User:Douglian30/sandbox/Clement Attlee (part)

However, with the rising threat from Nazi Germany, and the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations, this policy eventually lost credibility. By 1937, Labour had jettisoned its pacifist position and came to support rearmament and oppose Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement.

At the end of 1937, Attlee and a party of three Labour MPs visited Spain and visited the British Battalion of the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. One of the companies was named the "Major Attlee Company" in his honour. In the House of Commons, Attlee stated "I cannot understand the delusion that if Franco wins with Italian and German aid, he will immediately become independent. I think it is a ridiculous proposition." Dalton, the Labour Party's spokesman on foreign policy, also thought that Franco would ally with Germany and Italy. However, Franco's subsequent behaviour proved it was not such a ridiculous proposition. As Dalton later acknowledged, Franco skilfully maintained Spanish neutrality, whereas Hitler would have occupied Spain if Franco had lost the Civil War.

In 1938, Attlee opposed the Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler to give Germany the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, stating in the House of Commons:

"We all feel relief that war has not come this time. Every one of us has been passing through days of anxiety; we cannot, however, feel that peace has been established, but that we have nothing but an armistice in a state of war. We have been unable to go in for care-free rejoicing. We have felt that we are in the midst of a tragedy. We have felt humiliation. This has not been a victory for reason and humanity. It has been a victory for brute force. At every stage of the proceedings there have been time limits laid down by the owner and ruler of armed force. The terms have not been terms negotiated; they have been terms laid down as ultimata. We have seen to-day a gallant, civilised and democratic people betrayed and handed over to a ruthless despotism. We have seen something more. We have seen the cause of democracy, which is, in our view, the cause of civilisation and humanity, receive a terrible defeat. ... The events of these last few days constitute one of the greatest diplomatic defeats that this country and France have ever sustained. There can be no doubt that it is a tremendous victory for Herr Hitler. Without firing a shot, by the mere display of military force, he has achieved a dominating position in Europe which Germany failed to win after four years of war. He has overturned the balance of power in Europe. He has destroyed the last fortress of democracy in Eastern Europe which stood in the way of his ambition. He has opened his way to the food, the oil and the resources which he requires in order to consolidate his military power, and he has successfully defeated and reduced to impotence the forces that might have stood against the rule of violence."

and:

"The cause [of the crisis which we have undergone] was not the existence of minorities in Czechoslovakia; it was not that the position of the Sudeten Germans had become intolerable. It was not the wonderful principle of self-determination. It was because Herr Hitler had decided that the time was ripe for another step forward in his design to dominate Europe. ... The minorities question is no new one. It existed before the [First World] War and it existed after the War, because the problem of Germans in Czechoslovakia succeeded that of the Czechs in German Austria, just as the problem of Germans in the Tyrol succeeded that of the Italians in Trieste, and short of a drastic and entire reshuffling of these populations there is no possible solution to the problem of minorities in Europe except toleration."

However, the new Czechoslovakian state did not provide equal rights to the Slovaks and Sudeten Germans, with the historian Arnold J. Toynbee already having noted that "for the Germans, Magyars and Poles, who account between them for more than one quarter of the whole population, the present regime in Czechoslovakia is not essentially different from the regimes in the surrounding countries". Eden in the Munich debate acknowledged that there had been "discrimination, even severe discrimination" against the Sudeten Germans.