appeasement, Foreign policy of pacifying an aggrieved country through negotiation in order to prevent war. The prime example is Britain’s policy toward Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought to accommodate Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and took no action when Germany absorbed Austria in 1938. When Adolf Hitler prepared to annex ethnically German portions of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain negotiated the notorious Munich Agreement, which permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia.