The contradiction at the heart of the 1935 Saar plebiscite – its public perception as a tool of international peace, and its political reality as a Nazi triumph – would lead to the plebiscite playing a particularly ignoble role in the diplomacy leading to the 1938 Munich Pact, where the Saar plebiscite was a precedent literally written into the agreement dismembering Czechoslovakia. Consequently the reputation of the plebiscite soon collapsed, and during the Second World War it was not seriously entertained by the allies planning the post-war world. Although women as a whole were largely marginalised in these official peace planning organisations, Sarah Wambaugh’s connection to the now-discredited plebiscite served to marginalise her even further. At the same time, both Wambaugh and the post-war planners began to appreciate that the plebiscite’s component parts could be used to perform other tasks, including monitoring domestic elections and administering territory.

The Munich conference notoriously symbolizes appeasement and its failure. The issue under dispute concerns territory – specifically, the Sudetenland. This territorial dispute was initially internal to Czechoslovakia, a disagreement between the Sudetenland Germans and the central government of Czechoslovakia. Eventually, however, the nationalistic element to the dispute brought in the German government. The major powers avoided war because the French and British prime ministers – Daladier and Chamberlain, respectively – forced the Czechoslovakian president, Benes, to accept the peaceful transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, based on the norm of nationalism (or self-determination). As this case shows, when actors widely agree on the norms through which territory can change hands, the probability of war declines. Nevertheless, this peace was short-lived. Indeed, the afterword to the chapter describes how Hitler invaded Prague shortly thereafter. The Danzig–Poland crises then followed. By that point, Britain and France had abandoned appeasement and shifted to balancing against Hitler; they allied with Poland and gave Hitler an ultimatum to try to stop his invasion. This conventional deterrence failed, and the Second World War began in Europe.

The second political service provided by firms is to supplement the state’s societal control efforts. When public grievances arise over a project, infrastructure, or plant, the state may politicize the associated firms by demanding their assistance in managing social unrest. Firms play two distinct roles in societal control: serving as allies when the state employs suppression strategies against protesters or acting as scapegoats when the state opts for appeasement strategies.

Private firms are more suited to serve as scapegoats, while SOEs, particularly large and powerful ones, are stronger allies. This distinction arises from differences based on ownership and extent of political capital available to firms. Private firms typically have narrower and more limited sources of political capital than SOEs. In sectors where protests become increasingly frequent and intense, suppression strategies often replace appeasement, leading to a decline in the standing of private firms as large SOEs gain dominance.

Using comparative case studies, process tracing, and in-depth interviews, this chapter builds on Chapter 6 to examine the mechanisms connecting protests, societal control strategies, and outcomes for firms in the solid waste treatment sector. Process tracing is first applied to Wuxi, a city with multiple incineration plants, to illustrate how escalating protests gradually shifted the city government’s strategy from appeasement to suppression. This shift in strategy made private firms less effective in providing societal control services, leading to the transfer of the city’s incineration plants into the hands of SOEs.

Next, a most-similar case study compares an incineration plant in Wuxi with another in Qinhuangdao, highlighting how differences in political capital, linked to firm ownership, influence the outcomes of societal control efforts. The weaker political capital of private firms means they are less equipped to assist local governments during protests, making them less favorable. This comparison sheds light on how Chinese local governments perceive protests and firms, explaining why SOEs increasingly dominate a sector as protests within it become more frequent and intense.

This chapter begins the empirical examination of the second political service provided by firms: societal control. I situate this political service within China’s solid waste treatment sector, where the development of waste incineration plants has consistently faced public opposition and protests. Drawing on original data from all 351 incineration plants built or under construction in Chinese cities between 1999 and 2016, as well as records of protests against these plants, I demonstrate a strong relationship between protests and firm ownership in this sector. During the bidding stage for waste treatment contracts, local governments factor in societal control when selecting firms to build and operate these plants. If local governments anticipate employing appeasement strategies toward protesters, private firms are more likely to thrive in a city. Conversely, if governments expect to rely on suppression strategies, state-owned enterprises tend to dominate.

Thinking about humiliation and its consequences informs various areas of political theory – even if latently. Part of the point of classical jus in bello restrictions like the requirements of proportionality and discrimination is to limit the harm we do to our enemies, so as to keep alive the possibility of future reconciliation. Indiscriminate and disproportionate harms undermine the chances of peace, among other reasons, because they are humiliating. In the field of transitional justice, the prospect of ending the humiliations endemic to authoritarian governance can justify the compromise of liberal principles (such as retroactive criminalization and reliance on shaky evidence) that transitional policies often involve. Our discussion also takes up the role humiliation plays in political appeasement. We argued that one of the reasons that appeasement is wrong is that it involves a self-humiliation. By deferring to those who threaten force, the appeaser communicates that survival matters more to them than their self-respect.

The politics of Vietnam was born in the early Cold War when Republicans made a concerted effort to undercut the national security advantage that Democrats enjoyed after a decisive victory in World War II. The years after the war are often remembered as a period when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there were a number of factors that moved the US military deep into the jungles of Vietnam, including a “domino theory” positing that if one country fell to communism everything around it would follow, partisan politics was a driving force behind this disastrous strategy. The same political logic and prowess that led President Lyndon Johnson to strengthen the legislative coalition behind his Great Society simultaneously pushed him into a hawkish posture in Southeast Asia.

This essay focuses on the debate over Chamberlain’s attempts at ‘appeasement’ during his negotiations with the presidents of Germany, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, who would soon become the central European Axis powers in the Second World War. It specifically looks at two intertwined public protests in 1938 against Chamberlain’s plans to cede the German-speaking regions of Austria to Hitler, in exchange for Hitler not declaring all-out war in Europe. In addition to analysing Troilus and Cressida, directed by Michael Macowan in modern-day battle dress at the Westminster Theatre in London, this essay turns not only to Punch magazine’s review of the play in their October 1938 issue, but also to the other numerous cartoons, ironic poems, and satiric song lyrics that filled that issue, all clearly condemning Chamberlain’s reluctance, often called cowardice, to realize the consequences of agreeing to Hitler’s demands.

For much of the decade prior to 1940, Churchill was out of office and often seen as a warmonger. He saw appeasement as a policy not befitting a country of Britain’s standing that failed to take account of innate German militarism. One of his most effective tactics in opposing it was his evocative use of history, drawing parallels between his own life and that of his eighteenth-century ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. To Churchill, the British government’s dealings with Gandhi and the Congress Party were also a form of appeasement. There was a paradox in his thinking; that the forms of nationalism that bolstered British international power were legitimate, while those that did not were not. Churchill’s opposition to Hitler was based on his own first-hand experiences while researching his Marlborough biography and on his reading of the German ‘mental map’. The chapter traces his evolving response from the German occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 through to the Munich Crisis of 1938 and beyond. It ends by analysing Churchill’s path to power as prime minister, suggesting that far from being a triumph of opportunity, there were simply no other suitable candidates for the post.

This chapter explores the place of compromise in transitional justice. While all-pervasive in politics, compromise is a neglected topic, almost a non-topic, within the current transitional justice literature. The chapter is an attempt to reverse this tendency and rehabilitate the notion of compromise. If, as pluralists hold, we are often faced with cases of hard moral choices where, whatever we do, something of value is irreparably lost, then the best we can hope for is some kind of acceptable compromise between clashing goods. The question about the limits of compromise thus features centrally in this chapter. How far should transitional societies go in their willingness to compromise? When is a compromise acceptable, fair, guided by principle, and when is it rotten to the core, simply illegitimate? To what extent is it acceptable to compromise deeply held values such as justice and truth for the sake of other equally important values such as, say, civil peace and democracy? While doubtful that we can settle such issues once and for all, the chapter identifies a range of questions that should be part of the collective conversation about when a political compromise is acceptable and when it is not. The discussion begins, however, with a concrete historical figure, the communist leader Joe Slovo, who played a critical role in South Africa’s negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy. Slovo’s reflections on the nature and limits of compromise in the South African context serve as a central reference point for my discussion throughout this chapter.

In a parallel way, when we move to consider Keynes’s political views and involvement, we find a similar reliance upon the privileged networks of his intimates. In particular the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Keynes, as the two figures of real genius in Bloomsbury, is explored – with insights on the impact that her tract Three Guineas had upon his (much-discussed) memoir ‘My Early Beliefs’. Keynes’s political stance is also examined through his proprietorial influence upon the left-wing weekly the New Statesman, of which Kingsley Martin (a close friend of the late Frank Ramsey) was now the presiding editor. What Keynes wrote about uncertainty in decision-making was as relevant to choices in foreign policy as to the macro-economic universe that he surveyed in his General Theory.

This chapter tackles the dilemmas of French defense planning in a factious Europe, increasingly divided by ideology, with a French population haunted by the sacrifices of the Great War, and the deep political divisions within France brought to the surface in 1936 with the election of the Popular Front government. A coherent defense scheme proved difficult to agree on in a military roiled by inter- and intra-service rivalries, under the uncertain direction of commander-in-chief General Maurice Gamelin and defense chief Édouard Daladier. As international conditions in Europe deteriorated, France was in a poor posture to surmount them, in the front line against a populous, powerful, and rearming Germany, led by the bombastic and belligerent Hitler. With a Soviet alliance off the table, this left as potential alliance partners a constellation of quarreling Eastern European nations, or Great Britain, in the hands of conservatives whose policy until 1938 was one of “limited liability” in a continental conflict. This situation required France to rely at least initially on its own military forces. One of the arguments of post-war historians was that the Third Republic, and in particular the Popular Front, did little to shore up French defense. In fact, that was not true. While the Maginot Line had absorbed a large share of the defense budget in the 1930s, the Popular Front had expended a great deal of money to modernize the French Air Force and create one of the world’s largest tank armies, despite the risk of capital flight, inflation, and the sacrifice of much of the social agenda of the French left. But defense modernization hit two snags. The first was a lack of government-directed coordination, which joined outmoded plant and industrial practices to put ambitious production quotas out of reach. The second was that this armament upgrade was bestowed on a multifaceted, Balkanized military organization whose leadership lacked a coherent defense vision for inter-arm and inter-service cooperation. It was with a military force that was modernizing in a piecemeal and improvized way that France plunged into war.

This chapter examines the intellectual and institutional challenges that the architects of International Relations (IR) faced during the 1930s. It first shows how the Nazi government nationalised research centres and forced scholars into exile, essentially eliminating the independent study of IR in German-speaking Europe. The second section reviews how Hitler’s rise to power was perceived by the IR community and how scholars struggled to make sense of his foreign policy agenda. The third section inspects ‘peaceful change’ as a political idea. The fourth section explores its application as a policy instrument, notably Arnold Toynbee’s quasi-diplomatic ventures to Germany. The final section traces the gradual demise of IR scholarship, from financial and political difficulties in the mid-1930s to the complete suspension of activities within the first year of the Second World War.

The years between 1937 and 1940 were dominated by two themes: the future of the bank and the move to war. With their investment business gone, the partners retreated into inertia, an inclination deepened by the sharp contraction of 193–38. Against Wall Street opinion, and Federal Reserve Board policy, the partners argued that tightening monetary policy was unsound. As the recession deepened, the White House reached out to J.P. Morgan & Co. This feeler ended in disharmony. When it did, confronted with the subsequent death of their partner Charles Steele, the partners decided that survival required incorporating. Making this decision easier was the European war. J.P. Morgan & Co. was of modest consequence as war loomed. Supporters of appeasement, the partners tried to help France in the late 1930s but their timidity was marked enough that the French had recourse to others. Across the Channel, Neville Chamberlain’s government ignored the Morgan partners. With war, the Morgan partners moved closer in their embrace of Roosevelt. Ardent supporters of Britain and France, J.P. Morgan & Co. was not in the interventionist camp. They argued for aid to the Western democracies but not American belligerency, a posture that aligned with the president.

It really seems time to take into account the consequences of the fact that countries, particularly leading or developed ones, reversing the course of several millennia, no longer envision international war as a sensible method for resolving their disputes. Indeed, the aversion to international war or the rise of something of a culture or society of international peace that has substantially enveloped the world should be seen as a causative or facilitating independent variable. International war seems to be in pronounced decline because of the way attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern by which the institution of formal slavery became discredited and then obsolete. Under the circumstances, there is potential virtue in the traditionally maligned diplomatic techniques of complacency and appeasement for dealing with international problems. The phenomenon asuggests that there is little justification for the continuing and popular tendency to inflate threats and dangers in the international arena—even to the point of deeming some of them to be “existential.” In addition, although problems certainly continue to exist, none of these are substantial enough to require the United States (or pretty much anybody) to maintain a large standing military force for dealing with them.

Ireland, a small state, and America, a great power, had little in common by 1938–9. But on the eve of the Second World War, security needs brought interaction between the two countries. Both states intensified military preparedness. But the London factor was influential again during negotiations when the American government agreement to sell arms and equipment was with British approval. The chapter concludes that the inevitable inclusion of Ireland in the US-defined war zone illustrated again de Valera’s misunderstanding of US foreign policy concerns. This gap between reality and aspiration was highlighted throughout the war also as Ireland adhered to neutrality while US neutrality was abandoned in 1941 proof also of the differing needs of a small vulnerable state and a great power and their respective leaders.

Key questions for a foreign diplomat in Washington DC were how to have his government’s concerns heard by the administration which was taken up with economic revival and implementing the New Deal and also would Roosevelt move from isolationism to internationalism? The chapter unravels how Ireland’s interests featured in official America’s foreign and domestic policies. It argues that the two Irish ministers, Michael MacWhite and Robert Brennan had contrasting abilities and personalities which affected how each fulfilled de Valera’s unrealistic instructions to secure Roosevelt and the State Department’s attention. Trade negotiations between the US and Ireland never formally commenced, despite MacWhite and Brennan’s efforts and throughout the period Roosevelt restated his opposition to intervention in partition. However, both diplomats prevented a diplomatic crisis when the US government protested to the Irish government about the illegal dissemination and sale of Irish Hospitals Sweepstake tickets in the US. By 1939, de Valera and Roosevelt accepted that international co-operation through the League of Nations had failed.

The National Government entered a new phase in the spring of 1937, as Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Conservative leader and Prime Minister. As this chapter shows, appeasement, though controversial, preserved peace in the present and did little to disrupt the Conservatives’ continuing efforts to construct their popular appeals around the government’s record of economic recovery from 1931. Drawing upon all twelve constituency case studies, the chapter considers the impact of rearmament on employment levels and assesses the local implications of the government’s social reform programme, including the Education Act 1936, the Holiday with Pay Act 1938 and especially the impact of the Physical Training and Recreation Act 1937 on local government facilities. The chapter also demonstrates how Labour wrestled back some control of the political initiative in the late 1930s. It argues that Labour began to restore its own reputation for competent government through a well-publicised programme of municipal social reform in London, its growing presence in neighbourbood organization (including among the suburban electorate), and its critique of the government’s handling of the distressed area. In doing so, Attlee’s party not only contested the government’s narrative of recovery, it also began the process of articulating a particular version of 1930s Britain that ultimately defined Britons’ political and historical imaginary for several generations.

This chapter argues that the case for just redistributive wars is ambiguous. It looks through the standard sufficient conditions for just war theory: there is reason to believe that the severity of global poverty is sufficient to be a just cause for war given its comparison with crimes against humanity and interpreting the definition of aggression; the question of legitimate authority is murkier, there is an acceptance that unjust state have the right to self-defence against aggressors, but the likelihood of unjust states waging a war in this context seems unrealistic; the question of last resort is difficult to assess but there is at least a case to make that in the face of intransigent non-compliance all reasonable choices are exhausted; reasonable probability of success is difficult to assess because reasonability is contingent and there are numerous examples of intuitively just wars being fought with long odds; finally, proportionality seems hard to discount even if the burdens are high, because the status quo is so onerous. The case for just war seems vaguely plausible, until it collides with reality where the asymmetry of power between affluent and poor states makes defeat inevitable for the latter.