ABSTRACT
During the next twelve months the pattern tentatively set in the summer of 1938 - to keep France in perpetual fear of Germany on the continent so as to procure her pliability in the Mediterranean - hardened into the central feature of Italian foreign policy. It was not inevitable that it should work out this way, and in fact twice, after the Munich conference and after the final occupation of Czechoslovakia, it looked as if Italy's rush into the arms of Germany might be halted and the harmony promised by the Easter Accords be given a chance to provide some stability for Europe. In fact, partly in gratitude for Mussolini's mediation at Munich and partly because the arrangement was clearly to its advantage, the British government decided on 16 November to ratify the Accords. But the Accords were not allowed to develop their potential as an instrument of general pacification because Mussolini additionally continued to demand, in effect, the surrender of France, unaware until too late that his price for British friendship was impossibly high and that his chosen instrument of pressure - a relationship with Germany more binding and more threatening than the Axis - would inevitably ensnare him and deprive him of practically all freedom of action.
