When
the global economy collapsed in 1929, the older, established
democracies rode out the crisis by instituting subsidies and
unemployment relief programs, but in nations with shallower
democratic roots, the global slump kicked out the underpinnings
of liberal democracy and destroyed its credibility. As the
voters turned toward parties with more radical agendas, the
number of democracies in the world plummeted as quickly as the
economic indicators. For a time it was uncertain whether nations
like Germany would swing hard left or hard right, but when it
came down to choosing sides, the right wing offered the most and
made fewer demands. They promised full employment, consumer
gratification and a golden age of national unity of purpose --
just like the Communists -- but without denouncing God, Homeland
and private property. The corporate and military elites
supported the Nazis as did a plurality of the voters, so in
1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
For awhile, the Western democracies themselves had difficulty
deciding whether the hard right or left was the greater danger
to civilization. Then, in 1936, the Spanish right wing rose
against the democratically elected leftist government, and
Fascism lost most of its respectability worldwide.
Across Asia and North Africa, in the old heartlands of
civilizations, there where hints that the old era of imperialism
might be coming to an end. In 1932 and 1936, the British set the
ancient nations of Iraq and Egypt free, while they also arranged
a larger measure of self-government for India in 1935 after a
mass protest campaign orchestrated by Mohandas Gandhi. With the
1931 Statute of Westminster, the UK reorganized the Empire into
a newer Commonwealth which granted independence to the
dominions. The Americans meanwhile agreed to set up an
autonomous Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1934.
Unfortunately, there were plenty of younger countries which had
missed out on the 19th Century frenzy of conquest and had now
decided to make up for lost time; however, timing is everything.
It was not considered appropriate for them to begin a new round
of empire-building now that the civilized world was turning away
from that sort of thing, so when Japan invaded Manchuria (1931)
and Italy invaded Abyssinia (1935), the rest of the world loudly
(but impotently) condemned them. Then Germany started to carve a
new empire out of smaller European neighbors (Austria,
Czechoslovakia: 1938), but it wasn't until the third nation
(Poland: 1939) was overrun that the Western Powers bit the
bullet and declared war.
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