Clearing the bog
D. C. WATT
Munich 1938 Keith Robbins (Cassell 55s) Poland and the Western Powers 1938-39 Anna M. Cienciala (Routledge and Kegan Paul 56s)
Contemporary historians find themselves con- fronted with a dilemma at its strongest when they examine the history of recent international politics. Not for them the comforting myth that their chosen subjects are tabula rasa. The blackboards they inherit look like nothing so much as the wall of a gents in Wembley Stadium at the end of a cup final: odds, graffiti, erasions, when not deliberate falsifi- cations, nationalist and individualist boasts, slurs on the referee's parentage, honesty and ultimate destination. Their task is on the one hand to clear away the untruths and half- truths, on the other to fill in those parts of the story which are missing.
The work of these two authors excellently illustrates the difference between the two ap- proaches. Mr Robbins, of the University of York, is one of that distinguished group of young scholars who came from St Antony's College, Oxford, in the early 1960s. His pre- vious work has been concerned with liberal and radical attitudes to international affairs in Britain. He writes clearly and intelligently and with frequent recourse to the relevant private papers on the background of liberal- radical thought, from which came much of the language and concepts of appeasement as well as some of its doughtiest opponents. But, with this exception, his book is concerned with re-evaluation rather than with citing new material. Indeed, it must be confessed that his bibliography reveals a number of obvious and startling gaps. The absence of any of the re- cent material published in Hungary and Poland, much of it in Western languages, may perhaps be excused, as may the absence of any Italian material, in view of Mr Robbins's concentration on Britain's role in the crisis. But the absence of any citation of the numer- ous French memoirs, of Bonnet, the Foreign Minister, Gamelin, Chief of the French Gen- eral Staff, of Andre Francois-Poncet, Leon Noel, Robert Coulondre, the ambassadors in Berlin, Moscow and Warsaw, let alone of the volumes of evidence produced at the post- war French parliamentary commission of inquiry, is more than a little regrettable.
Mr Robbins, it emerges, is almost entirely concerned with Britain and British interpreta- tions of the Munich crisis, especially with attempts to erect what he calls 'anti-appease- ment' into a general law of foreign policy. His plea is for a fair and considered judgment by the yardsticks of British politics at the time: as a judicious summary of a controversy which still continues, the book is well worth reading.
Where Mr Robbins's book, despite appear-
ances, is essentially a lucid contribution to an intellectual debate, Miss Cienciala, a Canadian citizen of Polish (diplomatic) parenthood, is concerned with a delineation, almost de novo, of an area in which most Western students have to confess virtual ignorance. There has, in fact, been a good deal of material pub- lished, both by émigré Poles and in contem- porary Poland, on the foreign policy of that country, the threat to whose independence from Germany brought Britain to enter the Second World War. But the vast bulk has been in Polish, a language known, among con- temporary historians, only to the late Sir Lewis Namier.
Miss Cienciala has woven all this material into a fascinating and indispensable account of Polish relations with Germany and the West, between the opening of the Czech crisis in January 1938 and the issue of the British guarantee to Poland in March 1939. Its cen- tral theme concerns the continuous efforts and the failure of Marshal Pilsudski's chosen man, Colonel Joszef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, to find a role befitting Poland's ci-devant claim to be a Great Power. As such, it is a study in the delusion and futility which did much to contribute to the hreakdosma of security in East Europe, from which Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia alone profited. It has, incidentally, a number of uneasy parallels with the recent foreign policy of this country. Colonel Beck's vision of a Third Europe, an intermarium stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea under his leadership, collapsed very quickly in the aftermath of Munich. He was left facing urgent pressure from Nazi Germany to accept satellite status in a campaign to expel Britain from Europe, as a preliminary to the drive for Lebensraum in the East.
The consequences of his refusal lie beyond Miss Cienciala's narrative, which ends with the giving of the British guarantee. Miss Cien- ciala has not perhaps penetrated to the heart of the issue of that guarantee, which she sees as a logical outgrowth of British anxiety fol- lowing the German occupation of Bohemia. It was, in fact, the result of a sudden panic brought on by a quite gratuitous piece of mis- information planted on Mr Ian Colvin, who had just been expelled as News Chronicle correspondent in Berlin, by persons unknown, concerning an imminent German attack on Danzig and Poland. It was the second such false alarm in a fortnight, the first having been the equally false report of a German ultimatum to Rumania. Both appear to have been designed to spur the British government . into taking a stand against Germany, a sad comment on Britain's image in European eyes at the tune. The Chamberlain-Halifax ménage was subject to such sudden panics and loss of nerve, but this must have been quite the most significant. Rarely can a decision, taken for such erroneous reasons, have been basically so correct in import.
Mr Robbins's message is, so he says, that the great lesson of Munich is that there are no great lessons. This is to undervalue his own work. For both these books_ underline the degree to which statesmen, victims of their own systematic misconceptions, can stagger into decisions which may crown them with fame and fortune or plunge them into disgrace and defeat. For, in matters of foreign policY dogma, theory and systematic preconceptions are the enemies of clear seeing, cool deciding and calm doing.
Previous page
