The Romance of Decline the Historiography of Appeasement by Patrick Finney

Author:Patrick Finney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2009-12-27T07:45:26+00:00

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appeasers had been flawed and that their designs had not turned out as they anticipated:

appeasement, which was intended to conciliate, failed to

pacify. Rearmament, which was meant to deter, failed to do so. War, which it was hoped to avoid, broke out on 3

September 1939, and the British Expeditionary Force proved inadequate for its task. (95)

If appeasement were redefined as a failure, then it would no longer be possible to discount its immoral dimension - the fact that it involved

'imposing sacrifices on the publics of countries who had looked to Britain as a model and a protector' (96)-as revisionism had through its preoccupation with structural constraints and realpolitik logic. This view would refocus attention on to personality and ideology, the subjective motives and contingent choices of individual statesmen. The future importance of personality was foreshadowed in Larry Fuchser's sceptical 1983 study of Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement (which might have had more impact without its encumbering psycho-historical jargon) (97) while in 1986 Paul Kennedy, to a certain extent recanting his earlier revisionism, argued that it was necessary to re-emphasise

those very important personal feelings behind appeasement: the contempt and indifference felt by many leading

Englishmen towards east-central Europe, the half-fear-halfadmiration with which Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were viewed, the detestation of communism, the apprehensions

about future war. (98)

31 It was only in the 1990s that a full-blown counter-revisionist interpretation came into focus, crystallised by the publication in 1993 of R.

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