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The latter. It was a resounding victory for democracy, and it flourished all over the world for decades. That being said, history is written by the victors.

ceejayoz 7y ago
The decades after WWII were consumed by the Cold War, between two sets of victors, one of which was definitively not democratic. The other side had a tendency to prop up dictators as long as they opposed the Communists.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >The other side had a tendency to prop up dictators as long as they opposed the Communists. As opposed to the democratic governments the Soviet Union supported? Give me a break here. The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology. I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union.
  - asark 7y ago
    Why did you take the parent post as an example of anyone being completely blind to the actions of the Soviet Union? The points seems to be that treating the immediate Post-WWII era as some high point for democracy is... well, requiring further support than is immediately obvious, anyway, since there were two victorious sides, one of which wasn't democratic at all, and the other which supported autocracies all over the world, too. Pointing out that the spread of democracy post-WWII was mostly confined the defeated states in that conflict, and that neither victorious side did much to support democracy elsewhere and even the "free world" often did the opposite, isn't a defense of the Soviets.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology. That's the point, though. The USA did exactly the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair I am not blind to the bad actions of the USSR. I'm just also not blind to the bad ones of the USA and its allies during the same time period.
  - nroah 7y ago
    >I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union. It's in the interest of those who control the present narrative.
- derefr 7y ago
  I think the parent poster is just trying to count the total number of functional democratic vs. {nonfunctional democratic, non-democratic} regimes at any given point in time. WWII didn’t create the USSR, so that doesn’t make the count go down; nor did those dictatorships they later propped up just come into existence. (Propping up newly-formed dictatorships when they emerge out of previously-stateless areas is more the US’s thing.) But WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations. It also produced semi-global representative-democratic “treaty organizations” in the form of NATO and the UN, which, again, were at least temporarily functional and taken seriously and used to enact changes by the will of their members. (Really, though, the member nations of NATO/the UN just all had a good temporary working relationship due to being either on the same side of the war, or being made powerless by the means of their defeat, so these bodies were just a formal representation of the way their leaders were already talking to one-another at the time. As soon as everyone in these nations got newer leaders, these bodies stopped “working”—because it was never the bodies themselves that functioned in the first place.)
  - pjc50 7y ago
    > WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations. Outside of the Axis powers .. did it? How? Which countries? The more I try to think of a list the more I come up with examples that were due primarily to local action (e.g. India), their own wars (Kenya, Algeria), or happened a lot later than 1945.
    - natechols 7y ago
      True, but WWII was the precipitating event nonetheless, partly because nations like the UK could barely afford to hang onto their empires, and were increasingly dependent on the US which was generally anti-colonialist (if inconsistently so).
pjc50 7y ago
> history is written by the victors Well, quite. Given the role of the Soviet Union in grinding down the Axis forces until the counter-invasion was feasible, and their subsequent seizing of half the territory, you could equally say it was a victory for Communism. No, the victory in the war wasn't really due to the political systems of the belligerents - and democracy was suspended in the UK during the war. The real long-term benefit was the installation at gunpoint of constitutions written by idealists on the defeated powers, and the construction of transnational free blocs (NATO and the EEC, in contrast to the Warsaw Pact). The democratic post-colonial transition in the victorious powers didn't really happen until about 1968. Britain and France had to shed their colonies, with another few hundred thousand killed along the way. America had to give up on Vietnam and grant civil rights to its Black citizens. Australia and South Africa had to give up on their official policies of racial discrimination. France had its collapse and re-establishment of the 5eme Republique, after a narrow brush with military dictatorship. Greece, Spain, Portugal remained as Fascist dictatorships into the 1970s! The UK had a small civil war, complete with security services murdering in secret, troops shooting people dead in the street, and the near extermination of the entire government in a terrorist bombing. Post-war democracy in the post-colonial Middle East states was barely even tried. To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >Given the role of the Soviet Union in grinding down the Axis forces until the counter-invasion was feasible, and their subsequent seizing of half the territory Let's not forget that the Soviet Union enabled WWII and was an initial aggressor along with Nazi Germany. >To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center. This underscores how much political systems are influenced by the empires of the day. When Soviet Union and America were the superpowers the world was split between democratic and communist governments. When America became the sole superpower, that accelerated the move to liberal democracy.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    > accelerated the move to liberal democracy .. in the short term. And it worked for those countries west of Kiev. It did not stick in Russia. The problem is that the US has always had its internal tension between the official liberalism ("all men are created equal"), the colonial racism ("except those guys"), economic freedom for the individual, and economic freedom for the megacorp. It exports all four of these, and sometimes the wrong ones win in another country. The banana republics got the racism and capitalism. Russia got hyper-capitalism with poor rule of law, enabling its collapse into a Mafia state.

ceejayoz 7y ago

The decades after WWII were consumed by the Cold War, between two sets of victors, one of which was definitively not democratic. The other side had a tendency to prop up dictators as long as they opposed the Communists.

macspoofing 7y ago
>The other side had a tendency to prop up dictators as long as they opposed the Communists. As opposed to the democratic governments the Soviet Union supported? Give me a break here. The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology. I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union.
- asark 7y ago
  Why did you take the parent post as an example of anyone being completely blind to the actions of the Soviet Union? The points seems to be that treating the immediate Post-WWII era as some high point for democracy is... well, requiring further support than is immediately obvious, anyway, since there were two victorious sides, one of which wasn't democratic at all, and the other which supported autocracies all over the world, too. Pointing out that the spread of democracy post-WWII was mostly confined the defeated states in that conflict, and that neither victorious side did much to support democracy elsewhere and even the "free world" often did the opposite, isn't a defense of the Soviets.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology. That's the point, though. The USA did exactly the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair I am not blind to the bad actions of the USSR. I'm just also not blind to the bad ones of the USA and its allies during the same time period.
- nroah 7y ago
  >I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union. It's in the interest of those who control the present narrative.
derefr 7y ago
I think the parent poster is just trying to count the total number of functional democratic vs. {nonfunctional democratic, non-democratic} regimes at any given point in time. WWII didn’t create the USSR, so that doesn’t make the count go down; nor did those dictatorships they later propped up just come into existence. (Propping up newly-formed dictatorships when they emerge out of previously-stateless areas is more the US’s thing.) But WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations. It also produced semi-global representative-democratic “treaty organizations” in the form of NATO and the UN, which, again, were at least temporarily functional and taken seriously and used to enact changes by the will of their members. (Really, though, the member nations of NATO/the UN just all had a good temporary working relationship due to being either on the same side of the war, or being made powerless by the means of their defeat, so these bodies were just a formal representation of the way their leaders were already talking to one-another at the time. As soon as everyone in these nations got newer leaders, these bodies stopped “working”—because it was never the bodies themselves that functioned in the first place.)
- pjc50 7y ago
  > WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations. Outside of the Axis powers .. did it? How? Which countries? The more I try to think of a list the more I come up with examples that were due primarily to local action (e.g. India), their own wars (Kenya, Algeria), or happened a lot later than 1945.
  - natechols 7y ago
    True, but WWII was the precipitating event nonetheless, partly because nations like the UK could barely afford to hang onto their empires, and were increasingly dependent on the US which was generally anti-colonialist (if inconsistently so).

pjc50 7y ago

> history is written by the victors Well, quite. Given the role of the Soviet Union in grinding down the Axis forces until the counter-invasion was feasible, and their subsequent seizing of half the territory, you could equally say it was a victory for Communism. No, the victory in the war wasn't really due to the political systems of the belligerents - and democracy was suspended in the UK during the war. The real long-term benefit was the installation at gunpoint of constitutions written by idealists on the defeated powers, and the construction of transnational free blocs (NATO and the EEC, in contrast to the Warsaw Pact). The democratic post-colonial transition in the victorious powers didn't really happen until about 1968. Britain and France had to shed their colonies, with another few hundred thousand killed along the way. America had to give up on Vietnam and grant civil rights to its Black citizens. Australia and South Africa had to give up on their official policies of racial discrimination. France had its collapse and re-establishment of the 5eme Republique, after a narrow brush with military dictatorship. Greece, Spain, Portugal remained as Fascist dictatorships into the 1970s! The UK had a small civil war, complete with security services murdering in secret, troops shooting people dead in the street, and the near extermination of the entire government in a terrorist bombing. Post-war democracy in the post-colonial Middle East states was barely even tried. To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.

macspoofing 7y ago
>Given the role of the Soviet Union in grinding down the Axis forces until the counter-invasion was feasible, and their subsequent seizing of half the territory Let's not forget that the Soviet Union enabled WWII and was an initial aggressor along with Nazi Germany. >To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center. This underscores how much political systems are influenced by the empires of the day. When Soviet Union and America were the superpowers the world was split between democratic and communist governments. When America became the sole superpower, that accelerated the move to liberal democracy.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > accelerated the move to liberal democracy .. in the short term. And it worked for those countries west of Kiev. It did not stick in Russia. The problem is that the US has always had its internal tension between the official liberalism ("all men are created equal"), the colonial racism ("except those guys"), economic freedom for the individual, and economic freedom for the megacorp. It exports all four of these, and sometimes the wrong ones win in another country. The banana republics got the racism and capitalism. Russia got hyper-capitalism with poor rule of law, enabling its collapse into a Mafia state.