The Second World War left in its wake a worldwide disorientation, having revealed the destructive power of nation states on an unprecedented scale. Nothing in the violent past of governments had ever even approached the statistics of mass killings and deportations, in addition to the even larger numbers of physically maimed and psychologically traumatized victims of that war. There are many iconic images that recall the shock of the violence, but among the most infamous remain the firebombing of civilian urban centers like Dresden and Hamburg, the complete devastation resulting from the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the emaciated survivors of the Nazi death camps.

This period also saw, by contrast, a reduction in the number of regimes collapsing, compared to the situation at the close of the Great War. At that time, the defeat and collapse of several major empires had signaled the disappearance of governments across the European continent. In the void created by the vanishing of the Romanov, Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian imperial regimes, the victorious allied powers created entirely new states at the postwar Versailles conference in 1919, including Poland (an independent country for the first time since being partitioned among Russia, Austria and Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria, and the Weimar republic, all of which were vulnerable because they had to consolidate their newly established political legitimacies.