Democracy Denied: Comparing Italy, Germany, and Japan

AP® EXAM TIP

You need to know the definition and examples of twentieth-century authoritarian governments.

Despite the victory of the democratic powers in World War I — Britain, France, and the United States — their democratic political ideals and their cultural values celebrating individual freedom came under sharp attack in the aftermath of that bloody conflict. One challenge derived from communism, which was initiated in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and expressed most fully in the cold war during the second half of the twentieth century (see Chapter 21). In the 1920s and 1930s, however, the more immediate challenge to the victors in the Great War came from highly authoritarian, intensely nationalistic, territorially aggressive, and ferociously anticommunist regimes, particularly those that took shape in Italy, Germany, and Japan. (See Working with Evidence: Ideologies of the Axis Powers for the ideas underlying these regimes.) Such common features of these three countries drew them together by 1936–1937 in a political alliance directed against the Soviet Union and international communism. In 1940, they solidified their relationship in a formal military alliance, creating the so-called Axis powers. Within this alliance, Germany and Japan clearly stand out, though in quite different ways, in terms of their impact on the larger patterns of world history, for it was their efforts to “establish and maintain a new order of things,” as the Axis Pact put it, that generated the Second World War both in East Asia and in Europe.