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Writer's pictureMichael Julien

Putin might be today’s Hitler, but history offers little guide as to what happens next

Updated: Feb 15, 2023

Britain’s support for Ukraine has surely been partly driven by its regret at having appeased the Nazis says Professor Robert Tombs for The Telegraph - 12.02.23


It is an ingrained belief that we can learn lessons from the past. Those who fail to do so, in George Santayana’s familiar phrase, are “condemned to repeat it”. There are reasons for scepticism. Knowing the past does not save humanity from repeating even its darkest experiences.


Some may even learn perverse lessons, as Hitler did from the Armenian genocide. Moreover, history is as enigmatic as the Oracle at Delphi, and needs careful interpretation. Nevertheless, it does seem that Britain – both governments and people – have been applying what they think is a lesson of history over the past year.


That lesson is that abandoning Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 did not save us from danger. “Appeasement” became a shameful word in our political lexicon, which it had certainly not been before. The memory marked us deeply, and even those who know little about history absorb its gist: appeasing aggressors does not work.


This has often been repeated by politicians, and repetition entrenches it as conventional wisdom. It has led us astray in the past. Sir Anthony Eden embarked on the reckless 1956 Suez fiasco because he decided the Egyptian leader Nasser was a new Hitler. One of Tony Blair’s justifications for invading Iraq was that he feared being “the Stanley Baldwin who did nothing”.


It seems plausible that the speed with which Britain sent military aid to Ukraine, and its having set the pace since, with anti-tank missiles, with the first pledge of tanks, and recently with the offer to train Ukrainian pilots, is because of a broad cultural and political consensus derived from the collective memory of appeasement. Consequently, opposition to today’s policy is muted. I hope and believe that we have got it right this time: appeasing Putin would have stored up even worse dangers in Europe and Asia.


Not all countries draw this lesson from the 1930s. A French acquaintance said to me, “Well, it ended less well for us than for you”. Americans are always tempted to isolate themselves from European conflicts. Germans have their own dark memories. Other motives are certainly in play – most obviously the need for Russian energy – but these memories are surely as weighty as our own very different ones.


History’s lessons are always ambiguous. Our position now, to pursue the comparison, is as if we had decided in 1938 to support Czechoslovakia against Nazi Germany, rather than pressuring the Czechs (who were armed and ready to fight) to give in. The parallels are plain.


The appeasers argued that Czechoslovakia was not really a country, and that part of its territory was inhabited by people who wanted to be part of a neighbouring state. How could one risk a world war on such uncertain grounds? Our potential allies did not want it. Better to compromise. As the head of the Foreign Office put it, “As long as Hitler could pretend he was incorporating Germans in the Reich, we could pretend he had a case.”


But with Putin we did the opposite, encouraging and aiding the Ukrainians to resist. At this point history goes blank. It cannot be a guide to what did not happen. Would the Czechs have defended themselves successfully against an unprepared German army? Would Hitler have been overthrown by his generals? And then what? A return to peace? Another dictator just as bad? An interminable war into which we would inevitably have been drawn?


At least our much-maligned predecessors – Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the mass of appeasers of all parties – knew what they were risking. Despite their wishful thinking, they were ready to face the worst if necessary. Baldwin began rearmament in 1936, and Chamberlain doubled defence spending between 1938 and 1939. Huge numbers of people volunteered for civil defence or the armed forces.


But today we are still hoping for the best, trusting in the Ukrainians to defeat aggression for us, and so far showing little sign of wanting to do much more. Even though the Labour Party is now advocating higher defence spending – something they stubbornly opposed in the 1930s – there is no sign of action.


The divergence between Britain and the other main Western states was wide after the Russians invaded. Macron was desperate to do a deal with Putin, Biden vacillated, and the Germans even forbade the RAF to fly arms to Ukraine through their airspace.


Did Brexit facilitate British boldness? The contrast with our actions in the Balkans in the 1990s is stark. Then Britain insisted on following a “European” policy despite it “falling to bits around us” (in the words of the then foreign secretary Douglas Hurd). Surely we would have done the same in 2022 had we still been a member-state.


What had changed was the mindset of those who made the decisions – Boris Johnson and Ben Wallace, who are believed to have overridden their advisors, as Professor Gwythian Prins argued in these pages. Perhaps they wanted to show that Britain had not been marginalised by leaving the EU. If so, they amply succeeded. As the Ukrainians have acknowledged, Britain was their first and crucial supporter.


And now? History teaches other lessons too. That there is rarely a quick solution to major conflicts. Wars are never “over by Christmas”. We may be nearer the beginning than the end. These are lessons we may not yet have learnt.



For this article in pdf, please click here:

Professor Robert Tombs is a British historian of France and is the co-editor of History Reclaimed. He is professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. Prior to this, he was a reader in the subject until 2007. Tombs is the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government.

Neville Chamberlain arrives in Munich - September 1938

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