To Appease or to Concede? Contrasting Two Modes of Accommodation in International Conflict
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117806060928 |
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Author | Samuel Azubuike |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Relations Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 20(1):49–68
[DOI: 10.1177/0047117806060928]
To Appease or to Concede? Contrasting Two Modes of
Accommodation in International Conflict
Samuel Azubuike*, University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
It is sometimes necessary in serious interstate disputes for a party to unilaterally
accommodate an opponent’s demands or claims. Such unreciprocated or one-sided
accommodation, however, does not only pose political and psychological risks, it also
seems to conflict with the basic bargaining norm of reciprocity. Yet the imperative of
ending deadlocks that can degenerate into belligerent conflicts demands such unrecip-
rocated accommodation. This imperative also calls for a positive and principled concept
for understanding unreciprocated accommodation. With the perhaps unjustified and
continuing discrediting of appeasement as a legitimate accommodative bargaining
strategy, this article highlights the notion of concession as a valuable, non-pejorative
concept of accommodation. The article offers a framework of concession that helps
determine when/why a strong state would undertake the unreciprocated accommodation
of an opponent. The argument is empirically illustrated using the Anglo-American
conflict over Venezuela at the end of the nineteenth century.
Keywords: appeasement, bargaining, concession, diplomacy, negotiation
In a conflict between two relatively strong states, for the dispute not to degenerate
into war, one state would have to make a final accommodation of the opponent’s
demands by giving up all or part of its own position. Ideally, for an amicable
resolution of interstate conflicts both parties should reciprocate accommodative
moves, thus leading to a compromise settlement. However, in a serious dispute
involving substantial and zero-sum perceptions of interests, the deadlock may often
only be ended peacefully by a final and complete accommodation by one state of
the opponent’s position. But despite its manifest utility as a bargaining strategy,
unreciprocated accommodation is usually viewed with immense concern. This
concern emanates from the susceptibility of such accommodative moves to be
perceived as capitulation or surrender, undermining the party’s reputation for
resolve and encouraging further demands and challenges.1This article broadly
reaffirms the usefulness of unreciprocated accommodation in international
relations. The argument is made by first comparing two prominent modes of
accommodation in interstate bargaining, the concepts of appeasement and
concession. After examining the current status of appeasement, fuller attention is
focused on concession, with the aim of showing that while appeasement remains
discredited concession affords greater conceptual and analytical scope for the
politics of accommodation. Empirically, the argument focuses on the 1895–6
conflict between Great Britain and the US over the Venezuela–British Guiana
boundary dispute.
r
i
The notion of appeasement
As a diplomatic bargaining strategy, appeasement has become opprobrious
politically, semantically and psychologically. Stripped of all acquired emotive
baggage, one might define appeasement simply as principled or pragmatic concil-
iation or accommodation. However, following Neville Chamberlain’s Munich
diplomacy, appeasement has undergone a rapid metamorphosis from the positive,
pragmatic and principled to the negative and pejorative. As George Lanyi has
noted, even the dictionary definition of appeasement quickly changed to catch up
with the new interpretation. Hence, whereas the fourth edition of the Oxford
Concise Dictionary (1951) still derived the noun from ‘appease’, which meant to
pacify or quieten a person, strife or anger, less than a decade after the Second World
War the revised edition of the dictionary (1954) had added that ‘appease’ also meant
‘to try to conciliate or bribe a potential aggressor’ often ‘with implications of
sacrifice of principles’.2This Munich-induced negative interpretation is now the
‘orthodox’ or ‘traditional’ view of appeasement.3
However, the accuracy of the historical account behind this semantic transfor-
mation was already being called into question when in the 1960s and 1970s the
British archival documents relating to the 1930s were released.4This produced a
mass of revisionist and counter-revisionist histories united by their challenge to,
and rejection of, the orthodox view, but divided by how much blame for the
outcome of Munich that they level at Chamberlain himself or at the structural
constraints underpinning his actions.5Kennedy, for instance, has argued that owing
to socio-strategic imperatives, the policy of appeasement ‘has been a particular
British form of diplomacy since the middle of the 19th century’.6This traditional
British policy, he goes on to say, was what Chamberlain was continuing. His major
error was persisting with the policy even when a different strategy was obviously
required. Thus, most historians now seem to be of the view that far from appease-
ment being an inherently bad policy, Hitler was an evil aberration whose ultimate
objectives could not be appeased.7
Despite this revisionism, however, policymakers and many scholars persist in
using the Munich-tainted definition of appeasement.8They conveniently and
indiscriminately cite the ‘lessons of the past’ to justify, advocate, diagnose and/or
facilitate decisions and preferred policies.9So appeasement ‘is today a dirty word
in political controversy’ with a specific meaning in academic writing on inter-
national politics.10 Now ‘burdened with emotional and ideological undertones’,
appeasement is used ‘as meaning the cowardly surrender to the threat of force’.11
Even among scholars, including especially IR scholars, the pejorative view of
appeasement persists, as reflected in key textbooks.12 Hence, appeasement has been
described variously as ‘synonymous with weakness or cowardice’, ‘a corrupted
policy of compromise’, and a policy which results from ‘weakness or ignorance’.13
While no statesman would now wish to be thought of as ‘an appeaser’, the issue
with appeasement is not only that it is held in opprobrium. Rather, it is the fact that
revisionism seems to have failed to positively redefine the term by offering a
50 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 20(1)
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