1930s End of Collective Security
Global developments: 1929-1943 Great Depression
Quote
“The economic crisis… did more than anything else to sour relations between the major states and to bring to an end the era of internationalist collaboration. Policies of economic selfishness revived old grievances and created new ones. Resentments that had simmered beneath the surface in the 1920s burst into the open with a fresh urgency. The social consequences of the slump [Great Depression] pushed populations in the weaker economies towards political extremism and violent national self-assertion.
–Richard Overy, The Inter-War Crisis, p.80
- 📉 1933: 25% of U.S. labor force and 6 million Germans unemployed
- 1931-1933: Banking crisis hit thousands of U.S. and European banks as they collapsed
- Great Depression undermined confidence in the capitalist system and parliamentary democracy
- Germany and Japan were hit worst → Germany and Japan later posed the greatest threat to world order
- Causes of the Great Depression
- Wall Street Crash
- 1929 October 29: Wall Street’s New York Stock Exchange crash. 16 million shares sold at much-reduced prices
- 1933 July: Share prices continued to fall, until reaching 15% of their original value in October 1929
- Financial instability of many European countries
- Fall in world agricultural prices
- Wall Street Crash
- differed from periodic recessions in lasting much longer and economic output falling more sharply
- governments reacted by protecting their own industries from foreign competition by raising tariff barriers against imported goods
- Move to Global War textbook Page 54