Europe in an Age of Dictatorship, 1919–39561An Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, launched
the world into the age of broadcasting in 1895, shortly
before the Lumières showed the first film. Marconi’s
“wireless telegraphy” did not develop as rapidly as the
cinema did, but individual radio transmissions in Eu-
rope and America began in the decade before the war.
The first broadcast of a program of music occurred at
Graz (Austria) in 1908, and the world’s first station
broadcasting regularly scheduled radio programs began
its transmissions in Pittsburgh in 1920. That same year,
the British government created a broadcasting monop-
oly, the BBC (British Broadcasting Company, later Cor-
poration), and it produced the first European daily
programming in 1922. Radio, like the movies, became
widespread in interwar Europe. By 1930–31 radio
reached most households in western and central Eu-
rope; there was a radio set for every 12 people in
Britain, one per 15 in Germany.
European Democracy after World War I
Most of Europe lived under parliamentary democracy
in 1920 but under authoritarianism in 1939. The era
began with popularly elected parliaments in the new
states of eastern Europe, from the Finnish and Estonian
assemblies of 1919 to the Turkish republic of 1922 and
the Greek republic of 1924.
The enthusiasm for democracy included an expan-
sion of its definition. Between 1915 and 1922, eighteen
European countries gave women the right to vote in na-
tional elections. The trend began in Scandinavia, where
Norway had led the way before the war. Denmark en-
franchised women in 1915, with Finland (1917) and
Sweden (1918) following. The idea then took root in
the new regimes of Eastern Europe and in the Austrian
and German republics. Ironically, women’s suffrage
found less acceptance in western Europe. Britain only
allowed women to vote at the age of thirty until an
equal franchise law was passed in 1928 (see illustration
28.3). In France, a conservative Senate blocked
women’s suffrage in 1922 and prevented women from
voting until 1944. Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and
Switzerland (the last state in Europe to accept women’s
suffrage) also rejected enfranchisement. A second
expansion of democracy was proportional voting to
give representation to minorities. Under traditional
procedures, a group receiving 10 percent of the vote
seldom won an election; advocates of proportional
representation said that group deserved 10 percent of
the seats in a legislature. Belgium had employed pro-portional representation since 1899, and varieties of
that system were adopted in France, Germany, and Italy
at the end of the war.
Despite such trends, democracy did not flourish
during the interwar years. By 1939 more than a dozen
parliamentary democracies had been replaced by dicta-
torships. The newly independent states were especially
vulnerable. General Jozef Pilsudski used the Polish
army to hold dictatorial power for nearly fifteen years
after his coup d’état of 1926. Monarchies abolished po-
litical freedoms in Yugoslavia and Albania. In Hungary,
Admiral Miklos Horthy governed (from 1920 to 1944)
as the regent for a vacant monarchy; he retained a Par-
liament, but curtailed the electoral process, held a veto
over legislation, and created an anachronistic upper
house of Parliament controlled by nobles.
As the failed democracies of eastern Europe sug-
gest, the era between 1919 and 1945 became an age
of dictatorship. The Communist dictatorship of
Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union (ruled 1924–53);
the Nazi dictatorship of Adolf Hitler in Germany
(ruled 1933–45); the Fascist dictatorship of Benito
Mussolini in Italy (ruled 1922–45); the military dicta-
torships of General Primo de Rivera (ruled 1922–30);
General Francisco Franco in Spain (ruled 1936–75);Illustration 28.3
Women’s Suffrage.Women won the right to vote in many
European states during or immediately after the world war—
including the Soviet Union (1917), Britain (1918), and Germany
(1918), but not France or Italy. Here British women protest that
they did not receive the right to vote until age thirty.