Section Overview |
The demands of total war |
During World War I, states increased the degree and scope of their authority over their economies, societies, and cultures. The demands of total war required the centralization of power and the regimentation of the lives of citizens. During the war, governments sought to control information and used propaganda to create stronger emotional ties to the nation and its war effort. Ironically, these measures also produced distrust of traditional authorities. At the end of the war, four empires dissolved—the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires—but the democratic nations that arose in their place lacked a tradition of democratic politics and suffered from weak economies and ethnic tensions. Even before the end of the war, Russia experienced a revolution and civil war that created not only a new state, the USSR, but also a new conception of government and socioeconomic order based on communist ideals.
In Italy and Germany, charismatic leaders led fascist movements to power, seizing control of the post–World War I governments. Fascism promised to solve economic problems through state direction, although not ownership, of production. The movements also promised to counteract the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles by rearming the military and by territorial expansion. The efforts of fascist governments to revise the Treaty of Versailles led to the most violent and destructive war in human history, World War II—a conflict between democracies, temporarily allied with communist Russia, and fascist states. At the end of this conflict, fascist forces had been defeated, Europe was devastated, and the international diplomatic situation developed into a conflict between the capitalistic democracies and the centrally directed communist states.
In the post–World War II period, states in both Eastern and Western Europe increased their involvement in citizens’ economic lives. In the West this came through social welfare programs and the expansion of education, while Eastern European nations were heavily regulated in planned economies directed by the Soviet Union. With the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Western European democracies celebrated the triumph of their political and economic systems, and many of the former communist states sought admission into the European Union and NATO. By the late 1990s, it became evident that the transition from communism to capitalism and democracy was not as simple as it first appeared to be, with Western Europe experiencing difficulties because of economic recession and the extension of social welfare programs.
Source: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-european-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf
In Italy and Germany, charismatic leaders led fascist movements to power, seizing control of the post–World War I governments. Fascism promised to solve economic problems through state direction, although not ownership, of production. The movements also promised to counteract the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles by rearming the military and by territorial expansion. The efforts of fascist governments to revise the Treaty of Versailles led to the most violent and destructive war in human history, World War II—a conflict between democracies, temporarily allied with communist Russia, and fascist states. At the end of this conflict, fascist forces had been defeated, Europe was devastated, and the international diplomatic situation developed into a conflict between the capitalistic democracies and the centrally directed communist states.
In the post–World War II period, states in both Eastern and Western Europe increased their involvement in citizens’ economic lives. In the West this came through social welfare programs and the expansion of education, while Eastern European nations were heavily regulated in planned economies directed by the Soviet Union. With the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Western European democracies celebrated the triumph of their political and economic systems, and many of the former communist states sought admission into the European Union and NATO. By the late 1990s, it became evident that the transition from communism to capitalism and democracy was not as simple as it first appeared to be, with Western Europe experiencing difficulties because of economic recession and the extension of social welfare programs.
Source: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-european-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf
The Bolshevik Revolution
Joseph Stalin (left), Vladimir Lenin (center), and Leon Trotsky (right) led the Bolshevik Revolution and founded the Soviet Union.
The sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937) is one of the most famous art works of Socialist Realism.
Stalinism
A Soviet Cult of Personality celebrated Joseph Stalin, depicted here in the Socialist Realist style.
Altered documents erased individuals killed during the Great Purge from the historical record.
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Propaganda posters for the Five-Year Plans
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Failures of Democratic States
Józef Piłsudski overthrew the infant Polish Republic in the 1926 May Coup and ruled as a behind-the-scenes dictator until his death in 1935.
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Béla Kun led a communist revolution that established the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic which collapsed when Romania invaded Hungary. Miklós Horthy oversaw a right-wing White Terror and collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
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Ion Antonescu (left) allied himself with the far-right Iron Guard party and allied Romania with Nazi Germany during World War II.
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During the chaos of the Ruhr Crisis, Adolf Hitler tried to spark a far-right revolution in Germany during the failed Beer Hall Putsch. While in prison afterward, Hitler wrote his political treatise Mein Kampf.
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During the Ruhr Crisis, Weimar Republic suffered extreme hyperinflation which crippled the German economy.
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The British National Government was a coalition of Conservative, Liberal, Liberal National and National Labour politicians who worked together to pull Britain through the Great Depression.
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Text: "It's the Soviets pulling the strings of the Popular Front." French right-wing critics denounced the Popular Front alliance of Liberals, Socialists, and Communists as puppets of the Soviet Union.
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The Spanish Civil War was a proxy war between far-right and far-left forces. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported the Spanish Nationalists led by Francisco Franco while the USSR gave aid to the Spanish Popular Front.
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Nazi Germany field tested its new high-altitude long-range aerial bombers on a small Basque town. Spanish artist Pablo Picasso painted his masterpiece Guernica (1937) protesting the horrors of modern, industrial warfare.
The American Dawes Plan and Young Plan stabilized the failing German economy and ushered in a brief period of prosperity during the Weimar Golden Age until the U.S. stock market crash in 1929. The Nazis, of course, were opposed to Dawes Plan and any foreign influence in Germany.
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Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
Above: Reacting against the looming communist threat during the Two Red Years, Blackshirts conducted the March on Rome in 1922 to install Benito Mussolini as the new Italian prime minister.
Below: Fascist Party Headquarters in Rome in 1934 |
Total War
At 50 million megatons, the Tsar Bomba thermonuclear device is the most powerful weapon ever developed. It was tested in 1961 during the peak of the Cold War. Reaching 35 miles into the atmosphere, the mushroom cloud was seven times the height of Mount Everest.
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Postwar Economies
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The Beveridge Report became the basis of the post-Second World War cradle-to-grave welfare state established in Great Britain.
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Soviet Collapse
Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech ushered in a period of Soviet de-Stalinization. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Alexander Denisovich (1962) highlighted the atrocities of Soviet gulags. Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika reforms of the 1980s unraveled the last traces of the system established by Stalin.
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The Eurozone
Austerity measures adopted during the 2009 European Debt Crisis drew widespread protests. The recently adopted common euro currency was imperiled by sovereign debt crises in the troubled PIGS economies.
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