Despatching ground forces - the Field Force - to the continent constituted a cardinal element of British grand strategy from early 1934 to early 1938. In winter 1933-1934, through the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee [DRC], senior Foreign Office and Treasury officials, working with the Chiefs of Staff, advised the Cabinet to begin moderate rearmament - ulti-mately 52 pound million - with a deadline of 1939. Central to DRC recommendations was the Field Force to underwrite British maintaining the European balance of power through military support for France and the Low Countries to deter possible German aggression. When reporting in February 1934, the DRC identified two adversary Powers requiring improved British defences: Germany, the 'ultimate potential enemy', and Japan, of lesser importance. The War Office immediately began creating the Force, built around four divisions. In 1935, given the Abyssinian crisis, Italy joined the list of potential adversaries, and the Cabinet approved almost 400 pound million DRC-recommended additional defence spending, again, by 1939. The government guided by the Foreign Office monitored the balance; and War Office planning now centred on a 16-division Field Force. However, in May 1937, Neville Chamberlain rose to the premier-ship and initiated a defence review requiring more spending - 1.625 pound billion in two tranches: 1939 and 1941 - but eliminating the Field Force. Eschewing the balance, Britain would rely on powerful air and naval forces to maintain national and imperial security. However, after Germany's conquest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and a darkened continental milieu, the Field Force was reborn to underpin British strategy.

Esme Howard, the British diplomat posted to the Paris Peace Conference to handle policy towards North and Northeastern Europe, saw his proposals except for the Polish Corridor largely ignored by David Lloyd George, the prime minister, and his advisors at Downing Street. The two men had decidedly different conceptions of post-war Poland: Howard plumped for a large Poland with adequate territory and economic resources to counter the certain revival of Britain's adversaries Germany and Russia; Lloyd George looked for a smaller one to appease republican Germany and Russia whether the latter became 'Red' or 'White'. It has been suggested that as Howard was Roman Catholic, he looked to support reborn Roman Catholic Poland as much as he could. Such assertions are incorrect. Before and after 1919 in his various postings, he always put British interests above all else, even in Catholic countries in which he served. His advice at Paris was to ensure smaller Powers like Poland and the Baltic States could with British support maintain a regional balance of power against Britain's Berlin and Moscow. Lloyd George lacked any strategic vision in seeking to ameliorate differences with the Germans and Russians.

British war aims concerning Germany developed haphazardly during the Great War of 1914-1918. The vicissitudes of unexpectedly conducting total war-one lasting more than four years-periodically deflected their consideration. Inter-Allied diplomacy and pressures from non-governmental lobbyists from Central-Eastern Europe seeking independent states to succeed the Habsburg, Romanov, and Wilhelmine empires forced reconsideration at crucial moments, for instance, after the advent of the nascent Bolshevik regime in Russia in late 1917 to early 1918. So, too, did British public opinion. Nonetheless, the British government had a clear general strategy: return stability on the European continent. In this context, the prime minister after December 1916, David Lloyd George, became central. Beyond the general aim, however, he wanted to avoid firm commitments over a range of issues touching Germany to give him flexibility in negotiating with the other Allied leaders at the eventual Peace Conference. Thus, less concerned with the minutiae of transforming war aims involving German territorial losses, disarmament, and paying for the war, he looked to make deals that might lack strategic purpose.

The Treaty of Versailles is one of the twentieth century's most controversial international agreements; and British policy towards the settlement with defeated Germany equally so. British policy at the Peace Conference stemmed from war aims developed after 1914 - desultory because of unexpected total war. In this process after December 1916, Prime Minister David Lloyd George controlled policy-making and, by late 1918, had general aims involving German territorial losses, disarmament, and paying for the war. Despite distrusting Foreign Office professionals, Lloyd George and his Downing Street advisors at Paris relied on non-professional experts through informal networks below them. One was James Headlam-Morley about the future of Danzig; and several pre-war historians also contributed in a profound way, their experiences stimulating the establishment of diplomatic history as a field of academic research and the emergence of the nascent discipline of international relations. On bigger issues, like Anglo-American naval rivalry that emerged at the Conference, Lloyd George sparred with President Woodrow Wilson. And as only Lloyd George of the Big Four survived politically after the Conference, development of his ideas and policies during the war and after played a major role in post-war international politics. Some issues at Paris have not received needed attention like the restitution of cultural objects in German possession: the Koran of Caliph Othman and the Skull of Sultan Mkwawa. Finally, after the war, the Treaty's impact on both Britain's enemy, Germany, and its ally, France profoundly affected the European balance of power.

The union of Austria and Germany in March 1938 - the Anschluss forced by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany with the acquiescence of Italy was the first test of the appeasement strategy of the Neville Chamberlain government. Austro-German Anschluss did not occur unexpectedly: after Habsburg collapse in 1918, it had been desired by pan-Germans in Austria and Germany but denied by the Paris Peace Settlement; its possibility arose a couple of times in the early 1930s; and by 1937, the majority of Austrians seemed willing to unite with their Nazi neighbour. Even before Chamberlain became Premier in May 1937 and changed the strategic basis of British foreign policy, the Foreign Office and other ministries wrestled over whether to thwart Anschluss and, until 1937, worked to keep the two German-speaking Powers apart. After Chamberlain took power, the willingness to oppose abated as Hitler's pan-German solution spoke to both national self-determination and Austrian ambivalence about independence. Chamberlain's government submitted expecting that they might use the absorption of Austria as a means to divide Nazi Germany from Fascist Italy. 'Good relations' with the dictators existed as a cardinal element of Chamberlain's brand of appeasement.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE DARK European International History 1933-1939 Zara S. Steiner Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 1248 pp, US$65.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0199212002With the second and final volume of her study of European international politics between 1919 and 1939, Zara Steiner has completed what is now the touchstone for several generations and beyond of international historians, international relations specialists, and the wider reading public interested in the period between the two world wars of the 20th century. Together with the first volume, this study is an immediate classic - one based on 20 of research and, before that, a distinguished scholarly record and accumulation of knowledge stretching back to the late 1950s. Demonstrating the same deft analytical hand that dissected the vagaries of European international history from the Paris peace conference to the collapse of the Weimar republic, a command of English and foreign language sources, and lucid prose, Steiner provides an exegesis that neither preaches about nor excuses the generation of statesmen, politicians, military leaders, diplomats, and journalists who dominated Europe and hold responsibility for the outbreak of a second world war in 1939. In the first volume of her study, she argued that by the end of the 1920s, the problems spawned by the First World War were resolved and continental stability had emerged from the chaos of war and revolution. This process was then undermined by the hinge years of the Great Depression, beginning in late 1929 when the disruption of the international economy, the concomitant undermining of democratic government, and the rise of radical prescriptions to meet the apparent failure of capitalism and democratic governance emerged.In this context, the central figure of this book is Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor after January 1933, supreme German leader after August 1934, and fountainhead of National Socialist ideology. Steiner's initial chapter, Brown dawn, looks closely at the Nazi revolution and the end of the quest for disarmament. She sees Hitler's ideology as nourishing the roots of a foreign policy designed to make Germany supreme in Europe and laying the basis for an eventual struggle with the United States to make Germany the sole world power: territorial expansion to the east, whereby the newly created states, including German- speaking Austria, would have to be brought within the Reich; the complete destruction of Nazidom's ideological enemy, Bolshevik Russia; and cleansing Europe of its subhuman races, especially the Jews. Through his dark social Darwinian lens, Hitler looked for the means and opportunity to achieve his foreign policy goals.Opportunism is central here. In his influential 1961 book, The Origins of the Second World War, the revisionist A.J. P. Taylor argued that Hitler did not follow a diplomatic blueprint but was pragmatic in foreign policy: announcing German rearmament in 1935, remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, forcing the annexation of Austria in March 1938, detaching the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia six months later, occupying the Czechoslovak rump in March 1939, and initiating the Polish crisis in September 1939. In contrast, Steiner shows clearly that while Hitler was opportunistic, he was an opportunist who knew where he was going. He gambled on inaction by the other great powers, took risks, and proved daring in exploiting the openings given to him. He took the initiative and the other powers' leaders reacted.In Steiner's estimation, these responses were crucial to the origins of the Second World War. Engaged in a pyrrhic competition among themselves, all the successor states except Czechoslovakia gradually moved into the German orbit because the new Bolshevik Russian threat differed little from the old tsarist one. In Italy, Benito Mussolini found common ground with Hitler after the Italian conquest of Abyssinia in May 1936 and led his country away from London and Paris, which had temporarily united with Rome in a vain effort to contain Germany. …

British grand strategy in the 1930s had two cardinal elements: security of the home islands and Imperial Defence. This article questions the view that Britain did not have a strategic commitment to the continent of Europe till late in the 1930s. It also provides an over-arching analysis of the two distinct but intertwined periods in the evolution of national strategy and Imperial defence in that decade: before 1930 till late 1937 built around the strategy of the balance of power; and from late-1937 till early 1939 built around the strategy of appeasement. Moreover, it is impossible to understand the high level debate within the British government over strategic issues without putting the domestic political situation into the context of the impact of the First World War on Britain's society and economy. Similarly, the development of the new international order created at the Paris Peace Conference – and its demise in the ‘hinge years’ of the early 1930s – also needs to be better understood in terms of how British grand strategy emerged in this period. A rational and realistic policy, appeasement was a tactical diplomatic manoeuvre; it had no place serving as the strategic basis of British external policy.