ABSTRACT
The question of why democracy generally ‘failed’ in Eastern Europe between the wars is one of the most crucial issues in the history of twentieth-century Europe. The failure effectively negated the 1919-20 peace settlements, facilitating the expansion of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, engulfing Europe in another world war and paving the way for the mid-1940s expansion of communist power and the East-West partition of Europe. The question of why democracy generally did not take root in inter-war Eastern Europe naturally poses another question, one which has from the outset cast a shadow over the re-establishment of democracy in Eastern Europe since 1989: could history repeat itself?
