Ángel Alcalde The Death of Democratic Republics in the 1930s: Germany, Austria, Spain Abstract: This chapter examines how Republics died in the interwar period, focusing on the cases of the Weimar Republic, the Austrian Republic, and the Spanish Second Republic. First, the chapter introduces various traditional interpretations of the de- mise of liberal democracies and rise of authoritarianism in interwar Europe. Then, the chapter provides a review of historical developments in Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain, noting the factors that most commonly allow historians to explain the end of democracies in the 1920s and 1930s. In the last part of the chapter, a new interpre- tive model is proposed, which highlights transnational processes, namely the influ- ence and direct intervention of Italian fascists in Europe, as the key to understand why various interwar democratic Republics fell. In his influential book Die Diktatur (The Dictatorship), first published in 1922, German jurist Carl Schmitt, a scholar who would become known for his collaboration with Hit- ler’s Third Reich, located the roots of the modern concept of dictatorship in “Roman history and its classic authors”. He noted, “the dictatorship is a wise invention of the Roman Republic”; “the dictator [was] . . . an extraordinary Roman magistrate . . . with the task of dispelling the dangerous situation that is the reason for his appointment, whether through the conduct of war (dictatura rei gerendae), or through the defeat of an internal uprising (dictatura seditionis sedandae)”. When Schmitt wrote this work, right after the First World War and the treaty of Versailles, democracies clearly domi- nated Europe, but from Lenin’s revolutionary Russia since October 1917, a new model of communist society was being projected by Bolsheviks, who aimed to export revolu- tion to the entire world. In his book’s preliminary note, written in the summer of 1920, Schmitt reacted to Marxist debates about the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”,a concept that also revealed —Schmitt remarked— the transitory nature of dictatorial power: a dictatorship that eventually “does not make itself superfluous is rather des- potism”. 1 Schmitt’s reflections on dictatorship were influenced by the Great War and the post-war revolutionary context. 2 With the sudden end of the Great War, bourgeois fear of revolution and the masses’ impulses from below combined to bring democracy and universal suffrage to many countries that had participated in the conflict. Many  Schmitt (1989) xi–xx, 1. Schmitt (like many Roman historians) fundamentally misunderstood the ‘traditional’ Roman office of dictator as it occurred until the end of the Second Punic War: see Cornell (2015).  Kelly (2013). Open Access. © 2025 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111705446-021