The Second World War as a social revolution

The persistent stability of post-war structures accounted for the tendency in comparative politics and in political thought to approach the Second World War from an outcome-perspective. It entailed durable geopolitical changes, of which the most salient were the expansion of Soviet influence into eastern Europe, the division of Germany, and the ensuing split into a bipolar world. The Second World War also marked a modernising turn in a great many domains of domestic and international politics. One of the consequences of the war was the democratisation of an important number of countries, especially the defeated Axis powers Germany, Italy, and Japan. The creation of the United Nations and the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were milestones in the acknowledgement of the priority of law over violence.

While the Second World War as an international military conflict between states was clearly delimited by temporal and spatial boundaries, the rise of communism and fascism in the decades after 1917 allows historians to speak of a ‘European civil war’ or ‘Europe's Second Thirty Years' War’ that spans from 1914 to 1945. Not only did the political religions of communism and National Socialism act against liberal values, the individual, and his reason but, in eastern Europe, the interwar period was also characterised by the fragility of fledgling independent nation-states.