ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses authoritarian/totalitarian-capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system until 1945 but have been absent since then, and it is with their renewed challenge. The liberal democratic camp emerged victorious from all of the three gigantic great power struggles of the twentieth century–the two world wars and the Cold War–overcoming its authoritarian, fascist, and communist rivals alike. During the nineteenth century, in the 1950s and 1960s and again in the post-Cold War era, liberalism and democracy were widely assumed to emanate almost inevitably from these developments. Only during the Cold War did the Soviet communist economy exhibit deepening structural weaknesses, made all the more evident when compared to the increasingly sophisticated and globalizing market economy. The Soviet system successfully generated the early and intermediate stages of industrialization excelled in the regimentalized techniques of military mass production during Second World War and kept abreast militarily during the Cold War.
