Page 1 of 5 CHINA AND APPEASEMENT,
PART 1 Beyond Munich: Geostrategy
and betrayal By Henry C K Liu
The Munich Pact of September 30, 1938, has become an icon of the failure of
appeasement. What is generally left unmentioned by many Anglo-US historians is
the fact that the Munich Pact, in addition to allowing Germany to annex the
Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia heavily populated by ethnic Germans,
also allowed Poland and Hungary, eventual victims of German
expansionism, to seize respectively the Teschen district and parts of Slovakia.
Munich is mainly viewed in the West as a symbol of the lack of
resolve on the part of the two great powers of Western Europe, Britain and
France, to resist German expansionism that later led to the outbreak of a
European war that quickly became a world war. Most Western historians subscribe
to the view that had the Western European Allies drawn a firm line in the sand
backed by credible threat of force, Germany might not have been tempted by
Franco-British appeasement to push beyond the line of peaceful co-existence.
Yet the historical facts behind Munich do not support the simplification of it
as a case of pure appeasement. Geopolitical calculations played a large role in
the Munich decisions.
Appeasement by one nation in international relations is a policy of accepting,
rather than resisting, the illegitimate imposition by another nation of
aggressive geopolitical expansion or interference or intrusion in the appeasing
nation's internal affairs or in the development of its indigenous socioeconomic
and political system in ways that sacrifice indigenous cultural values,
ideological principles, or national interests. In the case of Munich,
appeasement was accomplished not by sacrificing the national interests of the
appeasing powers but by sacrificing a helpless third nation whose opinion was
never sought.
The compromise in appeasement is usually rationalized by an allegedly higher
principle of a non-violent means of avoiding war. As Henry Kissinger, arguably
the greatest statesman in Cold War realpolitik, famously said of the policy of
detente, which some criticized as appeasement: "Peace too is a moral
imperative." Notwithstanding post-Cold War distortion of the meaning of the
term by neo-conservative ideologue hawks in the administration of US President
George W Bush, a willingness to negotiate does not in itself constitute a loss
of "moral clarity" or appeasement, which is the unwarranted and
counterproductive capitulation before or during negotiation.
Yale historian Paul Kennedy (Strategy and Diplomacy, 1983) defines
appeasement as "the policy of settling international quarrels by admitting and
satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby
avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody and
possibly dangerous".
While appeasement had at times led to successful outcomes, as in the
Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, albeit not without the tragedy of igniting a civil
war, war hawks have used Munich to reinforce the negative notion of appeasement
as a policy of failure. Since Munich, the term "appeasement" has gained a
disparaging overtone in US political discourse, as a code word for moral
weakness and political cowardice in the face of evil and strategic
self-deception that would eventual fail the peace.
Nevertheless, Munich is deemed strategically successful by some historians of
geopolitics for yielding critically valuable months (1938-39) for British
rearmament. Munich also relieved pressure on Western Europe by channeling
German expansion eastward. The sacrifice of Czechoslovakia to German
geopolitical ambition, a development that the Franco-British alliance was not
in a timely position to prevent anyway, had been rationalized by its effect on
the strengthening of the subsequent defense of the British Isles.
Yet Germany was also able to boost its offensive power significantly in the
time thus granted, and quite possibly to a greater extent than the Allies,
since Germany had no illusion about Munich being a path to "peace for our
time". More significant, the annexation of Czechoslovakia provided German
militarism much-needed validation in German domestic politics. Munich also gave
the German war machine access to well-developed Czech industrial resources and
significantly improved German strategic standing, avoiding an otherwise costly
conflict presented by the heavily fortified terrain of the Czech-German border.
German occupation of Czechoslovakia also lengthened Poland's border with
Germany, making Polish defense more vulnerable.
Munich took place in an anti-war atmosphere in Western Europe in reaction to
the mass slaughter of World War I. Fear of otherwise avoidable war with France
and Britain also motivated the German high command, being apprehensive of Adolf
Hitler's reckless overrating of German military strength, to try at several
points to move toward removing the adventurous little corporal Fuehrer from
power to put a stop to his overreaching foreign policy. Forty days after
Munich, buoyant in domestic popular support by its surprising success, the
Nazis staged a massive, coordinated attack on German citizens of Jewish
ethnicity throughout the Third Reich on the night of November 9, 1938, and into
the next day, which has come to be known as Kristallnacht or the Night
of Broken Glass. Kristallnacht was the opening salvo of methodical Nazi
persecution of the Jews of Europe.
Great powers maneuver for war
Yet Munich was motivated by more than mere war avoidance. Geopolitical
maneuvering on the part of Britain and France was clearly also a key factor.
The Munich Pact followed Franco-British rejection of two successive Soviet
offers (in 1934 and 1937) to form an alliance against Germany in Europe and
Japan in Asia, thus pushing the USSR to enter the Soviet-German Non-aggression
Pact of August 23, 1939, less than a year after Munich. From the Soviet
perspective, Munich was a Western scheme to turn Nazi aggression eastward and
use German fascism to counter Soviet communism. The Soviet-German
Non-aggression Pact was an attempt to turn the tables against capitalism by
freeing up fascism against it.
Munich convinced the USSR that the Western powers were pursuing a policy of
selective appeasement only toward German eastward expansion and were not
interested in joining the Soviet Union in an anti-fascist alliance promoted
through a popular front. In addition, there was concern about the possibility
that Britain and France would stay neutral in a war initiated by Germany
against the USSR, hoping that the two warring Eastern powers would wear each
other out and put an end to both the Bolshevik Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
In this sense, Munich was less a strategy of appeasement to secure peace than
Western capitalist democracy's strategy of directing war eastward between
fascism and communism.
There is also historiographical evidence of international acclaim for the
Munich appeasement at the time of the pact's signing. Munich was praised by
practically all Western leaders, including pope Pius XI, defender of the true
faith, and US president Franklin D Roosevelt, defender of liberal democracy.
Prime minister Neville Chamberlain was applauded by the British public for
having cleverly avoided another war in the West at the expense of the East. It
was viewed as another shining example of the triumph of high-minded British
foreign policy rewarded by a bonus of collateral practical payoff of
instigating war between fascism and communism.
France paralyzed by democracy
France had fallen into foreign-policy paralysis through chaotic multiparty
democracy. During the decade leading up to Munich, cabinets in France fell with
maddening frequency. One government lasted but a single day; another only two
days.
Leon Blum became France's first Socialist and Jewish premier on June 4, 1936,
and immediately became the prime object of hate to the Catholic and the
anti-Semitic right. On February 13, 1936, shortly before becoming prime
minister, Blum was dragged from a car and beaten to near-death by members of
the Camelots du Roi, a group of anti-Semite royalists. Blum formed a Popular
Front government that lasted an unprecedented period of more than a year,
during which time it introduced the 40-hour week, paid holidays, collective
bargaining, and other socialist reforms for worker rights. It also nationalized
the Bank of France and the armaments industry into service to the French nation
rather than for the benefit of private capital.
With no effective capital control, the result was capital flight from France at
such an alarming pace that the Bank of France, striving to halt the exodus, had
to raise the central bank's already-high discount rate of 4% to a "panic rate"
of 6%. The Blum cabinet was desperately short of cash throughout its tenure,
leaving most socialist programs unfunded. Finance minister Vincent Auriol
devalued the franc by 40% and borrowed 8 billion francs to deal with the
liquidity crisis. The government's Exchange Equalization Fund had been
exhausted, and only support from Washington and London kept the exchange rate
of the franc from slipping further. The need for foreign financial support kept
Blum's Socialist government from moving further to the left.
The French Popular Front had a majority in the chamber composed of a coalition
of radical socialists, socialists and communists. The communists alone had no
cabinet appointments. Nominal meanings notwithstanding, the radical socialists
were literally less radical than the socialists in French politics. At the
emergency session, the radical socialists and socialists quarreled over
anti-labor tax policy. To deal with the financial crisis, the cabinet asked the
National Assembly for dictatorial powers over the French economy and finance
markets for six weeks, despite the fact that the left had always decried such
power "as the opening wedge to fascist dictatorship".
The communists, with 72 swing votes indispensable to the Blum cabinet, at first
refused to go along but finally fell in line after securing the government's
promise to aid the Spanish Popular Front. By a vote of 346-247, the chamber
voted "full powers" for six weeks to the Blum cabinet, but the bill was
rejected by the Senate. Blum took his bill back to the chamber, got it approved
again before midnight by a margin of 346-248, but was rebuffed again by the
Senate 168-96. The Blum cabinet resigned the next day, on June 23, 1936, after
only 19 days in office.
Soviet leader Josef Stalin's political purge of the Red Army was confirmed in
France by news of the execution of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven
generals in Moscow on June 11, 1937. The news profoundly affected French
political opinion, greatly weakening the French communists. It revived France's
long-standing doubt on whether the Red Army was good enough to make the
Franco-Soviet military alliance an effective check on Germany, France's eternal
enemy. With the Red Army weakened by a political purge of its ablest
professional leaders, Paris was forced toward conciliation with Berlin, and
under pressure from Stanley Baldwin and Anthony Eden of Britain, rejected
communist demands to help the Spanish Popular Front and adopted a policy of
neutrality, which had the practical effect of being pro-German.
A few days after news of the Red Army purge, for the first time since before
World War I, a high-ranking German staff officer, General Ludwig Beck, was in
Paris to confer with General Marie-Gustave Gamelin of the French General Staff,
to share with him the German Secret Service dossier on political developments
in Moscow. Veteran Paris correspondent John Elliott of The Herald Tribune
reported: "There can be no doubt that the [German] general's visit was inspired
by the British Foreign Office, anxious
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