20.1: Political Disappointments

World War I had left the great powers reeling, weakened, and at a loss for how to prevent a future war. The Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh penalties on Germany, returning Alsace and Lorraine to France, and imposing a massive indemnity on the defeated country. In addition, Germany had to accept the "war guilt clause," in which it assumed full responsibility for the war having started in the first place. Simultaneously, the Austrian Empire collapsed, with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the new Balkan nation of Yugoslavia becoming independent countries and Austria a short-lived republic. Almost no one would have believed that another "Great War" would occur in twenty years.

In other words, World War I did not resolve any of the problems or international tensions that had started it. France and Britain blamed Germany for the conflict. Meanwhile, Germany believed that communists and Jews had conspired to sabotage the German war effort. Thus, many Germans felt they had been wronged twice: they had not “really” lost the war, yet they were forced to pay outrageous indemnities to the “victors.”

This context of anger and disappointment gave rise to fascism and its racially-obsessed offshoot Nazism arose. World War I provided the trauma, the bloodshed, and the skepticism toward liberalism and socialism that underwrote the rise of fascism, a modern conservatism that clung to its mania for order and hierarchy, but which did not seek a return to the days of feudalism and monarchy. It was a populist movement, a movement of the people by the people, but instead of petty democratic bickering, it glorified the (imagined) nation, a nation united by a movement and an ethos.