Graham Stewart

That worthless piece of paper

Munich, by David Faber<br /> <br type="_moz" />

issue 27 September 2008

Munich, by David Faber

David Faber’s account of the Munich crisis has been published to mark the 70th anniversary of the four-power conference that made appeasement a dirty word.  But it is timely as well as commemorative. 

True, the recent comparisons drawn between Hitler and Putin are dangerously misplaced. Nonetheless, Western politicians are finding themselves debating the same sort of issues over Georgia — with Ukraine and the Baltic States to follow — that divided their forebears over Hitler’s Czechoslovakian demands in 1938. Are national boundaries inviolate or subject to revision along ethnic grounds? Would offering guarantees to small countries protect them or make confrontation from their big neighbour more certain? Most fundamental of all, to what extent should concessions be forced from what Neville Chamberlain once called ‘people of whom we know nothing’ in order to preserve the peace and quiet of the rest of us?

It is not hard to fathom why Chamber-lain’s appeasement policy has held such an enduring appeal for historians.

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