Finney Patrick - The Romance of Decline The Historiography of Appeasement

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The Romance of Decline :

The Historiography of Appeasement

and British National Identity

Patrick Finney

[ Department of History University of Wales ]

1 Ever since the 1930s, in the context of Great Britain's secular decline from

world power status, the historiography of appeasement has been

inextricably intertwined with shifting understandings of British national

identity. Baldly stated, the assertion is probably unexceptionable: most

historians would agree that historical inquiry is a social process, and within

this body of work the significance of decline as a factor influencing

interpretation has long been acknowledged. (1) But for most international

historians, the role of such cultural factors remains marginal and certainly

does not impinge upon the ultimate sovereignty of primary archival sources

in determining interpretation. In the discipline at large, these traditional

empiricist assumptions are now under sustained challenge from textualist

and relativist critiques, problematising the claims of traditional historical

methodology to offer access to objective truths, not least through analysis

of the ideological tensions at play in particular bodies of historiography and

of the political projects and socio-cultural identities which they have served

to ground. In this last respect, moreover, there are many fruitful points of

interaction with broader inter-disciplinary work on the 'imagining' of

national identity through textual representation, in which the scripting of

national historical narratives bulks large.

2 With an eye to this critical theoretical work, it is intended to advance a

strong reading of the opening assertion, and to suggest that changing - and

competing - conceptions of British national identity have been crucial in the

evolution of interpretations of appeasement. On the one hand, shifting

perspectives on national identity have critically shaped academic

engagement with the subject. On the other hand - though here the claim is

somewhat less strong - this writing has helped to disseminate particular

conceptions of national identity in the wider social world. (2) This is not to

deny that it is still legitimate to regard this historiography in conventional

terms as a discourse about some discrete events in the 1930s as refracted

through the extant documentary traces. Documentary factors have

certainly played a role in facilitating the production of more detailed

accounts over time. However, the aim here is to foreground some of the

rather more subjective aspects of historians' engagement with

appeasement. Arguably, since the archival record can apparently be

admitted but still leave room for drastically contrasting, if not

contradictory, interpretations, it is necessary to attend much more closely

to the assumptions - political, cultural, ideological in a broad sense - which

have conditioned how the documents are read. Whatever the merits of

traditional perspectives on the historiography of appeasement, it is at least

as interesting and valid to think of it as a discourse about British national

identity in the present as well as the past.

3 In order to analyse a body of historical writing as voluminous as that on

appeasement, some kind of analytical framework is required. (3) From a

diachronic perspective, it can plausibly be argued that the historical verdict

on British foreign policy in the 1930s has passed through a series of

distinct phases: the orthodox critique first elaborated in the war gave way

after the 1960s to a more sympathetic revisionist reappraisal which has in

turn recently been supplanted by a self-styled counter-revisionist

interpretation. Since these phases were not entirely discrete, however,

such an analysis downplays the significance of dispute between historians

and the coexistence of competing interpretations at any given point. Hence

Philip Bell's argument that debates about the origins of the war should be

conceptualised synchronically, as revolving around sets of interpretive

dichotomies - such as the thesis of an inevitable war versus that of an

unnecessary war or arguments as to whether the war was fundamentally

about ideology or about power politics - 'which have flourished during the

whole period since the 1930s'. (4) In the case of appeasement, such an

analysis has merit, given that hostile and sympathetic perspectives have

indeed existed side-by-side and since what is centrally at stake in the

debate between them is whether policy was the product of individual

agency or determined by objective structural constraints. Yet, such an

approach is by definition unable to explain why it should be that at certain

points in time one interpretation should be dominant and the other

marginal. This explanation is best found through an approach combining

the diachronic and synchronic, focusing on how ideas about national

identity and other broad cultural forces have conditioned the course of

historiographical debates.

4 The canonical point of departure for historical writing on appeasement is

Guilty Men . (5) Conceived and written over a weekend in June 1940 by

three radical Beaverbrook journalists - Michael Foot, Peter Howard and

Frank Owen - under the pseudonym 'Cato', this polemical indictment proved

immensely popular and has cast a long shadow over subsequent

historiography. The book's instant success was due to the vitriolic and

accessible tone in which it offered a bewildered public a compelling

explanation of the crisis facing Britain at the time of its publication in early

July 1940; a point which marked the nadir of Britain's fortunes in the war,

after the débâcle of Dunkirk but before the Battle of Britain which marked at

least a temporary respite for the nation. These perilous circumstances

conditioned the book's savage critique of the appeasers, on whom blame

for recent catastrophes was unequivocally laid. Prime Ministers Neville

Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin and their whole political clique, 'blind to

the purposes of the criminal new Nazi war power', had consistently

misjudged Hitler's intentions, capitulated to his escalating demands by

proffering unilateral concessions in the vain hope of preserving peace, and

so neglected Britain's armaments as to conduct 'a great empire, supreme in

arms and secure in liberty' to 'the edge of national annihilation'. (6) July

1940 lent a terrible retrospective clarity to the events of the 1930s which

thus unfold in the pages of Guilty Men with the remorseless inevitability of

Aeschylean tragedy: there was little point probing for rational motives

behind appeasement since it could not but appear as an incomprehensible

policy of utter folly, if not cowardice.

5 The form and content of Guilty Men can be connected to notions of

national identity, with respect both to the preconceived assumptions that

shaped the authors' argument and to what the text was avowedly designed

to achieve. First, the interpretation of Guilty Men is fundamentally premised

on the assumption of British strength, greatness and capability. 'Cato'

takes it for granted that British policy-makers in the 1930s had the freedom

to choose alternative, better, policies - of resistance and confrontation

rather than conciliation - had they but the vision, intelligence and

competence to do so: the essence of their culpability lies in the fact that

they could and should have acted differently. Second, the authors' intention

was to effect change in the real world. Despite Winston Churchill's

assumption of the premiership in May 1940, many of the appeasers

remained in office, including Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, the Foreign

Secretary, and 'Cato' intended to rally the nation through a purging of those

responsible for the calamity of 1940. Hence the closing words of the text:

'Let the Guilty Men retire of their own volition and so make an essential

contribution to the victory upon which all are implacably resolved'. (7) The

logic of Guilty Men is to personalise responsibility for the disaster by

arraigning certain individuals in order by extension to exculpate the rest of

the nation: the corollary of their guilt is our innocence. Thus after the

departure of the culpable the mass of the nation - 'a people determined to

resist and conquer' - could unite without further recrimination for the

supreme effort of conducting total war, a war which given the assumed

underlying strength of the country could be prosecuted to victory. (8)

6 In other words, a particular interpretation of appeasement - a negative

one stressing personal culpability rather than broader structural or

impersonal factors - was required to underpin the future war effort. Thus

Guilty Men has to be seen as a key text in the broad cultural movement of

1940 that enacted the collectivist and consensual identity that carried

Britain through the 'People's War' and beyond. Of course, there was much

more to this identity than anti-appeasement: recent work has identified the

many diverse fronts on which the British people were mobilised to fight the

Second World War as a war against the 1930s. (9) Equally, as collectivism

has been eroded in contemporary British politics, the reality of the wartime

consensus has been convincingly called into question. But there is good

evidence that whatever divisions remained amongst the British, they

united during the war in treating appeasement as 'an object of universal

revilement'. (10) Guilty Men was thus crucial for providing a reading of the

past, linked to a particular characterisation of national identity (a national

'us' which excluded the architects of appeasement), which together offered

a workable foundation for the waging of the war ahead.

7 The truth of the interpretation advanced in Guilty Men was therefore

essentially a product of its political effectiveness. Alternative readings of

the 1930s were certainly possible on the basis of the information then in

the public domain, but such explanations failed to acquire similar

contemporary authority or subsequent influence because they lacked

Guilty Men 's practical utility. Harold Nicolson's Penguin Special, Why Britain

is at War , published in November 1939, advanced a cautious defence of the

appeasers both implicitly by focusing much more on the iniquities of Adolf

Hitler's foreign policy than on the democratic response to it and explicitly

by reference to the alleged det ermining influence of structural factors,

particularly pacific public opinion. (11) This too was a text for its times, a

product of the Phoney War when Britain was at but not really in war and

when Chamberlain remained in office as Prime Minister. In these

circumstances patriotism, together with Nicolson's own solidly bourgeois

temperament and position as a National Government MP, dictated a broadly

sympathetic approach seeking to unite the country behind rather than

against the appeasers. (Not that Nicol son abstained from all criticism: his

pre-publication belief that sections of the book would 'annoy the

Government terribly' was partially justified. (12) W. N. Medlicott's scholarly

accounts of the origins of the war similarly prefigured revisionist themes in

evincing a sensitive perception of Britain's global strategic dilemma and the

historical antecedents and determinants of appeasement, even while

remaining critical of that policy as a departure from realpolitik. (13) In

terms of literary elegance, coherence, logical consistency and scholarly

rigour, the works of Nicolson and Medlicott were manifestly superior to

Guilty Men , but in 1940 their interpretations were decisively marginalised.

The disasters of Norway and Dunkirk rendered Nicolson's inclusive

approach anachronistic and implausible, while Medlicott's treatment - with

its Rankean detachment and preoccupation with the arcane subtleties of

diplomacy - paled anaemically beside the passionate vigour of Guilty Men .

Thus 'Cato' effected a closure over other, more complex, explanations of the

1930s; by offering the only account which worked ideologically to provide a

national history and present identity in tune with the new realities of 1940

and the exigencies of the 'People's War'.

8 From the outset, therefore, the scripting of a negative interpretation of

appeasement followed from preconceived assumptions that Britain was

strong and capable. In the immediate post-war period, interpretations

refined and developed the essential theses of Guilty Men , which seemed

only to have been confirmed as the course of the war revealed both the

extent of Hitler's ambitions and the wickedness of the Führer's regime.

These views were given a judicial imprimatur by the Nuremberg war crimes

trials: the indictment of leading Nazis for conspiring to wage an aggressive

war - 'planned and prepared for over a long period of time and with no small

skill and cunning' (14)- implicitly also condemned those in the democracies

who had failed to perceive and foil the conspiracy. A slew of historians

working in this climate recapitulated this notion of premeditated German

aggression, the corollary of which was to damn appeasement as a product

of 'political myopia' (15) and as a policy 'burdened ... with make-believe', a

lamentable 'failure of European statesmanship'. (16) These authors did not

require documentary evidence to prove the truth of their interpretations,

(17) but the evidence which had become available in the form of captured

German documents could easily be read as confirming (and thus lending

additional authority to) what had now become common sense. The political

expediency of the Nuremberg interpretation for all the great powers in the

context of post-war international relations served to further cement its

status as self-evident truth. (18)

9 The most emphatic and enduring articulation of this post-war orthodox

view was that published in 1948 by Churchill in the first volume of his

magisterial history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm .

Churchill's narrative scripted the 1930s in Manichean terms as a titanic

confrontation between the 'English- speaking peoples' and 'the wicked'. The

existence of a Nazi 'programme of aggression, nicely calculated and timed,

unfolding stage by stage' was axiomatic: Hitler had advanced through the

decade along a 'predetermined deadly course'. The appeasers had failed to

perceive this, and as a result of 'a long series of miscalculations, and

misjudgements of men and facts' pursued a policy amounting to little more

than 'complete surrender ... to the Nazi threat of force'. Appeasement was

essentially a policy of one-sided concessions which proved both

dishonourable - in that it entailed purchasing peace through betraying

small states - and disastrous in that it condemned Britain to fight the war

against Germany in the most unfavourable circumstances. For Churchill the

past conflict was 'the unnecessary war', and his narrative catalogued the

lost opportunities - from the Disarmament Conference of 1932-4 through to

the Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations of 1939 - at which Hitler could have

been stopped. Failure to grasp these openings and to take concerted

resolute action inexorably transformed an unnecessary war into an

inevitable war, from which Britain was hard-pressed to emerge victorious.

(19)

10 The Gathering Storm is a complex text that can profitably be read in

many different ways. It of course represents a significant chapter in

Churchill's almost ceaseless autobiographical self-construction: he was

himself a participant in the events about which he wrote, and in vilifying the

appeasers he also magnified his own heroic status, not only as the

successor to Chamberlain who saved the nation from the consequences of

his folly, but also as the Cassandra of the 1930s whose warnings and calls

for resistance to Hitler were consistently ignored. (20) But the text can also

be read through the lens of national identity, for it is laden with ideas and

anxieties about Britain's role in the world. Churchill's critique of

appeasement - like that of 'Cato' - was premised upon an assumption of

British strength: policy-makers not only should but could have rearmed

more quickly and constructed a coalition to contain Hitler. Though

Churchill's account is more sophisticated, the roots of appeasement are

thus still located in erroneous individual choices rather than objective

structural constraints. Moreover, Churchill positions appeasement in a

longer-term context, identifying it as alien to the spirit of 'the wonderful

unconscious tradition' of British foreign policy which from at least the

Elizabethan age aimed at opposing 'the strongest, most aggressive, most

dominating Power on the Continent', thereby to preserve British freedom

and 'the liberties of Europe'. On this reading, appeasement was a sad

aberration from a traditional policy that had laid the basis for imperial

prosperity by combining 'in natural accord' the protection of particular

British interests ('our island security' and the growth of a 'widening Empire')

with the furthering of the 'grand universal causes' of justice, democracy and

freedom. (21) So a particular romanticised (and doubtless to non-English

eyes sinister or laughable) notion of British history and identity

underpinned Churchill's critique: appeasement was a betrayal of that

history which for him 'confirmed the particular genius of the English race

and proved its right to be rich, Imperial and the guardian of human

freedoms'. (22)

11 As these ideas constructed Churchill's interpretation of appeasement,

so he intended that interpretation to influence British identity in the post-

war period. Within his text Churchill stressed his continued fidelity to the

conception of Britishness which had informed his original hostility to

appeasement - principles 'which I had followed for many years and follow

still' (23)- and his explicit allusions to the post-war situation make clear

that those ideas entailed policy prescriptions. This is particularly apparent

in those passages where Churchill makes his own contribution to the

promulgation of a general law of foreign policy based on anti-appeasement,

the notion that conciliating dictators was always disastrous and wrong.

Repeatedly, Churchill draws parallels between the Nazi threat in the 1930s

and the alleged threat from Soviet Russia confronting the west 'in singular

resemblance' at the time of writing, explicitly intending that 'the lessons of

the past [might] be a guide' to ensure that the democracies did not repeat

the mistake of appeasing totalitarianism in the Cold War. (24) Clearly,

Churchill felt Britain could and should continue to pursue its traditional

foreign policy towards the continent, and take a leading role in opposing the

machinations of a Joseph Stalin whom policy- makers were increasingly

'fitting ... to the Hitler model'. (25) By the same token, there was no sign

that he had abandoned his belief that the British 'ought to set the life and

endurance of the British Empire and the greatness of this Island very high

in our duty'. (26) So Churchill's reading of the past, itself dictated by a

particular sense of national identity, produced a prescription for present

action designed to sustain that identity, as narrating the past elided into

scripting the present. It is true that Churchill's account was not devoid of

anxieties about the survival of an identity threatened by shifting geo-

political realities: it would be no mean feat to negotiate a path through 'the

awful unfolding scene of the future'. (27) So while Guilty Men had

attempted to fashion a new sense of nationhood, Churchill's text was a

rather more conservative intervention, designed to protect an identity that

was now fragile and threatened. But it was nonetheless premised on a past

and present ideal of British national identity rooted in imperial prestige,

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1TheRomanceofDecline:TheHistoriographyofAppeasementandBritishNationalIdentitybyPatrickFinney[DepartmentofHistoryUniversityofWales]1Eversincethe1930s,inthecontextofGreatBritain'sseculardeclinefromworldpowerstatus,thehistoriographyofappeasementhasbeeninextricablyintertwinedwithshiftingunderstandingsof...

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Finney Patrick - The Romance of Decline The Historiography of Appeasement

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