Key Concept Notes – Chapter 34: An Age of Anxiety
Key Concept
6.2 – Global Conflicts and
Their Consequences
■ At the beginning of the
20th century, a Europeandominated global political
order existed, which also
included the United States,
Russia, and Japan. Over the
course of the century, peoples
and states around the world
challenged this order in ways
that sought to redistribute
power within the existing
order and to restructure
empires …
▪ Communism in Russia
▪ Fascism in Italy
▪ Nazis in Germany
6.2.V – Although conflict
dominated much of the 20th
century, many individuals and
groups – including states –
opposed this trend.
■ Groups and individuals
challenged the many wars of
the century.
▪ The artist Pablo Picasso
and his painting Guernica
6.3 – New Conceptions of
Global Economy, Society
and Culture
6.3.I. – States responded in a
variety of ways to the
economic challenges of the
20th century.
■ Stalanist Russia controlled
its economy with Five-Year
Plans.
Notes
■ led by Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik Revolution transformed Russia into the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR … or Soviet Union) by 1922
▪ Russia’s civil war was won by the Reds (Bolsheviks) and the Whites, but it lasted three
years and beyond the end of the First World War … and led to “war communism”
▪ war communism – the elimination of private property, state control of banks, private
industry; landed estates, monasteries and churches were now property of the state … and
peasant uprisings against this were ruthlessly crushed (estimates run as high as 10 million
people were killed in Russia during its civil war
■ Italy under Benito Mussolini (1922-1943) was the first and most notable fascist state, but
Hitler’s Nazi Party was also a variant
▪ Fascism – 1) one-party totalitarian dictatorship run by a charismatic leader using
propaganda, press censorship, secret police and violent repression of all opposition;
2) ultra-nationalistic and militaristic; 3) gained support because of disillusionment with the
struggles of liberal democracy (and its perceived “decadent” culture) and, most importantly,
the fear of Bolshevism (i.e., communism) spreading
■ Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power through the democratic process before
stripping that mechanism away once in charge of the country and imposing a fascist reality on
Germany
▪ Nazi Germany was a “racial state” obsessed with racial purity, anti-Semitism and
eugenics (the systematic liquidation of those seen as unfit for life, including the lame and
mentally handicapped)
▪ signed the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1939 (later to be joined by Japan)
■ Painted by Picasso in 1937, Guernica is a massive (more than 11 ft. x 25 ft.) black-and-gray
mural protesting the aerial bombing (by Italian and German warplanes, requested by Spain’s
fascist general Francisco Franco) of the small town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War
… history’s first indiscriminate targeting of innocent civilians (who were mostly women and
children) → most famous anti-war painting ever, first displayed at the World’s Fair in Paris
■ the first of Joseph Stalin’s multiple Five-Year Plans came in 1929, when he abandoned
Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which restored small-scale, free-market enterprises
to help the USSR’s struggling economy
▪ emphasized heavy industry (steel, machinery, hydroelectric dams) at the expense of
consumer goods … and aimed at turning the USSR into an industrial nation capable of
competing with the West
▪ unprecedented state coordination of resources and labor force, which came at the onset of
the Great Depression (and therefore appealed to many as an alternative economic program
to capitalism, which was undergoing a major, worldwide crisis of legitimacy)
▪ an integral component of this Five-Year Plan was the collectivization of agriculture,
which was enforced ruthlessly against kulaks, peasants who had prospered during the NEP;
collective farming and redirecting the yields to industrial workers in the cities backfired badly
(though Stalin never admitted to it ever being anything but a resounding success), leading to
the starvation of perhaps 5 million or more rural Russian peasants in 1932-33
▪ Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan (1933-37) was originally designed to produce more
consumer goods, but it changed course to emphasize the munitions and armaments industry
once the Nazis took over Germany in 1933 … and the Russian people remained in a state of
deprivation all the while
■ Stalin’s Great Purge (1935-38) illustrates how ruthlessly he wielded power in the Soviet
Union: one-half of top military officers and two-thirds of Communist Party elites suspected
of opposing him were executed or sent to labor camps
■ At the beginning of the
20th century in the United
States and parts of Europe,
governments played a minimal
role in their national
economies. With the onset of
the Great Depression,
governments began to take a
more active role in economic
life.
▪ The New Deal in the
United States
▪ Fascist corporatism in Italy
and Germany
■ Causes of the Great Depression, a worldwide cataclysm:
1) overreliance on U.S. capital financing (i.e., loans) to rebuild and, in the case of Germany,
pay reparations for World War I
2) technical advances undermined key industries: a) new methods of manufacturing
automobile tires allowed “reclaimed” rubber to be used, which resulted in a glut and thus
steeply declining prices for rubber, hitting hard the economies of the Dutch East Indies,
Ceylon and Malaysia; b) coal industries in Britain and elsewhere were hard hit as new uses for
oil were discovered; c) cotton textile industries were harmed by the introduction of new
synthetic fibers; d) and the nitrate industry in Chile was devastated as artificial nitrogen –
made possible by the Haber-Bosch process – was now used in fertilizer
3) depressed prices for agricultural output as European farm production came back on line
following World War I, resulting in a worldwide glut of product
4) economic nationalism (i.e., high import tariffs)
5) the overheated U.S. economy (due in part to easy credit) … then sharp contraction
following the stock-market crash of October 1929
■ the New Deal – the sweeping program of economic and social reforms instituted by U.S.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (aka FDR)
▪ support for banking system, the provision of jobs and farm subsidies, the establishment of
Social Security for the vulnerable elderly → dramatically altered people’s views of what the
federal government should be in the business of doing for its people
▪ ideas closely aligned with those of influential economist John Maynard Keynes, who
advocated for government to 1) play an active role and stimulate the economy by increasing
the money supply, thus reducing interest rates and encouraging investment, 2) undertake
public works projects to provide jobs, and 3) redistribute incomes through tax policy
■ Fascist corporatism sought to harmonize the interests of workers, employers and the
state
▪ post-World War I economic hardships provided the context for the rise of radical political
movements such as fascism
▪ a key difference between fascism and communism is that fascist leaders like Mussolini –
unlike in the communist Soviet Union, where free-market capitalism did not exist – enjoyed
the backing of corporate oligarchs (i.e., “big business”), who wanted to forcefully suppress
the many worker uprisings that came with economic hardships in many countries
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Additional notes:
Postwar pessimism and attacks on progress:
▪ Even before World War I, cultural elites had taken on a “modernist” avant-garde approach
to art … an approach that rejected realism and conformity, that questioned the traditional …
and this approach took on new momentum with the disillusionment of many coming out of
the mindless destruction of the war.
– Pablo Picasso’s cubism, Salvador Dali’s surrealism, Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaism
▪ The so-called “lost generation” of writers – U.S. expatriates (such as Ernest Hemingway and
F. Scott Fitzgerald) living in Europe – captured in their works the disillusionment of
meaningless death and suffering.
▪ New findings in physics (such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s
“uncertainty principle,” which holds that we cannot objectively observe sub-atomic particles
because the very act of observing interferes with them) and psychology (such as Sigmund
Freud’s psychoanalysis) led people more than ever to question what they knew to be true
about the world.