A Europe of Dictatorships

The victory of the Entente and the United States seemed to impose democracy as a power structure. Even the brutal civil war in Finland that claimed the lives of one per cent of the population did not destroy this country’s chances for the parliamentary system to develop.³

Unfortunately, hope for the further expansion of civil liberties fairly soon began to dissolve. Mussolini’s “March on Rome” (1922), even if it did not immediately result in creating a dictatorship—the fascist leader was initially just named Prime Minister—signaled that violence could be an avenue to power.

Further incidents were soon to follow, in Spain (1923), in Poland and Portugal (1926), and in Yugoslavia (1926).

“By 1938, fifteen of Europe’s twenty-seven parliamentary regimes were rightist dictatorships.”⁴ The causes for this state of things were varied and did not necessarily overlap in the various countries. In Portugal, a major factor was the significant debts the country incurred to take part in World War Oner, out of fear of the winning powers carving up their African colonies.⁵ In Spain, public and military emotions were heated by the question of responsibility for the military catastrophe in Morocco,⁶ while in Poland a factor was the grand ambitions of Józef Piłsudski, who considered himself the father of independence and demanded his paternal rights to decide on the country’s future.⁷

Another aspect in most cases was a not irrational anxiety about the revolutionary left—generals in government seemed the best shield against communism.⁸ The shallow roots of the parliamentary system in a given country also worked to its disadvantage. One American political scholar has noted: “Only one country, Greece, of the dozen countries that introduced democratic institutions before 1910 suffered a reversal after 1920. Only four of the seventeen countries that adopted democratic institutions between 1910 and 1931 maintained them throughout the 1920s and 1930s.”⁹

Most of the aforementioned regimes are classified as authoritarian, unlike the totalitarian states (the Third Reich, the Soviet Union) or systems aspiring to total rule (fascist Italy), they did not try to mobilize people to join an ideological crusade, and sometimes left society a great amount of civic freedom. Moreover, in Poland and Hungary opposition groups sat in parliament, even if they were largely bereft of any real power, and in Spain, conservative General Primo de Rivera cooperated with the socialists. At the same time, in defense of their prerogatives, rulers did not shy from orchestrating political trials or physically attacking their opponents (the Brest trials in Poland).

The climate of the 1930s also caused many authoritarian regimes to emulate the extreme nationalist rhetoric of the fascist states, as well as some of their institutions (the single-party system, paramilitary groups). Depending on the fate of the country during World War Two, these influences were rejected (Portugal) or bolstered, leading to international aggression or an active role in the Holocaust (Romania).