Putin, Appeasement and the Lessons of History

Historia magistra vitae, Cicero tells his readers in De Oratore. The idea of history primarily as a stock of examples from which we could learn was a dominant understanding from the classical period until the eighteenth century. Frederick the Great perhaps best encapsulated such a view when he said that the scenes of world history repeat with only the names changing.

The idea that lessons can straightforwardly be learned from the past still has a strong instinctive hold on the popular imagination. In February, Kaja Kallas, the EU Commissioner for External Affairs condemned Trump’s approach to making peace in Ukraine as ‘appeasement’ and declared: ‘it has never worked’. Similarly, when Bridgette Brink resigned as American Ambassador to Ukraine in April she declared: ‘history has taught us time and again that appeasement does not lead to safety, security or prosperity’.

‘Appeasement’ as a negative notion has become so familiar that a mention does not even need to explicitly reference Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler in 1938. The then British Prime Minister believed that by permitting Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, a European conflict could be averted. In conventional wisdom, the lesson of Munich is that concession, especially regarding territory, in international relations will encourage rather than stem demands.

But is it legitimate to draw direct parallels with the past in such a way? In particular, are Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler at Munich in 1938 an apt parallel for the situation in Ukraine today? It does need to be said that in the modern period, the idea that the past offers immediate parallels with the present and that we can learn lessons from it, has become an unpopular one among professional historians. Mommsen, the great German historian of Rome and Nobel prize winner, argued that history is ‘instructive solely in that it inspires and instructs independent creative judgment’.

Sir Richard Evans, former Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, notably questioned the idea in his In Defence of History (1997), a textbook now familiar to generations of undergraduates in the subject. He contended:

“While many people, especially politicians, try to learn lessons from history, history itself shows that in retrospect very few of these lessons have been the right ones. Time and again, history has proved a very bad predictor of future events. This is because history never repeats itself; nothing in human society, the main concern of the historian, ever happens twice under exactly the same conditions or in exactly the same way.“

As an example, he observed how the Russian revolutionaries were obsessed with the trajectory of the two previous great revolutions in European history. Both the English revolution in the seventeenth century and the French in the eighteenth had ended in military dictatorship. Determined to avoid that fate, when Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky, perceived to be the most obvious threat as head of the Red Army, was marginalised in favour of Stalin.

Sir Richard particularly questioned the Munich analogy as a classic mistaken example of supposedly leaning lessons from history (he is one of the foremost experts globally on the Nazi regime). He noted in particular how, in the post-war period, British politicians became highly sensitive to the dangers of repeating Chamberlain’s mistake. Thus when in 1956 Colonel Nasser nationalised the Anglo-French-owned Suez Canal, it was disastrously determined that the only correct response was a military strike and reoccupation. But instead of reestablishing their position, France and the UK were forced by international opinion to cede the canal to Egypt and, rather than containing Soviet influence in the Middle East, ended up losing much of their own.

Clearly then, the very idea of learning lessons from history can itself lead to poor decisions. Arguably, never conceding to Putin on any of his major demands has become an idée fixe in western policy that has turned a crisis in Ukraine into a conflict. The supposed ‘lessons of Munich’ have tragically resulted in a persistent failure to acknowledge or address Russian concerns.

There were no serious attempts to implement the Minsk agreements which, in any case, ignored wider relations beyond the regional conflict in the east of Ukraine. Diplomatic efforts were finally stepped up in the months after the invasion in 2022 and came very close to a peace deal but were undermined by Johnson and Biden throwing their weight behind a military response.

Rather than make simplistic and underinformed parallels, we need to engage in in-depth critical assessment. Contrary to the popular wisdom of ‘lessons of history’, political scientists and international relations scholars who have studied ‘appeasement’ in wide range of contexts have noted that concessions, even territorial ones, have often successfully drawn a line under potentially volatile situations in international relations.

It has long been argued that a policy of ‘compromise, rational discussion and mutual understanding’ on the part of the British was not novel in 1938 but was a deeply established policy going back to the late nineteenth century. This avoidance of belligerence is linked to the advent of a mass franchise, with ‘butter not guns’ generally encapsulating the public mood.

The acceptance of the Western Hemisphere as an American sphere of influence is often cited as an example of British appeasement. This established the basis for a cooperative relationship with the US in the run up to the Great War. Practically, it involved allowing Washington to interfere in the Venezuela/British Guiana dispute, abandoning support for Canada in its Alaskan boundary quarrel and giving up Britain’s half ‘share’ in the proposed isthmian canal.

Even relations with Germany in the run up to the Great War can be seen to be characterised by attempts to defuse conflict. Hopes were placed in arms reduction agreements such as the Hague Conferences or Churchill’s ‘naval holiday’ idea. Colonial concessions in the Middle East and Africa were proposed and binding military guarantees to France avoided. Not only could C. P. Scott write positively in the Manchester Guardian of the desire for a ‘peace of appeasement’ but the Pall Mall Gazette could, in 1913, applaud Britain as ‘an Empire of appeasement’.

Stephen R. Rock of Vassar College authored perhaps the most extensive comparative study of appeasement twenty years ago. In concluding advice to policymakers his number one point was: know your adversary. He contended that it was particularly important to register the difference between ‘greedy’ – that is expansionist – states, and insecure ones that felt themselves threatened.

Prominent Russia observers, including former British diplomats, have long argued that the West has caricatured Putin and failed to understand his motivations. Rather than seeking to recreate the USSR as is often asserted, his regime has sought to find a way to realistically live with the consequences of its collapse.

Since Putin’s aggrieved address to the Munich Security Conference in 2007, even recognising his concerns has been condemned as ‘appeasement’. The irony is that, aside from the rather sui generis case of Crimea (which it must be stressed was part of Russia from 1783 to 1956), Putin never actually had any territorial demands on Ukraine before 2022. His essay on the historical closeness of Russia and Ukraine is often mentioned as proof, but its detail rarely read. The essay ends by comparing the pair to Germany and Austria, or the USA and Canada, two sovereign nations that share much but ultimately are separate and distinct and should respect one another.

Putin’s major concern was Kyiv ‘serving someone else’s’ ‘national interests’, that is, Ukraine being admitted to membership of NATO. It was the potential threat of losing Russia’s Black Sea base at Sevastopol (leased from Ukraine) that led to the invasion of Crimea, not any general territorial ambition. Similarly, far from coveting Ukrainian territory, after 2015 Putin discouraged separatist ambitions in Donbass.

So obsessed have western policy makers become with the idea of not conceding to Putin that they have refused to rule out NATO membership even though there has never been much practical chance of the country being admitted to the alliance. Given the USA’s own Monroe Doctrine, it is hardly a Hitleresque demand that a state which was part of federal union with Russia until 1991 should not be admitted.

Putin’s other concerns were largely about the increasingly nationalist nature of regimes in Kyiv and their treatment of the Russian language and the Soviet past. When recognition of minority rights is in principle aligned with the core values of the EU, it is extraordinary that this issue was not addressed and left to fester.

From 2008 to 2022, the West could not engage Putin’s real concerns for fear of ‘appeasing’ him. It was largely assumed that deterrence alone would work, as it had done with the USSR during the Cold War. However, Rock concluded from his wideranging survey that deterrence alone is inappropriate against a state acting from insecurity.

The tragedy is that because the West would not engage Putin’s concerns, he did end up invading Ukraine. This has led to the current situation where he is now demanding territory in the east of the country where previously he had no such ambitions. Again, this aligns with Rock’s observations: in particular, that there is ‘evidence to suggest that refusing to make concessions when demands are minimal is far more likely to stimulate an expansion of objectives than is the granting of concessions’.

Another important conclusion of the same study was that ‘unlike deterrence, appeasement can succeed in pacifying an adversary that is highly committed to its goal’. Despite Putin’s repeated and vehement emphasis, it seems never to have registered with decision-makers in the West that NATO membership and language and cultural issues are existential concerns for Russia that must be addressed in order to defuse tensions.

In the spring of 2022, Macron and others who sought a peace deal that would have seen Russia retain some of the land that it had gained since its February invasion were condemned for ‘appeasement’. This proposal potentially could have prevented three years of war, saving hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

History will be the judge of the West’s actions and omissions in the run up to and during the Ukraine conflict. Current media coverage largely paints the situation as akin to the second world war, a righteous fight against an opponent who must be defeated to establish peace. But Hitler had an ideology of war for war’s sake, and to confuse Putin for such a figure is a massive mistake. My strong suspicion is that the events of the last three years will rather be looked back on as akin to the Great War, a bloody and needless tragedy.

Long before Ukraine had become a concern in international politics, academics had become explicitly concerned about how politicians and the public were failing to register that policies of appeasement could not be reduced to a single analogy. With the advent of Trump as President with his signature policy of seeking peace in Ukraine, ‘appeasement’ is again rarely off the lips of those who must make crucial decisions. Before presuming we are reliving 1938, they must think twice about ‘the lessons of history’.