Politics and Ideology 1918–39

Abstract

The First World War led to the fall of the emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey; the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and aborted revolutions in eastern Europe in the years immediately following the war enlarged the spectrum of political choice and confronted Europe with leftist theory put into practice. The establishment of a social democratic republic in Germany heralded a third path between Bolshevik Marxism and the nineteenth-century liberal-conservative ideology, and the exigencies of the depression mandated new approaches to solve economic and social problems. The strong-arm authoritarian rulers of the 1920s were succeeded by the era of the totalitarian state in Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, new governments which tried to establish a total control over society. Then, the end of that decade witnessed a violent confrontation among the old and new ideologies in the civil war in Spain. Extra-parliamentary and formal politics mingled, as movements considering themselves outside the normal configuration of politics emerged and used tactics ranging from general strikes to street brawls and coups d’etat to achieve their ends. The institution of universal manhood suffrage — and the opening of the franchise to women in some countries — enlarged the number of participants in politics; even the peasantry, a relatively quiescent mass before the First World War, displayed a new degree of politicisation.