Appeasement was the foreign policy followed by the British and French governments in the 1930s, whereby they did not attack or confront other governments, specifically that of Germany's, when international laws were breached, but rather gave into some of the demands to keep the peace.

After the horror and dramatic loss of innocent lives (amassing over 3 million) in the First World War, both the French and the British governments were keen to avoid any more blood shed and their pacifist policies meant they started to take a very lenient attitude towards breached international laws. They knew that the general public, for whom the memories of war were still rife, thought the idea of another conflict unacceptable. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, the League of Nations were unable to enforce any effective sanctions and when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1936, the economic sanctions they managed to enforce had little...