Standing up for appeasement: Alexander Rose argues that appeasement is a mark of civilization��it just doesn't work against enemies who don't share your values

THE URGE to appease others--especially our enemies--is, perhaps, the noblest sentiment to which we can aspire. Indeed, the very idea of appeasement is the high-water mark of civilization, the triumph of Reason and Manners over a savage, fanatical state of barbarism.

The practice of appeasement has, of course, a checkered legacy. Calling someone an "appeaser" is a dreadful insult, one implying, faint-heartedness, limp-wristedness, lily-liveredness, and all the rest. This unfortunate reputation arises from the formal "policy" of appeasement, exemplified by Neville Chamberlain--the pre-World War II Conservative prime minister forever doomed to be mocked as a weak, naive fool--in which he attempted to placate Nazi Germany with concessions. Appeasement s dismal performance at Munich in 1938, when Chamberlain sold the Czechs down the river in his, at the time wildly popular, attempt to sate Hitler's insatiable demands, provided an essential Cold War axiom. When it came to the Soviets (now replaced by the Chinese), thundered hawks and anti-communists, the "Lesson of Munich" was clear: Always stand up to tyrants, for if you yield, they will demand more and more until, finally, there is no option but full-scale war. As Jefferson counseled, it is an "eternal truth that acquiescenc e under insult is not the way to escape war.

Appeasement's reputation suffered yet another blow in the aftermath of September 11. The Chomskyite left, earnestly huddled around the office water-cooler at the Nation, tried hard to find a reason, any reason, to avoid waging war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The palaeo-lefi sought to shift the blame to the United States. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were portrayed as understandable, if overly violent, reactions to arrogant American "hyper-power," capitalist globalization, "biased" pro-Israeli policies, colonialist exploitation, the U.S. withdrawal from the UN Conference on Racism in Durban, and the usual gumbo of grievances, real and imagined.

Unwittingly, but revealingly, today's left echoes those historical revisionists of the 1920s--many of whom went on to become diehard appeasers a decade later--who recast the origins of World War I in a way that diminished Germany's primary role in provoking it by declaring that all the Great Powers were equally at fault. The capitalist, colonialist international system, not the actions and decisions of individual statesmen or the kaiser, was to blame for the Great War.

New York Times-y liberal commentators were agreeably bellicose but cautious about the potential impact of the war on terror. For the most part, their concerns centered on the assumed adverse reaction of the "Arab Street" and Washington's Middle Eastern allies. In this respect, liberals ironically echoed pre-war Chamberlain Conservatives who urged restraint to avoid unduly antagonizing Herr Hitler. The unilateralist reluctance to risk inflaming underlying tensions earned them a ticking-off from the right. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, wrote online: "What appeasers never realize is that it is the application of American force that makes the world amenable to our demands, and that the more powerful we seem--and the more willing to use that power-the more allies we will have."

The vast majority of people, both here and abroad, rightly rejected leftist and liberal appeasement and resolved on firm retaliation. President Bush, it appears, was determined not to repeat the "Lesson of Munich."

We should be careful not to conflate the practice of appeasement with the idea of appeasement, and thereby consign it, willy-nilly, to damnation.

Rather, we should readily recognize that, while the practice of appeasement in the real world has been a consistent failure, and will, no doubt, continue to be, this does not mean that the idea, or the ideal, of appeasing others' grievances peacefully is necessarily a bad thing. It would seem to most sensible people, I think, that a signal mark of a civilized mentality is to refrain from resorting to war or issuing murderous snarls the moment a grievance or disagreement is aired by the other side. Such vulgar, instinctive behavior is best left to animals and beasts like Hitler, Stalin, and the rest of their ilk. In the end, however, despite our best attempts at removing the sources of friction, the survival of civilization may well depend upon exterminating, or containing, the menace, which should be achieved with the appropriate degree of ruthlessness.

How did this dichotomy arise between the realistic appraisal of appeasement as foolish and shortsighted and the idealistic vision of appeasement as a worthy cause?

"Appeasement" is descended from, first, Latin, and later, medieval French, for "peace," or more specifically, "to bring to peace." In the fourteenth century, when, thanks to Chaucer, English was replacing French as the official and baronial language of England, the verb was rendered "apees," and amended to "appease" during the great spelling reforms of the Tudor era. At the time, when church and state were indivisible, the idea and practice of appeasement was an eminently Judeo-Christian worldview; it signified a wholesome willingness to pacify, assuage, or allay another's anger, discomfort, or displeasure from a position of either weakness or strength on either an individual or state level.

IT WAS MACHIAVELLI, regarded as an agent of Satan by the Church, who distinguished between the actions and motives of Christian princes as simultaneously Christian individuals (who should behave according to Biblical precepts of turn-the-cheek, all-are-brothers, do-unto-others morality) and rulers (who are not bound by such conventional codes of morality, given the nature of the vile world we inhabit). If a ruler wanted to survive amid the chaos of deadly competition, accordingly, any display of gentleness, or gesture of magnanimity, or granting of concessions, to a stately foe was folly. If a prince, commented Machiavelli, yields voluntarily to a rival, "It is for the purpose of avoiding war," a policy which will lead to disaster for two reasons: The rival's "arrogance will increase as his esteem for the prince is lessened," and "the zeal of the prince's friends will be chilled on seeing him appear feeble or cowardly" (see Lowry, above).

Post-Munich anti-appeasers tend, it seems to me, to think solely in terms of state versus state, which is why policies of appeasement appear foolhardy and naive. Appeasers are applying their personal inclination to do good--and "bringing to peace" is a thoroughly good ideal--to the sphere of inter-state relations, where such an ideal does not necessarily belong. Appeasers, therefore, assume that others are, or think, like them; i.e., that man's natural condition is of an enlightened, classically liberal kind wherein conflicting interests between two camps can be reconciled in a sort of Hegelian synthesis. "I don't see why we shouldn't say to Germany, 'Give us satisfactory assurances that you wont use force to deal with the Austrians and Czechoslovakians, and we will give you similar assurances that we won't use force to prevent the changes you want,'" Chamberlain mused to his sisters in November 1937. Their hopes, tragically, were disappointed. On September 3. 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, a disillusioned Chamberlain mournfully said in the House of Commons, "Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins."

Appeasement, in other words, in the world of diplomacy and statecraft, is civilizational suicide when applied to the likes of Hitler or Stalin or Saddam or Osama bin Laden. To men--and they are all men (typical, just typical)--such as these, who plot and terrorize and murder to attain power, the right to existence is ruthlessly contingent upon the ability to sucker others into compromising with their demands in both individual and state senses. In the early thirties, Hitler, for example, expertly exploited the well-meaning desire of the British and the French (and the Americans, too, over the reparations issue) to assuage Germany's "legitimate grievances" stemming from what contemporary appeasers called the "unjust" Treaty of Versailles "imposed" on Germany after the 1918 Armistice.

These are extreme examples, of course. In practice, conducting foreign policy in the normal course of affairs rarely involves mutually loathing adversaries and more usually consists of, say, rather tedious trade negotiations between partners of varying degrees of amity. In these instances, appeasement is an unspoken assumption, especially when "bringing to peace countries with distinct cultures and political considerations is the goal. Since it is natural for states to have different objectives, there will always be roadblocks and obstacles to finding a friendly solution, but appeasement on both sides can help remove them. In this case, being anti-appeasement--or doggedly refusing to make concessions for fear of being exploited or suckered--can be hazardous: After all, the alternatives are not either a shameful peace with a totalitarian megalomaniac or a Clausewitzian war to the death. Rather, both sides naturally seek to fulfill their primary aims but realize that they must necessarily surrender some of thei r secondary ones during negotiations that will be mutually beneficial.

For the Stains and Osamas of this world, however, there is no such thing as a quid pro quo. They are tyrants and ideologues whose sole concern is imposing their Nietzschean will to power upon the weak, the uprightly bourgeois, the decently intentioned. Moderation, gentility, compromise, a willingness to exhaust peaceful alternatives before embarking on war: These civilized concepts are alien to the annihilationist mind, which remains locked into a late nineteenth-century Romanticist straitjacket of all-or-nothing.

But the urge to appease is a noble sentiment, even if its actual application has often been sadly misplaced or badly misjudged. Appeasement shows us what we can be, or at least what we should aspire to be, and that it is possible to strive to overcome the exigencies of brute, worldly Power through personal morality and adherence to such abstract principles as Honor, Reason, Fidelity, Mercy, Trust, and Equity.

In the real world, of course, the idea of civilized morals overcoming the practical prerogatives of power remains a fantastical one. Perhaps, in the end, the best we can do is try to reconcile the two; that is, temper our ability to dominate with our desire to appease.

Alexander Rose is the Washington correspondent of Canada's National Post. His forthcoming book, Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History, 1066-1489 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), appears in July.

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