There are two prevailing schools of thought in analyzing history. The first is the ‘great man’ theory, in which great men such as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte drive history. The second school of thought is that history is inspired by societal trends and circumstances, not merely the actions of one man. This essay seeks to examine Benito Mussolini and try to understand if his rise to power was a product of circumstance or made possible by his efforts.
Daniel Szwec | @szewc_daniel
Historically speaking, the Baltic-Black Sea isthmus, currently occupied by the Polish and Ukrainian states has always experienced extremely strong policical forces, ones set on uniting the region into a single political entity. From having a monopoly on the non-Scandinavian geopolitical European Rimland’s border, to being the crossing of trade routes from North to South, and East to West, the region was already in a political union, in the form of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, during which the region enjoyed enormous prosperity and had the largest aristocratic class in all of Europe. What’s more, the geopolitical longing for uniformity may be seen as one of the major causes for the first world war- the region was split in between the Entente and the central powers- Western Poland belonging to the German Empire, the East of Poland and the Ukraine belonging to the Russian Tsardom, and Galicia belonging to Austria-Hungary.