Appeasement
Appeasement, the diplomatic policy of granting concessions to an aggressive power in hopes of avoiding conflict, changed world history on the 30th of September 1938. On that date in Munich, Neville Chamberlain emerged from a conference with Adolf Hitler clutching an agreement and announced to cheering crowds that he had secured "peace for our time". The House of Commons had sent him off with noisy cheers. The royal family invited him onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace before he had even reported to Parliament. Yet within a year, the world was at war. How did a policy so widely popular, so enthusiastically backed by governments, royal families, military chiefs, and newspapers, fail so catastrophically? And why has the word "appeasement" itself transformed from a respectable term for peaceful settlement into something closer to a synonym for cowardice and surrender?
The League of Nations was established after World War I with a simple premise: that collective resistance to aggression would deter any nation from starting another war. Members were entitled to one another's assistance if attacked. Running alongside the League were efforts at disarmament, including the largely symbolic Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and a Disarmament Conference that began in 1932.
In September 1931, Japan, a League member, invaded Manchuria in northeast China. The League set up the Lytton Commission, which condemned Japan. The League adopted the report in February 1933. Japan's response was to resign from the League and continue its advance into China. Neither the League nor the United States took any action beyond the U.S. issuing the Stimson Doctrine and refusing to recognise Japan's conquest. Historian David Thomson argued that the League's inactivity in the Far East gave every encouragement to European aggressors who planned similar defiance.
At the Disarmament Conference, the central argument was German insistence that either all nations disarm to Germany's Versailles-mandated levels, or Germany be permitted military parity with its neighbours. Hitler's walkout from the Conference signalled that a new kind of diplomacy was emerging, one that did not necessarily involve the League at all. British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare then began a quiet process of stabilising economic relations with Berlin, starting with the 1934 Anglo-German Payments Agreement, which guaranteed German interest repayments on bonds from World War I reparations.
In December 1934, a clash at Walwal, near the border between British and Italian Somaliland, left around 150 Abyssinians and 50 Italians dead. Italy demanded apologies and compensation. Emperor Haile Selassie appealed in person to the League's assembly in Geneva. When the League persuaded both sides to seek a settlement under the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928, Italy kept moving troops anyway. Mussolini launched a full attack on Abyssinia in October 1935.
The League declared Italy the aggressor and imposed sanctions, but crucially excluded coal and oil from the embargo, fearing that sanctioning them would provoke war. Albania, Austria, and Hungary refused to apply sanctions at all. Britain considered closing the Suez Canal but decided against it. Then, in November 1935, British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval held secret discussions in which they agreed to concede two thirds of Abyssinia to Italy. The press leaked the details. Public outrage forced both men to resign.
In May 1936, Italy captured Addis Ababa, the Abyssinian capital, and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel III Emperor of Ethiopia. The League abandoned sanctions in July. The episode's outcome was far-reaching. Mussolini, condemned by the British public's reaction to the Hoare-Laval revelations, was pushed toward Hitlerian Germany as the only power willing to support his invasion. The Rome-Berlin Axis was rapidly concluded under Italy's new pro-German foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano. After Abyssinia, crises like the Czechoslovak crisis were barely referred to the League at all.
On the 7th of March 1936, Hitler sent the Wehrmacht into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarised under the Versailles Settlement and accepted as such by Germany under the Locarno Treaties of 1925. His officers had orders to withdraw if they met French resistance. France consulted Britain and lodged protests with the League but took no action. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said Britain lacked the forces to back its guarantees to France, and that public opinion would not permit it.
Labour MP Hugh Dalton, who usually advocated stiff resistance to Germany, said that neither the British people nor Labour would support military or economic sanctions. In the Council of the League, only the Soviet Union proposed sanctions. Hitler, invited to negotiate, proposed a non-aggression pact with the Western powers. When asked for details, he did not reply. The occupation persuaded Hitler that the international community would not resist him.
The Spanish Civil War, which erupted the same year, provided another revealing test. Britain and France endorsed "Non-Intervention" on the 2nd of August 1936, which in practice starved the Spanish Republic of arms while Germany and Italy supplied the Nationalist faction. The German representative Joachim von Ribbentrop later remarked that it would have been better to call the supervising committee "the Intervention Committee", since its members spent their time explaining or concealing their own participation. A.J.P. Taylor cites the 1937 Nyon Conference as a rare instance of fascist forces backing down when directly confronted by Britain, this time over unrestricted submarine warfare.
Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden on the 15th of September 1938 to negotiate directly with Hitler over Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, where the Sudeten German Party leader Konrad Henlein had threatened in April 1938 to seek "direct action to bring the Sudeten Germans within the frontiers of the Reich". Hitler, who had ordered 750,000 troops to the Czech border, told Chamberlain that not Sudeten self-government but full absorption into Germany was his demand.
What Chamberlain did not act on was significant. In August 1938, General Ludwig Beck had relayed a message to Lord Halifax explaining that most of the German General Staff had prepared a coup against Hitler if there were proof that England would fight for Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain dismissed the information. After the Sudetenland was ceded, Czechoslovakia lost 800,000 citizens, much of its industry, and its western mountain defences. Churchill compared the negotiating sequence at Berchtesgarten, Bad Godesberg, and Munich to a man demanding one pound, then two pounds, then settling for one pound seventeen shillings and sixpence.
Appeasement was not the policy of a small degenerate clique, as postwar accounts often implied. Historian A.J.P. Taylor showed that it was popular and represented continuity in British foreign policy. It was supported by the British upper class, royalty including King Edward VIII and George VI, big business centred in the City of London, the House of Lords, and major media including the BBC and The Times.
Anti-communism was central to its appeal. A common upper-class slogan was "better Hitlerism than Communism". Lord Halifax, a close ally of Chamberlain, visited Goering and met Hitler in 1936 and 1937 and wrote that he could not doubt "these fellows are genuine haters of Communism". Chamberlain himself reportedly believed Britain and Nazi Germany were "the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against communism".
The military had its own reasons. The Royal Air Force warned the government in October 1938 that German Luftwaffe bombers would probably get through British defences for the next twelve months. The Hurricanes and Spitfires were not yet ready. In France, General Joseph Vuillemin, air force chief of staff, warned that the French air force was far inferior to the Luftwaffe and consistently opposed war against Germany. The Royal Navy calculated that Britain lacked the political and military resources to intervene and maintain imperial defence simultaneously.
Chamberlain also manipulated the information environment. His government pressured the BBC, with Lord Halifax telling radio producers not to offend Hitler and Mussolini. The results of an October 1938 Gallup poll, which showed 86% of the public believed Hitler was lying about his future territorial ambitions, was censored from the News Chronicle at the last minute. As historian Richard Cockett observed, by controlling the press Chamberlain was increasingly mistaking his pliant press for real public opinion.
Once Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939 and World War II began, the meaning of the word shifted permanently. Three British journalists writing under the name "Cato" published Guilty Men, calling for the removal from office of 15 public figures they held responsible. Their book defined appeasement as "the deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying". It is said to have contributed to the Conservative defeat in the 1945 general election.
Historians have since argued in every direction. John F. Kennedy in his 1940 Harvard thesis argued that appeasement had been necessary because Britain and France were unprepared for war. A.J.P. Taylor's 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War called it a rational response to an unpredictable leader. In the early 1990s, a counter-revisionist wave argued appeasement was probably the only option but was poorly implemented and came too late. Frank McDonough, whose book on Neville Chamberlain is described as a "post revisionist" study, argued that Chamberlain's worst error was believing he could lead Hitler toward peace when Hitler was firmly marching toward war.
Postwar statesmen reached for the Munich example repeatedly: Harry Truman to justify the Korean War in 1950, Anthony Eden to justify confronting Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956, Lyndon Johnson to justify the Vietnam War, Margaret Thatcher to justify the Falklands War of 1982, and George W. Bush and Tony Blair to justify the 2003 Iraq War. In August 2025, commentators invoked the same language when Donald Trump hosted Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, for brief bilateral talks without Ukrainian or European delegations, and emerged having adopted the Russian position of rejecting an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. Timothy Garton Ash observed that the comparison made Chamberlain look like "a principled, courageous realist" by contrast, since in 1938 the war had not yet started.
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Common questions
What was the policy of appeasement in the 1930s?
Appeasement was a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power with the intention of avoiding conflict. It is most closely associated with the British foreign policy between 1935 and 1939 under Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and above all Neville Chamberlain toward Nazi Germany.
What was the Munich Agreement and what did Chamberlain promise?
The Munich Agreement was signed on the 30th of September 1938 by Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. It required Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. On his return to Britain, Chamberlain delivered his famous "peace for our time" speech to crowds outside 10 Downing Street, and the royal family invited him onto the Buckingham Palace balcony before he had reported to Parliament.
Why did Britain pursue appeasement toward Nazi Germany?
Multiple pressures converged: anti-war sentiment following World War I, belief that the Versailles Treaty had been unjust to Germany, anti-communism among the conservative elite, and military assessments that Britain was not ready to fight. The Royal Air Force warned in October 1938 that German bombers would likely get through for at least the next twelve months, since Hurricanes and Spitfires were not yet operational at scale.
Who opposed appeasement before Munich?
The Labour Party opposed the Munich Agreement, and a small number of Conservative dissenters also refused to support it. Winston Churchill warned the week before Munich that the partition of Czechoslovakia under British and French pressure amounted to complete surrender to Nazi force. Secretary of State for War Duff Cooper was the only Member of Parliament to advocate war and resigned from the government to protest the agreement.
How did the book Guilty Men shape views of appeasement after World War II?
Guilty Men, published by three British journalists writing under the name "Cato", called for the removal from office of 15 public figures it held responsible for appeasement, including Chamberlain. The book defined appeasement as "the deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying". It is said to have contributed to the Conservative Party's defeat in the 1945 general election and shaped subsequent thinking about the policy for decades.
How have historians reassessed Neville Chamberlain and appeasement?
Historians have moved through several phases. A.J.P. Taylor's 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War argued appeasement was a rational, active policy by men confronting real problems. Counter-revisionist historians in the early 1990s, including Frank McDonough, concluded it was probably the only option available but was poorly implemented and came too late. McDonough's view is sometimes called a "post revisionist" position, arguing that Chamberlain's worst error was believing he could lead Hitler toward peace.
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