Allan Beattie on a critic of appeasement
Mr Colvin's book consists of extracts from recently-released official papers, used to illus- trate a view of British foreign policy in the pre-war period. The documentary extracts will be of great value to students, the accom- panying commentaries of relatively little : they constitute yet another example of the skill of the critics of appeasement in com- bining inadequate history with incompetent pamphleteering.
Mr Colvin puts forward a thesis encoun- tered in his book on Vansittart : Britain failed to rearm, failed to take seriously the need for allies, and hopelessly misjudged the nature of German intentions. The sub-title of the book ('How the meetings in 10 Downing Street, 1937-9, led to the Second World War') indicates the extent to which Mr Colvin places responsibility almost wholly upon the British, and his account of the nature of Chamberlain's Prime Ministership narrows responsibility still further. This is a plaus- ible thesis, vitiated in Mr Colvin's case by the incompleteness of his argument and the naivety of its presentation. The military, economic, domestic-political and inter- national limitations upon British' govern- ments after 1932 are noted in the introduc- tion, never to reappear. The alternatives to Chamberlain's policies are barely discussed, and their practicability consequently un-
examined. Chamberlain's 'domination' of the Cabinet is exaggerated by almost total re- liance on Cabinet papers to the exclusion of other forms of evidence, and is subtly mis- understood through Mr Colvin's failure to indicate the precise respects in which Cham- berlain departed from the traditional pro- cedures of Cabinet government (Vansittart's absence from the relevant meetings is fre- quently noted, but the reader is given no indication as to why, given established prac- tices, he should have been present).
These contextual shortcomings are com- pounded by what is perhaps the most curious failure of all : the failure to understand Chamberlain's policy. Mr Colvin is not alone in believing that Chamberlain saw Hitler through liberal-rational spectacles, expecting him to behave in a predictable manner. Yet this was not the case : nearly all Chamberlain's difficulties arose from the fact that he saw in Hitler a unique depart- ure from previous standards of international conduct, thus leading him to discount (though not to ignore) the possibility that Hitler's actions were, given his circumstances and the attitudes adopted by the British, by no means irrational or unpredictable.
Mr Colvin does not tuialyse the nature of Chamberlain's opponents, their divisions and uncertainties, and their political weaknesses.
His failure to penetrate the years prior to 1937 leads him to ignore the subtleties and difficulties of the policies of Baldwin and Eden before Chamberlain's accession, and gives him no incentive to inquire into precisely what it was about these policies and their changing circumstances which led Chamberlain to reject them.
It is a measure of Mr Colvin's failure that Chamberlain emerges from this book as not so much mistaken but rather as a man whose actions are incomprehensible unless explained by the umbrella category of pure folly. Since Chamberlain was demonstrably not foolish, both his critics and his historians will remain unsatisfied with Mr Colvin's exertions.
Allan Beattie is a Lecturer in Political Science at the LSE and author of English Party Politics.
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