Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain, 1936-1939 (review)

The tone of this book is that of a teacher writing for students and determined to challenge their preconceptions. American undergraduates and their instructors who are in search of a brief introduction to the debates concerning the place of Appeasement in British external policy in the interwar period could do worse than begin by consulting it.

But they should also be aware that it is not without its pitfalls. The book begins with a brief survey of interwar British society that may be a little confusing to the reader coming to the topic for the first time. Levy's analysis of the British class structure lacks nuance and leaves too little room for the middle classes. He is on firmer ground when he deals with the core of his own topic, and the rest of the book then focuses on the period after 1936. Levy has constructed his case broadly within the framework created by Paul Kennedy some years ago. By the 1930s Britain was an over-extended imperial power with too many potential enemies and too few reliable friends. It had an arthritic economy, so the National Government never had the resources it required to create an army, navy, and air force capable of deterring or fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously. Domestic politics also counted for much, for that same government was reluctant to adopt deficit financing, which might have paid for a higher level of rearmament, for fear that they would be punished for it by the voters.

Levy presents a sympathetic picture of Neville Chamberlain as a man who hated war and was intent on avoiding it by a mixture of deterrence and diplomacy. What set him apart from Churchill (who in the index is unaccountably given the forename "William," but is correctly identified as Winston in the text) was that Chamberlain had no confidence that ultimately the United States would bail the British out, and in any case feared that the pricetag attached to U.S. assistance would be cripplingly high.

Ultimately, Levy contends that although the men who pursued Appeasement were not blameless, what they attempted to do was logical, rational, and humane. In the conclusion the author leaves the reader with the distinct impression that he approves of Chamberlain because he was not George W. Bush. The book ends with a bibliographic essay that reviews some of the recent literature, but ignores some important references. Given the salience of Neville Chamberlain to his thesis, it is surprising, for example, to find no mention of R. A. C. Parker's Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (1993).

Levy's writing is breezy and accessible. His interpretations of the evidence, and his willingness to draw present-day parallels will probably provoke some lively student seminars.