Depression, Ideology and the Second World War

Why the Depression mattered politically

The economic collapse of the 1930s discredited liberal democracy and free markets in many countries at once, and it did so precisely where post-war settlements had already created grievance.

Different states responded differently: state intervention and welfare in the United States and much of western Europe; fascism in Italy and Germany; Stalinist five-year plans in the Soviet Union, which industrialised at enormous human cost including engineered famine.

Fascism combined extreme nationalism, a leader cult, rejection of liberal democracy, and the promise of national restoration after humiliation. Its appeal is best explained by conditions — unemployment, inflation, fear of revolution, resentment of the peace settlement — rather than by ideas alone.

The Second World War as global war

It began in Asia before Europe: Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. Understanding this prevents the common error of treating the war as a European story with an Asian appendix.

The war's defining feature was the scale of civilian death. Strategic bombing of cities, the siege of Leningrad, the Holocaust — the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others — and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What came after

The United Nations replaced the League with enforcement mechanisms it had lacked. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention established that how a state treats its own people is a matter of international concern — a genuine break with earlier understandings of sovereignty.

The Bretton Woods institutions — IMF and World Bank — were designed to prevent the economic instability that had preceded the war.