Patrick Finney - The Romance of Decline The Historiography of Appeasement

The Romance of Decline :

The Historiography of Appeasement

and British National Identity

by

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 dbcle 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