32 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Having identified certain general rules of state behaviour, Toynbee
turned his attention to the concrete grievances expressed, albeit not
through official channels, by the unsatisfied nation whose disposition
most concerned him. Toynbee made note in his lecture of the German
for ‘demands for “liberation” of the districts outside the Reich’ in
which were housed minorities who spoke German and identified polit-
ically as German: the liberation of Germany’s terre irredente as he had
referred to such districts in his address at Chatham House on December
17 1935. Toynbee stated in relation to these districts that ‘he thought
some kind of territorial revision in this apparently important and diffi-
cult field must be sought.’^103 Toynbee then raised the colonial question:
the German demands for the retrocession of Germany’s former African
colonies which had been lost to Germany under the Treaty of Versailles.
Responding to German complaints regarding its need for sources of sup-
ply and population outlets, Toynbee stated that there were ‘only dim,
limited, and diminishing possibilities of white settlement in Africa and
the German requirements in tropical raw materials far exceeded the pro-
ductive capacity of her former colonies.’^104
Nonetheless and broaching another point he had raised at Chatham
House in the previous December, Toynbee observed that there was more
to the colonial question than this: there was more to it than bare eco-
nomic or demographic considerations. As we saw, Toynbee was con-
scious of what he called the psychological demands of the so-called
have-not powers: ‘the craving for equality of status with one’s peers.’^105
It was with this craving in view that he had told his Chatham House
audience in December 1935 that for reasons of prestige, the have-not
powers would not be satisfied by a mere economic response to the colo-
nial question:
(^103) Ibid. Andrew Crozier states that in respect to ‘the problems of German minorities
populations in Europe,’ Toynbee thought there was ‘little prospect of their being solved
by incorporation of the territories concerned into the Reich without recourse to war. The
solution appeared to be some kind of autonomous status.’ Andrew Crozier, ‘Chatham
House and Appeasement,’ in Andrea Bosco and Cornelia Navari, Chatham House and
British Foreign Policy, 1919– 1945 (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1994), 228.
(^104) Times, February 29, 1936.
(^105) Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 41.