Guest Post: Slippery Sam Signs the Unequal Treaty of Munich

This article first appeared on Today in Alternate History.

30 September, 1938:

Samuel Hoare, our greatest prime minister, though cruelly known to his detractors as "Slippery Sam," was the British Empire's man of the hour once again.

His rise to international statesmanship began three years earlier when he had joined with Pierre Laval, the prime minister of France, to resolve a nasty colonial dispute in East Africa. It was his brilliant partition plan that had averted an Italo-Ethiopian War and, more importantly, kept Benito Mussolini's regime firmly inside the Stresa Front. Due to this overseas policy success, Hoare was the logical choice to step up from Foreign Secretary to enter Number Ten Downing Street after the retirement of Stanley Baldwin. With Europe on a collision course between the Great Powers, he was the ideal candidate for the job because of his masterful diplomatic skills. A prominent member of the pro-appeasement group, the Cliveden Set, his primary mission was to prevent the outbreak of another Great War.

With an ear perfectly attuned to the public mood, he knew two things very well: neither was the Armed Forces ready for such a conflict nor was there any appetite to fight in the electorate that had voted in the National Government. Perhaps the shameless old war-monger Winston Churchill would have railed support from the back-benches, but he was long gone, having died in an unfortunate automobile accident in New York in 1931.

Fortunately, there would be no car crash in Europe because it turned out that the Hoare-Laval Plan was a perfect diplomatic blueprint for settling the festering dispute over the Sudetenland. German Dictator Adolf Hitler was only interested in an agreement, but Hoare insisted upon a formal treaty in the knowledge that an agreement is not legally binding under international law. In theory, this diplomatic instrument was a robust legal barrier that would prevent the Nazis from occupying rump Czechoslovakia and becoming a pariah state.

On 10 March, 1939, Hoare, addressing Imperial Citizens on the BBC World Service, predicted that the policy of appeasement would lead to a new "Golden Age." Yet only five days later, Hitler violated the treaty and sent the Wehrmacht into Bohemia and Moravia. Unlike the Rhineland or the Sudetenland, this occupation was not a territorial readjustment of the Treaty of Versailles but conquest, an unmistakable act of expansionist aggression in Eastern Europe. The Nazis had fallen into a trap carefully laid by Hoare because this egregious act of bad faith created doubt in Stalin's mind and led to his last-minute decision to back out of signing the proposed Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Hitler was stubbornly determined to invade Poland alone, but his generals were strongly opposed and overthrew his regime as Hoare had correctly anticipated.

Author's Note:

In reality, the proposed Hoare-Laval Plan for the partition of Ethiopian land between Italy and Ethiopia drew immediate and widespread denunciation, forcing Hoare's resignation on 18 December, 1935. He was seen as a leading "appeaser," and his removal from office (along with that of Sir John Simon and the removal of Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister) was a condition of Labour's agreement to serve in a coalition government in May 1940.

Provine's Addendum:

All eyes in Europe watched Germany as Hitler sought to return to power against the military regime he had led. Many suspected it could go as far as civil war, but fresh parliamentary elections in 1940 kept the turmoil political other than a few riots between the different parties. The Nazi establishment continued to dominate with its effective propaganda, which could drown out even the efforts of Hitler's hastily constructed Freiheit (Freedom) Party. Hitler's health was wrecked by the campaign, though conspiracy theorists suggest he may have been poisoned. Others maintain his regimen of "energy pills" and other drugs caused nonfatal overdose.

With the German issue largely settled, international diplomacy turned back to the questions of ongoing imperialism. Much of the world had been carved up, but new players wanted to enter the game, as seen with Italy's wars in Africa. The Empire of Japan, which already controlled much of China, threatened to move southward and even into French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. India sought independence from the UK, which had dominated the subcontinent after centuries of wars elbowing out other European powers. The Soviet Union, recovering from Stalin's purges, had begun efforts to retake what it saw as lost territory in Finland and the Baltic.

Hoare and his political followers kept up the policy of appeasement, trying to find common ground for all. He staved off Indian independence with offers of more local rights by rolling back the Rowlatt Act and ultimately breaking up the Raj into several states to discourage cooperation in non-violent protests. Elsewhere in the world, the empires butted up against each other and watched for signs of weakness where rebellions could be encouraged and then later stamped out by another empire coming in to "assure peace."