals to self interest. He could not, in other words, be appeased. He was uninterested in the economic rationalizations other European leaders made against war; he was similarly uninterested in the humanitarian reasons to prevent another war on the scale of the first. For Hitler, war in itself was a strategic objective, a function of his desire to harden the German spirit in order to make it worthy of the Thousand Year Reich he visualized. It is therefore instructive that while many historians have ascribed to Hitler a victory at Munich, the man himself viewed the entire episode as a defeat. He had been dissuaded from going to war when his all political instincts and personal desires propelled him in that direction.

Neville Chamberlain’s Role

Neville Chamberlain, on the other hand, who has been portrayed for decades as a dupe and fool, was actually nothing of the sort. He was a canny politician with a strong sense of the national mood. He not only reflected the near universal desire of the British citizenry to avoid war, but was practicing the kind of personal international statecraft which had worked so well for the leaders of his father’s generation. Chamberlain, aloof and self-righteous, believed that the fate of civilization hinged on the decisions of just a few men. He therefore expected his fascist counterparts in Germany and Italy to play along with his determination “ to make gentle the life of Europe.”

But the British leader, whose policies more or less dictated those of France (who felt too weak militarily to go to war alone against Germany) cannot be excused for his egregious miscalculations. He failed to assess the strategic consequences of Germany’s union with Austria; he failed to appreciate the deterrent value of combining an accelerated rearmament program with a firm commitment to defend France and the Low Countries with troop deployments; he failed to understand that Eastern Europe could not be defended by Britain and France but only with the intervention of the Soviet Union. His unwillingness to explore the option of an alliance with the communists would doom Eastern Europe to Nazi domination.

Chamberlain’s personal style and arrogance set the tone for the disaster which overcame the West in the twelve months following the Munich Agreement. Yet the lessons of Munich should not focus on Chamberlain’s foibles, but on what the West as a whole might have accomplished had it reached a unified consensus about Adolf Hilter’s ambition to dominate Europe.

Counterfactual scenarios can feed endless speculation on the question of what might have happened had England and France stood up to Hitler. What if they had seen through Hitler’s veil of respectability as a head of state and understood him for the unprincipled adventurer and manipulator that he actually was? What if they had vigorously combined their military and financial superiority to force a German retreat? What if, instead of shamefully abandoning Czechoslovakia to its fate, Chamberlain and Daladier had stood firm and threatened war instead of offering accommodation?

It is possible that had Hitler been handed a true defeat at Munich, his generals, who had been against a confrontation with the West, might have risen against him and removed him from power. Had he survived such a coup, a chastened Fuhrer may have re-thought his plans for territorial conquest and focused on internal control. Certainly, the outbreak of the Second World War would have been delayed if not averted, giving the West the time it needed to strengthen its defenses and build the alliances necessary to hem in an aggressive Germany. In the event that Hitler would not back down, there would have been war, and, as almost all historians agree, such a pre-emptive confrontation could have saved millions of lives.

The trouble for both historians and leaders with any pre-emptive strike or action, is that, since the event sought to be avoided never happens, one can never truly assess the magnitude of the would-be catastrophe. Yet the exploration of “what ifs” is still important for an understanding of how the world has operated since the end of the Second World War. That is because the memory of Munich retains an enormous influence over the way American political leaders react to the challenges to national security.

Indeed, every United States president since 1945 has invoked the specter of Munich to justify the execution of some aspect of foreign policy. For Harry Truman, Munich dictated intervention in Korea since: “ Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen and twenty years earlier.” Dwight Eisenhower used Munich to justify the domino theory – that is, “that aggression unchecked, is aggression encouraged.” John F. Kennedy cited Munich during the Cuban Missile Crisis warning that “ the 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war.”

Lyndon Johnson was propelled into escalation in Vietnam by fear of appearing to be an appeaser. He told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: “Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did…… I’d be giving a reward to aggression.” Richard Nixon agreed, stating in his memoirs: “ What had been true of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938 was no least true of the betrayal of South Vietnam to the communists, advocated by many in 1965.” Jimmy Carter invoked Munich in his cancellation of the U.S. participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. “We have learned from Munich that accommodations of aggressive behavior only leads to further aggression.” Ronald Reagan arguing forcefully for a strong defense: “ One of the greatest tragedies of this century, “ he said in a 1983 speech, “ was that only after the balance of power was eroded and a ruthless adversary decided to strike, was the importance of a strong defense was realized”

George H.W. Bush, in justifying intervention in Kuwait, stated: “ If history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms. Appeasement does not work. As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive neighbor threatening his neighbors.” Bill Clinton used Munich as an analogy in dealing with the Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal campaign in Serbia: “What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hilter earlier? How many peoples’ lives might have been saved?” George W. Bush , on the eve of launching Operation Freedom in Iraq, observed that “ In the 20th Century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were able to grow into genocide and global war.”

So often is Munich still invoked on the political stage that its reference has reverted today to something of a political cliché. But if the above statements prove anything, it is that every generation of American leaders since the Second World War, has felt that aggression, if not met by a show of force, invites deep threats to national security. Sometimes they have been proven right – as was the case with Kennedy and Reagan; but sometimes they have also been proven wrong – as was the case with Johnson.

Threats to Western Civilization

What these quotes also reveal is that there will always be threats to freedom and to the Western way of life. How we deal with those threats will depend on how we characterize them. Today the threats to our civilization emerge from rogue regimes whose acquisition or near acquisition of nuclear weaponry threatens to upset the international order. In this regard, Iran and Korea stand as the prime international aggressors. Iran’s genocidal threats to Israel, dismissed by so many in the West as mere puffery, will take on graver reality when Iran finally comes into possession of nuclear weapons. The West seems quite oblivious to the threats to Israel - which is a position not unlike that of the Allies’ attitude towards Czechoslovakia . Even if Israel, unlike the Czechs in 1938, has the means for massive retaliation or pre-emption, the unwillingness of the West to recognize a threat to a democratic country as a threat to the itself, has important psychological ramifications. It feeds the sense of Western disunity and its unwillingness to resolutely defend its own values.

The perceived weakness of the West in allowing these countries to continue their brazen conduct, may inevitably present it with some very serious dilemmas. Either it must be prepared to live with dangerous enemies who show little sign of restraint in the deployment of weapons of mass destruction, or else it must confront those regimes while there is still time, with ultimatums, backed by the threat of military force. Successful engagement of either regime may depend on a frank assessment as to what conciliaton can realistically accomplish. Iran’s leaders have already demonstrated that they have no regard for maintaining international order. Nor do they care much for the humanitarian cost of their policies. But are they prepared, like Adolf Hitler before them, to sacrifice the welfare of their own populations and perhaps the survival of their own regimes for the fulfillment of an ideological agenda? That can only be tested by the commitment of the democracies to a policy of confrontation, and , if necessary, military force.

Since August, 2008, another nation has joined this club of rogues, although its membership has not quite yet been validated. Russia’s invasion of Southern Ossetia and its trampling of Georgian independence augurs a return to ‘sphere of influence’ international politics of the 19th Century. While Russian hegemonic ambitions may be related only to its own region and not to world domination, it is not clear whether the resurgent northern nation’s quest is to extinguish democracy altogether or to remove the threats of independence movements on its southern and western borders. The Russian desire to regain lost national honor after the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, bears much in common with the collapse of Germany following the First World War. But whether this means that Vladimir Putin is on the road to a dictatorship that bodes a new confrontation with the West, is still unclear. As Russia gains strength and confidence, the West will need to find a forceful response to that country’s next invasion or intimidation of a neighboring democracy. For Western silence or inaction will almost certainly be interpreted in Moscow as assent.

While appeasement has traditionally been regarded as reflecting the relations between nation states, the reality is that today in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin – and even in some cities in the United States - a new form of appeasement has arisen which now demands our attention. With the growth of the multicultural state and the emphasis by nearly every modern democracy on pluralism, Islamic fundamentalism, operating under the umbrella of “cultural diversity” has grown in strength and appeal to young Muslims disaffected with Western life. In recent years, the Salman Rushdie Affair, Danish cartoon riots, French riots , the London and Madrid bombings and the slaying of well known Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh are all examples of the growing strength and confidence of Islamic fundamentalism in Western society and its strategy of using democratic protections to advance a destructive agenda.

As Robert Spencer capably demonstrates later in the pages of this booklet, rather than recognizing the seriousness of the threat that this movement presents to democratic life and freedom, Western democracies have abetted its growth. In England ,the highest prelate in the country, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has voiced his opinion in favor of independent Islamic courts to adjudicate family and financial matters within the Muslim community of Britain. He has been supported in this view by Britain’s Chief Justice. Such an argument has as its natural corollary the fragmentation of the common law as a universal code for one people. It is an ominous sign of societal breakdown which Islam is all too willing to exploit.

In France, imams preach destruction of the West as their ‘ democratic right’, protected by the law, while in some areas rioters burn cars nightly almost unimpeded by French police. In certain areas of France and other parts of Europe, honor killings, genital mutilation, spousal abuse and arbitrary violence against non–believers, takes place unchallenged by local authorities for fear of upsetting cultural sensitivities.

Acquiescence

Those who seek to expose these developments are often met with derision, isolation and even prosecution. Writers such as France’s Michel Houellebecq and the late Italian author Oriana Fallaci have been prosecuted for incitement. In Canada, journalist Mark Steyn has been prosecuted for his views, while in Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch legislator, was forced to flee her own country because the authorities could not guarantee her safety. Throughout Europe, there is increasing trepidation in criticizing Islam and the Muslim community – not only for fear of offending Muslims, but also in dread of tripping the wires of the guardians of political correctness. One is reminded of Winston Churchill’s admonition to the House of Commons following the Munich Agreement:

“ I hear it said sometimes now - that we cannot allow the Nazi system of dictatorship to be criticised by ordinary, common English politicians. Then, with a Press under control, with every organ of public opinion doped and chloroformed into acquiescence, we shall be conducted along further stages of our journey.”

Have we, in the 21st Century, been “chloroformed and doped” into acquiescence? If so, changing that reality must begin by reassessing how we understand the concept of appeasement. It needs to be stretched in our understanding beyond its current application from aggressive states to aggressive populations as well. For to broaden the definition is to also broaden our acceptance of the threat to our communities, societies and civilization.

When we think of Munich today, we recall two nations negotiating desperately for their own survival. But that’s not the way Neville Chamberlain necessarily thought of his role. He considered himself a savior who was negotiating to save not only Britain but the world from the prospect of a cataclysm. The thought that his actions might actually hasten that cataclysm, never seemed to cross his mind – and millions of people went along with him. What he and Daladier and others failed to understand was that it was neither Britain, France nor Czechoslovakia as individual nations nor the “world” (which included the fascist governments) that were imperiled at Munich. The Nazi assault on Europe was a moral crusade aimed at undermining the foundations of Western civilization. While the Nazis certainly sought the destruction of democratic government, they also planned the excision of Judeo-Christian values and the social framework built upon them. At Munich, Hitler probed the strength of Western resolve to protect those values. When he found that it couldn’t or wouldn’t defend them, he was emboldened to move forward with his own territorial and genocidal objectives.

Today it is therefore not enough for democratic governments to characterize the provocations of rogue regimes or minority populations as merely criminal activities or troubling security issues. They are civilizational threats. Events such as the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers , the London Underground plots or the Madrid bombings were not just new atrocities or political theater perpetrated to bring attention to a cause. They were the work of patient strategists and planners who understand the psychological and political weaknesses of the West and the perceived cravenness of its response to provocation.

Ultimately, then, there are three vital lessons the West must continue to glean from the Munich experience:

First, appeasement only works, if it works at all, when the appeasing nation operates from a position of military, economic, and psychological superiority.

Second, all countries who subscribe to the Western democratic tradition and the rule of law, must remain constantly vigilant and unified in their understanding that any attack on a democracy, is also an attack upon their own values and principles.

Third, preemptive war, so shrouded in political obloquy these days, may at times not only be a military necessity, but a moral imperative.

Without these understandings, another Munich – with all attendant disasters it brought down upon the civilized world, may be visited upon us once again.

The Western Word - An International Weekly Digest   9-26-2008