The term “appeasement” was originally a term of approval. It had the positive connotation of peaceful change in a world not recovered, and perhaps never to recover, from the ravages of a conflict always referred to either as “the war” or the “Great War,” what is now referred to as World War I. It was increasingly believed by both the public and those in government in most European countries that the terrible disaster which that war had been for all European peoples had come about more by inadvertence than design and that assuredly no one would intentionally start once again such a chain of horrors.

If this was one generally held set of beliefs, there was another, more dimly perceived but nevertheless of great significance. The war had started in Europe and had, to a very large extent been fought in Europe and by Europeans, but it had required the participation of non-European states for the Allies to defeat the Central Powers, as Germany and its associates were called. The monument on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to the Canadians who fought at Vimy Ridge, the commemoration by Australia of Anzac Day, the day the Australian and New Zealand Expeditionary Corps landed at Gallipoli; these and other symbols reminded the British government that in a reversal of the prior pattern of British forces struggling with others for the control of territories outside of Europe, on this occasion it had been troops from all over the Empire and Commonwealth that had had to come to the aid of the United Kingdom.