The past 15 years have seen upheaval around the world. There is still uncertainty due to the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, the COVID-19 pandemic, and major regional conflicts in Sudan, the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Added to this is rising tensions between the United States and countries it perceives as adversaries, particularly China.
In response to these turbulent times, commentators often turn to the easy-to-understand metaphor of the post-1945 era to explain geopolitics: We are repeatedly told that the world is entering a “new Cold War.”
But as a historian of the United States' place in the world, referring to the decades-long ideological struggle between the West and the Soviet Union and its allies, and the repercussions that the Cold War had around the world, is the wrong lens through which to view events today. Viewed critically, the world looks more like the violent breakdown of the global order that occurred in the 1930s than it does like the structured competition of the Cold War.
“A decade of low dishonesty”
In 1939, the poet W.H. Auden called the previous decade “a decade of vulgarity and infidelity” – a time that produced uncertainty and conflict.
Viewed from the perspective of nearly a century later, the period between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of World War II may be distorted by loaded terms like “isolationism” and “appeasement.” The decade is portrayed as a morality play about the rise of figures like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and a simplistic story of aggression appeased.
But that period was far more complex. Powerful forces of the 1930s transformed economic, social, and political ideals, and understanding these dynamics can provide a clearer understanding of the turbulent events of recent years.
The big recession and the little recession
The Great Depression of the 1930s, as we often remember it, was not just the stock market crash of 1929. It was just the beginning of a much larger collapse of the world economy that lasted for a very long time.
Prolonged economic problems affected economies and individuals from Minneapolis to Mumbai, India, and triggered major cultural, social, and ultimately political change, while the prolonged Great Depression and resistance to standard solutions such as using market forces to “clean up” the corruption of the great crisis discredited the laissez-faire approach to economics and the liberal capitalist state that supported it.
The “little depression” that followed the 2008 financial crisis did the same, throwing international and national economies into disarray, destabilizing billions and discrediting the liberal globalization that had ruled since the 1990s.
During both the Great Depression and the Little Depression, people's lives around the world were upended, they saw flaws in existing ideas, elites and institutions, and they turned to more radical and extreme voices.
The stock market crash of 1929 destroyed confidence in financial institutions. AP photo
It wasn't just Wall Street that collapsed. For many, the crisis undermined the ideology that had driven the United States and much of the world: liberalism. In the 1930s, this skepticism raised questions about whether democracy and capitalism, which were already plagued by contradictions in the form of discrimination, racism, and imperialism, were up to the demands of the modern world. The past decade has similarly seen voters in countries around the world turn to authoritarian populists.
“We have not only lost our way in the economic labyrinth,” American essayist Edmund Wilson lamented in 1931, “but we have also lost confidence in the value of what we are doing.” Writers in leading magazines explained “Why Liberalism is Bankrupt.”
Today, figures on the left and right alike share the view expressed by conservative political scientist Patrick Deneen in his book, “Why Liberalism Failed.”
Bad wind
Liberalism – a philosophy based broadly on individual liberty, the rule of law, private property and free markets – has been touted by its proponents as a way to bring democratization and economic prosperity to the world, but recently liberal “globalization” has stalled.
The Great Depression had a similar effect. The optimism of the 1920s, the so-called “first wave of democratization,” collapsed as countries from Japan to Poland established populist and authoritarian governments.
Japanese military parade marking the second anniversary of the Second Sino-Japanese War in Manchuria. Imagno/Getty Images
The rise of figures like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China reminds historians that authoritarianism remains attractive in uncertain times.
A common thread in both eras is that the global economy was becoming increasingly fragmented and countries, including the United States, tried to stop the bleeding by raising tariffs to protect their domestic industries.
Economic nationalism, although fiercely contested and opposed, became a dominant global force in the 1930s, which is reflected in recent calls for protectionist policies in many countries, including the United States.
A world of discontent
The Great Depression gave rise to the New Deal in the United States and saw government assume a new role in the economy and society, while other countries suffering the collapse of the liberal global economy saw the rise of regimes that entrusted enormous power to central governments.
Today, China's authoritarian economic growth model and the image of the strong state embodied by Orbán, Putin and others, which is popular in parts of the Global South as well as in parts of the Western world, are reminiscent of the 1930s.
The Great Depression intensified the so-called “totalitarian” ideologies such as Italian Fascism, Russian Communism, Japanese militarism, and especially German Nazism.
Importantly, it gave these systems a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of many around the world, especially when compared to aging liberal governments that seem unable to provide answers to the crisis.
Some of these totalitarian regimes had long-standing dissatisfaction with the world that had been established after World War I, and after a global order based on liberal principles failed to bring stability, they sought to remake it on their own terms.
Observers today may be shocked by the resurgence of major war and the threat it poses to global stability, but there are clear parallels to the Great Depression.
In the early 1930s, countries such as Japan tried to use military force to modify the world order, hence the name “revisionism.” Its separation of parts of China, especially Manchuria, in 1931 was met with little recognition from Western democracies, as was Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014.
As the decade progressed, open military aggression escalated. China was a pioneer whose anti-imperialist war against Japan in defense of its own country was intermittently supported by other great powers. Ukrainians today will understand the parallels well.
Ethiopia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and eventually Poland became targets of “revisionist” states seeking to use military aggression, or the threat of it, to reshape the international order in their own image.
Ironically, by the late 1930s, many who lived through the crisis saw their own “Cold War” against the systems and methods of states like Nazi Germany. They used these very words to describe the breakdown of normal international affairs and their subsequent enslavement in a whirlpool of constant, sometimes violent competition. French observers described this period as one of “neither peace nor war,” or the “demi-guerre.”
Those involved then understood that this was not an ongoing competition but a testing ground for new norms and relationships, and their words resonate today as we witness the formation of a new multipolar world and the rise of regional powers seeking to expand their own regional influence.
Taking Control
It is sobering to compare the current situation with past situations that ended in world wars.
Historical parallels are never perfect, but they can encourage us to rethink the present. Our future does not have to be a repeat of the “hot wars” that ended in the 1930s, or the Cold War that followed.
The growing power and capabilities of countries like Brazil, India, and other regional powers remind us that historical actors evolve and change. But recognizing that ours is a complex, multipolar era marked by deep crises, like the 1930s, helps us see that tectonic forces are once again shifting many fundamental relationships. Understanding this offers us an opportunity to constrain the forces that led to catastrophe in another era.
