To what extent can Britain's policy towards Germanybefore Munichbe defended?

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To what extent can Britain’s policy towards Germany before Munich be defended?

        

Whether Britain’s policy of appeasement towards Germany was the right policy to employ after the First World War has been highly debated among Historians of both a Counter Revisionist view such as R.A.C. Parker and Revisionist such as J.Charmley. It was appeasement which made Neville Chamberlain infamous and histories based upon Churchill’s Gathering Storm that gave it a different post-war meaning which regarded appeasement as a policy of cowardice and surrender. Yet we must look beyond this misinterpreted turn of phrase and concentrate on its actual true meaning. Firstly, therefore, there is nothing ignoble about appeasement. To ‘appease’ means to conciliate, to listen to your opponent and try and meet his grievances. This was the pre-war understanding of the word, before it began to have such unpleasant over-tones. Such criticism of Neville Chamberlain, typical of Traditional historians like Cato and Churchill, is unjustifiable as at the time it could be seen as the most sensible option that was certainly supported by Charmley not to mention the public majority.

        To understand Chamberlain’s foreign policy we need to understand what Chamberlain was trying to achieve. When Chamberlain came to power in May 1937 he was never in any doubt as to his broad aim “we have a definite objective in front of us. That objective is a general settlement of the grievances of the world without war.” – Chamberlain at the House of Commons in December 1937. A.J.P. Taylor and W. Churchill have often argued that he was overconfident and lacking in experience. This can be seen as an accurate assessment of come of Chamberlain’s weaknesses, counter-revisionists such as R.A.C. Parker supports this view and emphasizes on his personality faults especially leading up to Munich. Yet it has to be asked how reliable such acquisitions are, in the 1930s Churchill was on the fringes of the Conservative Party and there was great animosity between the two men. Also Churchill himself wrote in the Gathering Storm that until he left office in 1929, “I felt so hopeful that the peace of the world would be maintained that I saw no reason to take any new decision” but when we look at his career more closely this is clearly unwarranted for throughout his period as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Chamberlain had been closely involved in the evolution of Britain’s defence and foreign policies. In fact when Chamberlain comes to power in 1937 appeasement had been a British policy since 1919, Chamberlain simply maintains Britain’s tradition policy. His views on defence strategy carried great weight in the debates about it in the House of Commons in 1934-5, and he had strong views on foreign policy issues. For example, he made a decisive intervention in the discussion about applying oil sanctions against Mussolini’s Italy in 1935 saying that it would be “the very midsummer of madness to apply them. This has been done, Chamberlain subsequently remarked, because someone needed to give the lead which the party and the country needed”.

        The grievances he spoke of in the House of Commons arose, of course, out of the Treaty of Versailles that had redrawn the map of Europe in the wake of the First World War. To the victorious powers of the First World War (Britain and France) it was a peace settlement, but to the Germans it was a diktat, the dictated, imposed settlement forced upon them by deceit and against their will. They had come to Versailles to negotiate freely, and left as slaves. That much was felt by all Germans and quickly came to be felt by all thinking Englishmen and Frenchmen as well. “Germany saw the treaty of Versailles purpose as disarm and dismember Germany to such an extent that she was not only no longer a ‘Great Power’, but scarcely a ‘power’ at all.”

        If German politicians were motivated by a feeling of dishonour and thus revenge in post-Versailles world, British politicians tended to be motivated by feelings of guilt for a treaty that most came to see as unfair and unworkable. Such people included Neville Chamberlain who agreed the Treaty had been a mistake and that unless treaty revision was undertaken, a bitter but not necessarily weak Germany would do the job herself. Throughout the course of the late 1930s the dilemma of whether to stand by such countries as Czechoslovakia and Austria, which he knew would be largely unworkable or to follow his own instincts i.e. appeasement remained a major predicament. Chamberlain didn’t see why Sudeten Germans should not have the right to return to Germany, as with Austria and Danzig. Charmley supported the view that Chamberlain sensibly maintained the British outlook of the Treaty of Versailles. Chamberlain also believed that a revision of the Treaty of Versailles resulting in German people in Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia being united once again, would be tolerant to those interests and may even help Britain’s interests. Nevertheless I feel this would also help German interests greatly and encourage Hitler’s expansion; Churchill also criticizes Chamberlain because he thinks that it would hearten Hitler to increase his territory even Overy states that Hitler’s ambitions were greater than undoing the Treaty of Versailles.

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        At this stage it is hard to see the problem of Neville Chamberlain adopting a policy of appeasement, after all it was clear that the British public were heavily against a war especially seeing the horrors of the First World War, it also allowed Britain to rearm and recover economically. Chamberlain and Hitler were largely motivated by the same concern for the revision of European status quo, so how did they drift into war? One view of it is that Chamberlain had the right ideas and was working on the right policy, but several years too late. When Chamberlain began ...

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