Content area
Full Text
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000) 248pp.
Reviewed by Holger Schmidt
Can aggressors be appeased? Ever since Neville Chamberlain's famously futile efforts to pacify Nazi Germany with a string of diplomatic and territorial concessions, most analysts have taken it for granted that they cannot. Once considered a viable tool of statecraft, even by realpolitik advocates such as E.H. Carr, the so-called 'Munich experience' transformed appeasement into a political invective used to discredit policies that critics consider either naive or excessively accommodating of foreign adversaries.
Stephen Rock's Appeasement in International Politics boldly challenges the stereotypical characterization of appeasement as an inherently flawed and often counterproductive approach to coping with potential aggressors. According to Rock, standard critiques of appeasement not only downplay the costs and risks of alternative strategies but also ignore the fact that many revisionists seek only limited changes in the status quo. Consequently, giving in to-' the demands of dissatisfied opponents does not inevitably whet their appetites nor encourage further challenges or aggression, as conventional wisdom would have it.
In Rock's view, this point is as much an empirical as a theoretical one. One of the book's key claims is that cases of successful appeasement do exist, even though scholars and policymakers alike commonly overlook them. Therefore, the real issue for Rock is not so much whether appeasement can work, but when. Accordingly, the book's principal goal is to elucidate the conditions under which appeasement is likely to succeed and to "provide policymakers with guidance regarding both the appropriateness of the policy and its proper implementation." To this end, Rock examines five major instances of attempted appeasement. Two of these-British appeasement of the United States at the turn of the 20th century and current US policy towards North Korea-are categorized as examples of appeasement successes. Rock categorizes another two-British appeasement of Nazi Germany and US efforts to appease Iraq prior to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait-as unambiguous failures, with the fifth case-Anglo-American appeasement of the Soviet Union during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath-falling somewhere in between.
To illuminate what accounts for these varied results, Rock employs a technique known in political science lingo as "structured, focused comparison." In this variant of the comparative case study method, the researcher conducts an indepth...