5 NOVEMBER 1988, Page 42

Sleepwalking into nightmare

Robert Kee

PEACE FOR OUR TIME The strength of the British obsession with the second world war, about to be prolonged for at least six years by the 50th anniversary syndrome, is in inverse ratio to the actual experience. We, after all, suf- fered less in the course of that war than any other European country except the neut- rals. Yet.books and television programmes (not forgetting the cathartic 'Allo! 'Al100 hold attention among us more compulsive- ly than anywhere else. Why should this be so?

If an obsession can be defined — is, indeed, so defined by the dictionary — as vexation by an evil spirit from without, an obsession's continued hold implies failure to exorcise that spirit. Perhaps we have been trying to exorcise the wrong one. Perhaps we would do better to concentrate on our responsibility for allowing that war to come about, with all the evil it brought to so many millions and, to a lesser degree, ourselves. No better beginning could be made than with this lively and intelligent book.

That its author is a Belgian, Jewish, a distinguished former diplomat, ambassa- dor to Britain in the 1970s, are matters of no relevance. What is important is that he came to manhood at the beginning of the 1930s, that he experienced in a discerning heart and mind the full emotional trauma of that 'low, dishonest decade', and that he now looks back on the period fortified with wide reading in secondary sources and occasional dips into the British, Belgian, French and German diplomatic archives. It is not a scholar's book though there is little, I think, in his appraisal with which a scholar would fundamentally disagree. He starts reasonably enough with the self-centred feebleness of the British re- sponse to Japan's invasion of Manchukuo in 1931 (under an Emperor whom, even in his death throes, we still seem anxious to respect). That pillar of high-minded princi- ple, Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and the 'collective security' it was said to enshrine, were thus early revealed as the hollow sham they were to remain for the rest of the decade which did not prevent them from con- tinuing to be revered as a convenient moral refuge from action.

Not that Britain alone was to blame for the rest of the sorry tale — and certainly not alone the British Right which formed the Government. But Britain, if no longer in reality one of the two dominant powers in the world, still gave herself airs as if she were, and cannot escape the responsibility with France of that position. She must even accept some of France's responsibility too. The debilitating effect on French morale of Britain's insistence on reconciliation with Germany at the expense of France's con- cern for her own security does much to explain not only France's betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich but also the events of 1940.

So how did we become fixed on such a disastrous track? The essence of the charge is not villainy but that on which all govern- ments need to be regularly tested: smug self-satisfaction and the lack of awareness of reality this can engender. It has often been said that the democracies slept while Hitler acted, but it was worse than that. They walked in their sleep, believing them- selves to be awake and knowing what they were doing. Rothschild may exaggerate when he attributes to Chamberlain the belief that he was being led by the hand of God but certainly his progress through the diplomatic field from the beginning of 1938 onwards suggests something of that happy somnambulist posture. He did not like Hitler, he did not like the morality of the Nazi state Hitler had created, but he thought that such considerations, along with consideration for the feelings of peo- ple of whom we knew nothing, should he kept out of the field of British foreign Policy, whose central aim had been for years the balanced.appeasement of Europe in the interests of the stability of the British Empire.

That Hitler had harnessed German en- thusiasm for rectification of Versailles to expansionist aims which altered the whole context of foreign policy was something which continued to escape Chamberlain even after he had grasped it. `. . . Force is the only argument that Germany under- stands,' he wrote as Hitler took over Austria. Yet he was to let him have the Sudetenland, acquiesce in the seizure of the rest of Czechoslovakia and hope to do a deal with Hitler over Poland even after the Germans had attacked it.

All this and much more Robert Roths- child illuminates with a nice eye for histor- ical detail and a number of neat sketches of tangentially disastrous characters such as Laval and Gamelin. Nobody, except poss- ibly Churchill and his friends, comes out of it well. Even the legendary knight-errant of the period, Anthony Eden, is revealed correctly as wearing armour made of card- board. Praise then for Rothschild and his translator Anthony Rhodes, though the publisher must take a rap for more than 40 misprints.