Introduction

In the Introduction, Andrzej Nowak defines and describes the subject of his book as “an attempt to analyze the historical phenomenon called ‘appeasement’.” Generally, the historical concept of “appeasement” is associated with the Munich agreement the Western Powers made in 1938 with Hitler: the Prime Ministers of Britain and France agreed that “instead of risking war with Hitler, it would be better to appease his voracity with Czechoslovakia, and assuage a ‘quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing,’ as the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain put it.” These words make up a leitmotif which recurs later in Nowak’s book; however, after a brief review of his predecessors’ work on appeasement, he backdates the beginnings of the concept and its practice in international politics to 1919–1920 and the Polish-Bolshevik war. The rest of the book is an in-depth analysis of the backstage events and documents drawn up in the diplomatic and political circles involved in this war.