The Great Depression, the crisis of democracy, and the crisis of the international system, are all closely linked. The economic crisis put great, and frequently intolerable, strains on democracy. In the industrial areas of Europe, unemployed workers were alienated; they often included in the objects of their attack traditional labor organizations that seemed blind to their plight. The sequence of the different aspects of crisis was different in each of the central European crisis economies, but the outcomes were surprisingly similar. Germany was the initial focus of the economic and political crisis in Europe. The economic crisis was bound up with the unsolved problems of postwar reparations. The United Kingdom virtually stopped buying wheat, and other agricultural products, from south-central Europe, which in consequence had little alternative except to cultivate the German market. The Depression convinced many politicians in the metropol that empire was more necessary, both for the economy and for defense.