{"title":"An Age of Crisis","authors":"Agnes Cornell, J. Møller, Svend-Erik Skaaning","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198858249.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198858249.003.0002","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":351125,"journal":{"name":"Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116941429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusions","authors":"Agnes Cornell, J. Møller, Svend-Erik Skaaning","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198858249.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198858249.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Several observers have recently invoked interwar political developments to make the case that even established democracies are fragile. The main takeaway point from our analyses is pretty much the opposite, namely, that democracies have proven remarkably resilient if they have had time to become rooted and/or have strong associational landscapes. Crises—even as devastating as the Great Depression and the appeal of totalitarian movements—had little bite under such circumstances. It was only in new democracies with weak parties and civil societies that the economic, political, and social dislocations of the 1920s and 1930s spelled the end of democracy. On this basis, recent warnings about the fragility of contemporary democracies in Western Europe and North America seem exaggerated. At least, they cannot be sustained by interwar evidence.","PeriodicalId":351125,"journal":{"name":"Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121902765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}