Here is an answer to a question from last week paraphrased as "Did Chamberlain actually think that he could avoid war, or did he use the Munich Agreement to give Britain more time to prepare for a war he knew was coming?"
When we talk about the „appeasement“ of Hitler, you have to remember that the word did not have such a negative connotation at the time. Those attempting to pacify Hitler used the word openly to describe their strategy, and outside observers, such as American policymakers, praised the likes of Neville Chamberlain for pursuing such a policy. Indeed, it was not until after Hitler violated the Munich Agreement by occupying the rest of Czechoslovakia that the term „appeasement“ became pejorative. When we look back at 1938, Chamberlain is already condemned, and historical analysis of the Munich Conference starts from the assumption that the deal with Hitler was a mistake that helped to spawn another world war. Thus Chamberlain's detractors have a much easier time than his defenders (the „revisionists“), who are forced to spend much of their analysis contextualizing appeasement in order to convince their readers that it was the best option that Chamberlain had given what he knew then. But don't get me wrong—I maintain the Orthodox position that Chamberlain could have and should have taken a more aggressive stance against Hitler prior to the Second World War.
What was Appeasement?
By definition (without any of the negative connotation we ascribe to the term today), „appeasement“ a diplomatic term that means to make concessions to an enemy power in order to avoid a more destructive conflict. The word is almost always used now to refer specifically to British appeasement of Germany in the 1930s. The policy actually began before Chamberlain became prime minister of Britain. According to the Versailles Treaty negotiated by the Allied powers at the end of the First World War, Germany was not allowed to militarize the Rhineland, but when Hitler did just that in March of 1936, the British government not only passively allowed it but some even openly conceded that the Germans should be allowed to militarize their own territory. Likewise, the British did nothing when it became public knowledge that Hitler had been rapidly rebuilding the German military in violation of Versailles. The British response was to avoid conflict and to build up their own military as a deterrent to war. It is understandable that in 1936, just eighteen years after the bloody and pointless First World War had ended, that the British did not desire to enter into a second, and possibly more damaging, conflict.
When Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937, he continued to pursue the already-existing British policy of appeasement. This meant continuing to rebuild the British military—specifically the navy and air forces, which could be used to project British power without engaging a large ground force in another European war—but it also meant continuing to ignore German aggression on the continent. In March of 1938, after having stirred up unrest in Austria, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to occupy the nation and restore order. In the infamous „Anchsluss,“ Hitler annexed Austria in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Britain protested, but only weakly. Hitler then turned his attention to Czechoslovakia, a nation created by the Allies at the end of the First World War that included a large German population in the Sudeten region bordering Germany. The Allies had allowed Czechoslovakia to maintain this territory in part because the Sudeten sat in traditional Bohemia, but also because the mountainous region provided Czechoslovakia with protection against German aggression, though many, even in 1919, had felt that it was a mistake to allow the Czechoslovaks to rule over such a large German minority. When Hitler threatened war if Czechoslovakia did not cede this ethnic-German territory to him (and supporters in the region had called for Hitler to rescue them from Czech domination), the government of Edward Benes began mobilizing the Czechoslovak military in response. This „May Crisis“ led to months of anxiety and tense negotiation in Europe, which culminated in the infamous Munich Conference of September, at which the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Italy—but not Czechoslovakia—agreed that Hitler could annex the ethnically-German Sudeten region
Why not allow Hitler to annex the ethnically-German Sudeten region?
The analysis I provided above, as well as the analysis provided by Chamberlain at the time, seems to justify capitulation to Hitler over the Sudeten. After all, it was primarily Germans he was annexing into Germany—didn't this correspond with the ideal of the self-determination of peoples? And why would Britain go to war in order to esnure that Czechs could rule over Germans? Indeed, in justifying the appeasement of Hitler, Chamberlain had earlier declared that it would be „horrible, fantastic, incredible“ for the British people to go to war over a „far away country“ populated by people „of whom we know nothing.“ Hitler now has a terrible reputation (to say the least), but we have to recognize that in 1938, many people, including Chamberlain, sympathized with Germany's demands that all Germans be united into one nation. We might even be able to sympathize with this point of view if we ignore the fact that we now know that Hitler had always intended to go to war even if he was given the Sudeten region. In this light, critics of Chamberlain's appeasement such as Winston Churchill may seem like warmongers, even in retrospect. What reasons did Chamberlain have then to také a more aggresive stance against Hitler in 1938?
In short, by deciding to appease Hitler, Chamberlain re-balanced the power structure in Europe in favor of Germany without gaining anything except a promise from Hitler that he would not use the increased strength of Germany for further aggression. It should be noted, however, that Czechoslovakia's defenses had not been designed to repel an invasion from Austria, and so the Anschluss had weakened Czechoslovakia as an ally well before Munich.
Continued below:
The truth is obviously that it was very foolish, but that's biased by hindsight that Chamberlain didn't have at the time. As with most subjective questions, the answer is complicated and far from definitive in any direction.
One has to consider the backdrop of the situation and the facts as most people understood them before forming an opinion.
First, consider the recent and familiar experience of WWI. A war that was so traumatizing it radically altered the perception of most of the civilized world toward warfare and dramatically changed the landscape of geopolitical intercourse. After the war there was an incredibly strong desire to avoid such a calamitous conflict in the future, which was a major motivation for the creation of the League of Nations as well as the creation of the Washington Naval Treaty. From the 1920s onward there was a desire and a perception that major war between modern, industrialized powers could be avoided through compromise and diplomacy.
Second, consider the perception of the balance of power in Europe prior to WWII. The landscape looked very different from the example of WWI, with its elaborate and omnipresent alliances spreading across the continent and a massive arms race of every kind between major powers. Germany's armed forces still looked fairly weak in the late 1930s, at best still building up to moderate strength. Moreover, Germany did not have a vast network of mutual defense alliances, at best it had an ally with a fairly weak power, Italy, and some questionable relations elsewhere. It was not until late 1939 that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, and even that was not a mutual defense alliance but merely a non-aggression pact. In fact, the Axis powers did not ally themselves together until after war had been underway for some time, which was very much an opposite situation from WWI.
Additionally, on paper the French/British armed forces looked to thoroughly outclass the German military. Their individual naval power was superior to Germany's, let alone combined, and their individual ground forces seemed much superior to Germany's as well, combined it wasn't even a competition. In fact, through much of the late 1930s France was quite capable of waltzing into Germany with its army and toppling the German regime.
Third, everyone knew that modern warfare required vast resources, especially petroleum, rubber, and metal, resources that Germany was generally lacking at home. Though nobody realistically believed that a war in Europe would be a protracted one, due to the weakness of Germany's military at the time, they well knew that Germany seemed to lack the resources to prosecute a long war.
For all these reasons many people felt that Hitler was more of a tin pot dictator than anything else, full of bluster as North Korea is now but more or less seemingly reluctant to engage in all out war. And, as mentioned, the feeling was that Hitler's military was sufficiently weak enough that it could be put in its place fairly handily by the combined British/French armed forces. The problem was then perceived more as a matter of how to avoid another total war in Europe where British/French forces rolled across the Rhine to bring Germany to heel, with the inevitable destruction and complication involved, than it was to put forward every effort to contain Hitler's military ambitions. There was rarely the idea on anyone's mind that he would get very far.
The invasions of Poland and the rapid conquest of France were quite shocking to the world, and came as a major surprise. Geopolitical leaders especially didn't appreciate how rapidly Germany's military might had grown, how sophisticated and robust their tactics were, how hard their soldiers fought, and how dramatically the new blitzkrieg tactics could transform the battlefield in a short period of time. The British and French forces were caught with their pants down, between April and June the German's invaded and conquered 5 different countries.
By then people saw the shape of things and saw the folly of having tried to appease Hitler. But before then there was still the seductive promise of peace and an absence of vastly destructive war. It had been quite some time since a European power had gone on an unfettered campaign of conquest across Europe, even the consolidation of Germany was a much more complicated affair that did not generally involve entire nations being put under the boot heel of another. It was not something people were prepared for, especially mentally.
In short, few at the time foresaw anything close to the level of mad conquest and destruction Hitler and the German military were actually capable of, and at the time the idea of "peace in our time" more involved the refusal to use one's own country's armed forces to brutally suppress petty German territorial ambitions than it did the concept of keeping a bottle on German conquest of Europe or the holocaust. People were eager to avoid widespread bloodshed in Europe again, and many people thought the Munich agreement did just that.