Charlie Eklund at the The Other Shoe posted a brief note on the 1938 Munich Agreement. He suggests that the recent impasses in the Security Council over Iraq was comparable, and asks if France's Jacques Chirac was comparable to Daladier of that time.
Historical analogies are probably more often misleading than helpful. So I think it's important to try to understand these events on their own terms. Hitler had begun a major rearmament program essentially from his first day in office. In 1934, he backed a coup attempt in Austria by the Austrian Nazis. The Austrians resisted, but Mussolini's Italy also pledged to support Austria in a conflict with Germany. At the time, those things enough threat to induce Hitler to back off. In 1935, he had illegally moved the German army into the Rhineland in violation of his treaty obligations, and the French chose not to resist. In early 1938, he marched into Austria, whose internationally isolated, clerical-fascist regime chose not to resist.
Then Hitler began using his ethnic-German Fifth Column in Czechoslovakia to agitate against the alleged oppressions of the Czechoslovak government (not all of which were inventions of German propaganda). Hitler intended to seize the western area of Czechoslovakia, which among other things would give him a crucial boost in weapons-production capacity. At this point, the combined armies of the later anti-Hitler alliance in Europe were clearly stronger than Germany's. Czechoslovakia was a democracy and the government was ready to resist.
Stalin's Soviet Union offered to defend Czechoslovakia militarily if Britain and France would also agree to do so. Britain and France were not only concerned that the Soviets might have other motives than defending the territorial integrity of the Czechoslovak democracy, and their suspicions were probably well founded. But Chamberlain and Daladier also hoped that Germany and the USSR would balance off each other, or even go to war with each other and thereby weaken the two powers that most threatened to destabilize the established order in Europe.
Winston Churchill, no admirer of the Soviet regime, was a dissenter in Parliament on this whole issue. He correctly judged that Nazi Germany was a far greater threat to England at this time than the Soviets were and advocated cooperation with the Soviets to contain Germany.
Czechoslovakia was in no military position to resist alone. So they allowed the German army to enter their country and seize the territory Britain and France had agreed for them to give up. At this point, the USSR was left facing a Germany with a vastly expanded armaments industry that also had an improved geographical position to attack the USSR.
So Stalin made a deal to carve up Poland, not the first time in history Germany and Russia had done so. That brutal deal gave the USSR badly-needed time to build up its military and prepare for the German attack they knew would eventually come.
No easy or indisputable lessons for the present can be drawn from this. But one thing that strikes me is that the leaders of Britain and Germany let hope and ideology override a practical evaluation of the risks. Among other things, believing that the extreme ideological hostility of the Nazis and the Communists would prevent an alliance, the Western leaders put the USSR in an isolated position where they were at immediate risk of attack and defeat, forcing them into a radical course change in foreign policy.
It's also important to remember that Hitler's invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the three major events that produced the Second World War, were wars of aggression. Germany attacked them without provocation and seized their countries. That experience very much shapes not only the theoretical thinking of European leaders, but their practical policies and their attitude toward international law.
Some may think that EU countries like France and Germany made the wrong judgment in the case of Iraq. But their understanding of the dangers of "aggressive war", as the crime of unprovoked invasion was called at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, very much shaped their response to Bush's Iraq War. And they continue to influence European concern about the risks - and legality - of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.
Tags: appeasement, munich agreement, second world war, world war ii
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