The Crisis of the Interwar Years (1919-1939)
The Great War of 1914-1918 shattered Europe’s equilibrium. The peace settlement reached at Versailles in 1919 briefly raised hopes that the suffering caused by the war would be compensated for by the achievement of national independence for many formerly dominated peoples and by the spread of democracy. These hopes were quickly undermined, however, by new political conflicts and widespread economic difficulties. The interwar period was characterized particularly by the apparent failure of liberal democracy and by breakdowns of the capitalist economic system, especially the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. By the mid-1930s, many Europeans were convinced that Europe’s future lay either with Fascist dictatorships modeled after Mussolini’s Italy or with Communism as it had developed in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In either case, the ideals associated with the French Revolution of 1789 seemed to have become outdated or illusory.
I. The Political Crisis of the Interwar Years
A. The War and the Undermining of Liberalism and Democracy
1. the new age of violence
2. the experience of wartime dictatorship
3. dissatisfaction with the peace settlement
B. Fascism: a new political model
1. the leader: Benito Mussolini
2. the program: dictatorship, nationalism, suppression of social conflict, the ‘total state’
3. the tactics: mass movement, propaganda, calculated violence
C. The Impact of Mussolini’s takeover (Oct. 1922)
1. a defeat for liberal democracy
2. a model for other parts of Europe
II. The Economic Crisis of the Interwar Years
A. The Postwar Economic Settlement
1. reparations: from Germany to France, England, Belgium
2. the problem of war debts
B. The German inflation crisis (1923-24)
C. The fragile prosperity of the 1920s
D. The Great Depression (1929-38)
1. the US stock market crash and its effects (1929)
2. overproduction and underconsumption
3. the failure of liberal economics
4. the political consequences
Excerpts from Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932)
“Fascism desires an active man, one engaged in activity with all his energies: it desires a man virilely conscious of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle considering that behooves man to conquer for himself that life truly worthy of him…”
“Fascism is opposed to democracy, which equates the nation with the majority, lowering it to the level of that majority…”
Fascism in action (1922) (from the diary of the Fascist leader Italo Balbo): “We undertook this task in the same spirit as when we demolished the enemy’s stores in war-time… We had to strike terror into the heart of our enemies… We went through Rimini, Sant-Arcangelo, Savignano, Cesena, Bertinoro… and destroyed all the red buildings, the seats of the Socialist and Communist organizations. It was a terrible night. Our passage was marked by huge columns of fire and smoke.”
League of Nations report on world agricultural conditions (1931):
“All countries report the existence of a more or less accentuated agricultural crisis, even countries hitherto renowned for the prosperous situation ensured to their farmers by specialisation and by the diversification of their agricultural undertakings…. It is not merely a question of bad harvests caused by natural or atmospheric disorders… The evil is deep-rooted and its progress may be traced throughout the world…. Frequently the returns of agricultural undertakings are not enough to cover the necessary outlay for the purchase of the material or products necessary for continued operation or for the payment of wages and taxes…”
George Orwell on mass unemployment in England (1937): “I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand what was happening to them. They had been brought up to work, and behold! It seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of working again. In their circumstances, it was inevitable, at first, that they should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation. That was the attitude toward unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which happened to you as an individual and for which you were to blame.”
Mass strikes in France: the Popular Front (1936): “7 in the evening at the Boulogne-Billancourt (factory), in front of the main gate of the Renault factory: 200 onlookers are waiting. They are unemployed workers, militants, wives looking for their husbands. At the gate, factory delegates check those who enter: only workers or union members are allowed in, and no one is allowed to leave after entering… The workers’ security force takes its job seriously. For many of them, it is an adventure; they are careful and serious like children enjoying a game. One of them breaks wine bottles with diligence: ‘No drinking inside. Calm and dignity’… Everyone talks: ‘6 francs an hours after ten years on the job… The assembly line, the line… we’ll have a collective contract, and the 40-hour week, too; this time, we’ve got them…”