Appeasement And Rearmament

Standing against conventional wisdom, historian James Levy reevaluates Britain's twin policies of appeasement and rearmament in the late 1930s. By carefully examining the political and economic environment of the times, Levy argues that Neville Chamberlain crafted an active, logical and morally defensible foreign policy designed to avoid and deter a potentially devastating war. Levy shows that through Chamberlain's experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he knew that Britain had not yet fully recovered from the first World War and the longer an international confrontation could be avoided, the better Britain's chances of weathering the storm. In the end, Hitler could be neither appeased nor deterred, and recognizing this, Britain and France went into war better armed and better prepared to fight.

"A new history of the British appeasement of the Third Reich on the eve of World War II"--

"Challenging this assumption, Peacemaking by Democracies breaks down the category of "democracy" to argue that differences in structural autonomy among democratic states have a lot to do with how foreign security policies are chosen and international negotiations are carried out. The more structural autonomy the foreign security policy executive possesses, the greater the policy independence from public and legislative opinion it is able to achieve."--Jacket.

Here is a comprehensive analysis of rearmament under the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments. It reveals the primary determinants of events and provides important new information regarding the principal considerations underlying Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. The author concentrates on a problem that was of central concern to the government. For this reason, and because he draws on the recently opened Cabinet and Treasury papers at the Public Record Office in London, he is able to offer a broader view than that of the existing studies. He describes in detail the interaction of the Cabinet, Treasury, and Armed Services, and the influence of the financial and industrial communities. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Drawing on a wide range of material, including primary sources, Frank McDonough re-examines the controversial policy of appeasement, and argues that appeasement was part of a broad consensus in British society at the time.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined material, this staggering account sheds new light on the Allies’ responsibility for a landmark agreement that had dire consequences. On returning from Germany on September 30, 1938, after signing an agreement with Hitler on the carve-up of Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain addressed the British crowds: “My good friends…I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” Winston Churchill rejoined: “You have chosen dishonor and you will have war.” P. E. Caquet’s history of the events leading to the Munich Agreement and its aftermath is told for the first time from the point of view of the peoples of Czechoslovakia. Basing his work on previously unexamined sources, including press, memoirs, private journals, army plans, cabinet records, and radio, Caquet presents one of the most shameful episodes in modern European history. Among his most explosive revelations is the strength of the French and Czechoslovak forces before Munich; Germany’s dominance turns out to have been an illusion. The case for appeasement never existed. The result is a nail-biting story of diplomatic intrigue, perhaps the nearest thing to a morality play that history ever furnishes. The Czechoslovak authorities were Cassandras in their own country, the only ones who could see Hitler’s threat for what it was, and appeasement as the disaster it proved to be. In Caquet’s devastating account, their doomed struggle against extinction and the complacency of their notional allies finally gets the memorial it deserves.

This distinguished book offers fresh perspectives on British appeasement, grand strategy, and policymaking in a crucial and much-debated period of history. Innovative in both his interpretation and his method, Gaines Post, Jr., reexamines how British leaders planned foreign policy and imperial defense as they faced the increasing likelihood of war with the dictatorial regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan. He clarifies the ways in which the dynamics of the machinery of government affected the choice of policies, delimited the management of crises, and restricted the pace of rearmament. Post provides a novel and intricate synthesis of what we know about British foreign policy in the 1930s: rearmament, deterrence, decisionmaking, and the question of timing. Analyzing the Ethiopian and Rhineland crises as case studies, he shows how they defeated British efforts to develop a comprehensive strategy of conventional and extended deterrence. London's unsuccessful attempts to deter Hitler and Mussolini, he demonstrates, were frustrated by confusion in the decisionmaking machinery of government, by conflicting notions of how to buy time, by unpredictable international crises, and by the plans of Neville Chamberlain for correlating airpower, economic stability at home, and conciliation overseas. Challenging the generally accepted interpretation of British grand strategy in the 1930s, Dilemmas of Appeasement will be important reading for historians, especially of modern Britain and Europe, political scientists, and defense studies specialists.