Hitler's totalitarian enthusiasm ushered in a new era of leadership.
Beginning in 1911 with the overthrow of the Chinese empress, the 20th century has exhibited several extraordinary trends of change in world leadership, ranging from ruthless authoritarianism to clever diplomacy. Inspired by radical changes and political instability in their own nation or even neighboring countries, citizens of the 20th century have sometimes staged regional and even worldwide developments in the leadership of nations.
Growth of Democracy
Although World War I had been fought primarily as a result of Social Darwinism, where each nation had attempted to demonstrate its superiority to others, the victorious Allies instead placed the entire blame for the massive conflict on the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Ottoman Empire, Germany). One of the reasons that nations such as Germany and Austria-Hungary had been aggressive, they argued, was due to their strong monarchical form of rule. While Britain and France rearranged Germany into a weakened republic, American president Woodrow Wilson separated several new democracies out of the old Austria-Hungarian Empire. By creating the new nations of representative government, the world leaders hoped to involve common people more heavily in world politics, so the people themselves would work to prevent new wars.
Weakness in Monarchies and Republics
China's monarchy, too, had fallen during the early 1900s, to be replaced by a republic similar to those formed out of the old German and Austria-Hungarian Empires. The European Republics, however, lost their subjects' confidence in the face of economic depression, and the new Chinese Republic proved far too weak to enforce its rule into the expansive Chinese empire. The 1920s were characterized by a feeling of helplessness, where people considered their governments too weak to remedy the dire needs of the people. This economic and psychological depression was epitomized in T.S. Eliots "The Waste Land," an artistic meditation on the failure of the Western world and its weak governments.
Rise and Fall of Totalitarians
The perceived weakness in representative governments acted as a vacuum for powerful authoritarians to assume power. The people, hungry for a regime strong enough to affect change, looked to these energetic, charismatic, and forceful men for leadership. Once in control, they consolidated their rule with subversive ideologies such as Nazism, Communism or Fascism. Men like Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tong, and Joseph Stalin epitomized a trend of totalitarian leadership where heads of state sought to command their people's political and ideological obedience. Suffering a major blow in World War II, totalitarian leadership became less and less common as people began to realize how destructive this form of rule usually became.
Age of Diplomacy
Following the end of World War II, America and Russia competed for global influence, and Russia's eventual collapse has since left America as the sole arbiter of modern globalism. In the years following WWII, the globalist influence has proved to be a major deterrent to volatile forms of national leadership, supporting more representative and diplomatic forms of rule than more authoritarian and unilateral methods of leadership. Modern societies recognize the need for strength in leadership, but also the needs for social representation and ideological toleration in order to guard against the total and complete control which the totalitarians had asserted.
