Europe

Abstract

Abstract The end of World War I brought a wave of democratization to Europe, toppling longstanding dictatorships. Yet by the 1930s, many of these democracies were gone, some collapsing into a new and more dangerous form of dictatorship: fascism. Precisely because fascist dictatorships were so dangerous—causing millions of deaths and the deadliest war ever—trying to understand the dynamics of the interwar period, and in particular how and why fascist regimes arose, became the foundation of postwar studies of political development. This chapter will, accordingly, discuss what we know about why some democracies survived and others failed during the interwar years and why some of these failures generated traditional authoritarian regimes and others fascist, or totalitarian, ones. It will relatedly discuss the differences between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, a theme that is once again topical as use of the term “fascism” has become almost commonplace in discussions of contemporary democratic backsliding.