In the world of domestic politics, the war produced long-range changes
that embittered the century. Prewar Europe, for all the differences among
its various countries, followed basic political norms: constitutions, growing
electorates, formally established civil rights, limits on monarchical absolutism.
Military dictatorship was not impossible—Italy had one in the late
1 890s—but it hardly seemed likely among the Great Powers. Dictators with
radical ideologies for reshaping their country's government and even society
were scarcely imaginable. Napoleon III had been a crowned dictator in
the mid-nineteenth century, and General Georges Boulanger had been a
threat in the late 1880s, but France, like the rest of Europe in 1914, seemed
no candidate for such a sharp departure from the norms of the continent.
The failure of existing forms of government to fight the war successfully
or to create a prosperous postwar order opened the road to radical change
in several countries. In the decades following the war, embittered populations,
first in Italy, then in Germany, turned to demagogues. Adolf Hitler
could never have been a serious candidate for national power in the stable
and hierarchical political system of imperial Germany. Even in the most
unstable circumstances of Italian politics, Benito Mussolini had no discernible
route to power. The burdens and shame Germans felt the settlement of
the war had placed on their nation were the principal fuel for Hitler's engine.
The disappointment and frustration of many Italians—over the cost of the
war and the small rewards Italy got, as well as over the surge of political
and social unrest after the Armistice—opened the way for Mussolini.
Beyond the emergence of dictators one can see the war as a force coarsening
and brutalizing political and social life. Ernst Jiinger, a combat veteran of the
war, wrote with ominous eloquence in the 1920s about the gap between the
"front fighters" and those who had remained at home. Every European society
now contained large numbers of men who had killed or tried to kill the enemy,
and many of them, as Mussolini and Hitler knew, were willing to bring
violence into domestic politics. On a larger scale, individual leaders had sent
tens and even hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths in military
operations during the course of the war. Mass slaughter was now a recent
memory for many Europeans. The ethnic massacres of World War II such as
the Jewish Holocaust—which had their model in the Turkish slaughter of
Armenians in the earlier war—seem inconceivable without this preliminary
massacre of Europe's young men in uniform.
The circumstances of economic life resulting from the war heightened
the opportunities for radical political leaders. In contrast to the increasingly
prosperous Europe of pre- 1 9 1 4, the postwar world was a place of stagnating
living standards and diminished hopes in most countries. The international
trading system never recovered from the disaster of the war. Currencies were
inflated to the point of becoming worthless—quickly in Germany after the
war, more slowly but just as effectively in France. A potent image of
Europe's postwar economic distress was the German worker bringing a
wheelbarrow to work in order to carry away his daily pay. In the fall of 1923,
at the peak of the inflation in Germany, a university student who left home
with funds to cover a year's living expenses might well find, the next day,
that all he could buy with this money was a beer or a postage stamp.
World History
