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appeasement, Foreign policy of pacifying an aggrieved country through negotiation in order to prevent war. The prime example is Britain’s policy toward Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought to accommodate Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and took no action when Germany absorbed ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Introduction: “The good war” The Second World War is popularly remembered as “the good war” in American history, a heroic struggle against fascist totalitarian states.
- The rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi rule in Germany. The First World War, as historian Ian Kershaw wrote, made Adolf Hitler possible. Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution, the failed artist and social drop-out would not have found his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue.
- Onset of war in Europe and Asia, 1933-1941. The Nazis identified their reign as the “Third Reich,” heir to the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806) and the German state empire (1871-1918) which collapsed at the end of the First World War.
- U.S. foreign policy in the interwar years. 4.1 Diplomatic appeasement of fascist states. 4.2 Corporate America and the Nazis. 4.3 Responses to Jewish repression in Germany.
- British Domestic Concerns
- British Imperial Politics
- Other Geopolitical Considerations
- Germany Annexes Austria
- The Sudetenland View This Term in The Glossary Crisis
- Chamberlain Negotiates with Hitler
- Neville Chamberlain: “Peace For Our Time”
- Winston Churchill Condemns The Munich Agreement
The British policy of appeasement was partly a reflection of domestic issues, including economic problems and antiwar sentiment. In the 1930s, the Great Depression, known in Britain as the Great Slump, caused unemployment to skyrocket.Economic distress led to rallies and demonstrations in the streets. Antiwar sentiment and support for the policy of...
Britain’s imperial politics also shaped the British government’s attitudes towards war and appeasement. British wealth, power, and identity depended on the empire, which included dominions and colonies. During World War I, the British had relied on their empire for resources and troops. In the event of another world war, the British needed the empi...
The British policy of appeasement was also a reaction to the diplomatic landscape of the 1930s. The strongest international players at the time (namely the United States, Italy, the Soviet Union, and France) each had their own domestic and geopolitical considerations.1And, the League of Nations, which had been created to prevent war, proved to be i...
In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria,a blatant violation of post World War I peace treaties. The annexation of Austria signaled the Nazis’ complete disregard for their neighbor’s sovereignty and borders. Despite this, the international community accepted it as a done deal. No foreign government intervened. The international community hoped t...
All hopes that Germany would stop with Austria were dashed almost immediately. Hitler set his sights on the Sudetenland, a largely German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia. In summer 1938, the Nazis manufactured a crisis in the Sudetenland. They falsely claimed that Germans in the region were being oppressed by the Czechoslovak government. In reali...
In September 1938, Europe seemed to be on the brink of war. It was at this point that Chamberlain personally got involved. On September 15, 1938, Chamberlain flew to Hitler’s vacation home in Berchtesgaden to negotiate the German leader’s terms. Chamberlain’s goal was to reach a diplomatic solution in order to avoid war. But the matter remained unr...
Chamberlain returned from the meeting in Munich triumphant. In London, he famously proclaimed: Chamberlain is sometimes mistakenly quoted as having said “peace in our time.”
Chamberlain’s optimism did not go unchallenged. In a speech to the House of Commons on October 5, 1938,Winston Churchill condemned the Munich Agreement. He referred to it as a “total and unmitigated defeat” for Britain and the rest of Europe. Moreover, Churchill claimed that the British policy of appeasement had “deeply compromised, and perhaps fat...
appeasement. and American isolationism. in 20th-century international relations in The origins of World War II, 1929–39. Written by. Walter A. McDougall. Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Author of The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age and others.
In the 1930s, the policy designed by the leaders of the UK and France – appeasement - towards the Third Reich was not an easy task. In fact, it was so difficult and complicated that, in the end, it served to the exact opposite end it was put into function: it encouraged Germany to further break the traditional norms of conduct in international relations and to violate the sovereignty of ...
The Munich Agreement of 1938 is often cited as a key moment of appeasement, where major powers allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland without facing any military opposition. Appeasement was rooted in the desire to prevent another devastating conflict like World War I, which had left many countries economically and politically weakened.
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20th-century international relations - Hitler's War, Chamberlain's Appeasement: For two decades after 1939, German guilt for the outbreak of World War II seemed incontestable. The Nürnberg war-crimes trials in 1946 brought to light damning evidence of Nazi ambitions, preparations for war, and deliberate provocation of the crises over Austria, the Sudetenland, and Poland. Revelation of Nazi ...
