7 - The Sudeten crisis, 1938

Summary

Even after half a century ‘Munich’ remains one of the most powerful images influencing the contemporary understanding of international relations – a symbol for the failure of appeasement, for the surrender of vital principles to a totalitarian aggressor, for a self-defeating policy of unilateral concessions which, in seeking to avert war, rendered it all the more certain. Historical scholarship has now moved beyond this traditional image, offering a far more complex account of the Sudeten crisis, the term preferred here to ‘Munich crisis’, since it refers to the six months during which the future of the Sudeten German minority in Czechoslovakia was the issue that raised the question of war. As in the previous case studies, the focus is on the views and debates within the decision making groups and not, for example, on the wide range of issues addressed in the public debate, especially in Britain, nor the question whether the radically different policy recommended by Churchill offered a better prospect for success – issues on which the decision makers' minds were closed.

The setting was exceptionally unstable. There was no accepted structure of international order but the 1930s saw rapid changes in military technology and in the relative strength of the great powers.