Economic Development 1918–39

Abstract

Two trends — psychological and social, rather than strictly economic — dominated the interwar years: a pervasive desire to do everything possible to restore the economic system which existed before 1914 and an equally pervasive desire to create a new system. The former, rooted in nostalgia for the past and embodied in the bureaucratic and property-owning elites, suffered from several fundamental misconceptions concerning the prewar economy. The latter, aiming towards Utopian visions of the future and embodied in dissatisfied intellectuals and social classes, could take both left and right-wing forms, but it suffered in both cases from equally fundamental misconceptions regarding the ease with which economic and social structures can be transformed. The absence of a social consensus reflected the increasing severity of the tensions inherited from the generation before the First World War and explains many of the economic problems which spilled over into social, political and cultural life.