I disagree, so we'll have to leave it at that. Basically, Britain and France were bound by treaty to defend Poland if it were attacked. They did nothing in its defense, but Hitler had to know that invading Poland would trigger a declaration of war by France and Britain.
It is important to remember that most European countries had been secular and socialist in nature for decades by that point (Germany as far back as the 1870s under Otto von Bismarck, after the unification of the Prussian states). The decade of the 1930s was marked by a major philosophical clash between two different brands of socialism -- the nationalist version that most "conservative" elements in these countries espoused, and the international Marxism (communism) that had risen in the Soviet Union.
Every dispute in Europe in the 1930s must be seen in this light (the civil unrest in France, the Spanish Civil War, etc.), because this was the overriding concern for all of these governments. In this sense, Neville Chamberlain gets a bad rap in the history books as an "appeaser" of Hitler. The reality is that Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler was part of a pragmatic, calculated decision on the part of Britain and France to allow Germany to re-arm in the 1930s to shield Western Europe from the growing threat of Marxism in the Soviet Union. This, in fact, is a role that Germany in its various forms (the small fiefdoms of Prussia, modern Germany, etc.) had played throughout European history -- despite their frequent antagonism towards their western neighbors, they served as a vital bulwark against potential threats from the "barbarians" of the East.
Throughout the 1930s, the governments of Britain and France were content to let Germany and the Soviet Union fight for dominance of Eastern Europe, which would leave neither nation capable of mounting a serious threat to the West. This is why the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was such a turning point in history -- the British and French were so alarmed over this pact that they turned to the United States for support against Germany.
Both the Soviets and the U.S. agreed to wage war against Germany, but they both demanded a heavy price from the Western European powers. The Soviets demanded -- and received -- the right to control Eastern Europe as a buffer region between them and the West, while the United States called for the European nations to abandon their colonies after the war was over.