Journey to the centre of the worldEvery week, this column will carry short excerpts from books that are in the newsDuring 1900 Paris was a major focus of attention in the core states the Universal Exposition opened on April 15 and attracted 48 million visitors. Three weeks earlier one event seemed to symbolize the industrial power of the core states and the emerging new technology of electricity. Two 275-foot-high chimneys, garlanded in flowers, let out the first smoke from 92 boilers, which drove turbines producing 40,000 horse-power of electricity to power the Exposition: the machines, a train, a `moving staircase', and a great wheel with 80 cabins. Another major technological achievement took place a few hundred miles to the east. Internal combustion engines had only just begun to power cars (there were only 8,000 vehicles in the whole of the United States), but on July 2 the first Zeppelin airship took off from the German side of Lake Constance for a twenty-minute flight, duringwhich it climbed to nearly a thousand feet. It was clear that aircraft would be flying soon as the power-to-weight ratio of petrol engines steadily increased.Although the core states were the most advanced in the world industrially, they still had major social problems. At least a third of their populations lived in poverty, often on the margins of subsistence, in poor housing and social conditions..Immediately after the First World War, the emergence of a mass electorate, economic instability, military defeat (or denial of what were seen as the legitimate spoils of victory) and the threat to the existing social and economic order from the Communist victory in Russia posed major problems across Europe. In some countries, such as Britain and France, the existing political, social and economic relations seemed to be broadly confirmed by victory. In other countries, elites rejected liberal democracy and drifted towards authoritarian solutions as a way of protecting their position. Elsewhere, at firstin Italy, then in Germany and later in central and eastern Europe new political movements emerged which capitalised on many of the discontents apparent after 1918. Despite the very real differences between the various movements, especially between those in Italy and Germany, they were broadly described as fascist. Although limited in scope, they came to dominate much of European politics between the two World Wars.Fascism was the only major ideological innovation to emerge in the twentieth century. Fascist parties were not found before 1914 and the lateness of their arrival partly explains why so many of their ideas were defined in terms of opposition to existing movements and ideologies. Fascism was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Communist and in many respects anti-conservative. It advocated a new, national, organic, authoritarian state, a rebirth of `cleansing' of the nation and broadly corporatist economic solutions which adopted some of the ideas of socialism.From `The Pimlico History of theTwentieth Century' (Clive Ponting, Pimlico, - 15)
