While studying European Fascism as an undergrad a decade ago one of my professors put forward his view that the western powers infamous policy of 'Appeasement' was actually active support for the Nazi regime rather than concessions to keep the peace.
His argument was that Britain/France saw a strong Germany as a bulwark against communism and thus gave Hitler free reign to rearm and begin interfering in the East, hoping that eventually his aggression would lead to a war with the USSR that Britain/France could watch from the sidelines.
He reinforced his argument by pointing out that the allies eventual intervention in defense of Poland came about only after the Nazis and Soviets had a agreed a non-aggression pact. Realizing their plan to play the Nazis and Communists off against each other had failed was the difference between the Czech annexation in March and the Poland invasion in September.
I find it an interesting way to re-frame the prewar period, but one at odds with the widely taught narrative of appeasement (they gave concessions because they had no will fight after WW1, they were too soft and Hitler took advantage, moral of the story is don't negotiate with aggressive powers).
Knowing the general political leaning of this professor (fairly radical left, and I say that as someone with a fairly left wing outlook) gave me a healthy skepticism of his framing of the capitalists/fascists being in cahoots against the communists. But his argument doesn't seem unreasonable, after all Allied troops had intervened in the Russian civil war less than 20 years before and the West clearly regarded communism as a major threat.
Is there a strong case to view 'Appeasement' as 'Support'?
Sorry that I'm answering this 5 days after you posted this, I only just noticed your post.
I'm going to assume by "Appeasement" that you mean specifically the 1938 Munich Agreement ceding Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Germany.
What should be addressed first and foremost is that France had signed into a defensive military alliance with Czechoslovakia, whereas the United Kingdom had no such deal with Czechoslovakia and therefore no ultimate defensive responsibility. France was only conditionally committed to offering Czechoslovakia military aid in the event that Great Britain would also come to Czechoslovakia’s aid, which the British government was decidedly not prepared to do (Mastný, The Czechs Under Nazi Rule, 16, 17) primarily for the reasons you touched on above of fatigue from the First World War and a lack of military preparedness in 1938. The Soviet Union had voiced multiple times to both Czechoslovakia and France that it would help militarily in a possible conflict against Germany, but this was conditional itself on a few factors, one of which, being France's involvement. The Soviet Union, however, was acutely aware that France would not ultimately help Czechoslovakia with military aid. Additionally, as the Soviet Union did not at that time share a border with Czechoslovakia, their forces would have either had to cross Romania or Poland in order to reach Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union was apprehensive to move any troops through either country, and in a telegram on May 29th, 1938, the Soviet Union’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, warned the Soviet delegation in Prague that the governments of Poland and Romania had agreed to engage in joint military action against the Soviet Union in the event that Soviet troops attempted to cross either of their borders. With no logistical way to get troops enmasse to Czechoslovak territory, as well as no binding entitlement to give Czechoslovakia aide with the lack of France's aide, the Soviet Union's consistent stressing of their willingness to help was ultimately empty posturing.
To elaborate on other causes for the "Appeasement" policy, an important fact to keep in mind was that after World War I and the Paris Peace conference, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom set a precedent that self-determination would dictate the make-up and borders of contemporary nation-states. This was articulated in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, where Wilson called for the “autonomous development” of the peoples living within the Austrian and Ottoman empires. Austria-Hungary, as a multi-ethnic empire and a defeated Central power, was notably singled out by Wilson in his tenth point. The Fourteen Points dictated the ideology of the West at the Paris Peace conference, and the significance of the document should not be undercut. That being said, according to the 1921 Czechoslovak census, 24.7% of the population was identified as "German," despite the fact that Czechoslovkia was supposed to be a nation-state for the Czech and Slovak peoples. This is by no means a perfect map, but accurately shows how complicated the ethnic make-up of Austria-Hungary was prior to its dissolution. Despite the Allied forces' dedication to self-determination, the Sudetenland, which contained the majority of Czechoslovakia's German population, was given to Czechoslovakia in 1918 originally due to the argument that it constituted the historic Bohemian (Czech) Crownlands, that it was part of the Czech administration within Austria-Hungary, and that due to its mountainous terrain, it would provide a natural defensive barrier should Germany attempt aggression against Czechoslovakia in the future. Hitler's argument in 1938 for the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany was that it would be a correction in favour of "self-determination." Essentially, Hitler put the Allies in a situation where he was using their own ideology against them in negotiations. Additionally, Hitler stressed that he did not want any Czechs within the Sudetenland to enter the German Reich, supporting his claim that he was only trying to further the West's goal of self-determination.
Additionally, there had been support for this from Germans within the Sudetenland. Shortly after the Austrian Anschluss, the Czechoslovak government had been discussing the possibility of Germany attempting to try a similar annexation of the Sudetenland. These fears are best expressed in a telegram from the Czechoslovak Minister to Germany to the Czechoslovak Minsiter for Foreign Affairs, in which the Czechoslovak Minister to Germany expressed a fear of ethnic Sudeten Germans, even those who were educated, voicing support for Hitler's government and spreading the idea that “Hitler macht alles ohne Kreig,” or “Hitler does everything without war” (Klochko, New Documents on the History of Munich, 34, 35). Additionally, in 1935, sixty-seven percent of all ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia voted for Konrad Henlein's Sudetendeutsche Partei, an ethnic based political party that was decidedly pro-Germany and was receiving funding directly from Berlin. Not only then was this a possible victory for self-determination, but also there seemed to be a degree of support directly from Sudeten Germans.
What might also be of note is that in January 1939, after the Munich Agreement but before the dissolution of the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom gave the government of the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic a bank account of ten million British pounds. Originally, the account was created as financial assistance for Czecho-Slovakia in order to help “sweeten the bitter pill of Munich” and to repair a newly crippled Czechoslovak economy, as well as dissuade the new Second Czecho-Slovak Republic from drifting too much towards the German sphere of influence out of disdain for the Western powers. The agreement creating the account is cited below in the Sessional Papers link and an article on it is cited in "The Guardian"
My final take as a historian would be that the Western powers would not have been disappointed had Germany been left to fight the Soviet Union without Western involvement. Your professor is correct in saying that there were undoubtedly anxieties about Communism from the West. That being said, To say that "Appeasement" was active support for "the Nazi Regime," that that thought drove the foreign policy of the United Kingdom or France, or that the difference between the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the war against Poland for Western involvement was the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union would be to completely disregard the political order that the Western powers sought to create and uphold (self-determination) in addition to the points that you brought up about exhaustion from the First World War as well as a decided unpreparedness for a second conflict at the point of the signing of the Munich Agreement. This comment's point is primarily to reassert the importance of self-determination during the interwar period. Self-determination in of itself is not the final answer, but was a major factor that contributed to the choices of France and the United Kingdom during the Munich Crisis in addition to what you mentioned as the "widely taught narrative."
One note to make, and I didn't touch on this in length in the proper body because it would have been too much of a deviation and would warrant its own post, but Sudeten Germans as a collective should not be blamed as a "fifth pillar" of support for Hitler as has been done by those such as Czech President Miloš Zeman in the past. Chad Bryant's work Prague in Black (full citation below) has a wonderful chapter on how in the early stages of German occupation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Sudeten Germans felt ostracized by Reich Germans, and were made to feel like a kind of "Secondary" German peoples. Additionally, how one is classified as a "German" or a "Czech" is extremely subjective, and was oftentimes fluid and subject to an individual's personal preference at a given time.
Let me know if you would like any clarifications and I will do my best.
Works of Interest:
“The Czecho-Slovak Crisis.” The Manchester Guardian, March 16, 1939.
Beneš, Edvard. Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš: From Munich to New War and New Victory. Translated by Godfrey Lias. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1954.
Bryant, Chad. Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Feinberg, Melissa. Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
Gilbert, Felix. The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984.
Glassheim, Eagle. Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Klochko, V. F., N.I. Kostyunin, J. Křížek, F. Píšek, V. Soják, and I. N. Zemskov, eds. New Documents on the History of Munich. Prague: Orbis Press Agency, 1958.
Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Mastný, Vojtěch. The Czechs Under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance 1939-1942. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
Mastný, Vojtěch. Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare,and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
Teichova, Alice. The Czechoslovak Economy 1918-1980. London & New York: Routledge, 1988.
United Kingdom. 20th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers. Bills and Acts series, Volume 2, Number 60, 521-531 (1938-1939). https://parlipapers.proquest.com/parlipapers/result/pqpdocumentview?accountid=14771&groupid=95378&pgId=e4e75faf-bded-4d03-a660-28a37d722423&rsId=1643E1C64D9#342.
