Lukacs J. Churchill Visionary. Statesman. Historian

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[84] Churchill, Europe, and appeasement

well with your neighbors, and that spirit of haughty and sul-

len isolation which has been digniﬁed with the name of non-

intervention. We are part of the community of Europe, and

we must do our duty as such.” Churchill would have agreed

to that. Such was his conviction throughout his life. He had

entered his public and parliamentary career when the entente

cordiale with France was concluded, in 1904. About that An-

drew Roberts, Salisbury’s excellent biographer, wrote that

“barely a year after Salisbury’s death, [the entente cordiale]

linked British fortunes to those of a country which turned out

to be in faster relative decline during the ﬁrst half of the twen-

tieth century than even Britain herself.”* But what alternative

did Britain have? Recently, near the end of the twentieth cen-

tury, a few people suggested and the British historian Niall

Fergusson wrote that Britain would have done better to accept

a German-dominated and perhaps thus united Europe and not

to have entered the European war in 1914 on the side of Bel-

gium and France. That is an argument that I think Churchill

would have dismissed (and, were he alive, he would still dis-

miss) with a quick and angry ﬂick of his cigar.

He was in favor of the entente with France from the begin-

ning. (It would be interesting to know what the sources of his

cultural Francophilia were; when and where did they begin?—

another topic for further research.) His pro-Americanism was

not in conﬂict with that. For in the background of the British

decision to proceed to an understanding with France there

* Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan, London, 1999, pp. 488,

843.

Churchill, Europe, and appeasement [85]

was an American element: the British decision, in and after

1898, near-universal among its people, sometimes unspoken

but profound, not to risk any confrontation with the United

States, to keep and maintain the best possible relations with

the emerging transatlantic giant, still a blood relative of sorts.

Only with this kind of security in the back could Britain engage

in the effort to arrange European support against a potential

confrontation with Germany.

Of course Churchill was also impressed with the record of

British armies in great wars fought on the continent of Europe,

including those waged by his ancestor Marlborough: a series of

battle names, ranging from Blenheim, Ramillies, Malplaquet

through Corunna, Badajoz, Salamanca, Waterloo (and per-

haps even Sevastopol). He had educated himself well; in any

case, his knowledge of European history and geography was

more than considerable. We know that he admired England’s

two greatest French opponents, Joan of Arc and Napoleon.

But this amounted to more than a sentimental or romantic

Francophilia. In 1914 there was more than a warrior’s tempera-

ment that convinced him how Britain could not but be in-

volved in the fast-coming European war. His description of

what happened late in the afternoon of 24 July, near the end

of the Buckingham Palace Conference preoccupied with the

problem of Ireland reﬂects that reality, impressionist and lyri-

cal as that description is. The meeting had been inconclusive,

the participants were tired, when a paper was brought to Sir

Edward Grey, with the terms of the Austrian ultimatum to Ser-

bia. “The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into

the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began im-

[86] Churchill, Europe, and appeasement

mediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon

the map of Europe.”* The map of Europe: that lit up Chur-

chill’s eyes, immediately.

Did he realize, soon after the war, what the bleeding and

broken mosaic of the new Europe, largely due to the victory

of the wearied and often thoughtless Allies, meant and would

mean? Yes and no—or, rather: yes rather than no. Immedi-

ately after the war his main preoccupations and actions con-

cerned Bolshevism in Russia and Ireland and the Middle East.

His wish to promote an ever closer British relationship with

the United States seldom appeared during the twenties. None

of his ofﬁcial posts or even parliamentary concerns had much

to do with Europe then. Yet he was thinking—and writing—

much about Europe, about its then present and mutable con-

ditions, and about its future. As early as November 1918 he said

in the Cabinet: “We might abandon Europe but Europe will

not abandon us.” Immediately after the war he spoke up

against mistreating the German people (as he would also do

after the Second World War). He welcomed the Treaty of Lo-

carno in 1925. At that very time he was writing the second vol-

ume of his own history of the First World War. Sometime in

1926 (The World Crisis,

1916–1918

was published in January

1927) he ended it with these ringing words: “Is this the end?

Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a

new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black

accounts of Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and

* Winston Churchill, The World Crisis,

1911–1918

, abridged, London,

1931,p.110.

Churchill, Europe, and appeasement [87]

gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the

very ﬁres of conﬂict that reconciliation of the three giant com-

batants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in

safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe?”

What appears from these words is Churchill’s certainty that

a dreadful future struggle between Germany and France

(“Teuton and Gaul”) would naturally and inevitably include

Britain too—a view not in the least shared by his British con-

temporaries at that time. Signiﬁcant is his rhetorical ending,

a hope for a prospective unity, “a share in rebuilding the glory

of Europe.” The prospect of a united Europe appealed to

Churchill. He wrote and spoke about it often during the twen-

ties. In 1923 the Austrian-born cosmopolitan nobleman Count

Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi launched his “Pan-Europe”

movement, followed by a considerable resonance. Churchill

supported it; so did, cautiously, the then-leading European

statesmen, Briand and Stresemann. In Coudenhove-Kalergi’s

plan neither Britain nor Russia would be part of a European

union: Churchill agreed with that. At the same time he wel-

comed the plan for some kind of European union emphatically

(again, almost alone among British politicians). In February

1930 he wrote in an American publication: “We see nothing

but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented Euro-

pean commonalty. But we have our own dream and our task.

We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked but not com-

mitted. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.”*

Signiﬁcant, too, are his occasional statements and writings

* Saturday Evening Post, 15 February 1930.

[88] Churchill, Europe, and appeasement

about what he saw as the most dangerous places and problems

situated on the new map of Europe: he would mention Danzig,

and Transylvania.

And his eyes were on Europe even before Hitler became the

leader of a new Germany, in the early thirties when Churchill

was politically embroiled—deeply and vocally, with consider-

able harm to his reputation—in what should happen with In-

dia, and when (as we shall see in the next chapter) he had and

spoke his doubts about the very viability of parliamentary de-

mocracy and of universal suffrage. We have seen how, surpris-

ing his German hosts, Churchill spoke at a diplomatic dinner

about his concern with Hitler in October 1930, at a time when

no one else in the world (except, of course, for Hitler himself),

including Germany, would ever envision Hitler as a future

leader of Germany. But even before Hitler came into power

there was growing evidence of a Germany feeling its oats, even

though struggling through the worst kind of economic depres-

sion. The evidence is there in the disarmament conferences

of 1931 and 1932, with German demands ratcheted up higher

and higher. Churchill understood what that meant. “Germany

Arming!” he declaimed—perhaps exaggeratedly so. Again and

again he emphasized the importance of the French army—not

because of his Francophile or sentimental inclinations: he saw

the French army as the only possible serious counterweight

against Germany’s rising power and arms.

Churchill’s warnings and his struggle against the “appease-

ment” of Germany have often been analyzed and described as

if his main concern had been the military unpreparedness of

Britain. (There are several valuable analyses comparing his es-

Churchill, Europe, and appeasement [89]

timates of British and German aircrafts and aircraft building

which now seem to have been inaccurate, though not entirely

wrong.) But we must consider that his ﬁghting against ap-

peasement, while concerned with the wanting state of Brit-

ish military preparedness, was at least equally, if not more,

concerned with the developing state of Europe. These two

cardinal matters were of course inseparable. But: had there

been no evidence of an increasing German preponderance in

the center of Europe, the state of British armaments would

have mattered less: it would have been secondary, if not alto-

gether marginal. Conversely: had British rearmament reached

a satisfactory, or even impressive, stage in the 1930s, the im-

portance of that condition would have been secondary to the

importance of a Third German Reich dominating more and

more of Europe. There were many Englishmen, including

some of Churchill’s friends, who did not see things in that

way. Some of them even believed that the very presence of

a new Germany was a welcome factor against Communism.

Among them was Lord Rothermere, who had met Hitler and

then received an impressive letter from him in 1935, which he

showed to Churchill. Churchill’s answer was: “If his [Hitler’s]

proposal means that we should come to an understanding with

Germany to dominate Europe, I think this would be contrary

to the whole of our history.” The whole of our history . . . Thus

the Europe-minded Tory Churchill, in contrast to his conser-

vative (and still imperial-minded) isolationists . . .

Appeasement and appeasers. Looking back from the twenty-

ﬁrst century we may see that the meaning of these terms

changed twice during the past sixty-ﬁve years. On 9 March

[90] Churchill, Europe, and appeasement

1936 (note that this was but two days after Hitler, dismissing

the Locarno Treaty, had marched into the demilitarized por-

tion of the Rhineland) Anthony Eden spoke in the Commons:

“It is the appeasement of Europe as a whole that we have con-

stantly before us.” Perhaps this was the ﬁrst time that the word

appeasement appeared, at that time employed in a positive

sense. Two years later Eden became one of the antiappeasers.

In less than another year appeasement acquired its negative

connotation, which it still maintains. Yet the motives of the

appeasers of the 1930s were not, and ought not to be seen, as

irresponsible. There were three main elements in their in-

clinations, words, policies, acts. One was the wish to avoid

war, an honest wish fortiﬁed by the memories of the carnage

less than twenty years before. It had a particular component:

not to see Britain involved in a potential, let alone actual,

war in Europe. The other was an outcome of British fair-

mindedness: the slow movement of belief, reaching its zenith

in the mid-thirties, that Germany had been treated unfairly by

the Versailles Treaty and that, consequently or not, Ger-

many deserved a beneﬁt of doubt. The third element was anti-

Communism, of which Hitler was the chief spokesman and

proponent. After all, Communism was now extirpated in Ger-

many, a nation that had become a bulwark against Soviet Rus-

sia and International Communism. When Neville Chamber-

lain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1937,

there was an additional element within his inclinations: a dis-

trust of France, together with the willingness to extend more

than a modicum of the beneﬁt of doubt to the new Germany

Churchill, Europe, and appeasement [91]

(an inclination that his brother Austen would not have shared

but that his father Joseph Chamberlain, who in 1899 had pro-

posed an Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic alliance to govern most of the

world, might well have). In Chamberlain’s mind, and in the

minds of many Conservatives, these inclinations contributed

to a tendency to regard most reports about the brutalities and

conditions of the Hitler regime as exaggerations and propa-

ganda.

These inclinations, maturing into acts, policies, and deci-

sions, may have been shortsighted; but they were not irrespon-

sible, and certainly not disreputable. Until March 1939 they

were largely in accord with the sentiments and opinions of

many, if not most, of the British people. As early as 23 March

1936 Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary: “The feeling in the

House is terribly pro-German”—perhaps an exaggeration, but

not much. The biographer of King George V, Kenneth Rose,

summed up the case against appeasement well: “What tar-

nishes the memory of the so-called appeasers is not that they

were deterred from robustness by the strategic and economic

realities of a defence policy; it is the sycophancy with which

they witnessed the creeping enslavement of Europe.”* Europe

...On11 June 1937 (a relatively calm year) Churchill wrote:

“How has it all gone in Europe while we have been thinking

about our own affairs? I, personally, have never been able to

forget Europe. It hangs over my mind.” As Robert Rhodes

James wrote: “He had been ﬁghting his campaign less against

* Kenneth Rose, King George V, New York, 1984,p.86.

[92] Churchill, Europe, and appeasement

an Administration than against a national temper.” This of

course involved the Press Lords, including Rothermere (a

friend) and Beaverbrook (who was to become close to Chur-

chill only years later). In 1935 Churchill wrote: “There would

be a great deal to be said for [Beaverbrook’s] policy of a paciﬁc

isolationism if we could only arrange to have the United King-

dom towed out ﬁfteen hundred miles into the Atlantic.” Evi-

dently Churchill did not always see the Channel as wider than

the Atlantic. In James’s words, he “saw and felt something

that few other contemporaries did—that the world was in

the presence of a terrible personal and national phenomenon

for which there has been no parallel since Napoleon”*—in-

deed, worse than Napoleon. In an otherwise unexception-

able and readable essay about “Churchill the Statesman”

A. J. P. Taylor writes that Churchill “had no vision of a new

Europe, still less of a new world. He wanted to get back to

the old one.”†

This is not convincing. In an excellent book, Churchill and

Appeasement, R. A. C. Parker illustrates that Chamberlain’s

policy to appease Hitler was not simply due to a shrewd and

prudent decision to gain time for rearmament. This is impor-

tant. It is true that while Chamberlain was engaged in pursuing

appeasement he was also engaged in British rearmament, es-

pecially in the air. But let me add: there is not the slightest

* Cited by Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure,

1900–

1939

, New York, 1970, pp. 308, 311, 318.

† A. J. P. Taylor, “The Statesman,” in Churchill Revised: A Critical

Assessment, New York, 1969, p. 36.

Churchill, Europe, and appeasement [93]

indication, or evidence, that after having reached a satisfactory

stage of rearmament, Chamberlain and the appeasers would

then have changed their course to a stiff opposition to Hitler.

There was, as mentioned earlier, also Chamberlain’s Russo-

phobia and Francophobia and anti-Communism.

Churchill was certainly anti-Communist. But it was the

prospect of a German-ruled Europe that was foremost in his

mind. He said in January 1937 to the Leeds Chamber of Com-

merce (which had invited Ribbentrop, then the German am-

bassador to Britain, who could not come, and they had to make

do with Churchill) that what Hitler believed (in part as an im-

plication of the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935) was

that Britain should abandon a goodly part of Europe, certainly

Central and most of Eastern Europe, to Germany. Churchill

understood Hitler very well, which turned out to be an incom-

parable asset. Whether a Churchill in power in the thirties

could have prevented the expansion of the Third Reich is cer-

tainly arguable—contrary to what he wrote in The Gathering

Storm, the ﬁrst volume of his The Second World War. What is

not arguable is that the essential difference between him and

the appeasers (a difference that, in many ways, prevailed until

July 1940) was his conviction that the fate of Britain was not

and could not be separated from the fate of Europe. His Con-

servative adversaries knew less of Europe than he did; and they

were suspicious of English ties and commitments to Europe.

This contributed to their lacking comprehension of Hitler’s

purposes and of his power. They did not understand that if

his Germany were allowed to dominate all of Central and most

of Eastern Europe, the independence of the Western Euro-