WHAP UNIT 7.4 Interwar Economy

How did the global economy change after WWI?

Lost Faith in Capitalism: GRM reparations + Ally debts to US + USSR refuses debt → slow rebuilt

• Roaring 20’s: rise of US consumerism in electronics, automobiles, sports, jazz clubs, innovations (Picasso, Freud, Einstein)

!!! Great Depression: USA agricultural overproduction + stock market crash → global unemployment & downturn

Russia

Russian Civil War: Widespread starvation → factory workers & sailors strike + farmers hoard

• New Economic Plan (NEP): Lenin reintroduces small-scale capitalism = some success

• Collectivized Agriculture: Stalin removes private businesses & forces farmers onto kolkhozes (group farms) w/ extreme quotas to make USSR industrial power (succeeded in exchange for mass famines/oppression)

  • Farmers destroy livestock, crops, city migration

  • Heavy Industry: Grew + Available jobs + cheap urban living

  • Gulag: Labor camps held/executed political prisoners

New Deal

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt implements policies for deficit spending according to Keynesian principles (expense>income) & cut taxes = rising employment & production

• Relief: for the suffering

• Recovery: get out of depression

• Reform: prevent future downturns

-Prospered by selling war/agricultural products to Allies + no attacks at home

Mexico

Institutional Revolutionary Party: Primary edu. & employment for infrastructure improvement, but dominated politics for decades

• Lazaro Cardenas: Successful land reform but little class reform

  • PEMEX: nationalized foreign oil company

Germany

Billions in reparations = debt

• Printed more money → hyperinflation + bank failures

Japan

Benefitted from selling supplies to allies in WWI

• Great Depression: Dependent on exports that cut in ½ → devalued currency → exports cheap + expansionism & military adv.

Fascism

Authoritarian & nationalist right-wing government suppressed media + oppressed minorities + militaristic

• ITL (coined Fascism)

• GRM

• JPN

Fascist Italy

Benito Mussolini: est. totalitarian state for Fascist Party to control all aspects of society after Treaty of Versailles denies promised colonies

• Fasces: Roman symbol for authority, coined Fascism

• corporatism: sectors of economy free to do whatever benefits whole (not actually)

• Propoganda: Schools taught flory of nation & “Il Duce” (Mussolini)

• Italian Somaliland: captures Ethiopia (breaks League of Nations)

Spain

Spanish Civil War: Fascist dictator Francisco Franco not involved in WWI but allied w/ Axis powers

• Nationalists: rebel forces of Catholic Church & gov. led by Franco

  • Guernica: ITL + GRM Luftwaffe (air force) bombs

• Popular Front (Loyalists/Republicans): Democratically elected leftist parties

Brazil

Hypernationalism: Superiority of one’s nations over others

• Coup: Slow industrialization → Urban middle class bloodlessly instate President Getulio Vargas

  • Corrupt police + censorship + one-party despite little violence