As much as the advances in machinary, transportation and industry had brought on a positive spirit of advancement and had improved the overall quality of life at the beginning of the century, in the 30’s the affects of all that progress and how to sustain it were being accounted for. Angry veterans returned from war to a changed and uncertain homelands. Economic structures were collapsing in the colonies and at home. WWI had done away with the former ways of governing that had stood for centuries in most european nations. The post war realities and economic crisis were dividing and reorganizing people in very negative ways.
A working class had been established pre WWI. People had come to expect a better life. Abroad, there were strikes and political demonstrations (Smith pg 263) “Hit in the colonies as they were elsewhere…Marxist, pan-Arab, pan-African, and Gandhian ideas spread. Instability kept increasing on every front.
In the USSR Stalin was preaching modernization and that “everyone was to be pulled form backwardness”, (Smith pg 274) . However, the reality was something else. ” The death and eviction of millions of farmers and their families contribued to the starvation…as the grain harvest declined…” (Smith pp 275). The same heavy handed scenerio was occuring in Germany as well as Italy and Spain, with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco promising growth and colonization to lead their nations to prosperity. The citizens of all these nations were looking for economic miracles in a time of crisis by men who all claimed expansion and growth by both ideological and ethnic cleansing, when stability, rebuilding, and maintaining may have been better long term choices.
Would these dictator’s been able to come to power even with the economic depression, had the social as well as political structures been stabalized post WWI?
