In the period between the world wars the Eastern European peripheries, where modernization began to falter in the nineteenth century and Western values came under criticism in the twentieth, instituted anti–parliamentary dictatorships. The regimes' attempts at protectionist, import–substituting industrialization proved unsuccessful. The course chosen by the region in the interwar period culminated in nazi occupation, a reign of terror by collaborationist fascist governments, and the unprecedented tragic devastations of World War II.

Even after the war the region was unable to return to “normalcy.” As a consequence of internal social forces or external Soviet force (and as often as not a combination of the two) and the increasingly tense atmosphere of the Cold War and a divided Europe, governments in the continent's central and southeastern regions shifted from the extreme right to the extreme left. Was the result a new dictatorship of modernization? Was it yet another attempt at breaking loose from the periphery?

Hoping to exploit the attraction of the Soviet model of industrialization and planned economy for underdeveloped agrarian countries, Central and Eastern Europe launched a program of enforced industrialization and dismantled the former hierarchy of social caste in the consistent framework of Stalinist socialism's closed society and ruthless dictatorship. The Soviet bloc, its institutions, ideology, and cultural politics hermetically sealed off from the West, thus used a state socialist, anti-humanist model to combat its historical backwardness. It withdrew from Europe in order to catch up with and surpass it.