Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933–1939

by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

It was World War II that decided which system of statism would triumph in the global arena: the totalitarian welfare state along Fascist/National Socialist lines, or Roosevelt’s liberal variant. As the outcome of the war demonstrated, Old Europe’s bid to modernize via Fascism and National Socialism failed. The victor was America, but an America that achieved the stability that became its hallmark only by assimilating a major part of its defeated enemies’ culture, much like the Alexandrian and Roman empires had in their time. The great postwar synthesis that created the trans-Atlantic “West,” spanning the United States and Europe, would have been impossible without the cross-fertilization of the 1930s, which included, as Karl Mannheim gloomily predicted prior to the war, the ongoing influence of the totalitarian model: As soon as the Western states have taken up [the] fundamental problem of universal security—the management of the trade cycle—they will gradually be forced to manipulate all social control, as the dictatorships have done from the start... . Competition with [the totalitarian] states compels the democracies to make use of some, at least, of their methods.