ABSTRACT
Looking back over inter-war Europe as a whole, one can see that popular expectations had been greatly raised by the consequences of the First World War, the peace settlements, the principle of national self-determination, the proclamation of democracy, the rise of mass movements and the promises of social reform. But these heightened expectations were fulfilled only to a very limited degree during the 1920s before the battered hopes were finally dashed by the 1930s Depression. On a more positive note, most states did enact significant land reforms, broaden the franchise and expand educational opportunities. But these constructive projects further raised expectations and, overall, the 1920s did not live up to the hopes held out in 1918-19. There were perhaps too many conflicting or mutually exclusive desires. Some of the dreams were impossible to fulfil. Moreover, except in Czechoslovakia, many reforms were bedevilled by corruption, incompetence and economic adversity, while the new regimes and political parties increasingly lost touch with their popular constituencies and succumbed to authoritarian, charismatic or personalistic forms of leadership. Many of the things that were done (or not done) in the name of ‘democracy’ merely served to bring democratic ideals into disrepute. Many people, not all of whom had innately fascist or communist leanings, became disillusioned or impatient with the East European travesties of ‘democracy’ and yearned for ‘strong government’, sometimes in order to defend the status quo against perceived threats from ‘profiteers’, ‘speculators’, ‘aliens’, Jews, Bolsheviks or ‘anarchists’, but in other cases to bring about ‘moral’ and/or ‘national’ regeneration and major social, political or economic changes. (There have been some disturbing parallels in post-communist Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet republics during the 1990s.)
FRUSTRATED RADICALISM
Other things being equal, the economic vicissitudes and the changes in popular mood and attitude might have been expected to result in the mushrooming of support for the communist parties. These very plausibly portrayed the rampant corruption, unrelieved economic hardship, deficiencies of the agrarian reforms, naked oppression of workers, peasants and ethnic minorities, and the growing concentration and abuse of wealth and power as the inevitable consequences of the deepening ‘crisis of capitalism’, the allegedly fraudulent nature of ‘bourgeois democracy’ and the growing recourse of capitalism to fascist or quasi-fascist methods of containing the crisis and the attendant intensification of class struggle and inter-ethnic conflict.
