European foreign policy of the Chamberlain ministry
Foreign relations
The European foreign policy of the Chamberlain ministry from 1937 to 1940 was based on British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's commitment to "peace for our time" by pursuing a policy of appeasement and containment towards Nazi Germany and by increasing the strength of Britain's armed forces until, in September 1939, he delivered an ultimatum over the invasion of Poland, which was followed by a declaration of war against Germany.
Commitment to peace
Like many others in Europe who had witnessed the horrors of the First World War and its aftermath, Chamberlain was committed to peace. The theory was that dictatorships arose if peoples had grievances and that by removing the source of those grievances, a dictatorship would become less aggressive. A popular belief was that the Treaty of Versailles was the underlying cause of Adolf Hitler's grievances. Chamberlain, as even his political detractors admitted, was an honourable man, who had been raised in the old school of European politics. His attempts to deal with Nazi Germany through diplomatic channels and to quell any sign of dissent from within, particularly from Churchill, were called by Chamberlain "the general policy of appeasement" on 30 June 1934.
Rearmament
A major structural problem that Chamberlain confronted at the beginning of his premiership and a major factor in development of his foreign policy was the problem of worldwide defence commitments and an insufficient economic and financial basis to sustain those commitments. According to a report by the British Chiefs of Staff in 1937, which had much influence on Chamberlain: Even today we could face without apprehension an emergency either in the Far East or the Mediterranean, provided that we were free ... to concentrate sufficient strength in one or other of these areas ... But the outstanding feature of the present situation is the increasing probability that a war started in any one of these three areas [the third being Western Europe] may extend to one or both of the other two ...
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