the rise of ideologies in the interwar period, including fascism, Nazism, communism, and the appeal of authoritarianism over liberal democracy after WWI

What this dot point is asking

VCAA expects you to define the three main competing ideologies of the interwar period (fascism, Nazism, communism), explain how each was structured around mass parties and texts, and explain why authoritarianism gained ground against liberal democracy between 1918 and 1939. Strong responses cite the core texts (the Doctrine of Fascism, Mein Kampf, Stalin's Foundations of Leninism) and named historians.

The answer

The crisis of liberal democracy

WWI ended four monarchies and produced new parliamentary republics across Central and Eastern Europe. By 1939, most had collapsed into authoritarianism or fascism. Of the 28 European states with parliamentary regimes in 1920, only about 11 remained democracies by 1939 (Britain, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Switzerland).

Liberal democracy failed on three fronts.

First, proportional representation produced fragmented legislatures. The Weimar Reichstag had over 20 parties after the 1920 election. The Italian Chamber after the 1919 election had no working majority. Cabinets fell quickly; legislation stalled.

Second, the post-war economy weakened the centre. War debts, reparations, currency collapses (Germany 1923), and the Great Depression (from October 1929) discredited classical liberal economics. Unemployment reached six million in Germany by early 1932 and 25 per cent in the United States in 1933.

Third, the perceived threat of communism radicalised the right. The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the failed risings in Berlin (1919), Bavaria (1919), and Hungary (1919) frightened European elites. Conservative parties accepted alliances with fascist movements to block what they saw as a worse alternative.

Communism: doctrine and movement

Communism in the interwar period meant Marxism-Leninism as codified by Lenin (1870-1924) and developed by Stalin (1879-1953).

Lenin's What Is To Be Done? (1902) called for a disciplined vanguard party. State and Revolution (1917) argued the proletariat must smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik seizure of power on 25 October 1917 (Old Style) put theory into practice.

Stalin's Foundations of Leninism (1924) and the doctrine of "socialism in one country" (1925) reorientated communism away from world revolution and towards Soviet state-building. The Third International (Comintern, founded March 1919) coordinated foreign communist parties from Moscow.

Communist mass appeal rested on the promise to abolish unemployment, redistribute land and factories, and end imperial rivalry. By the 1930s, communist parties were significant electoral forces in France (around 15 per cent in 1936), Germany (until banned in 1933), Czechoslovakia, and parts of Latin America.

Fascism: doctrine and movement

Fascism originated in Italy. Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan on 23 March 1919, drawing on his pre-war revolutionary syndicalism and on the trench-veteran experience of WWI.

The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), ghost-written for Mussolini by Giovanni Gentile, codified the ideology: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Fascism rejected both Marxism (for its materialism and internationalism) and liberalism (for its individualism and parliamentarism). It exalted the nation, the state, action, youth, and war.

Fascist movements spread across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s: the National Fascists in Italy (PNF, in power from October 1922), the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, Mosley's British Union of Fascists (1932), Doriot's French Parti Populaire Francais (1936), and Franco's coalition in Spain (Falange).

Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004) defines fascism by its features in action rather than by doctrine: a mass party of national rebirth in coalition with conservative elites, mobilised around a charismatic leader, and oriented towards internal purification and external expansion.

Nazism: doctrine and movement

Nazism (National Socialism) is best treated as a German variant of fascism with three distinctive doctrines: extreme antisemitism, biological racism, and Lebensraum (territorial expansion eastward).

The German Workers' Party (DAP) was founded in January 1919 by Anton Drexler in Munich; Hitler joined in September 1919 and renamed it the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in February 1920. The 25-point programme (24 February 1920) included antisemitism (Jews could not be citizens), territorial revision of Versailles, and corporatist economic clauses.

Hitler's Mein Kampf (Volume 1, 1925; Volume 2, 1926), written during his imprisonment after the failed Munich Putsch (8-9 November 1923), set out racial hierarchy with "Aryans" at the top and Jews as a parasitic threat, plus the doctrine of Lebensraum, the conquest of eastern territory for German settlement.

The NSDAP rose from electoral marginality (2.6 per cent in May 1928) to 18.3 per cent in September 1930 and 37.4 per cent in July 1932 under the pressure of the Depression. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

Why authoritarianism appealed

Across all three ideologies, authoritarianism offered four things liberal democracy struggled to provide.

Decisive action. A single party and a single leader could pass laws, ban opposition, and direct the economy without parliamentary obstruction. Mussolini's "totalitarian state," Stalin's Five-Year Plans, and Hitler's Reichstag Fire Decree (28 February 1933) and Enabling Act (24 March 1933) all promised speed.

Identity and meaning. Mass rallies (Nuremberg 1933 onwards), youth organisations (Hitler Youth founded 1926, Komsomol 1918, Italian Balilla 1926), and uniform politics offered belonging in societies fractured by class, region, and war loss.

Economic security. German unemployment fell from six million in 1933 to under one million by 1937 through public works, rearmament, and the suppression of free trade unions. Soviet industrial output grew at over 10 per cent a year through the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932).

A clear enemy. Fascism named communists and the Jews; Nazism named the Jews above all others; communism named the bourgeoisie and the kulaks. Enemy-naming let regimes blame failure on sabotage and conspiracy rather than on policy.

Historiography

Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004) treats fascism as a "process" through five stages, from creation through consolidation to radicalisation, rather than as a fixed doctrine.

Ian Kershaw (Hubris, 1998 and Nemesis, 2000) treats Nazism through "working towards the Fuhrer," the idea that subordinates anticipated Hitler's wishes and radicalised the regime from below.

Robert Service (Comrades, 2007) places Soviet communism within a global movement and treats Stalinism as a structural development of Leninist single-party rule rather than as a purely personal tyranny.

Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Extremes, 1994) frames the interwar period as a struggle between three competing universalisms: liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism, with liberal capitalism saved by its alliance with communism against fascism after 1941.

Common exam traps

Treating fascism and Nazism as identical. Mussolini's Italy was not initially racially antisemitic; the Manifesto of Race appeared only in July 1938, partly under German pressure. Nazism's racial doctrine is distinctive.

Treating communism as monolithic. The Comintern policy shifted significantly: ultra-left Class Against Class (1928-1934), then the Popular Front against fascism (1934-1939), then the Nazi-Soviet Pact (23 August 1939). Foreign communist parties followed Moscow's line.

Saying authoritarianism was "inevitable" after Versailles. It was not. Liberal democracy survived in Britain, France, the United States, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Czechoslovakia. Pin causation to the specific failures of each case.

Confusing the Doctrine of Fascism (1932) with Mein Kampf (1925-1926). The first is Italian and corporatist, ghost-written by Gentile. The second is German and racial, written in prison after the Munich Putsch.

In one sentence

Between 1918 and 1939, liberal democracy collapsed across most of Europe as economic crisis, parliamentary gridlock, and the fear of communism opened space for two new mass authoritarian alternatives, Italian fascism (Mussolini, March on Rome 1922) and German Nazism (Hitler, Chancellor 1933), while communism consolidated in the Soviet Union and offered itself as a third revolutionary path.