HOW WEAK WAS APPEASEMENT?

Interpretations of British Diplomacy during the 1930s

It is easy, at GCSE, to come away with the impression that British Foreign Policy was simply ‘giving way to a bully’, and to write off British politicians and diplomats as weak or cowards.

It is important that you do not fall into that trap – British diplomats were clever, with decades of experience and lots of strategies up their sleeve.  They were, however – as you saw in the story of the Hoare-Laval Plan in 1935 – shackled by lack of money, lack of an army, their obligations to the League of Nations, and a public that wanted peace, but also wanted them to take action against the aggressors ... but not to charge them the taxes to pay for rearmament.

In 1980, historian Stephen Walker studied 85 foreign policy decisions made in the 1930s involving Japan, Italy and Germany.  All three nations were following expansionist foreign policies which Britain found alarming.

Those actions ranged from expressing ‘concern’, warning of ‘disharmony’ and sending a ‘grave note’, through advocating negotiations, offering concessions, and imposing economic sanctions, to threatening military intervention and sending in the fleet.  Each decision was made carefully, because a large proportion of the very complex situations involved ‘cross-pressures’ with other complex situations.

What Walker found was that, in the 1930s, three quarters of those decisions were for the benefit of other countries, not about British interests – Britain in the 1930s was an interventionist power.

And he also found that, where only a tenth of British dealings with Japan involved some sort of military response (Japan was too far away for Britain to do anything), and only a quarter of decisions regarding Italy (for much of the 1930s, Britain saw Italy as an ally) … by contrast, half of Britain’s dealings with Germany involved some sort of military threat.  Which is remarkable, given the weakness of Britain’s military capabilities at the time, and the common impression that British politicians and diplomats lay down and let Germany walk all over them.