At frequent intervals during the past seventy-five years, politicians, pundits, and, of course, historians have been unable to get Munich off the mind. Leaders confronted by painful and puzzling foreign-policy decisions have been seen to be, and have seen themselves as, reliving the strategic and ethical dilemmas faced by the Men of Munich. Indeed, within very recent memory the Munich analogy has framed pressing debates, and in urging world leaders to intervene in Syria in the autumn of 2013, US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that this was to be “our Munich moment,” while Russian ambitions in the crisis-ridden Ukraine have been likened to the Czech Crisis of 1938 and Hitler's hunger for Lebensraum. Historians generally avoid prognosticating, but most would probably be quite happy to make a modest wager on the chronic recurrence of “the Munich psychosis.”

The Munich analogy has been most powerfully and, almost invariably, poisonously evoked within British politics where the starkly polarized rights and wrongs of appeasement were personified by the gullible “peace-in-our-time” prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the Cassandra-like Winston Churchill. Whatever failures or achievements were to their credit before or after, Chamberlain's and Churchill's reputations were made and unmade by the positions they took during those fateful months of 1938. With all its high drama, delusion, and dark forces, it is no wonder that the politics of appeasement has generated an enormous body of scholarship. Yet despite its breadth of coverage and its proliferation, the historiography has been methodologically conservative, spinning its wheels in familiar conceptual ruts.

While already several generations of historians have nuanced if not nullified the “Guilty Men” thesis—appeasement studies has gone through revisionist, counter-revisionist, and post-revisionist stages—the putative lessons of Munich have nonetheless haunted and hampered British foreign policy. This is the convincing, generously supported, and chronologically broad-ranging case put forward by R. Gerald Hughes in this recent contribution to the field. The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement represents the first attempt to make a systematic study of the post-Munich history of Munich, tracing strategic but also rhetorical and psychological patterns through the personal narratives of the main actors and the national metanarrative of crisis debates about British foreign policy since the Second World War. Promisingly, it takes what we might call the “rhetorical turn” and applies it to appeasement studies, with a focus on the language of politics and the recognition of the fundamental interaction and codependency in the foreign policy process between politicians, the media, and public opinion. In many respects what is on offer here is an etymology of “appeasement” and an explanation for why the specific term and by extension the whole language of appeasement has had to be expunged from political discourse. “What the appeasement of the 1930s had ensured was that, in future, appeasement would be regarded as an unacceptable way of conducting the foreign policy of any state” (17). Especially in the post-nuclear age, it was essential to achieve appeasement but by means of other rhetorical devices.

Beginning with a helpful survey of the historiography of appeasement, each chapter then treats an episode in the history of British foreign policy where the lessons and legacy of Munich played a decisive role. In the earlier examples, this decisive role was explained by the continuity of personnel, albeit now the policy makers and power brokers were those men who had avoided the tar of “Cato's” brush, and, as a consequence, were acutely conscious of avoiding repetition of the mistakes made and the reputations earned by the Guilty Men in 1938. The shameful memory of Munich predetermined Churchill's policy towards the Soviets, British involvement in the Korean War, Eden's political suicide in his handling of the Suez Crisis, and Harold Macmillan's policy during the Berlin Wall Crisis (1958–62). The legacy remained powerful throughout the Cold War and past it, too, and Hughes demonstrates how the rhetoric of anti-appeasement constructed and constricted British foreign policy and war making in Thatcher's Falkland Islands conflict and all the way to Blair's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, diplomatic and international historians and International Relations specialists have long been tracing the Munich motif, pausing at various intervals (and usually on anniversaries) to remark upon the contemporary resonances of appeasement debates. Here we have a work of framing and reframing, and of synthesis, vividly illustrated by the fact that a third of the book is made up by the end notes and the bibliography. In this respect it will certainly be a useful resource for students and a welcome addition to the modern British history syllabus. As a history of and about contemporary resonances, it will also be a valuable reference work for policy makers and journalists as they try to place in context the Munich moment of the moment. Hughes makes the provocative point that “the rhetoric of postwar anti-appeasement often caused policy makers to embrace morally-driven absolutist positions in international affairs” (191), thereby rendering a number of policy options permanently unavailable. But the most exciting insights are to be found in the exploration of the personal and domestic fallout of foreign policy crises, demonstrating how each postwar foreign policy crisis was performed and narrated as a sequel to the Munich Crisis.