"There is more than enough room in the world for Germany and Britain"
About this Quote
The reassuring tone suggests an easy accommodation between two great powers, but the voice behind it was John Amery, a British fascist and Nazi collaborator executed for treason in 1945. He used such lines in radio broadcasts from occupied Europe to persuade Britons that their true enemy was Bolshevism, not Germany, and to justify an Anglo-German understanding. The promise of coexistence hinges on a spatial metaphor: there is ample global room, so no need to fight. It implies that British imperial interests and Nazi ambitions could be neatly partitioned into separate spheres.
That formulation obscures the realities of the war. Nazi policy was not a conservative bid for status within an existing order but a radical project of domination, racial hierarchy, and annihilation, centered on expansion in Eastern Europe and backed by total war. In the West, Germany planned to knock Britain out of the conflict by blockade, bombing, and, if feasible, invasion. To suggest that the two empires could simply keep to their lanes converts a clash of irreconcilable values and aims into a mere misunderstanding over space.
The phrasing also courted a specific British audience. It flatters imperial sensibilities by implying that each nation deserves its realm, and it exploits anti-communist fears by offering a strategic bargain: leave Germany to reorder the continent while Britain preserves its empire. Dressed as realism, it is a euphemism for acquiescing to aggression, a rhetorical move that recasts capitulation as prudence.
Amery’s family name gave the appeal a paradoxical credibility. As the son of Leo Amery, a prominent Conservative statesman, he embodied a fringe but real temptation within segments of the British right to prioritize anti-Bolshevism over resistance to Nazism. The line captures the seduction of appeasement language, where vague assurances of room and order mask the moral stakes. Coexistence required at least minimal compatibility of aims and principles; Nazi Germany offered neither.
That formulation obscures the realities of the war. Nazi policy was not a conservative bid for status within an existing order but a radical project of domination, racial hierarchy, and annihilation, centered on expansion in Eastern Europe and backed by total war. In the West, Germany planned to knock Britain out of the conflict by blockade, bombing, and, if feasible, invasion. To suggest that the two empires could simply keep to their lanes converts a clash of irreconcilable values and aims into a mere misunderstanding over space.
The phrasing also courted a specific British audience. It flatters imperial sensibilities by implying that each nation deserves its realm, and it exploits anti-communist fears by offering a strategic bargain: leave Germany to reorder the continent while Britain preserves its empire. Dressed as realism, it is a euphemism for acquiescing to aggression, a rhetorical move that recasts capitulation as prudence.
Amery’s family name gave the appeal a paradoxical credibility. As the son of Leo Amery, a prominent Conservative statesman, he embodied a fringe but real temptation within segments of the British right to prioritize anti-Bolshevism over resistance to Nazism. The line captures the seduction of appeasement language, where vague assurances of room and order mask the moral stakes. Coexistence required at least minimal compatibility of aims and principles; Nazi Germany offered neither.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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