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Appeasement: Before and After Revisionism

Sidney Aster
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Diplomacy and Statecraft, 19: 443–480, 2008
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DOI: 10.1080/09592290802344962
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Diplomacy Statecraft, Vol. 19, No. 3, July 2008: pp. 1–61
APPEASEMENT: BEFORE AND AFTER REVISIONISM
Sidney Aster
Appeasement:
Sidney Aster Before and After Revisionism
Few of the enduring ‘lessons of history’ have had greater staying power
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than the legacy of appeasement. Decision-makers have used the crises of

the 1930s to eschew and condemn appeasement. However, historians
have not been so single minded in their analyses or applications. An his-
toriographical survey of ‘appeasement studies’ then posits that a linear
projection from orthodoxy, to revisionism, to counter- or post-revisionism’
is not accurate. As to why recourse to the appeasement analogy is so prev-
alent is linked to the engagement, or lack thereof, between historians and
public history and the decision-making process.
Few of the enduring “lessons of history” has been more important for
decision-makers in the twentieth and early twenty-first century than the
legacy of appeasement. The failure of appeasement to defuse Nazi
ambitions prior to 1939 has been resurrected at innumerable subsequent
turning points. Time and again politicians, diplomats and commentators
have focused on the 1930s to argue that effective deterrence and resis-
tance at an early stage obviates the need for armed resistance later. Their
rhetoric is consistent: appeasement simply will not do. In the run up to the
Gulf War that opened on 1 January 1991, for example, then President
George H. W. Bush declared: “If history teaches us anything, it is that we
must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms. Appeasement does
not work. As was seen in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggres-
sive dictator threatening his neighbours.”1 On 28 February 2003, on the
eve of the invasion of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared
that “The lesson we learnt [in the 1930s] was that if, confronted by a
threat, we back away because we assume that our good and peaceful
intentions are matched by those threatening us, the threat only grows and
at a later time has to be confronted again, but in far more deadly and
dangerous form.”2 Speaking to the Israeli Knesset on 15 May 2008,
President George W. Bush derided “the false comfort of appeasement,
which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”3 If the lessons for poli-
ticians seemed straightforward enough, why have historians had so much
trouble with the study of appeasement? If historians have it right, then
444 Sidney Aster
why have the lessons of history been so ignored by practitioners?

If historians have it wrong, or cannot come to any consensus, as the histo-
riography of appeasement suggested for many decades, then can public
policy be faulted for clinging to the enduring legacy?
In the early post-1945 period, the field belonged without question to
the Winston Churchill verdict, the “orthodox” interpretation, namely, that
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his team were “guilty
men.” Their underestimation of the dynamism of Nazism, refusal to
educate the public about Hitler’s expansionist ambitions, and failure to
rearm adequately contributed to the outbreak of the war. In the 1960s the
proliferation of documentation and memoir sources, among other factors,
led to “revisionism.” Historians contended that pre-war British policy,

both domestic and foreign, was determined by structural limitations
imposed, inter alia, by politics, finance, economics, empire and culture.
Consequently, appeasement was the logical and only response, given
diminished resources and worldwide imperial obligations, in the realpolitik
tradition; that is to say, appeasement works.4
Contrary to accepted wisdom, however, the revisionists have never
uniformly held the field in the 1960s or later. The “guilty men” verdict
was never completely buried. Historians such as J. A. S. Grenville, Larry
Fuchser, Anthony Adamthwaite, Richard Cockett, Greg Kennedy, and the
present writer, among others, acknowledged structural restraints, yet con-
tinued to argue the centrality, though not exclusivity, of personality and
policy structures and constraints. Yet some of these works had largely
been ignored or dismissed. More recently, “post-revisionist” historians,
such as David Dutton, R. A. C. Parker, Frank McDonough and Peter
Neville have begun to have second thoughts, or at least are beginning to
state their case with less certainty. Dutton concluded that the prime minis-
ter “was right to be wrong.” Furthermore, he alleged that at the heart of
post-revisionism is the notion “that viable alternative courses did exist,”
and these might have averted war. McDonough wrote of Chamberlain’s
“fatal misjudgments” but stated these were the results of “the errors and
miscalculations” dating back to 1918. Parker contended that Chamberlain
opted for appeasement after rejecting alternative policies and thereby
“probably stifled serious chances of preventing the Second World War.
Neville, aiming at an “evenly balanced” analysis, suggested that “politi-
cians in office sometimes get things wrong” and Chamberlain basically
faced “a choice between evils and dangers.”5
While historians have been debating the evidence, perceptions in the area
of public policy have not altered much since the outbreak of the Second
World War. At least from the time of the Suez crisis in 1957, if not earlier, a
clear line of argument has been held publicly. The “lessons of appease-
ment,” as proclaimed by then Prime Minister Anthony Eden, was that it
Appeasement: Before and After Revisionism 445
simply served to feed the appetite of the aggressor. “It is important to

reduce the stature of a dictator at an early stage,” Eden wrote and continued:
“A check to Hitler when he had moved to reoccupy the Rhineland would
not have destroyed him, but it would have made him pause.”6 This state-
ment echoed down through the rest of the twentieth century and into the
first major crises of the twenty-first century, the events of 11 September
2001 and the second Gulf war of 2003. “There can be no appeasement of
terrorism” was the rhetoric that followed immediately in its aftermath. Such
consistency invites questions, among much else, which this essay will
address. Is it truly the case that the debate in “appeasement studies” has
proceeded in a clear linear pattern from orthodoxy to revisionism to post-
revisionism? If this is not the case, then what is the real progression in
historical investigation? On related questions, one is still left with this long-
term dilemma. Why is it that when politicians and diplomats look to the
1930s and the origins of the war they uniformly contend that appeasement is a
policy that is doomed to failure? Is this the result of ignorance or a gap
between the academic and the public? Or is it the case that to argue otherwise
would be to take freedom of action out of the decision-making process?7
The debate and rhetoric surrounding the appeasement dilemma began
in earnest with the defeat of France in June 1940. On the last day of May,
three journalists employed by the Lord Beaverbrook press, Michael Foot,
Frank Owen and Peter Howard, concocted the idea of a collaborative
book to be titled Guilty Men, with the pseudonym, Cato. What bound the
three was their passionate contempt for Neville Chamberlain’s appease-
ment diplomacy. Guilty Men appeared on 5 July 1940 and was reprinted
more than 20 times by October. It instantly became “the most famous
polemic in British political history.”8 The immediate success of the book
was hardly due to its structure that betrayed its collaborative origins.
Rather its 24 brief chapters, listing a “cast” of 15, including Neville
Chamberlain, were dedicated to polemic, were sarcastic in tone and
engaged in outright character assassination. The book was erratic, without
chronological structure or coherence. Nonetheless, its extraordinary
popularity clearly spoke to a nation reeling under the withdrawal from
Dunkirk, the defeat of France and the prospects of a bleak future. Most
important of all, it spoke clearly to a public looking for answers when it
declared: “Let the guilty men retire, then, of their own volition, and so
make an essential contribution to the victory upon which all are implaca-
bly resolved.”9
The indictment detailed by Cato targeted a litany of alleged miscalcu-
lations, deceptions, incompetence and myopic foreign policy decisions
committed by the various governments of the 1930s. What did all these
accusations and invective amount to? The basic argument took aim at
the Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain
446 Sidney Aster
administrations. It was alleged that these failed in their responsibility to

rearm sufficiently to meet the threats of a three front war in Europe, the
Mediterranean and the Far East. Public opinion was misled with optimis-
tic accounts of the state of military preparedness. Secondly, appeasement
was further condemned as blind to the aggressive ideology of Nazism and
Fascism and for making concessions without a quid pro quo from the
dictators. Finally, the large parliamentary majorities that resulted from the
1931 and 1935 elections were employed to enforce compliance with
government foreign policy, even when decisions were unpopular and met
with criticism. Such tactics served to blur issues, smear the reputations of
critics, and promote the incompetent and compliant at the expense of the
talented.10
Although Guilty Men was the most popular of such indictments, it was
not the only such wartime publication. Prior to the outbreak of the war,
Victor Gollancz, had founded the Left Book Club,11 which generally
published two books a month, with a decidedly left wing, anti-fascist
perspective. In parallel with this was a series of “Penguin Specials,” also
highly critical of British policy both domestic and foreign. Concerns of
the former authors ranged over such issues of the Spanish Civil War and
threats posed by Nazism to eastern European states. These were then
buttressed by another wartime series from Gollancz, ”Victory” books.
Simon Haxey’s Tory MP (1939) impugned the reputation of many MPs
who had been in word or print supportive of Nazism or Fascism. He
derided appeasement as “the natural policy of a wealthy and privileged
social class,” and described the record of the government in foreign
affairs as “one of disastrous capitulation and even open support for the
Fascist aggressors.”12 Leonard Wolf, Barbarians at the Gate (1939)
accused Chamberlain of being prepared to make any sacrifice abroad “for
the sake of peace, capitalism and the British Empire”.13 Vigilantes (Koni
Zilliacus) in Why We Are Losing the Peace (1939) also attributed
appeasement to Conservative needs “to maintain the social and colonial
status quo in which their class power and privileges are rooted.”14
Geoffrey Mander in his We Were Not All Wrong (1941) reminded readers
that Liberal, Labour and even some Tory MPs had got it right about the
dictatorships and their aggressive ambitions. Your MP (1944) by
Gracchus argued that the “war . . . need not have happened.”15 Aneurin
Bevin’s Why Not Trust the Tories (1944) impugned “the mechanism of
the Tory mind” for whom “deception is accepted as part of their technique
of government” and who “connived at and facilitated the rise of Hitler to
power.”16 Diplomaticus in Can the Tories Win the Peace (1945) echoed
similar sentiments with the notion that the agenda pursued by the Conser-
vative governments was preservation of their power and privilege against
the newly empowered classes and races.17
While such extreme criticisms of the National Governments and their

leaders, especially, Chamberlain, fed popular perceptions, these did not
hold the field. Quinton Hogg, The Left Was Never Right (1945)
condemned all such leftwing diatribes as “deliberate and vicious.”18
Casius, in The Trial of Mussolini (1943), warned that the developing
orthodoxy which condemned pre-war appeasement portended dire conse-
quences for the future of Conservatism in Britain.19 The subject was even
broached in the House of Commons where Beveley Baxter dismissed
Guilty Men as an “adolescent triumph” and proceeded to defend the
Munich agreement.20 Yet it is interesting to note that two wartime
attempts to defend appeasement, one by Chamberlain’s Lord Chancellor,
Viscount Maugham, and the other by W. W. Hadley, editor of the Sunday

Times, hardly made a dent in the prevailing orthodox consensus.21
Moreover, it is sometimes forgotten that a major earlier contributor to the
discussion was E. H. Carr, the historian, member of the Foreign Office
and later Wilson Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth. While
not directly concerned with the guilty men debate, he had written exten-
sively at the time on the subject of British foreign policy. In The Twenty
Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, he criticized those who at the outbreak of war
had found it “almost fatally easy to attribute the catastrophe solely to the
ambitions and the arrogance of a small group of men, and to seek no
further explanation.” Carr went on to explore British policy within the
context of the dialectic of “idealism” versus “realism,” making the case
that the study of international politics, and problem solving, must move
from an “initial stage of wishing” towards “a stage of hard and ruthless
analysis.” As a result, he argued for a greater infusion of “realism” into
foreign policy. For Carr, yielding to threats of force was “a normal part of
the process of peaceful change.” This position also had led him towards
acceptance of peaceful change through appeasement, and the downgrad-
ing of morality, which he described as “the product of power,’ in interna-
tional affairs.22
After five years of worldwide warfare and mass destruction, and as the
ferocity of the Nazi regime was revealed with the re-conquest of Europe,
the orthodox interpretation of appeasement seemed even more confirmed.
In addition, the emerging Cold War seemed to offer lessons of its own:
never would the miscalculations and timidity of appeasement be repeated.
Cato’s verdict was widely endorsed by anti-appeasement, right wing
historians as well as liberal and left wing internationalists. Among the
former were publications by Winston Churchill, as historian, Sir Lewis B.
Namier and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett. In the first of a six-volume history
of the world war (1948–1954), Churchill wrote that he had once told
President Roosevelt that the world war should be termed “‘the Unneces-
sary War’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which had
448 Sidney Aster
wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.”23 For the
most part, however, Churchill reserved his sharpest criticism for Baldwin
rather than Chamberlain. Although a parliamentary historian of the mid-
eighteenth century, and really out of his depth in twentieth century
history, Namier wrote on the subject of the inter-war period mainly in
reviews and short essays that were collected, and revised, in three
volumes. This work, he admitted, was undertaken during his “leisure.”
Time and again Namier’s tone and choice of subject exhibited his pro-
found criticism of the leaders in, and their policies of, the inter-war
period, which he described as a “truly painful story.” In Diplomatic
Prelude, 1938–1939 (1948), he wrote: “Self-condemned to argue the
justice of Hitler’s conquests and to profess trust in his promises, they

burdened their policy with make-believe and disabled themselves from
striking out on a new and clear line.” There he also described Chamberlain
as “shrewd, ignorant and self-opinionated” with the capacity to deceive
both himself and others.24 John W. Wheeler-Bennett elaborated a more
focused and vitriolic condemnation of appeasement. His study, Munich:
Prologue to Tragedy (1966), remained for years the standard account of the
crisis of September 1938. He charged Chamberlain with “Surrender to
blackmail [which] is always damnable because it sets a higher value upon
mere self-protection than upon principles. Such appeasement is justly
condemned because it is felt to be an act of treason against all we stand
for—the purchase of life at the expense of those ultimate ends of which the
pursuit alone makes life worth living.”25 Neither Namier nor Wheeler-
Bennett wrote with the benefits of many archival sources and neither was
much interested in exploring constraints or limitations that might have led
them to a more balanced assessment of Britain’s role in the origins of the war.
A similar critique of appeasement was also the bailiwick of the liberal
and internationalist left. A. L. Rowse, a Fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford, had made his reputation as a historian of Elizabethan England.
However, in a series of memoirs and most pointedly in All Souls and
Appeasement (1961) Rowse fulminated against British politicians and
their foreign policies in the 1930s. He described Chamberlain as a “Vain
old fool” and derided appeasement as the policy of “a class in decadence
who ‘well-nigh ruined their country and reduced it to a second-rate place
in the world.’”26 Elizabeth Wiskemann, who had spent much of the 1930s
as a correspondent on the continent before becoming an academic,
similarly attacked Chamberlain as “stubborn, vain, naïf and ignorant” in
pursuing appeasement which was “futile, since Hitler was insatiable.”27
Both Rowse and Wiskemann openly contended that their accounts were
not dispassionate: the former admitted with a touch of bravura, “I am not
writing history, I am offering evidence to the historians;” while the latter
stated: “I make no claim to detachment.”28
Further to the left stood the contributions of fellow-travellers Andrew

Rothstein and W. P. and Zelda K. Coates. Rothstein had served as press
attaché at the embassy of the USSR in London, while the Coateses had
written voluminously on Anglo-Soviet relations. In such books as The
Munich Conspiracy (1958), and British Foreign Policy and Its Critics,
1830–1950 (1969), Rothstein held to the view that the key to the destruc-
tion of Fascism and Nazism would have been an Anglo–Soviet alliance.
Instead, he argued, British politicians were blinded by class hatred and by
continuing efforts to turn Germany against the USSR.29 The same view
was expressed by the Coateses whose arguments received the endorsement
of David Lloyd George in his Foreword to their History of Anglo-Soviet
Relations (1945). He wrote that had an Anglo–Soviet alliance been

achieved before the war, “many grave blunders in foreign policy would
have been avoided. Not only that, this war could never have occurred.”30
Although the history of appeasement was being largely written by
those with some personal or official experience that is not to suggest that
it was being totally ignored by academic historians. An American histo-
rian, Margaret George, attempted something like a new approach but
ended up with old conclusions. Her book The Warped Vision: British
Foreign Policy, 1933–1939 (1965) was intended to take a fresh look at
the appeasement period and the appeasers, to target motives and thus
explain “why they behaved as they did, [and] what they were trying to do
with their policy.” The conclusions, however, echoed the orthodox
“guilty men” thesis. George’s analysis returned to the condemnation of
the “Munichmen” for their “ineptness and incapacity, [and] almost crimi-
nal negligence in their appointed tasks of protecting the national secu-
rity.” Only a “grand alliance,” she argued, could have saved the country.
Instead, this was rejected because of deep-seated anti-communism and
confusion in the Conservative mind between preserving their class inter-
ests and the national interest. Indeed, the final words of the book were
dedicated to A. L. Rowse “whose insights on the Appeasers are well
worth quoting.”31
That the guilty men thesis refused to be put to rest was also confirmed
with the publication of Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, The Appeasers
(1963). The work of a professional historian and a working journalist, the
book was a commercial success and quickly reprinted. The basic thrust
was familiar: “British policy, far from appeasing Hitler, showed him that
the British Government were willing to come to terms with him at the
expense of other nations.” The authors rejected the argument, common at
the time from the government, that appeasement at Munich bought time to
rearm and brought a united nation into the war a year later. However, the
book broke much new ground. It opened up discussion of such previously
neglected aspects as colonial and economic appeasement and focused “on
450 Sidney Aster
the widespread fear of Communism that heavily weighted the scales in

favour of a pro-German policy.”32 Of equal significance was the diligence
of Gilbert and Gott in seeking out, through oral interviews and extensive
correspondence, many of the British participants in the decision-making
process, some of whom, such as Horace Wilson, spoke on the subject for
the first time. The consensus regarding the guilty men thesis could also be
followed in both popular and academic histories of the time, leading to
what one historian has described as “historical paralysis.”33
While the orthodox consensus inspired by Guilty Men commanded the
field, it never in fact had a monopoly. If Maugham and Hadley had failed
in their early revisionist attempts, others had also contributed. Keith
Feiling, the first biographer to be given access to Chamberlain’s private

papers, and still his most perspicacious, wrote a lively defence of his sub-
ject. Feiling observed: “to gain time to arm against an inevitable war . . .
was never his first motive, which was plain enough, simply the rightness
of peace and the wrongness of war.”34 Among the more senior of
Chamberlain’s cabinet colleagues, Sir Samuel Hoare produced a memoir
that also attempted something like a defence. It was significant that the
Chamberlain family supplied Hoare with copies of some of the former
prime minister’s papers. What Hoare produced was certainly a very
sustained and articulate defence of Chamberlain and appeasement. This
was based on the argument that the cabinet in which he served pursued
“the double policy of peace and rearmament.”35
Two other senior cabinet colleagues, Sir John Simon, Chancellor of the
Exchequer and Lord Halifax, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,
also contributed, but little, to the debate. Simon briefly contended that
Chamberlain’s “action was justified by the circumstances” then prevailing.
“The fact that his action did not ultimately preserve peace does not . . .
affect the essential rightness of his policy at the time.” Additionally, he
argued, “Munich gave us time.” Halifax, equally briefly, defended
Chamberlain by suggesting that the faults, if any, existed because of the
failures of previous governments to rearm. Chamberlain’s policy of
appeasement, according to Halifax, was based on “hope rather than faith.”
In a revealing aside, he noted that he “should very possibly indeed have
been among the critics” had he not been in the cabinet.36 Lord Swinton,
secretary of state for air from 1935 to 1938, observed that “it is totally
unjust to pillory them as guilty men.”37
There were two major dissident voices at the time, both expected, and
interestingly, both were veterans of the First World War. Alfred Duff
Cooper was first lord of the admiralty who had resigned in the aftermath
of the Munich conference and felt free, therefore, to elaborate further on
his critique of appeasement.38 The other came from Anthony Eden whose
disagreements with Chamberlain led to his leaving office as Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs in February 1938. In a volume of memoirs dedi-

cated to proving that there “is a difference between appeasement and
peace,” and has been criticized for being less than candid, Eden argued a
case based on the differences between outlook and methods, on the one
hand, and principles and objectives on the other. Eden admitted that he
had no differences with the prime minister on principles. However, he
continued, “in international affairs can anyone define where outlook and
methods end and principles begin? I do not believe that we can make
progress in European appeasement . . . if we allow the impression to gain
currency abroad that we yield to constant pressure.”39
Orthodoxy might have been set in stone. However, revisionism is the
business of historians. What began as expressions of doubt and discom-

fort soon became a landslide. In a series of book reviews, the historian
Max Beloff challenged the guilty men thesis.40 Another historian,
William Norton Medlicott of the London School of Economics and Polit-
ical Science (LSE), never entertained anything other than doubts about
the orthodox version of appeasement. His British Foreign Policy Since
Versailles, first published in 1940 and later expanded to cover the period
from 1919 to 1963, came firmly to the defence of Chamberlain. Medlicott
wrote that “Chamberlain had never doubted that a rearmed Nazi Germany
would throw its weight about.” Thus from 1934 onwards he supported
rearmament as a “check to German heavy-handedness” and with the
knowledge that “England’s huge responsibilities throughout the world
vastly exceeded her resources.”41 It was another two LSE colleagues,
Donald Cameron Watt and F. S. Northedge, who then took up the
revisionist position. In two seminal articles in 1963 and 1965, Watt
brought a powerful critique to appeasement and trumpeted the “rise of a
revisionist school.”42 Northedge could still describe Chamberlain as
“credulous and naïve,” suggesting that the government refrained from
telling the truth for fear of losing office, and yet point out that the real
problem was “a failure of resources,” the British were not up to the task.43
The revisions centred equally on personality and policy. Rather than the
gullible, vain, egocentric and domineering prime minister pilloried by
Guilty Men, a new assessment stressed Chamberlain’s cabinet experience,
his clear vision and his focused agenda. The policy of appeasement was
acknowledged to be the result of such determining factors as economic
weakness, the paucity of resources to meet worldwide commitments, and
the need to keep the dominions on side. Public opinion, it was alleged,
while not totally pacifist was still influenced by the ravages of the First
World War and not prepared to pay the price of standing up to Hitler.
Finally, it was also suggested that appeasement was not unique to the later
1930s but had deep historical roots. Appeasement was thus judged as the
only viable policy at the time. David Dilks, also at the LSE, went further
452 Sidney Aster
in cautioning historians about “the perils of reading the past in terms of

later events,” and urged them to avoid making “curmudgeonly objections
to simple explanations” and to rid themselves of partiality.44 The result
was that every accusation articulated by Cato was dismissed on the basis
of new evidence, mitigating circumstances or as just plain bunkum.
The emergence of such revisionist thinking was assisted in a sensa-
tional way by the appearance of A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Sec-
ond World War (1961). The controversy likely had as much to do with the
eminence of the author as the complexity of the argument. On the one
hand, Taylor’s portrait of Hitler was revisionist enough. Instead of the
unbalanced master planner intent on world domination, Taylor’s Hitler
was simply an opportunist. Instead of the supine stumbler, Chamberlain was

portrayed as a popular politician, in command of a complex situation,
who fought with “skill and persistence . . . to follow a moral line.” The
conclusions these views suggested was that appeasement, as witnessed by
the Munich conference, “was a triumph for all that was best and most
enlightened in British life; a triumph for all those who had preached equal
justice between peoples; a triumph for those who had courageously
denounced the harshness and short-sightedness of Versailles.”45 The book
led to endless articles and two entire compilations devoted to analyzing its
meaning, intent, impact and significance.46 However, an almost immedi-
ate contribution may have surprised many. Martin Gilbert, having
rethought the conclusions of The Appeasers, published an insightful and
landmark book, The Roots of Appeasement (1966). He now forcefully
argued that the identification of Chamberlain with appeasement was mis-
guided in the extreme. Rather, appeasement lay at the center of British
foreign policy in the entire inter-war period. Appeasement “both as an
attitude of mind and as a policy, was not a silly or treacherous idea in the
minds of stubborn, gullible men, but a noble idea, rooted in Christianity,
courage and common sense.” It was a policy intended to rectify those
German grievances against the Versailles peace treaties that might be
regarded as legitimate. It “was never a misguided policy, even if it
became, by 1938, temporarily an unrealistic one. The ‘Guilty Men’ tradi-
tion in English historical writing has flourished for over a century, and
ought now to fade away.”47
Little could Taylor or Gilbert, whose one time tutor at Oxford was
Taylor, have realized how fully their interpretations would seize the
imagination of historians. The missing dimension was added by historic
legislation passed in the British parliament in May 1967. The period of
secrecy for most state documents was reduced from 50 to 30 years. This
introduction of a Thirty Year Rule opened the floodgates for revisionism
and historians were quick to examine the archives. Early efforts by Ian
Colvin and Roger Parkinson, both journalists, and Keith Middlemas, an
academic, curiously tended to suggest that the archives might indeed

support the guilty men thesis.48 This might be partly attributable to publishers’
deadlines, and the eagerness to take advantage of any major revelations in
the new archival materials. What was clearly required was a more thor-
ough investigation. And this led inevitably to a proliferation of specialist
studies all framed in the revisionist mold. It would be difficult to docu-
ment or survey the entire outpouring of revisionist studies that followed.
Rather it is more revealing to delineate the several tracks along which
revisionism was elaborated—economic restraints, the influence of public
opinion, financial considerations, the role of the dominions, and military
and strategic constraints. Underlying all these tracks was the emergence
of a consensus, that domestic factors (Primat der Innenpolitik) were as

vital in determining the course of appeasement as external pressures
(Primat der Aussenpolitik)
The question of economic restraints encompasses a whole cluster of
determinants, ranging over, the power of trade unions and the labour
movement, and the impact of the Depression. The nature of public
opinion also provided fertile ground for investigation. Although public
opinion polling per se did not emerge until the latter 1930s, analyses of
by-election results and press studies provided further evidence.49 Finance
and the role of the Treasury were regarded as seminal in its support of
appeasement. “The Treasury was to emerge from the 1930s tainted not
only with failure (in the eyes of liberal opinion) to adopt Keynes’s ideas
to solve economic problems, but also by association with Neville
Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement of Germany.”50 More elaborate
studies of dominion policy and opinion appeared to suggest that this too
led in the direction of accommodating Germany.51 Finally, no words were
minced over the brutal reality that the United Kingdom was faced with
worldwide military and strategic obligations without the hardware to
enforce these duties.52 The conclusions suggested by this large body of
analysis tended to lead in only one direction: domestic foreign and impe-
rial constraints massively determined appeasement and there were no
alternatives. As a result, it was argued, Chamberlain pursued appeasement
because it was the only viable policy option. Furthermore, the “roots of
appeasement,” located by Gilbert in World War One and its immediate
aftermath, were now extended decades back into the nineteenth century.53
The seeming revisionist monopoly of the field by the early 1990s was,
strictly speaking, illusory. First, it must be stressed that historical expla-
nation had never proceeded in linear form. Secondly, the emergence of a
counter-revisionist approach challenged the focus on determinism over
the influence of personality and policy. In step with revisionism, a group
of historians had over the years continued the critique of appeasement,
mindful of the archives but also reaching orthodox conclusions. Anthony
454 Sidney Aster
Adamthwaite, J. A. S. Grenville, and Williamson Murray, basing their

studies on the same body of evidence, reaffirmed most of the elements of
the orthodox version.54 Among this same group, another historian, Larry
William Fuchser, however, had mined new materials. In preparation for
his doctoral dissertation, he had been given permission to examine the
papers of Neville Chamberlain at Birmingham University. When he con-
verted his thesis into a book, as he explained, “the custodians of the
Chamberlain papers found themselves unable to grant the author permission
to publish extracts from these papers.” Consequently, he was forced to
paraphrase references to the Chamberlain papers.55 Nonetheless, his book
was firmly rooted in the Chamberlain papers and his conclusions were
strong ones. Fuscher emerged convinced that Chamberlain “himself did

nothing to prepare the British people for war,” that he valued fiscal stability
and economic vitality more than rearmament, and that he was “the captive
rather than the master of events,” Thus he condemned Chamberlain for
his reliance on an “autocratic style of decision-making,” and a leader who
defined political power “as the ability to coerce, manipulate, and
intimidate.”56
There is no doubt that the gradual opening of collections and public
archives and the release of private papers were driving the agenda.57
The initial response in the late 1960s to the mid-1980s tended toward a
pro-Conservative orientation. This may be due to a generation gap, the
revisionist agenda, which all too often inspires the academic historian,
or more likely, because official documents and the archives preserved
by former public servants, provide evidence of what decisions were
made and why. Alternatives, policy disputes, reservations and disagree-
ments are rarely if ever recorded, certainly not in cabinet or other high
level committees. As Robert Skidelsky observed: “In fact the tendency
of official papers [is] to produce conservative history. . . . To show that
nothing different could possibly have been done.”58 It is thus of such
great interest that in only two diaries kept by officials close to the inner
circle of policy formulation can one discover even hints at the disagree-
ment and often disunity of the Chamberlain cabinet. Oliver Harvey, pri-
vate secretary first to Anthony Eden and then Lord Halifax, left a
revealing record. His diaries provided numerous critical comments on
government policies and personalities at the time. Harvey ascribed to
Chamberlain an “egocentric mentality,” who was personally ever
watchful whenever he noticed that “‘Appeasement’ is raising its ugly
head again,” and on the eve of war noted: “I am terrified of another
attempt at a Munich and selling out on the Poles.”59 The diaries of Sir
Alexander Cadogan, permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs, preserved a very detailed and forthright record of the temper
and agonies experienced by the Chamberlain cabinet and its close
policy-makers. It is little wonder that Cadogan wrote on the eve of war:

“In a sense, there is relief; doubts resolved.”60 After several days,
Cadogan again noted: “Nothing wd. have made any difference—except
complete surrender to Herr Hitler’s demands.”61
The last kick against the bucket of the guilty men syndrome was the
work of John Charmley. Within the framework of his own agenda,
Charmley had already written sympathetic biographies of Duff Cooper
and Lord Lloyd.62 He then followed this in 1989 with an analysis of
Chamberlain’s career as prime minister, writing: “The ‘Guilty Men’
syndrome has run its course, and Chamberlain’s reputation stands better
now than it has ever done. . . . The venom of his opponents pursued him
long, but his was the only policy which offered any hope of avoiding
war—and of saving both lives and the British Empire.” Charmley remains
convinced “that the real criticism of Neville Chamberlain is not that he
appeased too much and for too long, but that he abandoned non-intervention
too speedily and over the wrong issue.”63 To extend his argument,
Charmley followed with his Churchill: The End of Glory (1993). Here he
substituted Churchill as the real villain of the piece, suggesting that
appeasement “offered the only way of preserving what was left of British
power; if 1945 represented ‘victory,’ it was, as Chamberlain had foreseen,
for the Soviets and the Americans.”64 Charmley’s arguments have had
few takers other than among those historians engaged in their own revi-
sionist campaign against Churchill and that is outside the scope of this
essay.65
A collection of private papers, as important as anything previously
released since the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office)
documents, was in the interim opened on 22 July 1975. These were the
papers and diaries of Neville Chamberlain, deposited at Birmingham
University Library. Chamberlain had developed the habit of writing, on a
weekly basis, long, confessional letters to his two sisters, Hilda and Ida.
This massive correspondence, handwritten at the rate of almost 80,000
words a year, discussed in great detail the prime minister’s policies and
his reactions to events and personalities. They provide a poignant,
emotionally honest and extraordinary insight into his mind and emotions.
The letters, and occasional diary entries, reveal a personality hungry for
flattery that nourished his growing self-righteousness. He exulted in the
powers of the office that he held with an increasing sense of mission,
obsessively optimistic and convinced that there were no alternatives to his
policy of appeasement. He was always anxious to outmaneuver such
bête noirs as Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George and even
expressed contempt for what he cursed as the “wets” in his cabinet. He
was implacably opposed to unlimited rearmament, disregarded the
dynamics of totalitarianism, and detested war. A reading of the materials
456 Sidney Aster
in toto could not but conjure up, for most historians, echoes of the accusa-
tions in the pages of Guilty Men.66
The weight of such primary evidence examined in detail for the first
time, without any of the constraints of writing official biography and with
total freedom of access, was impossible to ignore. It was now feasible to
balance determinism and structuralism against options and variables,
constraints against choice, and policy against personality. The last decade
of the twentieth century and the first of the new one, therefore, found
historians trying to grope their way towards post-revisionism, or at least
a new consensus, with some few exceptions. Some important monographs
on the period soon took up the task. Gaines Post targeted the seminal
years of 1934–1937 to understand British attitudes toward deterrence. His

focus was on “the machinery of policy and the process of policymaking”
and there he found “confusion and irresolution . . . muddled deterrence
and lost time.” The administrative defects he uncovered “helped create
the illusion that Chamberlain’s more decisive style of policymaking could
solve Britain’s worsening strategic dilemma once he became prime
minister.” In the final analysis, Post suggested, “Chamberlain’s faith in
preventing war was no match for Hitler’s will to have one.”67 Michael Roi
also turned to this same period to study Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent
Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1930–1938, in an attempt to
examine whether there were “alternatives to appeasement.” The most
promising of these, he argued, was the deterrent effect of an alliance
between Britain, France and the USSR, which even if it failed to deter
was the only guarantee of ultimate victory against Nazi Germany. Hence,
he concluded, “Chamberlain had largely created the conditions in which he
found himself after 1938.”68 Set against a broader canvas, B. J. C. McKercher
had written voluminously about the inter-war period and Anglo–American
relations. He too added weight to the argument that “reliance on ‘appease-
ment’ ultimately failed whilst equally rational diplomatic strategies, like
the balance of power, were discarded.”69 John Ruggiero, with a mixture
of vitriol and scholarship, returned to the specific question of British
rearmament in the 1930s. In his view Chamberlain was misguided in his
preference for a strong air force over a continental army, a free market
rather than controls to finance the defence program, and unnecessary con-
cerns about manpower and industrial capacity. Ruggiero contended that
Chamberlain’s personality—self-willed, obstinate, dictatorial, resorting to
“half-truths and misrepresentations”—enabled him to pursue his policies
of “peace at any price.” Greg Kennedy’s conclusions on the subject were
that Chamberlain “did not address the defence issue adequately.” While
Christopher Price also argued that the British did have the requisite eco-
nomic and financial resources to fund a rearmament program. However,
Chamberlain’s government “did not rearm because it did not want to.”70
On a related front, Joseph Maiolo studied the question of the Royal Navy
and Nazi Germany in the context of appeasement and the origins of the
Second World War. He defended British naval armaments diplomacy
with Germany as “more rational, more ambitious and more complex”
than previous studies had suggested. Nor was it “the orthodox tale of a
reactive and bungling policy born of great power decline.” Rather the
Royal Navy had “realistic strategic incentives” to pursue the aims of
appeasement which it did in a vain attempt to preserve British naval pre-
eminence worldwide.71 Finally, appeasement in its transnational context
has also received further attention. After a gap of many years, when
interest in the Far East seemed to abate, Antony Best returned to examine
the subject of Britain and the origins of the Pacific war. He was at pains to
distance himself from anything approaching “finger-pointing” or attribu-
tion of blame. His argument revolved around the difficulties of accommo-
dating the dynamics of “have” versus “have not” powers. The same theme
of British attempts to preserve the status quo, mainly in south east Asia,
was pursued by Nicholas Tarling for whom the world war began in 1941
and not 1939.72 Finally, the Mediterranean origins of the Second World
War, also after a long period of neglect, were reexamined by Reynolds M.
Salerno on the basis of multi-national archival research. He concluded
that, in the face of a possible three-front war scenario encompassing
Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East, Britain chose the path of
least resistance by trying to appease Mussolini almost at the expense of
straining Anglo–French relations.73
The question of economic appeasement, first broached by Gilbert and
Gott, has also re-emerged as a focus for study. Scott Newton attempted
“to relate appeasement to the domestic politico-economic background
from which it was developed,” to “the socio-economic context in which
the politicians operated,” and to show that appeasement was ongoing
government policy until the resignation of Chamberlain on 10 May 1940.
Newton contended that a “hegemonic group,” based on the Treasury, the
Bank of England, the City of London and a growing middle class, was
determined to maintain free enterprise and the limited state against totali-
tarian ambitions and economics. As a result the National Government had
little choice but to pursue appeasement if the principles of liberal capitalism
were to be preserved among all the powers. Appeasement, therefore, “was
a strategy for the survival of a particular type of socio-economic order in
Britain and the wider world.” Its eventual wartime demise opened the
way for the emergence of the welfare state and decolonization.74 In a
somewhat similar vein, Neil Forbes explored Anglo–German economic
and financial relations in the 1930s. The morality of conducting peace-
time trade with dictatorships was set aside as was the argument that
British business abetted, or was sympathetic to, Nazism. Instead, Forbes
458 Sidney Aster
contended that economic appeasement essentially led to paralysis: “no move

could be made either to promote or stifle German economic recovery.”
However, he remained unconvinced that there was any “fusion of inter-
ests” between the City of London and government.75
Further particular aspects of appeasement and the period tended also to
return to the orthodox version, or at least lend its original approach some
credibility. Central to the defence of appeasement had been the sugges-
tion that the policy generally accorded with the broad consensus of public
opinion.76 Adamthwaite had originally questioned this commonly held
view, suggesting that “the government restricted public debate and lim-
ited the ventilation of alternative views,” and that “arguably, if more had
been known about the issues, resistance would have been greater.”77
However, Adamthwaite had few takers. So too was the reception given to
a book by the British journalist, James Margach, who accused Chamberlain
of “news manipulation on a grand scale.”78 It took a major contribution
from Richard Cockett to turn that tide. His Twilight of Truth (1989)
suggested that in the 1930s an “incestuous relationship” had developed
between Whitehall and the press, with the government attempting to
“subvert editorial independence.” He contended that the prime minister
applied the same test of loyalty to the press as he had done to his
colleagues. Chamberlain went further and blamed the Foreign Office
News Department for fostering press dissent about appeasement. Cockett’s
final judgment was harsh: “If a democracy can be defined as a healthy,
continuing clash of opinion, then the Chamberlain government, through its
control of the press, certainly succeeded in subverting democracy during
the years 1937 to 1940.”79 Even the subject of public opinion per se, one
of the most amorphous aspects of appeasement, could now be studied
with greater exactitude. The British Institute of Public Opinion, the
British name for Gallup, was established on 1 January 1937, with its find-
ings published in the News Chronicle. Another body, Mass Observation,
also began to function that same year, in February, under the leadership of
Charles Madge, a poet and journalist, Humphrey Jennings, a documentary
film maker, and Tom Harrison, an anthropologist.80 The results from both
organizations took decades before becoming the subject of study. And
that tended to indicate that public opinion, however inexact the methods
of both organizations, was in advance of government thinking regarding
the readiness of the British people to contemplate resistance to Nazi
aggression. It was also evident that the government was far less popular
than its leading ministers might have believed.81 To that might also be
added research on the clash of opinion within the cabinet itself where the
previous picture of unanimity, domination by the prime minister and
coalition unity has given way to one of deep divisions and disunity.82
Finally, and closely related, has been the question of what critique was
offered by political parties at the time in opposition. Richard S. Grayson

examined the thinking of the Liberal party from 1919 to 1939 and put
forward the case that the Liberals provided “a distinctive voice against
appeasement” with a doctrine of “interdependency”: the interaction
between economic disarmament, collective security, and alliances. By
1939, according to Grayson, the Liberals, along with other anti-appeasers,
“offered a clear alternative to government policy.”83 In a similar revision-
ist vein the thinking of the Labour party in relation to economics and the
rearmament debates in the 1930s has revealed that its critique of defence
economics presented a “constructive” alternative to the lack of co-ordination
and central direction of the prevailing national governments.84 Both
contributions add considerably to the growing consensus, regarding the

alternatives to appeasement, namely resistance and deterrence at an
earlier phase, despite the strong counter-factual barrier that may never be
overcome.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of neo-revisionism is the revival of
the views once advanced by British fellow travelers of the 1930s. This
contends that the hidden agenda of appeasement was to deflect Nazi
Germany toward the Soviet Union and that British policy makers were
obsessed with anti-Communism at best, or were sympathetic to Nazi
Germany at worst. The Margaret George shadow was resuscitated in two
books. The more curious was Clement Leibovitz who, in a study based
entirely on published sources, trumpeted the conclusion that “the story of
a free hand in Eastern Europe given by Chamberlain to Hitler. . . . can
legitimately be considered a well documented fact.”85 The revised
editions of the book, which found an American publisher, made no
compromise: the British elite of the time “were bloody-minded protectors
of privilege whose fixation with destroying communists and communism
led them to make common cause with fascists.”86 In the hands of a more
experienced historian, Michael Jabara Carley, who employed multi-
national and multi-language documentation, including Russian materials,
the contention that “ideological anti-communism” destroyed a possible
alternative to appeasement, the grand alliance between Britain, France
and the USSR, had to be taken more seriously. Carley’s broad canvas
declared that “Interwar anti-communism was an important cause of the
Second World War.87 The appearance of the book sparked a very exten-
sive, but ultimately inconclusive, debate on the H-Diplo List Serve.88
What was abundantly displayed was the fact that the Anglo–Soviet–
French negotiations of 1939 were still capable of bringing out the best and
worst in historians.
One area of appeasement studies that has witnessed further, though
limited, development is the study of that so-called “missing dimension,”
namely intelligence. When the National Archives released its materials on
460 Sidney Aster
the 1930s, the process of weeding was probably hasty, and certainly
faulty. Careful combing of the files by historians uncovered a certain
number of intelligence reports.89 Two early contributors, Wesley Wark
and Uri Bialer, and later, Joseph Maiolo and Antony Best, used what was
available for their respective studies.90 The most comprehensive analysis,
however, was provided by Christopher Andrew. In 1985 he surveyed the
history of the British secret intelligence services with an emphasis on
strategic rather than tactical intelligence from the turn of the twentieth
century to the Second World War.91 Since then many of the files of the
Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee of the Chiefs of Staff, established in
June 1936 and the Industrial Intelligence Centre, established in March
1931 under Major Desmond Morton,92 have been released for study. As
well, in 1997 the British government instituted a process which allowed
for selected releases of documents from the three principal intelligence
bodies: MI5, SIS or MI6, and GCHQ.93 While some initial work has used
these very limited sources for the 1930s,94 this has added little so far by
way of deepening our understanding of intelligence and appeasement. In
the meantime, intelligence history appears to have reverted to a more
orthodox study of spies, their memoirs and biographies.95
Another development of significance was the revival of orthodox
thinking in works of synthesis and collections of previously published
materials intended to survey the field of appeasement studies. Here the
trend to seek consensus and balance seemed to be the more evident.
Two compendia of reprints provided a map of the landscape and a
guide to where appeasement studies stood and where they might be
going. R. J. Q. Adams’ effort, although intended for a university audi-
ence, drew on the vast literature on the subject to attempt something
like a balanced overview of contending interpretations.96 In an earlier
effort in what he termed an “appeasement primer,” Adams concluded
that whatever may be said about the appeasers or their policies, “what
they were was wrong.”97 Much more sophisticated was Patrick
Finney’s compendium on the origins of the Second World War.
Finney’s selection of materials was thematic and he ranged over inter-
pretations and debate, the dictatorships, the democracies, economics,
strategy and public opinion. In an extensive introduction, he argued
that, although appeasement enjoyed wide support throughout much of
the 1930s, “in its Chamberlainite variant after May 1937 it comprised
too much conciliation and not enough deterrence. . . . he abandoned the
traditional British policy of containing threats through the maintenance
of the balance of power.” Finney also did more than just survey the his-
toriography of appeasement. While conceding that “appeasement is
still a concept with a potent metaphorical political currency,” he placed
the discussion against the changing understanding of traditional
international history, the emerging notions and relevance of national

identity, and national decline.98 Similar in purpose, although with
original contributions, Robert Boyce and Joseph A. Maiolo analysed
the ongoing state of debate about the origins of World War Two. The
first part examined the roles of several powers in the outbreak of war;
the second part took a thematic approach to investigate such questions
as ideology, peace movements and propaganda. Among the conclu-
sions reached by Boyce and Maiolo was that “‘appeasement’ seems
likely to remain a term of political derision.”99
Other works of synthesis also helped to provide some kind of
perspective over passion. R. A. C. Parker had produced numerous articles
on aspects of the subject before he published his Chamberlain and

Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War
(1993). This was the first real attempt to come to grips with counter-
revisionist research and apply it to a study of Chamberlain and appease-
ment. Parker acknowledged in fairness that the abundant documentation
on the inter-war period may have “sometimes overwhelmed historians
into interpretative surrender.” Nonetheless, he believed that Chamberlain
and his colleagues made political choices, based on their best assess-
ments. In the final analysis, Parker concluded that “the balance of evi-
dence points to counter-revisionist interpretations. Led by Chamberlain,
the government rejected effective deterrence. Chamberlain’s powerful,
obstinate personality and his skill in debate probably stifled serious
chances of preventing the Second World War.”100 Frank McDonough, a
former student of Parker, analyzed “appeasement from ‘above,’ within
the British government, and from ‘below,’ within British society in an
attempt to show why the policy provoked such passion and opposition.”
Within what he described as “a thematic/analytic framework,” he examined
attitudes and methods used by the appeasers to promote their views, in the
press, media and cinema, and also economic appeasement. McDonough
confirmed much of the orthodox litany. He conceded that Chamberlain
pursued clear objectives, albeit within “a dogmatic and obstinate belief
system.” Nonetheless, the prime minister was unduly optimistic, surrounded
by an inner circle of advisors, protected by intensive media management,
out of tune with public opinion and never willing to pay the price that eco-
nomic appeasement would have demanded. According to McDonough,
appeasement was “self-interested and defensive,” with Chamberlain
“chasing an unlikely dream.”101 Paul W. Doerr also focused on the wider
picture in the first survey since Northedge of British inter-war foreign
policy. In part he suggested that the British “were dealt a near-impossible
hand” since 1919, having to face a multitude of “structural” problems,
including both limited resources and global threats. On the other hand, he
urged that the revisionist critique must be taken into account, “if only to
462 Sidney Aster
balance the scales.”102 Thus among those who have looked at the wider
picture, examined the origins of the Second World War in general and
targeted a multi-national approach, there has emerged a very critical
assessment of Chamberlain and appeasement.103
One of the original revisionists to remain actively engaged in the field
is Donald Cameron Watt. His major contribution was a general study of
the immediate origins of the war, from September 1938 to 3 September
1939. This was based on many years of research on the period, numerous
prior publications, and a position at the London School of Economics and
Political Science, first as Reader and then as Stevenson Professor of
International History. There he had also supervised for over forty years
the post-graduate study of countless students, including many from

abroad, and a large number of Canadians. In the end, Watt concluded that
“Chamberlain was the architect of Munich” and that “Hitler willed,
desired, lusted after war.” Therefore, “neither firmness nor appeasement”
could stop Hitler, and this left the Chamberlain cabinet with the spectacle
that “their policy had failed to deter.” Watt, however, left it “open to
doubt whether any alternative course might have made a difference.”104
Yet even Watt could not ignore, subsequently, the ongoing tide of counter-
revisionism. In a lecture first delivered in 1991, titled, “Personalities and
Appeasement,” Watt targeted the personality of Chamberlain as “central”
to a discussion of appeasement. Gone were constraints and structures,
though he advanced the curious suggestion that appeasement was “essen-
tially an interventionist policy.” Instead, Watt argued that what separated
appeasers from their critics were disagreements “over methods, risks,
costs of action” and what he termed was Chamberlain’s “calculus of
honor,” that is, “risking war as a form of diplomatic maneuver.”105 Watt
again took up the focus on personality in an essay that examined the role
of several of Neville Chamberlain’s ambassadors in the 1930s, including
Sir Neville Henderson in Berlin and Sir Eric Phipps in Paris. Watt was
interested to test the hypothesis whether such diplomats could be called
“Chamberlain’s ambassadors” in the sense of his using them to bypass the
Foreign Office. While the evidence on Henderson was ambivalent and
circumstantial, Watt found that Phipps could properly be labeled “the
prime minister’s man in France.” From there Watt went on to suggest,
that Chamberlain indeed had “no objection to subverting the loyalties or
the chain of command of the Diplomatic Service.” More generally, he still
held to the belief that “Chamberlain was not ‘capitulationist or defeatist,’”
and that he did manage public opinion and the democratic process. How-
ever, Watt significantly conceded now that the prime minister, if to be
condemned morally, was responsible “for deceiving and misleading,” and
“imposing sacrifices” on other countries who regarded Britain as their
protector. “The immorality of appeasement is that it became the securing
of peace of mind for the appeasers at the expense of the sacrifice of the
interests and well-being if not the independence of others not their fellow
citizens.” Acting in the name of “God or history” resulted in Chamberlain
earning “the permanent disapproval of his people and historians.”106
The conclusions suggested by such a central figure in the appeasement
debates, with its echoes of Guilty Men and inferences to arguments
advanced by the counter-revisionists, brings this part of the analysis full
circle, or almost so. First, what is one to make of the fact that in 1998
Guilty Men was reissued by Penguin Books in facsimile, with a preface
by Michael Foot and an introduction by John Stevenson? The latter
praised the book as “a tract for the times” and as having driven the histori-
ography of the subject for decades to come.107 Secondly, Robert Self,

after editing four volumes of Chamberlain’s “diary letters,” published in
2006 a new one volume biography of the prime minister. This also incor-
porated the massive amount of primary sources available since the 1960s.
He attempted a “more balanced evaluation” of Chamberlain whom he
assessed as “misunderstood and underrated.” In the process of totally
rejecting the “guilty men” verdict, Self returned to the revisionist defence
of appeasement, with its emphasis on determinants and constraints.108
It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest closure for several reasons.
The ten-year anniversaries of the outbreak of the Second World War con-
tinue to inspire new books and review articles.109 Secondly, appeasement
studies retain their capacity to raise new questions and open new areas of
investigation. It continues to be applied to new historical interests as they
are explored by historians with the continuing expansion or re-emphasis
of fields of study and changes in methodology. This goes beyond the
transformation of diplomatic history into the new international history. It
has brought to the forefront fresh areas of investigation. The exploration
of women’s/gender studies has focused new light into the debates about
foreign policy in 1930s Britain. While this has not always been greeted
with the enthusiasm it deserves for raising a new agenda, it continues to
command intensive research and publication on such relevant issues as
advocacy and public opinion, and promises to widen our understanding of
the 1930s and its international history.110 Additionally, in a study that
should be more notable than for its being ignored, Terrance L. Lewis
focused on questions of public opinion, popular culture and “the general
climate of disillusionment” occasioned by the First World War to under-
stand the backdrop of appeasement. By concentrating on the literary
output of the “lost generation” he suggested that the prime motivator for
appeasement does not seem to have been a desire for peace as much as a
fear of war.111 Finally, emerging “cultural approaches,” that embrace “the
role of ethnicity, race, gender and religion,” promise new avenues to
understanding the roots of policy making and international history. The
464 Sidney Aster
start of the search for what must be termed the mentalité of appeasement
has just begun.112
Another area to attract interest has been the correlation between
“appeasement and national identity.” Finney broke new grounds in an
analysis that suggested, “changing—and competing—conceptions of
British national identity have been crucial in the evolution of interpreta-
tions of appeasement.” As Finney would have it, “cultural factors” must
not give way to “ultimate sovereignty of primary archival sources in
determining interpretation.”113 In his approach, Finney built upon the
previous work of P. M. H. Bell who had looked specifically at the ques-
tion as to why disputes between historians coexist with such fierce inter-
pretative competition. Bell examined the arguments both for and against
the thesis that the period from one world war to another was a “Thirty
Years War.” These he found largely unsatisfactory and suggested instead
that a multitude of “contradictory interpretations” on the origins of the
war have in fact coexisted. Furthermore, these have revolved around
several dichotomies, such as, an evitable versus an unnecessary war, pre-
meditated versus war by accident, Hitler’s war or just another German
war, an ideological versus a war defined in traditional terms of power
and national security. 114 On the other hand, Bell was determined not to
lose the focus that the prime actors were individuals. “Statesman make
calculations of interest, advantage, and power,” he wrote, “but they respond
also to emotions, to prejudices, to the assumptions which they have
absorbed from their upbringing, their way of life, and their friends.”115
Bell was wary of drawing any firm conclusions on the basis of his sug-
gestive analysis. But he did assert that appeasement never meant peace at
any price, that “much depended on the decisions (and hesitations) of
individual statesmen,” and that Hitler’s determination to dominate the
continent had to be resisted. However, what is one to make of his final
suggestion: “the explanation of the war is extremely simple, and histori-
ans have been prone to weave too many mystifications about it?”
Thirdly, the subject of appeasement, at least since the early 1970s, has
become one of increasing importance to political scientists, eager to
apply their theoretical constructs to the notions of appeasement and
deterrence.116 In the process, however, the specific origins of the world
war are most often used as a springboard towards conceptualization. The
Munich analogy is sometimes regarded as “a dangerous practice,”
misused as a “reflex act” by later generations of policy makers, or “more
readily invoked than . . . analysed.”117 Appeasement, most often twinned
with the deterrence model in international relations, is variously regarded
as unworkable or workable given certain conditions.118 Consensus
among the political scientists remains as elusive as among the historians.
Fourthly, it is clear that the appeasement syndrome has largely been
confined to its Atlantic context, with the British experience being taken
as a confined case study and its lessons largely drawn by the Anglo–
American axis. While geography, language, cultural propinquity and
ideology influence the practice of lesson drawing, a larger transnational
examination in a global context might yield a more complex understand-
ing of the politics of lesson drawing.119 A useful starting point that is
being increasingly explored by historians such as Antony Best and Greg
Kennedy would be the Far East. Finally, and possibly propelling the
underlying longevity of the subject, remain the so-called lessons of
appeasement, the Munich analogy and the lessons and or myths of his-
tory, which continue to reverberate in the arena of public policy.
The lessons of history and the Munich analogy have proceeded to be called
upon in the public domain in tandem with the evolution of orthodoxy,
revisionism and counter-revision. However, there has been a great differ-
ence: the relative lack of revisionism here of any kind. In 1973 Ernest R.
May, “Lessons of the Past”: The Use and Misuse of History in American
Foreign Policy drew attention to the enduring legacy of the 1930s with
the suggestion that “framers of foreign policy are often influenced by
beliefs about what history teaches or portends. Sometimes, they perceive
problems in terms of analogies from the past.” He further suggested that
this process of analogy determining foreign policy would continue,
despite the fact that policy-makers “ordinarily use history badly, haphaz-
ardly or thoughtlessly,” and will not entertain the notion that “linear
projection” might be mistaken. May called on better education in history
for policy-makers and for historians to engage with policy-makers. He
illustrated this phenomenon by looking at American thinking in the
Second World War, the opening of the Cold War, the Korean intervention
in 1950 and the Vietnam War.120
May’s fears about what he termed “linear projection” have unfortu-
nately proven to be correct subsequently and even into the opening of the
twenty-first century. These decades are littered, on both sides of the
Atlantic, with an intimidating number of instances where politicians and
diplomats referenced their decisions to the lessons of appeasement and
the Munich analogy. American examples have been the most easily
drawn upon by those who have charted such usage. In 1950 United States
President Harry Truman argued that the North Korean attack against the
South was “the same kind of challenge Hitler flaunted in the face of the
rest of the world” when he invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia. Truman
continued: “It was my belief that if aggression in Korea went unchal-
lenged, as the aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and in Ethiopia in 1935
had gone unchallenged, the rest of the world was certain to be plunged
into another world war.”121 President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban
missile crisis, warned that the “1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive
466 Sidney Aster
conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war.”122

President Lyndon Johnson’s rationale, in part, for pursuing the Vietnam
War was that withdrawal would “be doing exactly what Chamberlain did
in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression.”123 “We
learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of
aggression.”124 The background to the opening of the Gulf War of 1990–91,
as noted previously, was replete with echoes of the 1930s. One study con-
cluded that: “The 1930s, Vietnam and Falkland War analogies dominated
American and British decision-making during the Persian Gulf crisis.”125
Later the policy pursued by the Bill Clinton administration toward the
People’s Republic of China was condemned by many as “a chronicle of
appeasement that has, predictably, made things demonstrably worse.”126

In the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September
2001, the National Review, like many others, was strident in its applica-
tion of the appeasement analogy, arguing that “what appeasers never
realize is that it is the application of American force that makes the world
amenable to our demands.”127 Later, on 4 October Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon appealed to the United States: “Do not repeat the dreadful
mistake of 1938. . . . Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense—this
is unacceptable to us. Israel is not Czechoslovakia.” The White House
described these comments as “unacceptable.” Sharon then regretted the
use of the metaphor but also emphasized his warning, namely, “That
appeasement never works.”128 The appeasement analogy was again taken
up when President Bush addressed the United Nations on 10 November.
He stated: “In a Second World War, we learned there is no isolation from
evil. . . . And we resolved that the aggressions and ambitions of the
wicked must be opposed early, decisively, and collectively, before they
threaten us all. That evil has returned, and that cause is renewed.”129
The ready recourse to the appeasement analogy has never been limited
to American policy makers. The analogy had a respectable parentage in
Britain, often used in the 1920s, as Martin Gilbert first indicated, to desig-
nate conciliation. Furthermore, he suggested, it “was an attitude of mind
based upon the realization of the horrors of war.”130 The intent was to
achieve Anglo–German reconciliation and a broader European settlement.
It has also been pointed out that British policy toward Ireland, even
predating World War One, was often criticized for its efforts to pacify
both Unionists and Nationalists. At the time, however, such efforts were
sometimes lauded, as in the Pall Mall Gazette on Empire Day in 1913, as
follows: “No political system that the world has known has ever carried
such gifts abroad with less dependence upon might and menace. . . . It is
an Empire of appeasement, of an unparalleled genius for the solution of
racial disorders.”131 The experience of the 1930s, however, entirely
changed that perception. In Britain the analogy had always carried deep
resonance as a term of “political abuse.” In 1944 the New Statesman had

set the tone: “Moral and material disaster both come from what is called
‘appeasement’—a bad word for giving way on matters of principle in
order to buy favours from those who despise you and what you stand
for.”132 It was someone no less than Winston Churchill who, at the time of
the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, declared in Parliament:
“Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circum-
stances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal.
Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble, and might be the
surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.”133 The Suez crisis in
1957 was of course replete with the rhetoric of appeasement: the agenda
set publicly by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and readily taken up by

much of the media.134 It is the assumption that appeasement, as a concilia-
tory foreign policy with undertones of sympathy for the target of concilia-
tion, which thus predominated in Britain.
The Falklands War in 1982 once again witnessed the emergence of the
rhetoric. To the British prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, the
war was not only about the territory and its people. “We were defending
our honour as a nation, and principles of fundamental importance to the
whole world—above all, that aggressors should never succeed and that
international law should prevail. . . . we were not the sort of people to bow
before dictators.”135 In the 1990s the analogy still carried weight with
British decision-makers. Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that his
generation had also learned the lessons of the 1930s. On 24 April 1999,
while addressing events in Kosovo before an audience in Chicago, Blair
stated: “We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement
does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have
to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.”136 By that
time, the appeasement analogy was fully enmeshed in the British preoc-
cupation with notions of national identity. The rhetoric of appeasement
had become the battleground between right and left as to who genuinely
carried the torch of Britishness. As if to emphasize this point, Thatcher
revisited the events of 11 September 2001 in a letter to The New York
Times. She praised the way the world had seen the United States “gather
its strength, summon its allies and proceed to wage war halfway across
the globe against its enemy—and ours.” Timing was of the utmost
importance, in her view, and she drew the “more important lesson . . . that
the West failed to act early and strongly enough” against terrorism and
thus urged the “West as a whole . . . to strengthen its resolve against rogue
regimes and upgrade its defences.”137
It is the linkage between appeasement—before and after revisionism—
and the appeasement analogy that now stands at the center of appease-
ment studies. It may be suggested that the evolution of the historiography
468 Sidney Aster
of appeasement has seen historians trying for almost half a century to get
it right.138 The time and effort expended in this exercise is partly
explained by the sheer volume of primary materials that were available,
and in some format continue to appear.139 To some extent, academic
research at universities on both sides of the Atlantic also drove the
agenda. It is simply impossible to ignore the vast contribution made by
the International History departments of such institutions as the London
School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Leeds.
Nonetheless, one can suggest that at least at the turn of the present century
some sort of consensus may have emerged. The consensus is increasingly
based on a middle ground between constraints and determinants, on the
one hand, and policy and personality on the other. Finally, the role of
“morality,” often dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion,140 has returned
to occupy a central role, for it is simply inadequate to ignore that the
success of appeasement prior to 1939 was at the expense, real and poten-
tial, of others.
The appeasement analogy itself is also closely linked to the so-called
“lessons” of history. While historians may be reluctant to deduce
“lessons” from their research,141 in the area of public history and deci-
sion-making no such reluctance can be seen. Indeed, the lessons of history
and the lessons of appeasement have followed an immutable course. The
vagaries of historical debate on appeasement cannot by themselves
explain this phenomenon. The more central problem is the relationship
between the historian, and one may add the political scientist, and the
public realm. Michael Howard, in The Lessons of History (1991),
observed that the work of historians “if it survives at all, will be read as
evidence about our own mentalité and the thought-processes of our own
time rather than for anything we say about the times about which we
write, however careful our scholarship and cautious our conclusions.” As
a consequence he suggested that “history, whatever its value in educating
the judgement, teaches no ‘lessons.’”142 This was in sharp contradiction
to Ernest R. May who contended that the bridge between what historians
write and what politicians and diplomats do must be somehow bridged.
Whether that is an achievable, or realistic, end cannot really be
determined. It might be the case that the Munich analogy will remain con-
venient shorthand to rationalize decisions that have already been taken.
As well, recourse to the lessons of Munich remains a knockout argument
and nothing that historians can do will reverse the dynamics of lesson
drawing and its application in public policy. Policy makers, it has been
suggested “have no time to study history for its own sake.” They use
analogies, which are readily understood, to “simply draw a lesson for
immediate use.” In this way consensus can be quickly catalysed and
obviates the slow process of persuasion through endless discussion and
argument. And thus, it has been suggested, the familiarity of the analogy
replaces its validity.143 It is well to remember that the use of analogy in
historical discourse neither begins nor ends with Munich.144 It has from
time to time been suggested that the incidence of the appeasement/
Munich analogy will decline as the generation of public figures with some
experience or memory of the period passed from the scene.145 That
prediction appears increasingly untenable. Moreover, contrary to the view
once expressed by this writer that the appeasement debate was over, or
that it is “an ongoing one and historians change their minds,” or to argue
that there have been “too many mystifications” by historians,146 it is
abundantly clear that “appeasement studies” have a bright future.
NOTES
1. The Times, 9 August 1990. It was reported at the time that Bush was reading
Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (London, 1989) and cited Winston
Churchill’s view that the second world war could have been averted had Hitler’s re-
occupation of the Rhineland been resisted in 1936. Time, 7 January 1991, p. 21.
2. The Times, 1 March 2003.
3. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080515-1.html.
4. This analysis does not engage in a discussion of appeasement in its varying
definitions over the ages. Rather “appeasement” is here taken to describe the
foreign policy pursued by the National governments prior to the outbreak of
world war two, from largely English language sources.
5. David Dutton, Neville Chamberlain (London, 2001), pp. 218–219, Frank
McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War
(London, 1998), 161, R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British
Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (London, 1993), p. 347, and
Peter Neville, Hitler and Appeasement: The British Attempt to Prevent the Second
World War (London, 2006), pp. 201–202.
6. Anthony Eden, Lord Avon, Full Circle (London, 1960), p. 431.
7. Historians in other countries have carried on the debate in their own national
context. See for example, Jeffrey Record, The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering
the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (Washington, DC, 2007), David F. Schmitz and
Richard D. Challener, eds. Appeasement in Europe: A Reassessment of U.S.
Policies (NY, 1990), and Maya Latynski, ed., Reappraising the Munich Pact:
Continental Perspectives (Washington, DC, 1992).
8. Quoted in Michael Foot, Another Heart and Other Pulses: The Alternative to the
Thatcher Society (London, 1984), p. 319. A detailed analysis of the origins of
Guilty Men can be found in Sidney Aster, ‘“Guilty Men”: The Case of Neville
Chamberlain,’ in Robert Boyce and Esmonde M. Robertson, eds., Paths to War:
New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War (London, 1989), pp. 233–235.
Michael Foot added further reminiscences in his preface to a new edition of the
book published by Penguin, John Stevenson, ed., etc etc (London, 1998). ‘Cato,’
Guilty Men. See also Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot (London, 1994), pp. 85–91.
470 Sidney Aster
9. ‘Cato,’ Guilty Men (London, 1940), p. 125.

10. Ibid., passim.
11. See Paul Laity, Left Book Club Anthology (London, 2001), Ruth Dudley
Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London, 1987), Sheila Hodges, Gollancz:
The Story of a Publishing House (London, 1978), and John Lewis, The Left Book
Club: An Historical Record (London, 1970).
12. Simon Haxey, Tory MP (London, 1939), pp. 240, 245.
13. Leonard Wolf, Barbarians at the Gate (London, 1939), p. 209.
14. Vigilantes (Koni Zilliacus), Why We Are Losing the Peace (London, 1939),
pp. 159–160.
15. Gracchus, Your MP (London, 1944), p. 7.
16. Aneurin Bevin, Why Not Trust the Tories (London, 1944), pp. 79–80.
17. Diplomaticus, Can the Tories Win the Peace (London, 1945), p. 11.
18. Quinton Hogg, The Left Was Never Right (London, 1945), p. 81.
19. Casius, The Trial of Mussolini (London, 1943), pp. 80–81.
20. Quoted in Brendan Evans and Andrew Taylor, From Salisbury to Major:
Continuity and Change in Conservative Politics (Manchester, 1996), p. 62.
21. See W. W. Hadley, Munich: Before and After (London, 1944), and Viscount
Maugham, The Truth about the Munich Crisis (London, 1944).
22. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London, 1939), pp. ix, 8–10,
80–81, 146–169, 218, 223. See also his Britain: A Study of Foreign Policy from the
Versailles Treaty to the Outbreak of War (London, 1939), Conditions of Peace
(London, 1942), and International Relations between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939
(London, 1948). For the growing interest in Carr, see Ian Hall, ‘Power
Politics and Appeasement: Political Realism in British International Thought,
c.1935–1955,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 8 (2006),
pp. 174–192, Benjamin J. Smith, ‘Hitler’s Intellectual Allies in Britain: E. H. Carr
and the Apologia of Appeasement,’ (2006) http://www.cenconuk.bham.ac.uk/
onlineresources.htm, Jonathan Haslam, Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982
(NY, 1999), and Peter Wilson, ‘The Twenty Years’ Crisis and the Category of
“Idealism” in International Relations,’ in David Long and Peter Wilson, eds.,
Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed, (Oxford,
1995), pp. 1–24.
23. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume I: The Gathering Storm
(London, 1948), p. x. Cf. David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill
Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London, 2005).
24. L. B. Namier, In the Nazi Era (London, 1952), p. v, his Europe in Decay: A Study
in Disintegration, 1936–1940 (London, 1949), p. 172, and Diplomatic Prelude,
1938–1939 (London, 1948), pp. xi, 41.
25. John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (London, 1966),
pp. 3–4, 16.
26. A. L. Rowse, All Souls and Appeasement: A Contribution to Contemporary History
(London, 1961), pp. 83, 117. Cf., Sidney Aster, ed., All Souls and Appeasement:
A Portrait with Documents (Cambridge, 2004).
27. Elizabeth Wiskemann, Europe of the Dictators, 1919–1945 (London, 1966),
p. 145.
28. Rowse, Appeasement, vi; Wiskemann, Dictators, (London, 1969) p. 5.
29. Andrew Rothstein, The Munich Conspiracy (London, 1958), and his British For-
eign Policy and Its Critics, 1830–1950 (London, 1969).
30. W. P. and Zelda K. Coates, A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations (London, 1945).
31. Margaret George, The Warped Vision: British Foreign Policy, 1933–1939
(Pittsburgh, PA, 1965) pp. xi, 221–223. In the foreword to the British edition of
the book Rowse stated that George “has got it essentially right.” See Margaret
George, The Hollow Men: An Examination of British Foreign Policy Between the
Years 1933–1939 (London, 1965), p. 7.
32. Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, The Appeasers (London, 1963), p. 11. The
book was reprinted with a new introduction in 2000. It was dedicated to A. J. P.
Taylor, ‘Historian, Teacher and Friend.’
33. Dutton, Chamberlain, 95. See for example Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties in
Great Britain (London, 1940), C. L. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars (London,
1955), William McElwee’s, Britain’s Locust Years (London, 1962), and Ronald
Blythe, The Age of Illusion (London, 1963).
34. Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946), p. 359.
35. Sir Samuel Hoare (Viscount Templewood), Nine Troubled Years (London, 1954),
383. Copies of the Chamberlain materials inadvertently remained in the Temple-
wood papers at Cambridge University Library until 1973 when they were removed.
36. Viscount Simon, Retrospect (London, 1952), pp. 238, 254, Earl of Halifax,
Fulness of Days (London, 1957), pp. 197, 204. Halifax’s thinking can be more
fully understood in his Speeches on Foreign Policy, in H. H. E. Craster, ed.,
Speeches on Foreign Policy (London, 1940).
37. Lord Swinton, Sixty Years of Power: Some Memories of the Men Who Wielded It
(London, 1966), p. 122.
38. Alfred Duff Cooper (Lord Norwich), Old Men Forget (London, 1953).
39. Sir Anthony Eden (Lord Avon), Facing the Dictators (London, 1962), Foreword,
and pp. 596, 600.
40. Max Beloff, ‘Professor Namier and the Prelude to War,’ Fortnightly Review, 167
(1950), pp. 235–242, and ‘Historians in a Revolutionary Age,’ Foreign Affairs,
299 (1951), pp. 248–262.
41. W. N. Medlicott, British Foreign Policy since Versailles, 1919–1963 (London, 1940,
1968), pp. 233. See also his The Coming of War in 1939 (London, 1963), and Con-
temporary England, 1914–1964 (London, 1967), pp. 322–330, 356–414. Medlicott
was Stevenson Professor of International History at the LSE from 1953–67.
42. Donald Cameron Watt, ‘Appeasement Reconsidered—Some Neglected
Factors,’ The Round Table, 53 (1963), pp. 358–371, and his ‘Appeasement: The
Rise of a Revisionist School?’ Political Quarterly, 36 (1965), pp. 191–213. See
also his ‘The Historiography of Appeasement,’ in Alan Sked and Chris Cook,
eds., Crisis and Controversy: Essays in Honour of A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1976),
pp. 110–129. Watt served as Stevenson Professor of International History at the
LSE from 1981–93.
43. F. S. Northedge, The Troubled Giant: Brtain among the Great Powers, 1916–1939
(London, 1966), pp. 483, 618, 629.
44. David Dilks, ‘Appeasement Revisited,’ University of Leeds Review, 15 (1972),
p. 53. Cf., William R. Rock, ‘British Appeasement (1930’s): A Need for
Revision?’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 78 (1979), pp. 290–301.
472 Sidney Aster
45. A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Penguin ed., 1984), p. 235.
46. See, for example, the essays collectively titled, ‘A. J. P. Taylor’s Struggles for
Mastery,’ International History Review, 23 (2001), pp. 3–124, Gordon Martel, ed.,
The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered: The A.J.P. Taylor Debate after
Twenty-Five Years, (London, 1986), 2nd edition (London, 1999); and W. R. Louis,
ed., The Origins of the Second World War: A. J. P. Taylor and His Critics (NY, 1972).
47. Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (London, 1966), pp. xi, xiii, 187.
48. Ian Colvin, The Chamberlain Cabinet (London, 1971), Keith Middlemas, Diplo-
macy of Illusion: The British Government and Germany, 1937–1939 (London,
1972), and Roger Parkinson, Peace for Our Time: Munich to Dunkirk – The Inside
Story (London, 1971).
49. Franklin R. Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936–1939 (London,
1971), Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers: Conservative Opposition to

Appeasement in the 1930s (London, 1971), Maurice Cowling, The Impact of
Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1975), and
Benny Maurice, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi
Germany during the 1930s (London, 1991).
50. Robert Paul Shay, British Rearmament in the Thirties: Politics and Profits
(London, 1977), G. C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury (Edinburgh,
1979), and G. C. Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 1906–1959
(Oxford, 2000), p. 249.
51. Ritchie Ovendale, ‘Appeasement’ and the English Speaking World: Britain, the
United States, the Dominions and the Policy of ‘Appeasement,’ 1937–1939 (Cardiff,
1975).
52. David Dilks, ‘“The Unnecessary War”? Military Advice and Foreign Policy in
Great Britain,’ in Adrian Preston, ed., General Staffs and Diplomacy before the
Second World War (London, 1978), pp. 98–132.
53. P. M. Kennedy, ‘The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy,
1865–1939,’ British Journal of International Studies, 2 (1976), pp. 195–215,
P.W. Schroeder, ‘Munich and the British Tradition,’ ‘Historical Journal, 19
(1976), pp. 223–243, and Ernst Presseisen, Amiens and Munich: Comparisons of
Appeasement (The Hague, 1978).
54. A. P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second World War (London, 1977),
and his ‘War Origins Again,’ Journal of Modern History, 56 (1984), pp. 100–115,
J. A. S. Grenville, ‘Contemporary Trends in the Study of the British ‘Appeasement’
Policies of the 1930’s,’ Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschicts – und Geographie –
Unterricht, 17 (1976), pp. 236–247, and Williamson Murray, The Change in the
European Balance of Power, 1938–1939 (Princeton, NJ, 1984). To these can be
added such popular works as Robert Shepherd, A Class Divided: Appeasement
and the Road to Munich, 1938 (London, 1988), and Robert Kee, Munich: The
Eleventh Hour (London, 1988). A classical scholar, Donald Kagan, On the Ori-
gins of War and the Preservation of Peace (NY, 1995), p. 417, reached similar
conclusions: ‘The means for preserving the peace were not lacking, only the
understanding and the will.’
55. Larry William Fuchser, Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement: A Study in the
Politics of History (NY, 1982), p. x. Beside Feiling and Hoare, as mentioned pre-
viously, Iain Macleod, Neville Chamberlain (London, 1961), and Alan Beattie,
‘Neville Chamberlain,’ in John P. Macintosh, ed., British Prime Ministers in the

Twentieth Century, Volume I: Balfour to Chamberlain (London, 1977), made
limited use of the Chamberlain papers.
56. Fuscher, Chamberlain, pp. 196–202.
57. For information see Cameron Hazlehurst, Sally Whitehead and Christine
Woodland, eds., A Guide to the Papers of British Cabinet Ministers, 1900–1964
(London, 1996), and Chris Cook et al., eds., Sources in British Political History,
1900–1951, 5 volumes (London, 1975–78).
58. Robert Skidelsky, ‘Going to War with Germany: Between Revisionism and
Orthodoxy,’ Encounter, 39 (1972), pp. 56–62.
59. Oliver Harvey, The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1937–1940, edited by
John Harvey (London, 1970), pp. 269, 286, 307.
60. Sir Alexander Cadogan, The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938–1945,
edited by David Dilks (London, 1971), p. 213.
61. Quoted in Sidney Aster, 1939: The Making of the Second World War (London,
1973), p. 390.
62. John Charmley, Duff Cooper: The Authorized Biography (London, 1986), and his
Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London, 1987).
63. John Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (London, 1989), p. 212, and
his ‘Splendid Isolation to Finest Hour: Britain as a Global Power, 1900–
1950,’ Contemporary British History, 18 (2004), p. 140. Baldwin’s reputation
has never been similarly resuscitated. See Philip Williamson, ‘Baldwin’s
Reputation: Politics and History, 1937–1967,’ Historical Journal, 47 (2004),
pp. 127–168.
64. John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (London, 1993), p. 2.
65. On the subject of Churchill revisionism see Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill,
Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost
the World (London, 2008), R. A. C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement (London,
2000), David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester, 2000), and
Donald Cameron Watt, ‘Churchill and Appeasement,’ in Robert Blake and
W. R. Louis, eds., Churchill (London, 1993), pp. 199–214.
66. Aster, ‘“Guilty Men,”’ pp. 240–241 was based on a very thorough reading of
this collection. Robert Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, Volume
4, (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 1–48 offers a contrary view. On the Chamberlain
papers, see B. S. Benedikz, Guide to the Chamberlain Collection (Birmingham,
1978), and David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain, Volume I: Pioneering and Reform,
1869–1929 (London, 1984), p. 165.
67. Gaines Post, Jr., Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense,
1934–1937 (London, 1993), pp. 3–4, 341.
68. Michael Roi, Alternative to Appeasement: Sir Robert Vansittart and Alliance Diplo-
macy, 1934–1937 (Westport, CT, 1997), pp. 174–175.
69. B. J. C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Pre-eminence to the
United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 252.
70. John Ruggiero, Neville Chamberlain and British Rearmament: Pride, Prejudice
and Politics (London, 1999), pp. 8, 154, 181, 183; Greg Kennedy, ‘‘Rat in
Power”: Neville Chamberlain and the Creation of British Foreign Policy,’ in
T. G. Otte, ed., The Makers of British Foreign Policy (NY, 2002), pp. 173–189,
474 Sidney Aster
and Christopher Price, Britain, America and Rearmament in the 1930s: The Cost
of Failure (NY, 2001), p. xiii. Cf., James P. Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament:
Britain 1936–1939 (Oxford, 2006).
71. Joseph Maiolo, The Royal Navy and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939: A Study in
Appeasement and the Origins of the Second World War (London, 1998), pp. 3–4.
See also his ‘Anglo-Soviet Naval Armaments Diplomacy Before the Second
World War,’ English Historical Review, 123 (2008), pp. 351–378.
72. Antony Best, Britain, Japan and Pearl Harbor: Avoiding War in East Asia, 1936–
1941 (London, 1995), pp. 2, 201, Nicholas Tarling, Britain, Southeast Asia and
the Onset of the Pacific War (Cambridge, 1996), pp. ix–xi. See also Gregg
Kennedy, Anglo-American Strategic Relations and the Far East, 1933–1939
(London, 2002), Ann Trotter, Britain and East Asia, 1933–1937 (Cambridge,
1975), and Stephen Lyon Endicott, Diplomacy and Enterprise: British China
Policy, 1933–1937 (Manchester, 1975).
73. Reynolds M. Salerno, Vital Crossroads: Mediterranean Origins of the Second
World War (Ithaca, NY, 2003). See also Brock Millman, The Ill-Made Alliance:
Anglo-Turkish Relations, 1934–1940 (Montreal, 1998).
74. Scott Newton, Profits of Peace: The Political Economy of Anglo-German Appeasement
(Oxford, 1996), pp. 3–6.
75. Neil Forbes, Doing Business with Nazi Germany: Britain’s Economic and Financial
Relations with Germany, 1931–1939 (London, 2000), pp. 225–226. Economic
appeasement on a broader canvas but with similar conclusions is examined in
Paul N. Hehn, A Low Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and
the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930–1941 (London, 2002).
76. For a guide to the literature on ‘Public Opinion, Propaganda and the
Media,’ see Sidney Aster, British Foreign Policy, 1918–1945: A Guide to
Research and Research Materials, revised edition (Wilmington, DE, 1991),
pp. 211–219.
77. Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘The British Government and the Media, 1937–1938,’
Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (1983), p. 282.
78. James Margach, The Abuse of Power: The War Between Downing Street and the
Media from Lloyd George to Callaghan (London, 1978).
79. Richard Cockett, Twilight of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement and the Manipula-
tion of the Press (London, 1989), pp. 1–2, 189.
80. Among their first publications were Britain by Mass-Observation (London, 1939)
and War Begins at Home (London, 1940), and both indicated that the govern-
ment was out of touch with public opinion.
81. See Robert J. Wybrow, Britain Speaks Out, 1937–1987: A Social History As Seen
Through the Gallup Data (London, 1989), pp. 1–12, Robert M. Worcester,
British Public Opinion: A Guide to the History and Methodology of Political Opinion
Polling (Oxford, 1991), pp. 3–5, and Laura DuMond Beers, ‘Whose Opinion?
Changing Attitudes Towards Opinion Polling in British Politics, 1937–1964,’
Twentieth Century British History, 17 (2006), pp. 177–205.
82. Graham Stewart, Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the
Tory Party (London, 1999), pp. 3–5, 345–384; Christopher Hill, Cabinet Decisions
on Foreign Policy: The British Experience, October 1938-June 1941 (London, 1991),
pp. 1–17, 224–247.
83. Richard S. Grayson, Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement (London,

2001), pp. x–xi. See also Ian Hunter, ‘Archibald Sinclair: Liberal Anti-
Appeaser,’ Journal of Liberal History, 42 (2004), pp. 30–35.
84. Richard Toye, ‘The Labour Party and the Economics of Rearmament, 1935–1939,’
Twentieth Century British History, 12 (2001), pp. 303–326. See also Matthew
Worley, Labour Inside the Gate: A History of the British Labour Party Between the
Wars (London, 2005), and Henry R. Winkler, British Labour Seeks a Foreign
Policy, 1900–1940 (London, 2005). On alternatives to appeasement, see Richard
S. Grayson, ‘Leo Amery’s Imperialist Alternative to Appeasement in the 1930s,’
Twentieth Century British History, 17 (2006), pp. 489–515, Parker, Chamberlain
and Appeasement, pp. 307–327, R. A. C. Parker, ‘The Failure of Collective
Security in British Appeasement,’ in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Lothar Kettenacker,
eds., The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement (London, 1983),
pp. 22–29, and P.J. Beck, ‘Britain and Appeasement in the Late 1930s: Was
there a League of Nations’ Alternative?’ in Dick Richardson and Glyn Stone,
eds., Decisions and Diplomacy (London, 1995), pp. 153–173.
85. Clement Leibovitz, The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal (Edmonton Alberta, 1993),
p. 497. The book contained a foreword by Tony Benn, and a blurb by Larry
Pratt, author of East of Malta, West of Suez (Cambridge, 1975) challenging his-
torians to “refute” the evidence.
86. See Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler
Collusion (NY, 1998), pp. 21–22. This edition contained a foreword by Christopher
Hitchens.
87. Michael Jabara Carley, 1939: The Alliance that Never Was and the Coming of
World War II (Chicago, 1999), p. xviii. A similar argument was advanced in
Louise Grace Shaw, The British Political Elite and the Soviet Union, 1937–1939
(London, 2003).
88. See http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showlist.cgi?lists=H-Diplo For a
more sophisticated analysis of these questions, see Keith Neilson, Britain,
Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939
(Cambridge, 2006).
89. See Aster, 1939, passim.
90. Wesley Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939
(London, 1985), Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and
British Politics, 1932–1939 (London, 1980), Maiolo, Royal Navy, passim, and
Antony Best, British Intelligence and the Japanese Challenge in Asia, 1914–1941
(London, 2002).
91. Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence
Community (London, 1985). See also Richard Overy, ‘Strategic Intelligence and
the Outbreak of the Second World War.’ War in History, 4 (1998) pp. 451–480,
Williamson Murray, ‘Appeasement and Intelligence,’ Intelligence and National
Security, 2 (1987), pp. 47–66, Donald Cameron Watt, ‘British Intelligence and
the Coming of the Second World War,’ in Ernest R. May, ed., Knowing One’s
Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars (Princeton, NJ,
1984), pp. 237–270, Wesley Wark, ‘British Military and Economic Intelligence:
Assessments of Nazi Germany Before the Second World War,’ in Christopher
Andrew and David Dilks, eds., The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence
476 Sidney Aster
Communities in the Twentieth Century (London, 1984), pp. 78–100, David Dilks,
‘Flashes of Intelligence: The Foreign Office, the SIS and Security before the
Second World War,’ in Ibid., pp. 101–125, and his ‘Appeasement and
“Intelligence,”’ in David Dilks, ed., Retreat from Power: Studies in Britain’s
Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century, or Volume I: 1906–1939 (London,
1981), pp. 139–169.
92. See F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influ-
ence on Strategy and Operations, Volume I (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 4, 36. Both
Maiolo, Royal Navy, p. 5, and Best, Japanese Challenge, pp. 5, 201 acknowl-
edged that their analysis was hampered by incomplete intelligence files.
93. See Gill Bennett, ‘Declassification and Release Policies of the UK’s Intelli-
gence Agencies,’ Intelligence and National Security, 17 (2002), pp. 7–20, Len
Scott, ‘Sources and Methods in the Study of Intelligence: A British View,’

Intelligence and National Security, 22 (London, 2007), pp. 185–205, and
Stephen Twigge, Edward Hampshire and Graham Macklin, Secrets, Spies and
Sources (forthcoming, 2008).
94. See Richard C. Thurlow, ‘Soviet Spies and British Counter-Intelligence in the
1930s: Espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal and the Foreign Office Communica-
tions Department,’ Intelligence and National Security, 19 (2004), pp. 610–631, his
‘The Historiography and Source Materials in the Study of Internal Security in
Modern Britain (1885–1956),’ History Compass, 6 (2008), pp. 147–171, Percy
Cradock, Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the
World (London, 2002), and Robert Young, ‘Spokesmen for Economic
Warfare: The Industrial Intelligence Centre in the 1930s,’ European Studies
Review, 6 (1976), pp. 473–489.
95. See for example, M. R. D. Foot, Secret Lives: Lifting the Lid on Worlds of Secret
Intelligence (Oxford, 2002), and David Stafford, Churchill and the Secret Service
(London, 1997).
96. R. J. Q. Adams, British Appeasement and the Origins of World War II (London,
1994).
97. R. J. Q. Adams, British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement,
1935–1939 (Stanford, CA, 1993), pp. x, 160.
98. Patrick Finney, ed., The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1997),
p. 16. See also his ‘The Romance of Decline: The Historiography of Appease-
ment and British National Identity,’ Electronic Journal of International History,
June 2000, http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/publications/ejihart1.html.
99. Robert Boyce and Joseph A. Maiolo, eds., The Origins of World War Two: The
Debate Continues (London, 2003), p. 2.
100. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, pp. 343, 347. Similar conclusions can
be found in Geoffrey K. Fry, The Politics of Crisis: An Interpretation of British
Politics, 1931–1945 (London, 2001), pp. 81–132, and Peijian Shen, The Age of
Appeasement: The Evolution of British Foreign Policy in the 1930s (Stroud, 1999).
101. McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, pp. 8–9, 155–156, 161. See also the survey
in Robert J. Caputi, Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement (London, 2000).
102. Paul W. Doerr, British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939 (London, 1998), pp. 2, 272–273.
103. See for example, Victor Rothwell, The Origins of the Second World
War (Manchester, 2001), pp. 45–52, 97–109, Margaret Lamb and Nicholas
Tarling, From Versailles to Pearl Harbor: The Origins of the Second World War in
Europe and Asia (NY, 2001), pp. 124–130, Richard Overy and Andrew Wheat-
croft, The Road to War: The Origins of World War II, revised edition (London,
1999), pp. 79–104, Andrew J. Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War
(Oxford, 1997), pp. 11–12, and Richard Lamb, The Drift to War, 1922–1939
(London, 1989), p. x.
104. Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second
World War, 1938–1939 (London, 1989), pp. 610, 615, 624. The contributors to
a festscrift edited by Michael Graham Fry, Power, Personalities and Policies:
Essays in Honour of Donald Cameron Watt (London, 1992), included former
graduate students Fry, Larry Pratt, Robert J. Young, B. J. C. McKercher,
Sidney Aster, John P. Fox, Wesley K. Wark, Norman Rose and Uri Bialer.
‘
105. Personalities and Appeasement,’ in W. R. Louis, ed., Adventures with Britan-
nia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (Austin, TX, 1995), pp. 77–87.
106. Donald Cameron Watt, ‘Chamberlain’s Ambassadors,’ in Michael Dockrill
and Brian McKercher, eds., Diplomacy and World Power: Studies in British
Foreign Policy, 1890–1950 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 141, 160, 169–170.
107. ‘Cato,’ Guilty Men (1998), p. xviii.
108. Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain: A Biography (London, 2006), pp. 4, 450. In
contrast, Graham Macklin, Chamberlain (London, 2006) returned to the
orthodox critique of appeasement.
109. See for example, Roy Douglas, 1939, A Retrospect Forty Years After: Proceed-
ings of a Conference Held at the University of Surrey, 27 October 1979 (London,
1979), Keith Robbins, ‘Fifty Years On: Recent Scholarship on the Origins of
the Second World War,’ German History, 8 (1990), pp. 340–350, Wesley
Wark, ‘Appeasement Revisited,’ International History Review, 17 (1995), pp.
545–562, and Patrick Finney, ‘1939 After Sixty Years,’ Historian, 63(1999),
pp. 16–21.
110. See Donald Cameron Watt, ‘Women in International History,’ Review of Inter-
national Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 431–437, the ‘Masculinity as Ideology’ thread
in http://h-net2.msu.edu/~diplo/Dean.htm, Deborah Stienstra, Women’s
Movements and International Organizations (London, 1994), Julie V. Gottlieb,
Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–1945 (London,
2000), Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished
Business (Cambridge, MA, 2002), and for a methodological overview, V. Spike
Peterson, ‘Feminisms and International Relations,’ Gender and History, 10
(1998), pp. 581–589.
111. Terrance L. Lewis A Climate for Appeasement (NY, 1991), pp. 194, 233.
112. Peter Jackson, ‘Pierre Bourdieu, the “Cultural Turn” and the Practice of Inter-
national History,’ Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), pp. 155–181. See
also Erik Goldstein, ‘Neville Chamberlain, the British Official Mind and the
Munich Crisis,’ in Igor Lukes and Erik Goldstein, eds., The Munich Crisis,
1938: Prelude to World War II (London, 1999) pp. 276–292, his ‘The British
Official Mind and Europe,’ Diplomacy and Statecraft, 8 (1997), pp. 165–178,
Kennedy, Anglo-American Strategic Relations, 7, pp. 7, 262–268, and Northedge,
Troubled Giant, pp. 617–630.
113. Finney, ‘Romance of Decline.’
478 Sidney Aster
114. P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War, 2nd edition (London,
1997), pp. 44–54. Cf., Hidemi Suganami, ‘Explaining War: Some Critical
Observations,’ International Relations, 63 (2002), pp. 307–326.
115. Bell, Origins, 12. On the systemic factors versus personality debate in interna-
tional history see Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, ‘Let Us Now
Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back,’ International Security, 25
(2001), pp. 107–146, and T. G. Otte, ‘Introduction: Personalities and
Impersonal Forces in History,’ in T. G. Otte and C. A. Pagedas, eds., Personalities,
War and Diplomacy (London, 1997), pp. 1–13.
116. Stephen R. Rock, Appeasement in International Politics (Lexington, KY, 2000)
provides an overview of work by political scientists on the subject.
117. Melvin Small, ‘Some Lessons of Munich,’ in Melvin Small and Otto Feinstein,
eds., Appeasing Fascism (London, 1991), pp. 93, 98, David Chuter, ‘Munich, or
the Blood of Others,’ in Cyril Buffet and B. Heuser, eds., Haunted by History:
Myths in International Relations (Oxford, 1998), p. 65.
118. Jack Hirshleifer, ‘Appeasement: Can It Work?’ American Economic Review, 91
(2001), pp. 342–346, Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in Interna-
tional Politics (Princeton, NJ, 1976), p. 90, and Rock, Appeasement in Interna-
tional Politics, pp. 174–177. See also Daryl G. Press, ‘The Credibility of Power:
Assessing Threats during the “Appeasement” Crises of the 1930s,’ Interna-
tional Security, 29 (2004/5), pp. 136–169.
119. Richard Rose, Lesson-Drawing in Public Policy: A Guide to Learning Across Time
and Space (Chatham, NJ, 1993). Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social
Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998) is an example albeit confined to
problems of social reform.
120. Ernest R. May, ‘Lessons of the Past’: The Use and Misuse of History in American
Foreign Policy (NY, 1973), pp. ix–xiv. The analysis was further extended in
Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History
for Decision Makers (London, 1986).
121. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Volume 2, Years of Trial and Hope (NY, 1956), p. 463.
122. Quoted in Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (NY, 1965), p. 703.
123. Quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (NY, 1976),
p. 252.
124. Quoted in Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien
Phu and the Vietnam Decision of 1965 (Princeton, NJ, 1992), p. 179.
125. Scot MacDonald, ‘Hitler’s Shadow: Historical Analogies and the Iraqi Inva-
sion of Kuwait,’ Diplomacy and Statecraft, 13 (2002), pp. 29–59.
126. The Washington Post, 9 August 1999.
127. Rich Lowry, ‘The Mistake of Appeasement,’ 17 Sept. 2001, National Review
Online, wysiwyg://19/http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry091701.html.
128. The Jerusalem Post, 5, 6 October 2001.
129. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011110-3.html.
130. Gilbert, Roots of Appeasement, p. 29.
131. Quoted in G. K. Peatling, ‘Appeasement and Public History, Now and in the
Future,’ http://users.aber.ac.uk/gtp/appease.html. See also G. K. Peatling,
British Opinion and Irish Self-Government, 1865–1925 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 77,
103, 177–178.
132. Peatling, ‘Appeasement,’ p. 6.

133. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 14 December 1950, cited in Gilbert,
Roots of Appeasement, p. ix.
134. See Hugh Thomas, The Suez Affair (London, 1966), passim.
135. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 173, 264.
Cf., Paul Latawski, ‘Invoking Munich, Expiating Suez: British Leadership,
Historical Analogy and the Falklands Crisis,’ in Stephen Badsey, et al., eds.,
The Falklands Conflict Twenty Years On: Lessons for the Future (London,
2005).
136. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1297.asp.
137. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Advice to a Superpower,’ The New York Times, 11 February
2002.
138. The experience is not dissimilar to that of historians working on the Versailles
peace settlement after the First World War. Despite almost a century of
research, public perceptions retain the concept of the ‘Carthaginian peace.’
See William R. Keylor, ‘Versailles and International Diplomacy,’ in Manfred
F. Boemeke et al., eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 469–505, Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The
Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London, 2001), and
Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace After World War I (London, 2006).
139. See for example, John Julius Norwich, ed., The Duff Cooper Diaries, 1915–1951
(London, 2005), Ian Hunter, ed., Winston and Archie: The Letters of Sir
Archibald Sinclair and Winston S. Churchill (London, 2005), Gordon Martel,
ed., The Times and Appeasement: The Journals of A. L. Kennedy, 1932–1939
(London, 2000), Stuart Ball, ed., Parliament and Politics in the Age of Churchill
and Attlee: The Headlam Diaries, vol. 1, 1923–1935 (Lampeter, 1992), vol. 2,
1935–1951 (Cambridge, 1999), N. J. Crowson, ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons
and Politics: The Journals of Collin Brooks, 1932–1940 (London, 1998), Nick
Smart, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Robert Bernays, 1932–1939: An Insider’s
Account of the House of Commons (Lampeter, 1996), and Philip Williamson, ed.,
The Modernization of Conservative Politics: The Diaries and Letters of William
Bridgeman, 1904–1935 (London, 1988). Among core studies of central figures
at the time, see Peter Neville, Appeasing Hitler: The Diplomacy of Sir Neville
Henderson, 1937–1939 (London, 2000), Sidney Aster, ‘Sir William Seeds: The
Diplomat as Scapegoat,’ in Brian Farrell, ed., Leadership and Responsibility in the
Second World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Vogel (Montreal, 2002) which
made use for the first time of the private papers and diaries of Sir William Seeds,
Lindsay W. Michie, Portrait of an Appeaser: Robert Hadow, First Secretary in the
British Foreign Office, 1931–1939 (Westport, CT, 1996), and John Herman, The
Paris Embassy of Sir Eric Phipps, 1937–1939 (London, 1998).
140. See Wesley Wark, ‘Diplomatic Revolution in the West: 1939, The End of
Appeasement and the Origins of the Second World War,’ in Norman Hillmer
et al., A Country of Limitations: Canada and the World in 1939 (Ottawa, 1996),
pp. 35–57, and Watt, ‘Chamberlain’s Ambassadors,’ in Dockrill and McKercher,
Diplomacy and World Power, p. 169.
141. When a dozen leading British historians were canvassed on their views regard-
ing any parallels between 1939 and the 1956 Suez crisis and the looming war
480 Sidney Aster
against Iraq, most concurred that ‘comparisons with appeasement and Munich
are so much hot air.’ The Guardian, 19 February 2003.
142. Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (London, 1991), p. 11.
143. See Richard Rose, Lesson-Drawing in Public Policy (Chatham, NJ, 1993),
pp. 79, 84–86, and Beatrice Heuser and Cyril Buffet, ‘Historical Myths and the
Denial of Change,’ in idem., Haunted by History, p. 267.
144. David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical
Thought (NY, 1970), pp. 244–251.
145. Small, ‘Some Lessons of Munich,’ in Small and Feinsten, Appeasing Fascism,
p. 88, and Chuter, ‘Munich, or the Blood of Others,’ in Buffet and Heuser,
Haunted by History, p. 78.
146. Aster, “‘Guilty Men,’” p. 237; Neville, Hitler and Appeasement, p. xii, and his
Origins, p. 341. Some possible future directions are indicated in Ralph B. A.

Dimuccio, ‘The Study of Appeasement in International Relations: Polemics,
Paradigms and Problems,’ Journal of Peace Research, 35 (1998), pp. 245–259.

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1557-301X and Statecraft

APPEASEMENT: BEFORE AND AFTER REVISIONISM

than the legacy of appeasement. Decision-makers have used the crises of

why have the lessons of history been so ignored by practitioners?

led to “revisionism.” Historians contended that pre-war British policy,

simply served to feed the appetite of the aggressor. “It is important to

administrations. It was alleged that these failed in their responsibility to

While such extreme criticisms of the National Governments and their

Viscount Maugham, and the other by W. W. Hadley, editor of the Sunday

justice of Hitler’s conquests and to profess trust in his promises, they

Further to the left stood the contributions of fellow-travellers Andrew

Relations (1945). He wrote that had an Anglo–Soviet alliance been

the widespread fear of Communism that heavily weighted the scales in

Feiling, the first biographer to be given access to Chamberlain’s private

State for Foreign Affairs in February 1938. In a volume of memoirs dedi-

business of historians. What began as expressions of doubt and discom-

in cautioning historians about “the perils of reading the past in terms of

was simply an opportunist. Instead of the supine stumbler, Chamberlain was

academic, curiously tended to suggest that the archives might indeed

of a consensus, that domestic factors (Primat der Innenpolitik) were as

Adamthwaite, J. A. S. Grenville, and Williamson Murray, basing their

strong ones. Fuscher emerged convinced that Chamberlain “himself did

policy-makers. It is little wonder that Cadogan wrote on the eve of war:

years of 1934–1937 to understand British attitudes toward deterrence. His

contended that economic appeasement essentially led to paralysis: “no move

offered by political parties at the time in opposition. Richard S. Grayson

contributions add considerably to the growing consensus, regarding the

international history, the emerging notions and relevance of national

on aspects of the subject before he published his Chamberlain and

the post-graduate study of countless students, including many from

ography of the subject for decades to come.107 Secondly, Robert Self,

conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war.”122

appeasement that has, predictably, made things demonstrably worse.”126

resonance as a term of “political abuse.” In 1944 the New Statesman had

set publicly by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and readily taken up by

9. ‘Cato,’ Guilty Men (London, 1940), p. 125.

1971), Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers: Conservative Opposition to

‘Neville Chamberlain,’ in John P. Macintosh, ed., British Prime Ministers in the

83. Richard S. Grayson, Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement (London,

Scott, ‘Sources and Methods in the Study of Intelligence: A British View,’

132. Peatling, ‘Appeasement,’ p. 6.

Origins, p. 341. Some possible future directions are indicated in Ralph B. A.

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