Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France

This book examines the role of public opinion on the formulation of British and French foreign policy between the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the outbreak of the Second World War. More specifically, it analyses how public opinion was perceived by the respective policymaking elites, and thus influenced the course of foreign policy. Therefore, rather than offering an analysis of public opinion per se, it analyses how certain dominant tendencies of public opinion carried more weight, pervading the corridors of power, and thus assuming significance as an historical actor, contributing to the policymaking process. This book therefore fills a considerable gap in an otherwise vast literature, seeking to ascertain the extent to which public opinion can be said to have influenced the direction of foreign policy in a crucial juncture of British and French diplomatic history. Employing an innovative and unique methodological framework, the author distinguishes between two categories of representation: firstly, 'reactive' representations of opinion, the immediate and spontaneous reactions of the public to circumstances/events as they occur; and secondly, 'residual' representations, which can be defined as the remnants of previous memories and experiences, the more general tendencies of opinion considered characteristic of previous years, even previous decades. The book argues that the previously dominant 'residual representations' of opinion were gradually challenged and superseded by 'reactive representations', increasingly indicative of a hardening of opinion and thus undermining the credibility of the appeasement policy inaugurated at Munich. Moreover, it is argued that the French government of Eacute;douard Daladier was consistently more attuned to the evolution of 'reactive' representations than the British government of Neville Chamberlain. Consequently, it was the French rather than the British who reflected a hardening of public opinion by pursuing a firmer policy towards the European dictatorships within weeks of the Munich Agreement being signed. In Britain, it was only once 'reactive' representations of public opinion indicated unequivocally that appeasement had lost public support that the government effectively abandoned a policy of concession. A sophisticated analysis of a crucial period in international history, this book will be essential reading for scholars of the origins of World War II, the political scenes of late 1930s Britain and France, and the study of public opinion and it affects on policy.