This work provides a sweeping historical analysis of the political development of Western Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The author argues that the evolution of most European nations into liberal democracies, social democracies or fascist regimes was attributable to a discrete set of social and class alliances within individual nations.
In Britain, France, and Switzerland, countries with a unified middle class, liberal forces established political hegemony before the First World War. In countries with a strong, cohesive working class and a fractured middle class, Luebbert points out, a liberal solution was impossible. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia, political coalitions of social democrats and `family peasantry' emerged as a result of the First World War, resulting in social democracies. In Spain, Italy, and Germany, on the other hand, the urban middle class united with a peasantry hostile to socialism to facilitate the rise of fascism.
