Sunday, October 15, 2006

Jeffrey Record on appeasement (Part 1 of 3)

I've posted here before on the paper Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (August 2005) by Jeffrey Record of the Air Force's Air War College.

When I started composing a post to summarize it, I found it far more difficult than on most posts of this type.  And I think the reason is that I found the whole thing so intriguing and refrishing that I hate to call out parts of it for particular attention.  And since I'm familiar with Record's work on the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War, I felt very comfortable with his approach.

It's not often that you come across a genuinely insightful look at a familiar set of historical events.  But this is one.

Record's account is not "revisionist" history, especially not in the sense that David Irving and other pro-Nazi or Holocaust-denier types use the term.  And he's not making any claim to original research findings in this paper.  What he's doing is telling the story of the Anglo-French policy of "appeasement" toward Hitler's policies prior to Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939.

The policy has been universally recognized as a disastrous failure.  So much so that the word "appeasement", which in the 1930s and before simply meant a policy of concessions, has come to be a pejorative meaning weak, feckless and cowardly.  As one example among thousands, the leading neoconservative Robert Kaplan writes in Use Brinkmanship on Iran Los Angeles Times 09/29/06:

It was the delegitimization of force that provided the bedrock for appeasement in Europe in the 1930s.  Europe was still recovering from a continent-wide war that had cost too many lives and caused untold destruction for no demonstrable result, and that was the product of decisions made by a closed political elite.  Sound familiar? The idea that European governments could wage another conflict was seen as preposterous. There was no choice but to reach a diplomatic arrangement with the Nazis.

Appeasement was not only the product of cowards but also of eminently reasonable men. Adolf Hitler had not threatened to annihilate the Jews, and Germany's reasons for reoccupying the Sudetenland were based on principles of self-determination related to President Wilson's 14 Points - his vision for a just and lasting peace for Europe after World War I.  (my emphasis)

The standard account of appeasement goes something like this.  France refused to stop Germany from re-militarizing (moving troops into) the Rhineland in 1936.  Germany rearmed at a furious pace after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and the leaders of Britain and France failed to realize the meanace it represented.  In early 1938, Hitler occupied Austria and annexed it.  (Anschluss, as the event is known in English-language accounts as well as German ones, is the German word for "annexation".)

At the infamous Munich Conference later in 1938, Britain and France acceeded to Germany's demand to take over the part of western Czechoslovakia known as the Sudentenland, where German residents had carried on disputes of various levels of intensity with their Czech neighbors for decades.  In doing so, Britain and France abrogated their treaty obligations to protect Czechoslovakia.  This convinced Hitler of the weakness of the Western democracies, which emboldened him to further conquests, setting off the Second World War in Europe.

For ideologues like Kaplan, it becomes more of a tale of failure of Will than anything else.  And let's not even talk about überhack Victor Davis Hanson, who cranks out bad Second World War anologies by the bucketful.

Record doesn't challenge the basic account I summarized in that narrative.  And he certainly doesn't dispute the failure of the appeasement policy.  His purpose is to analyze those events to understand them in their actual context in order to challenge the ritual "lessons of Munich" and common assumptions about why appeasement failed.  As he notes, the failure of the appeasement policy is constantly invoked by strategists bother professional and armchair.  Because of the lessons of appeasement, Presidential declarations about how the foreign policy priorty of the moment is a testosterone contest between the US and its oppnenet of the moment have great resonance.  George W. Bush is by no means the first to invoke the comparison.  Record wrote a  book on the use of the Munich analogy, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002).

Record also observes that this is a favorite theme for our neocon unilateralists:

For neo-conservatives who have provided the intellectual foundation of U.S. foreign policy since September 11, 2001 (9/11) (enshrined in President Bush’s September 2002 *The National Security Strategy of the United States of America*), the failure of the democracies to stop Hitler in the 1930s remains the primary instruction on both international politics and America’s role in the world.  ,,, (my emphasis)

Though presidents can and have, knowingly and unwittingly, misused the Munich analogy to describe security threats and the consequences of failing to act against them, there is no gainsaying the power of that analogy to mobilize public opinion.  This is so because of the catastrophic failure of the security policies Britain and France pursued vis-à-vis Germany in the 1930s.  In retrospect, Anglo-French appeasement, driven by perceived military weakness and fear of war, did nothing but whet Hitler’s insatiable territorial appetite (and his contempt for British and French political leadership), while simultaneously undermining the democracies’ security.  The result was the most destructive war in history and an enduring pejorative image of appeasement whose casting includes Nazi ideology as a self-evident blueprint of Germany’s territorial aims; Neville Chamberlain as a coward and fool bent on peace at any price; Britain and France as betrayers of brave little Czechoslovakia; and Hitler as the great winner at the Munich Conference of September 1938. (my emphasis)

Engelbert Dollfuss, Austrian Standestaat dictator

Record reminds us of one event often neglected in discussion of appeasement toward Hitler.  That was the German attempt to take over Austria in 1934 by sending a strike force of Austrian Nazis across the border from Bavaria.  They failed to overthrow the "clerical-fascist" government, which the autocratic Chancellor EngelbertDollfuss called a Standestaat, or corporate state.  They did manage to murder Dollfuss.  But the Nazis failed to rally any kind of popular support for their coup attempt.  And Mussolini's Italy sided with Austria and was prepared to intervene militarily to stop the German takover.

Dollfuss murdered

This was an example of successful deterrance in the short run (though obviously not for Dollfuss).  But Hitler didn't give up his goal of annexing his home country to Germany.  When he achieved it four years later, Italy was no longer ready to stand with Austria against Germany.

This was in part because of France's refusal to act militarily to prevent the violation of the Versailles Treaty when Hitler moved token forces into the Rhineland section of Germany, which was forbidden under Versailles.  But Record is careful  to explain that France's failure was not a problem because it was a loss in a testosterone contest.  It was a problem because France's inaction was inconsistent with its strategic posture at the time.

German troops marching into the Rhineland 1936

(Continued in Part 2)

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