Bunreacht na hÉireann (1937) was created at a time of international upheaval and pronounced ideological contestation. The Great Depression of the 1930s had occasioned a pronounced transformation of the historical capitalist world-system, notably ending the hegemonic roles of both the British Empire and the City of London. The decade was characterised by the gradual dismantling of multilateral trade in favour of economic self-sufficiency, by the collapse of the League of Nations in favour of autarkist empires and, above all, by mass unemployment. Classic economic liberalism was dead, and would remain so for half a century. Among liberal democracies, various forms of state or ‘social’ control of capital emerged instead, typified by France's Matignon Agreements or by the New Deal in the US. Social democracy formed an often unsympathetic alternative to the social revolution and radical democracy attempted in Republican Spain and Anarchist Barcelona.

There were more authoritarian alternatives. In Italy and Germany, fascist parties introduced a highly coercive system of corporate societal management, achieving full employment while preserving the classic freedoms of capital (free investment, free accumulation, free exchange of contract, and free selection of markets). Similarly, authoritarian nationalists in Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Portugal selectively invoked Catholic corporatism to justify curtailing organised labour. Concomitantly, in Russia, Joseph Stalin's Communist Party introduced a series of Five-Year Plans, using a centrally planned economy to achieve rapid industrialisation and increased military capacity.

In contrast to wider European experiences, the Irish Free State's social conflicts were not of a scale or nature to threaten the state's continued existence as a representative democracy. In both parliament and civil society, the national anti-systemic movement remained in the ascendant, its party leadership largely committed to renegotiating sovereignty with Westminster while preserving existing institutions of government and administration in Dublin.