A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

The democracies of the West were tested in the

period after the war. If they failed to retain the

active support of the people, then others were

ready to take over power. To the right, fascist

movements and later the Nazi movement devel-

oped, promising new solutions. To the left, the

communists pointed to the Soviet Union and the

new society being created there as the right goal

for all progressive peoples.

Before the Great War the triumph of liberal

democracy had seemed certain in the West. Even

Russia had begun to establish embryonic parlia-

mentary institutions, and Italy had extended the

vote to all adult males. The war, which ended

with the victory of the democracies, might have

been expected to confirm the superiority of the

parliamentary form of government. The tide first

turned against democracy in Russia after the rev-

olution of 1917, in Italy in the 1920s with

Mussolini and the emergence of the fascists.

Forms of fascism spread to a number of the new

Balkan successor states of the Habsburg Empire.

Czechoslovakia was the shining exception, a

bastion of Western liberal ideas and institutions in

Eastern and central Europe. The most critical

question was whether Germany would become a

liberal democracy.

The immediate danger from the Bolsheviks

faded. The Polish defeat of the Red Army in 1920

halted any dream of spreading revolution with the

Red Army in the vanguard. Lenin and Stalin did

not lose their sense of isolation and insecurity. On

the contrary, they expected the capitalist West to

turn on communist Russia and crush it. In foreign

relations the initiative nevertheless passed out of

the hands of the Kremlin. Soviet policy in the

1920s was directed to increasing the difficulties of

‘imperialist’ Britain by encouraging the colonial

peoples, especially in Asia, to struggle for inde-

pendence. Another objective was to divide the

Western democratic nations from each other;

separate agreements of technical and military

cooperation were concluded with the government

of Weimar Germany (Treaty of Rapallo, 1922;

Berlin, 1926). Even while cooperating, however,

the third prong of Soviet policy, surreptitiously

masterminded by the Comintern, was to promote

internal disruption within the Western democ-

racies with the objective of weakening them and

so making it a safer world for the first and only

communist state – Russia. In Weimar politics the

German Communist Party exerted a harmful

influence on the attempts to construct a parlia-

mentary democracy. Thus, although the Soviet

Union lacked the strength to endanger peace in

Europe directly, communist tactics in the demo-

cratic states and fear of communism were among

the formative influences of the 1920s.

The communists were weakest in the country

which they had mistakenly believed would lead

the ‘capitalist assault’ on the Soviet Union one

day. There was never any danger between the two

world wars that Britain would deviate from its

(^1) Chapter 13
BRITAIN, FRANCE AND THE US FROM
WAR TO PEACE