This course examined the crisis of political legitimacy European governments faced in the wake of World War I (1914-1918). Having demanded unprecedented sacrifices from their populations during the war, no postwar government had the financial, political, or moral resources thereafter to make its citizens and subjects whole. Nevertheless, European political leaders tried—and ultimately failed—to build an enduring international order based on nineteenth century liberalism in the wake of what was hitherto one of humanity's most cataclysmic armed conflicts.

Beginning with an examination of the prewar precedents for this crisis of legitimacy, the course traced the trajectory of European politics as it passed from the perceived threat of socialist revolution, through a brief period of stability before the economic collapse of the Great Depression, and into the “war of annihilation” begun by National Socialist Germany in 1939. Central to the period was the challenge brought to the postwar liberal order in Europe by communist and fascist ideologies. Both these systems—communism and fascism—departed from the individual civil rights, market economics, representative democracy, and responsible government idealized by liberals since the 1830s. In their place, concepts of race, class, nation, and ideology presented Europeans with difficult, often compromising personal choices.

Throughout this course, we answered the following questions:

• What exactly is “liberal democracy” and how common was it during the period from 1919 to 1945?

• How did war and economic collapse reshape European ideas about the role of government in society?

• How did the ideologies of liberalism, social democracy, and Christian democracy constrain and channel the political projects of those on the far-right and far-left?

• How did the instrumentalization of violence help to maintain and disrupt the political order?

• How did events outside of Europe or on its periphery (e.g., in the USA, the USSR, East Asia, and in the colonies in Africa and the Middle East) affect the continent’s politics?

• What political debates in the Interwar years prefigured postwar events (e.g. the rise of the European Union or the Cold War)?

• How were medicine, law, education, and religion used to control society in interwar states?