Gedachten
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Appeasement: A Virtuous Peace
A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife. - Proverbs 15:18
In September 2002, just over a year after the terrorist strikes on the United States, columnist David Gelernter wrote in the Weekly Standard that it was "the 1920s all over again". He was referring to the policies of the major and minor continental European nations towards the threat of international terrorism, and towards the American government's strategy in the Middle Eastern region. This same historical analogy has been made by many other pundits, politicians and policy makers the last two years or so, condemning the perceived European unwillingness to respond and pacifism in the face of enemies who have struck in the heart of "safe" territory.
What is the main focus of the analogy? It is appeasement.
Appeasement is a phrase now thoroughly associated with vile cowardice, with trying to "feed a crocodile in the hope it will eat you last", in the words of famous British politician Winston Churchill. It is associated with Adolf Hitler's betrayal of Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time", when Hitler's troops marched through Prague and every chance of preventing a World War was lost. Most importantly, it is associated with a uniquely European failure to respond aggressively and decisively at the moment a dictator violates international rules and builds up his geopolitical power.
Because of this, opponents of the war in Iraq and those on the Continent who still prefer diplomacy and international games of give-and-take over open warfare and imperialism do their utmost to avoid being branded with the evil eye of 'appeasers'. This significantly weakens their position, as it is hard to explain to proponents of war measures that you do not want war, yet you still want to defeat the enemy and you also don't want to be cowardly. After all, to more and more people, especially in the United States, 'taking a firm stand' and 'waging a war' seem to have become synonymous. The ghost of Chamberlain, peace promises written by Hitler in hand, haunts the international political forum.
Yet this is not justified and not necessary. Because contrary to what some on the right would have you believe, there is more to appeasement than has met the eye of the militants so far.
First of all, appeasement was never about surrendering or retreating in the face of danger. It is about preventing war, certainly; but not at all costs. The issue here is that the best way to preserve peace is to remain at peace for as long as is tenable. This, in turn, means that you have to analyse who the enemy is, what his demands are, and how reasonable those demands are. Reasonable demands can be met, because that decreases the chance of war. This may be denounced by nationalists and proponents of war as "rolling over" or "surrendering", but what it in fact means is that you do not wage war over anything worth less than the cost of (world) war.
This was also the point of the much-derided Munich Conference: Chamberlain nor Daladier were prepared to start what would eventually become the Second World War over something as relatively unimportant as the Sudetenland. Besides, Hitler's claim that the Sudetenland was a German-majority area and that the population of this region, which had only been part of Czechoslovakia since 1919, was overwhelmingly in favor of joining Germany, was true. Considering these things in the light of decolonization and the right to self-determination, the latter much lauded by the same nationalists and proponents of war, waging a World War over Czechoslovak posession of these territories would have been an unnecessary breach of the peace.
Another important thing to consider is that appeasement is an important instrument in achieving a balance of powers, which is beneficial to peace, especially in volatile geopolitical situations (and few are those who would deny we now have a volatile political situation). The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the core of the 'Cold War', was in fact a balance of powers between two powers; the Victorian age was a balance of powers between several. In each of these cases, peace was preserved by diplomacy and by appeasement. It may sound strange that appeasement would work between two powers who both desire the defeat of the other, but "appeasement" originally meant "preserving peace", not "acquiescence to demands". Because it is in nobody's favor to start a real World War, all major powers, when in balance, must strive to keep this balance (as any war between major powers in such a situation would lead to World War because of alliances, as the First World War proved). The only way to do this is to not wage direct war. Through this forced (and superficial) pacifism, volatile tension between major powers is defused or, as in most cases like the Cold War, channeled towards minor powers. This actually increases the chances of 'lasting' peace.
'But Hitler did eventually start the Second World War, did he not?', you might ask, as the above abstractions may seem to contradict historical proof. Of course, fighting Hitler in that war was virtuous, the right thing to do. Of course, it would have been unacceptable to allow Hitler to swallow all the Eastern European states one by one and so form a power block in the center of the world that could not be defeated except at the cost of sacrificing almost all of Europe's population. No doubt. But the question is, was this World War because of appeasement or despite it? And what made it inevitable, acquiescence or war-mongering?
The Second World War was inevitable because of the First. The First was caused because public demand forced the major powers of the Victorian balance of powers, so carefully preserved still during the Fashoda Crisis, to abandon mutual appeasement and to fight each other head-on. Germany proclaimed that their troops would march under the Eiffel Tower within half a year; France announced taking Berlin "before Christmas". Instead of the short, valiant and victorious battle they expected, however, they got four years of harrowing fighting which eventually left twenty million dead. In the aftermath of this war, the victorious Allied forces forced upon Germany the Treaty of Versailles. Instead of going for the appeasement strategy of negotiating with the Germans over a reasonable reshaping of Europe as to maintain peace, they went for the aggressive strategy, and ruined Germany and Europe's chances of lasting peace by demanding punitive damages for starting a World War, a sum supposed to be so unimaginably large that no estimate was ever put onto paper. The Weimar Republic was the result of this nation-building by force instead of by negitiations, and it failed utterly, never being able to overcome the resentment of the German population because of the loss of dignity the Treaty had caused. In 1929 Stresemann died, and with him the main proponent of a more appeasing Versailles Treaty which would have acknowledged the end of the war but would not have been militant towards Germany itself, and the Great Depression did the rest. Hitler came to power in 1933, and after the aggressive response of Great Britain to the Italian annexation of Ethiopia pushed Mussolini towards him he started on the path that would eventually lead to the greatest and most horrific war mankind has ever known.
So it was appeasement that could have saved the initially strong Stresa entente of Italy, Great Britain and France: had the nations which later became the Allies allowed him to keep Ethiopia without repercussions, no Axis could have been formed. Surely, this would not have prevented the World War, but it might certainly have made the German onslaught less overwhelming. Another thing is that British and French appeasement towards the Germans over the remilitarization of the Ruhr, the Anschluss with Austria and the Sudetenland issue afforded these two Allied nations the time to remobilize, to prepare for the much-feared aerial bombings and to find the money and economic strength to sustain a war against evil enemies at a time when both were at the absolute ebb of their power. So, appeasement is also an excellent strategy of preparation: solving smaller and less threatening offenses against peace with diplomacy, all the while preparing for war. Such appeasement allows the appeasing nations to strike harder, better and more with more conviction when things really get serious than they otherwise would have been able to do. This goes especially for democratic nations, who always suffer from the hard to overcome effects of 'democratic patience' for wars being short in time and limited in bearable casualties.
This brings us to the present, and the so-called 'War on Terror'. Again we have a clearly vile enemy, against whom it is valiant to wage war. Again we have democratic nations forced to respond to violations of something of a balance of powers, and democratic nations who have to decide whether or not to wage complete open war over these offenses against peace. We have war-mongerers who desire this open war against an enemy difficult to overcome, because the cause is just. We have opponents of the war who share the same ideological rejection of the enemy, but who desire peace above all and who believe the time is not right and the means are not fit. As far as this goes, the analogy is indeed easily made. But let us hope that this time a World War can be avoided, and this time let us hope that history will be more fair to the legacy of the appeasers.
