Munich after 50 Years
Author(s): Gerhard L. Weinberg
Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Fall, 1988), pp. 165-178
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20043680
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Gerhard L. Weinberg
MUNICH AFTER 50 YEARS
J?L -M^alf a century after the Munich conference, that event
lives in the public memory as a series of interrelated myths.
For most people, Munich represents the abandonment of a
small country, Czechoslovakia, to the unjust demands of a
bullying and powerful neighbor by those who would have done
better to defend it. It is believed that the Allies, by the sacrifice
of one country, only whetted the appetite of the bully whom
they had to fight anyway, later and under more difficult cir
cumstances. The "lesson" derived from this widely held view
is that it makes far more sense to take action to stop aggression
at the first opportunity.
This view, not surprisingly, is especially influential with those
who personally experienced the events of the late 1930s and
who thereafter found themselves and their countries involved
in the costliest war in history. Many came to hold a view of the
proper conduct of U.S. foreign policy, the so-called domino
theory, which asserted that if drastic action were not taken to
halt aggression at its earliest occurrence, the countries in the
path of an encroaching power would fall like dominoes, with
the fall of each only hastening that of the next. Once promi
nently put forward as a justification for American intervention
in Vietnam, this thesis was temporarily discredited by second
thoughts about U.S. policy there. More recently, however, it
has been revived in connection with Nicaragua. Some believe
that a Sandinista regime, once fully consolidated, will surely
topple the adjacent "dominoes," this time in Central America.
Neither scholarship nor time is likely to shake the firm hold
that the symbols of Munich maintain on those who remember
a time when the city's name connoted more than good beer or
bloody Olympic games. The umbrella that British Prime Min
ister Neville Chamberlain carried with him to Munich in the
Gerhard L. Weinberg is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of
many books, including Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941, The
Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany (in two volumes, Diplomatic Revolution in
Europe, 1933-1936 and Starting World War II, 1937-1939) and World in
Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II.
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166 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
fall of 1938 came to represent not common sense in the
European autumn but cowardice in the face of danger. The
exclusion from the conference of Czechoslovakia, the country
whose boundaries and fate were at stake, is considered by those
even vaguely familiar with the history as a particularly revolting
aspect of the affair. On his return to London, Chamberlain
held in his hand an agreement stating that all questions con
cerning Anglo-German relations would be solved by consulta
tion between the two countries, so they would never again go
to war with each other. His famous comment that he, like
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli sixty years earlier, had
brought back from Germany peace with honor and "peace in
our time," has provided superb copy for every parody of British
policy in the 1930s.
ii
Three aspects of the Munich conference that develope
more fully afterward, or on which we are now better informed
suggest that this traditional interpretation warrants a clos
look.
In the first place, it was after all the same two Allied leaders
who went to Munich, Chamberlain of Great Britain and
Edouard Daladier of France, who one year later led their
countries into war against Adolf Hitler's Germany, something
no other leader of a major power did before his own country
was attacked. The Italians, who under Benito Mussolini
thought of themselves as a great power, joined with Hitler in
June 1940 in what Mussolini saw as an opportunity to share
the spoils of victory. Joseph Stalin was sending the Nazis
essential war supplies until a few hours before the German
invasion of June 1941 awoke the Kremlin from its confidence
in an alignment with Hitler. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had
repeatedly but vainly warned the Soviet leader of the German
threat, had worked hard to rouse the American people to the
dangers facing them; but until confronted by a Japanese sur
prise attack and by German and Italian declarations of war, he
had hoped that Americans might be spared the ordeal of war.
Only Britain and France went to war with Germany out of
calculations of broader national interest instead of waiting to
be attacked; and it is perhaps safe to argue that without the
lead from London, the French government would have backed
off in 1939 and awaited a German invasion of its own territory.
It is rather ungracious, especially for Americans whose country
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MUNICH AFTER 50 YEARS 167
would not take action to defend either Czechoslovakia or
Poland, and which had provided by law that it would not help
anyone who did, to condemn as weaklings the only leaders of
major powers who mustered up the courage to confront Hitler
on behalf of another country.
A second factor that prompts us to take a new look at the
1938 crisis is the view that Hitler, the man usually thought to
have triumphed at Munich, is now known to have held of it.
The opening of German archives and the new availability of
important private papers provide a picture rather different
from the one commonly held.
We now know that Hitler had never been particularly inter
ested in helping the over three million people of German
descent living inside Czechoslovakia, but only in the ways they
might help him in his project to isolate Czechoslovakia from
outside support, create incidents that would provide a pretext
for the invasion and destruction ofthat country, and thereafter
provide manpower for additional army divisions. The new
divisions, in turn, he considered useful for the great war he
planned to wage against the powers of Western Europe as the
prerequisite for the quick and far easier seizure of enormous
territories in Eastern Europe.
Hitler believed that German rearmament was far enough
advanced by late 1937 and early 1938 to make this first little
war against Czechoslovakia possible. While spreading propa
ganda on behalf of the ethnic Germans of Czechoslovakia,
Hitler was counting on the threat of Japan's advance in East
Asia and Italy's support in Europe, and the reluctance of France
and England to fight another great war, to isolate Czechoslo
vakia from outside support. It is understandable in this context
that the successful and peaceful annexation of Austria in March
1938 (which left Czechoslovakia even more vulnerable than
before), followed by a dramatic reaffirmation of Germany's
alignment with Italy during Hitler's visit to Rome, produced
Hitler's decision in the second week of May 1938 to go to war
that year. We are not ever likely to know whether his belief
that he was suffering from throat cancer contributed to his
haste; he was certainly a man with a mission in a hurry who
would explain later in 1938 that he preferred to go to war at
the age of 49 so that he could see the whole issue through to
resolution!
But there proved to be inner flaws in his strategy. The
prospective allies he had selected turned out to be reluctant.
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168 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The Japanese at that time wanted an alliance against the Soviet
Union, not against the Western powers. Poland and Hungary
both hoped to obtain pieces of Czechoslovakia but wanted
them without a general European war. The Italians, further
more, were not as enthusiastic as Hitler thought. Mussolini had
given a hostage to fortune by committing large forces to the
support of Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, forces
certain to be lost in a general war in which they would be cut
off from their homeland.
in
The basic miscalculation of the German governm
however, of a different type: it was integrally rel
issue that Hitler deliberately placed at the center
attention, the Sudeten Germans living in Czechoslo
purpose of this focus was obvious. The constant att
both publicity and diplomacy to the allegedly mist
lions of Germans living in Czechoslovakia was designed
it politically difficult, if not impossible, for Britain a
to come to Czechoslovakia's assistance when it was
attacked. How could democracies contest the princi
determination that they had themselves proclaim
they act to turn a small war into a huge one on the
assumption that a big war inevitably would come any
But there were aspects of this program that mi
Hitler's perspective, cause problems. One was that t
ued diplomatic focus on the Sudeten Germans, w
needed to assure the isolation of Czechoslovakia, mi
tually make the transition from diplomacy to war
cult. The other was that, despite the number and si
of the Germans inside the Czechoslovak state, t
obviously far more Czechs and Slovaks. If ever t
opposed to the pretended aim of German policy bec
the very same concept of self-determination tha
against support of Czechoslovakia as long as its Germ
ited rim was under discussion would shift in favor
once the undoubtedly non-German core came into q
was in this regard that the crisis of the end of Septe
came to be so dramatic and its resolution, in Hitler
faulty.
We now know that Hitler had originally planned to stage an
incident inside Czechoslovakia to provide Germany with a
pretext for invading that country with the objective of destroy
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MUNICH AFTER 50 YEARS 169
ing it all rather than merely annexing the German-inhabited
fringe. He was influenced by the experience of 1914, when
Austria-Hungary had taken the assassination of the Archduke
Francis Ferdinand as an excuse to attack Serbia.
In Hitler's opinion there had been two deficiencies in Aus
tria-Hungary's behavior, and Germany would on this occasion
remedy both. The first was the plainly accidental timing of the
assassination. If one waited for others to act, the most appro
priate moment might easily be missed: Hitler had long held
that the Central Powers should have struck well before 1914.
The obvious solution to the problem of timing was to arrange
for the incident oneself, and at the optimal moment. Hitler
originally thought of staging the assassination of the German
minister to Czechoslovakia, Ernst Eisenlohr; then he shifted to
the idea of having incidents staged by the German military
inside Czechoslovakia. Finally he resorted to the creation of
special squads of Sudeten German thugs who?since it was not
thought safe to entrust them with the secret date for the
scheduled invasion?were simply assigned quotas of incidents
to stage each week in each sector of the borderlands. This
process would continue until the time had come for Berlin to
announce that the most recent example of Czechoslovak
wickedness (in responding to the latest provocation) obviously
merited Germany's taking the drastic action of invading the
country.
The second defect of Austria's action in 1914, in Hitler's
view, was that Vienna had dithered for weeks during that
summer while the shock effect of the original incident wore
off. This time, Hitler reasoned, it would be very different
indeed.
Since the decision to invade would precede rather than
follow the incident selected as a pretext, the German military
would move swiftly and in accordance with carefully prepared
plans. The German dictator was confident that his army would
obey the order to attack, in spite of warnings of dissent from
some in the military hierarchy. Early in February 1938 he had
replaced the commander in chief of the army, Werner von
Fritsch, a great admirer of the National Socialist state but an
independent thinker, with Walther von Brauchitsch, a man
without backbone or scruples who was also the recipient of
special secret payments from Hitler (apparently the beginning
of a huge and never fully explored program of bribing most of
the highest-ranking German generals and admirals).
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170 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Hitler had also, at the same time, assumed the responsibilities
formerly assigned to Minister of War Werner von Blomberg.
Furthermore, he had recently replaced the chief of the general
staff of the army, Ludwig Beck, a vehement critic of the war
plan, with the more complaisant Franz Haider. Although there
were skeptics among the military?and there are some analysts
of the 1938 crisis who believe that an order to attack would
have touched off an attempted coup from within the army?it
seems to me that Hitler's confidence in the response of the
military to his orders and those of its new commander in chief,
von Brauchitsch, was fully warranted.
What, then, went wrong? Why was there no transition from
propaganda and diplomacy to war?
The constant emphasis on the Sudeten Germans in Nazi
propaganda brought too late a response from the government
in Prague, which until August left the initiative to Berlin. And
this in spite of a formal and explicit, but confidential, warning
to Prague from the French government in July that under
practically no circumstances would it come to the defense of
its Czechoslovak ally. Keeping this message undisclosed?and
it was one of the few secrets that did not leak out in the Paris
of the 1930s?was of course essential to the official French
pretense that it was the British who were holding them back
from full support of Prague, a pretense that turned to panic
when the British position hardened and could no longer pro
vide a fig leaf for French unwillingness to act.
The centrality of the nationality issue also created a terrible
dilemma for London. Canada, Australia and the Union of
South Africa (as it was then known) all made it absolutely clear
to the British government that they would not go to war
alongside Britain over the Sudeten German question. The
British chiefs of staff strongly argued against the risk of military
action. If war were to come, it would have to come under
circumstances that made the issues clear to the public in Britain
and the dominions, and, as the British learned in September
1938, to the French.
It was under these circumstances that on September 13
Neville Chamberlain decided to fly to Germany, originally
planning not even to tell Berlin that he was coming until after
his plane had taken off. The Germans were startled enough
even when notified in advance, and they were trapped by their
own propaganda that there were nationality issues to discuss.
Moreover, those who genuinely believed in the fairy tale of the
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MUNICH AFTER 50 YEARS 171
"stab in the back"?that Germany had not been beaten at the
front in World War I, but had instead lost the war because of
the collapse of the German home front?could not risk starting
a second war unless German public opinion could be convinced
that such a war, with all its costs in lives and treasure, was
everybody else's fault.
So the British prime minister had to be received at Berchtes
gaden. All he could be told, of course, was the official public
line that something had to be done for the poor Sudeten
Germans. While Chamberlain set about getting the agreement
of France and Czechoslovakia to having the German-inhabited
portions of Czechoslovakia ceded to Germany, Hitler began
plotting other ways to arrange for war in spite of the meddle
some Englishman. When at their second meeting, on Septem
ber 22 at Bad Godesberg, Chamberlain offered Hitler an Allied
capitulation to his ostensible demands?the French, Czechoslo
vak and British governments had all agreed to the transfer of
the Sudeten territory?the German dictator was dumbfounded
and raised new and obviously preposterous conditions for a
peaceful settlement.
IV
It was at this point that the issue shifted conspicuously
the fate of the Sudeten Germans to that of the Czec
Slovaks. Here Hitler was indeed trapped by his own stra
He now had either to risk a war with Britain and Fr
well as Czechoslovakia or pull back, call off the planned
sion, and settle for what Prague, London and Paris had
agreed to.
It was not only Germany's military and diplomatic leaders
who urged caution on the Nazi dictator. Troubled by the
prospect of a general war when the German people gave every
sign of being unenthusiastic about it, Hitler's closest political
associates, Hermann Goring and Joseph Goebbels, argued for
a peaceful settlement. The prospective allies of Germany in
this crisis were hesitant, now that war was a real and not merely
a theoretical possibility. The Poles certainly wanted a piece of
Czechoslovakia, but not at the risk of breaking completely with
their French ally and Great Britain. The Hungarians were
watering at the mouth over the possibility of realizing their
extensive territorial demands: all of the Slovak and Carpatho
Ukrainian portions of the Czechoslovak state and a few addi
tional pieces if they could get them. The authorities in Buda
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172 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
pest, however, were very conscious of having only recently
begun their own rearmament; they were also fairly certain that
Britain and France would go to war over a German invasion
of Czechoslovakia and that such a general war would end in a
German defeat.
Hitler never forgave the Hungarians, whose resolution, in
his eyes, was not commensurate with their appetite, but he was
even more astonished by the defection of his most important
ally, Italy. Mussolini's urging him to settle for the German
inhabited fringe of Czechoslovakia instead of attacking that
country as a whole?when Hitler had expected encouragement
to go forward, along with a full promise of support?appears
to have played a major part in his decision to recall the orders
for war, already issued, and instead agree to a settlement by
conference at Munich.
Precisely because he had not tested the predictions of those
who had warned against an attack on Czechoslovakia, Hitler
was then and ever after angry over having pulled back. He
projected his own reticence onto others, denouncing as cowards
those whose advice he had followed instead of testing his own
concept in action, and despising the British and French leaders
before whose last-minute firmness he had himself backed down.
If the Munich agreement, which others then and since have
regarded as a great triumph for Germany, appeared to Hitler
then and in retrospect as the greatest setback of his career, it
was because he had been unwilling or unable, or both, to make
the shift from propaganda and diplomacy to war as he had
always intended. He had been trapped in a diplomatic maze of
his own construction and could not find the exit to the war
that he sought. In the last months of his life, in 1945, as he
reviewed what had gone wrong and caused the dramatic de
scent from Germany's earlier heights of victory, he appears to
have asserted that his failure to begin the war in 1938 was his
greatest error, contributing to the eventual collapse of all his
hopes and prospects.
In the intervening years he was most careful not to repeat
what he considered were the great errors of 1938. A massive
campaign was begun to rally the German people for war. As
Hitler put it on November 10, 1938, meeting with the German
press, the peace propaganda designed to fool others had carried
in it the risk of misleading his own people into thinking that
peace, not war, was intended. Thereafter, Hitler would some
times postpone but would never again call off an attack on
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MUNICH AFTER 50 YEARS 173
another country once ordered, and he would never again allow
himself to be trapped in diplomatic negotiations.
In 1939 German ambassadors were kept away from London
and Warsaw; they were in fact forbidden to return to their
posts. The incident the Nazis had planned as the pretext for
war against Poland?an assault on a radio station inside Ger
many?would be organized and managed directly from Berlin.
Furthermore, as Hitler explained to his military leaders on
August 22, 1939, he had things organized so well that his only
worry was that at the last minute some Schweinehund would
come along with a compromise and again cheat him of war.
The allusion to Chamberlain and Munich was unmistakable.
And it ought to be noted that this "lesson" of Munich remained
with him. When the Soviet Union made desperate efforts in
1941 to avert war with Germany, by volunteering the most
extensive concessions, by offering to join the Tripartite Pact
and by soliciting diplomatic approaches from Berlin, Hitler
once again claimed to be worried about only one thing: a last
minute compromise offer that would make it difficult for him
to continue on the road to yet another extension of the war.
As for the remainder of Czechoslovakia, he was even more
determined that it be destroyed. The German government
devoted itself in the months after Munich to accomplishing
that objective, never realizing that, in the face of universal
relief over the avoidance of war, the violation of the agreement
just signed would make any further step by Germany the
occasion for war. In 1939 no one listened to Nazi tales of
persecuted Germans in Poland; the Germans themselves had
demonstrated to everyone that such propaganda was merely a
pretext for actions with entirely different objectives. And when
soundings were taken in London before the invasion of Poland,
the answer was that Czechoslovakia must have its independence
back first before any negotiations; similar soundings after the
German conquest of Poland were answered with the demand
that both Czechoslovakia and Poland be restored to independ
ence. Since Hitler and his associates had not been interested in
the fate of those who had been used as propaganda instruments,
they never could understand that others had taken the issue
seriously?but only once.
v
A third facet of the Munich agreement
it from the perspective of fifty years is th
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174 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
by the opening of wartime archives and the progress of re
search. The account of German policy presented here is in
large part based on materials that became available after World
War II. The British archives have also been opened and show
a government hoping against hope for a peaceful settlement,
but prepared to go to war if there were an invasion of Czech
oslovakia in spite of all efforts at accommodating what were
perceived as extreme but not entirely unreasonable demands.
We now know that Chamberlain was correctly reported as
willing to contemplate the territorial cession of the German
inhabited portions of Czechoslovakia in early May 1938, and
that the British knew that there was no serious French military
plan to assist Czechoslovakia?the only offensive operation
planned by the French if war broke out was into Libya from
Tunisia. It is now also known that in June 1938 Winston
Churchill explained to a Czechoslovak official that it was essen
tial for Czechoslovakia to work out an agreement with Konrad
Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, and that although
he, Churchill, was criticizing Chamberlain, he might well have
followed the same policy if he had held the responsibilities of
power.
It is also clear that there were serious doubts within the
British government?which may or may have not been justi
fied?about the ability of Britain and France to defeat Ger
many, and a determination that if war came and victory were
attained, the German-inhabited portions of Czechoslovakia
would not be returned to Prague's control.
The question of whether or not Britain and France would
have been militarily better off had they gone to war in 1938
will remain a subject for debate for historians. Most would
agree that the defenses of Czechoslovakia would have proved
more formidable in 1938 than those of Poland in 1939, but
then the question remains whether, since there was to be no
attack by the French in the west in 1938, a somewhat longer
Czechoslovak resistance would have made any significant dif
ference. It can be argued that the Germans used the last year
of peace more effectively than the British and the French, but
it must also be recalled that new British fighter planes and
radar defenses would not in any case have been available to
meet a German onslaught in 1939 as they were for the Battle
of Britain in 1940. And the excellent Czechoslovak tanks
Germany acquired must be weighed against Poland's essential
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MUNICH AFTER 50 YEARS 175
1939 contribution to breaking the German Enigma-machine
code.
There are other factors to be considered, including several
most difficult to assess. What, for example, would have been
the evolution of U.S. attitudes toward a European war in which
Canada remained neutral, as it might have done had war
broken out in 1938? Certainly there was in 1938 great doubt
about the economic and fiscal ability of Britain to sustain a
second great war within a generation, at a time when financial
support from the United States was prohibited by Congress. In
an age of determined American isolation, no one anticipated
the lend-lease program on which Britain would later prove so
dependent.
The other side of this coin is the clarity of British policy,
whether one agrees with it or not, in the year after Munich. If
this Munich pact were broken, it was agreed, then the next
German aggression that was resisted by the victim would bring
on war. It is from this perspective that the pairing in internal
British government discussions of Holland and Belgium with
Romania and Poland must be understood: the key issue was
any further step, not its specific direction or victim. With this
determination came a resigned recognition of the likely, per
haps unavoidable, cost of a new war for a weakened empire.
In August 1939 Foreign Office official Gladwyn Jebb, years
later the British representative at the United Nations, was told
by an official of the German embassy in London that in a
general war in which, as the Englishman predicted, all in the
end fought against Germany and eventually smashed it, there
would be only two victors, the Soviet Union and America. The
German then asked Jebb, "How would England like to be an
American dominion?" Jebb replied that "she would infinitely
prefer to be an American dominion than a German Gau."1
The opening of French archives has suggested to some a
rather more charitable view of France's policy. Efforts to
rehabilitate the French leadership of the 1930s have focused
on the deficiencies of British policy, the terrible weakening of
France as a result of World War I and the social and political
cleavages of the postwar years. Certainly the view of most
scholars on French policy in the immediate post-World War I
years has changed substantially: France is now viewed as weak
1 Rohan Butler, ed., Documents on British Foreign Policy, Third Series, Vol. 7, London:
H.M. Stationery Office, 1954, p. 556.
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176 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
ened and frightened rather than combative and assertive, while
the peace treaty of 1919 is increasingly seen as far more
favorable to Germany than either German propaganda or
subsequent popular views in the United States and Great Brit
ain have pictured it.
Nevertheless, the archives demonstrate even more hesitation
in French policy than was previously believed. In the terrible
civil war in Spain (still raging at the time of the crisis over
Czechoslovakia) it now is clear that the initiative for the policy
of nonintervention came from Paris, not from London as was
long believed. More immediately relevant is the revelation,
previously cited, that in July 1938 the French government
secretly warned Prague that French military assistance could
not be expected. The publicly advanced argument that France
could not commit itself in the absence of a British promise to
help was a sham; but in response to a plea from the Czechoslo
vak government, this deception was kept secret. When the
French government learned that the British were indeed seri
ous about fighting if Germany invaded, the ensuing panic in
Paris helped precipitate the decision of Chamberlain to fly to
Berchtesgaden.
The new light shed on French policy in 1938 also clarifies
the extraordinary evolution of French policy in World War II;
first the insistence on trying to conduct the war in Scandinavia
or the Caucasus, and, after the collapse of France in 1940, the
Vichy French willingness to fight the English, other Frenchmen
and the Americans, but under no circumstances the real ene
mies of France: Germany, Italy and Japan.
The archives of the Soviet Union remain closed to scholars,
though lately there are signs that this might change. New light
on Soviet policy has been shed, however, not only by Soviet
documentary publications but also by material from the files
of other powers. A new perspective on Soviet policy comes as
a result of our knowledge that throughout the 1930s Stalin,
who regarded Britain, not Germany, as the Soviet Union's
main enemy, was trying to arrange an agreement with Hitler;
the policy reversal that led to the Soviet-German Nonaggres
sion Pact in 1939 was made by Berlin, not Moscow. Further
more, Jiri Hochman has now demonstrated on the basis of
material from the Romanian archives that Moscow deliberately
rejected the option of sending land and air forces across Ro
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MUNICH AFTER 50 YEARS 177
mania to assist Czechoslovakia in case of war in the 1938 crisis.2
These factors help explain why the Soviet Union was the only
major power outside the Axis that recognized the legality of
the disappearance of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and urged the
Western powers to follow this example.
Americans have learned from the experience in Vietnam
that a democracy should only enter a major war if its people
see and feel the issues as so important to themselves as to
warrant a sacrifice of blood and treasure. Few, if any, in this
country urged the defense of Czechoslovakia against invasion
in 1968 or action against its occupation since then. Perhaps
someday this thought will make it easier for people to under
stand the reluctance of the dominions to rush to the defense
of Czechoslovakia thirty years earlier, and why they implored
the London government not to do so either. There are many
objectionable acts committed in international affairs that are
not necessarily perceived as so threatening to the national
interest of third parties as to warrant calling on many to risk
their lives to stop them. If a nation is to undertake the costs of
war, what is needed is a popular recognition of its necessity,
not the hurling of slogans.
What about the people most immediately affected? The
Germans had entrusted their fate to a leader who had promised
to establish a one-party state as had been instituted in the Soviet
Union and Italy and to lead them "whither they must shed
their blood." He certainly kept these promises, and by doing so
led them to ruin.
For the people of Czechoslovakia, he brought other great
disasters; first the end of their independence, and then their
subservience to the Soviet Union. As for the Sudeten Germans,
he brought a fate that included the return to Germany they
had shouted for, but in a way they had not anticipated. Here
is a lesson others might ponder. If you shout for something
long and loud enough, you run the risk of getting it. Having
tried to settle the problem by moving the boundary, the Allies
decided, after Germany had broken that arrangement, to let
Czechoslovakia move the people. The Sudeten Germans are
no longer ruled from Prague, but that is because they were
driven from their homes into post-World War II Germany.
2 The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934-1938, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1984, pp. 194-201.
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178 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
They have indeed come "Home into the Reich" as their slogan
required. Those in other parts of the world who prefer not to
live under a government they consider inappropriate for them
selves might want to think about the risk of expulsion as a
concomitant of the hope for new borders.
In the United States, the "lesson" of Munich may well remain
that appeasing aggressors, by making concessions to them or
merely verbally condemning their actions, only encourages
them and makes them more willing to take greater risks. There
is without doubt substance to this view, but only in a context
in which the alternatives and prospects and costs are assessed
soberly. As leaders contemplate the prospect of war, they would
be well advised to make sure that their people, or at least a
very large number of them, are prepared to make the relevant
commitment and are ready to pay the price of sticking to it.
In 1938, in neither Britain nor France?to say nothing of
the United States or the Soviet Union?were the masses clearly
willing to run the risk of war unless Germany committed the
most obvious and direct outrages. And the British dominions
had made clear their determination to stay out. The following
year Britain and France and the dominions acted in response
to the German attack on Poland. On the first occasion in World
War II in which a British army decisively defeated a German
army?at El Alamein in 1942?the majority of the divisions in
the British Eighth Army had come from the Commonwealth
to fight alongside the soldiers of the United Kingdom. At a
time when New Zealanders appear to some observers to be
inclined to opt out of their alliances, their great share in that
significant battle deserves to be recalled as a part of the lesson
of Munich for societies in which, by whatever mechanism, the
public's preferences control the policies of the state.
Those commitments, policies and alliances that can reason
ably be expected to involve a country in a great war must be
clearly articulated, understood at least in general by the public
and perceived as truly essential to the nation's security. In an
age of nuclear weapons that might be a useful "lesson" of the
Munich conference.
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