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The Postwar World
Political Consequences of the
War
The war and the peace treaties obviously wrought great
changes in the political geography of Europe. Germany was reduced in
size, while France and Italy were enlarged. There was a large independent
Poland between Germany and Russia, and the Baltic states and Finland
also became independent. Where the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been,
there were Czechoslovakia, a tiny Austrian republic, an independent
Hungary, a greater Rumania, and a united Yugoslav state. Most of the
frontier lines in the Balkans were new, and so were those on post-1920
maps of the Middle East. In general, the boundaries of states followed
more closely than ever the distinguishable lines of language and nationality,
though there were significant minorities of Germans in Czechoslovakia
and Poland and of Magyars in Czechoslovakia and Rumania.
In Europe, however, the geographical changes brought
about by the war were probably less significant than the institutional
changes. Where before the war there had been 19 monarchies and 3 republics,
by 1922 there were 14 republics, 13 monarchies; and 2 regencies (Albania
and Hungary). And, more important still, many of the postwar states,
republics and monarchies alike, had adopted or were to adopt ideologies
quite different from those that had animated either republics or monarchies
before the war. The revolutionary Marxism of the Bolsheviks triumphed
in Russia. Socialists governed the Austrian Republic and, for a time,
Germany, and Socialist parties made electoral gains in both Britain
(1923) and France (1924). In Bulgaria, in 1919, Alexander Stamboliski
and his Agrarian Party took power and established a dictatorship which
gave primacy to the interests of peasants. In Italy, in October 1922,
Benito Mussolini and his black-shirted Fascists seized control of the
government and set up a regime that boasted of suppressing civil liberties
and of subordinating the individual to the interests of the state. Government,
whether in representative forms, as in France and Britain, or in totalitarian
forms, as in Russia, Bulgaria, and Italy (and later in Nazi Germany),
sought to be of and for, if not necessarily by, the masses. Except in
Poland and Hungary, where oldfashioned regimes held sway, every nation
in Europe adopted programs for land redistribution and enacted some
kind of social service legislation. This formed a dramatic contrast
with the past, when all but a few European governments had been avowedly
of, for, and by a small minority. Nor was this transformation confined
to Europe, for similar movements emerged in Mexico, Peru, India, and
China.
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