How Did The Munich Agreement And Appeasement A Controversial Policy

The Munich Agreement and Appeasement policy was a controversial policy employed by the British to avoid a war that would destroy them. Their tactics brought Appeasement to the center of political debate, creating multiple views of this strategy. Chamberlain, the man responsible, was viewed differently by separate political parties. This tactic was Britain’s last chance at avoiding a war that they were in no shape to fight in. However, they put themselves in this undesirable position by political errors that severely crippled them. There are many possible rationales of why representatives of Britain signed the Munich Agreement, and why they thought that avoiding war would be beneficial to the country. Another reason was that Britain did
Also, in 1939, appeasement was described as “a clever plan of selling off your friends to buy off your enemies.” It is clear that appeasing to Hitler was a controversial action, and was used because it was a last-ditch effort for peace. People began saying that appeasement was a weak and fearful tactic, so in 1950, Winston Churchill, a British politician, defended the idea of appeasement by stating that it was a noble, intelligent strategy. The perception of appeasement also changed over a two-year span. Before 1937, appeasement was viewed by a large majority of people as a positive action that calmed hostility between countries. However, after 1939, the view of appeasement completely changed. People thought of appeasement as negative, and that it was simply “buying off” your enemies or “sacrificing principles” to satisfy an enemy. A. J. P. Taylor, Author of The Origins of the Second World War, argues that there were several critical errors made by Chamberlain that caused the war to be inevitable, such as Chamberlain offering a unilateral military guarantee to Poland in March of 1939. This was a devastating consequence
It did not prevent a war, in fact not long after this World War II started. On the morning of September 26, an unofficial version of the Godesberg Terms appeared in the New York Times that had been released by the Czechoslovak government. That weekend, the whole country was preparing for war. Everyone seemed to recognize the fact that they had failed, and that a catastrophic war was going to occur. The population was still recovering from World War I. For most of the population, their only memories of World War I were digging trenches, which at the time they still vividly remembered. World War II would bring greater terror and death than any of them could have thought of. According to Harold Macmillan, the British people were “grimly, but quietly and soberly, making up their minds to face war.” They knew they failed. At 11:15 AM on September 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain broadcasted to the nation, “We are now at war.” This was the official British declaration of war on Germany. At this moment, the Munich Agreement had failed. The Allies’ effort in preventing a war had been futile, and a Second World War had