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. Its failure ensured the second world war. And this was far from the limit of its legacy. ‘The lessons of Munich’ set the language and the frame of reference for geopolitics in the near half-century of Cold War that followed. It even influenced Anthony Eden in his disastrous intervention over the Suez Canal, helping to embolden the cause of Arab nationalism.
Yet, while the general historiography of appeasement is formidable, David Faber is the first British historian to write a major book specifically on the Munich crisis since the works of John Wheeler-Bennett and Keith Robbins in the 1960s. His achievement is such that we might wait another 40 years before feeling the need for someone else to give it a go.
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