An Age of Crisis

Abstract

To understand what interwar democracies were up against, we need to recognize that a number of mutually linked crises affected social and political life in the 1920s and 1930s. Besides the Great Depression between 1929 and 1933, these interwar crises included the aborted attempt at communist world revolution in 1917–20, the legacies of World War I in general and the Versailles and Trianon Treaties in particular, the post-war economic slump of the early 1920s, the advent of fascist and Nazi ideologies and mass movements, and the breakdown of the liberal world order in the 1930s. All of these crises had the potential to undermine democracy.