No Great Depression (or maybe a simple downturn handled matter-of-factly by not limiting trade and by not contracting the federal budget). No rise of the Nazi party, no World War II. Stalin is still a nut and still in power for a number of years. But maybe the competition between the U.S., UK, Germany, France, etc, on the one hand and the largely outmatched Soviet Union on the other is two-thirds economic competition on who can better provide genuine economic development for third world countries and honest trade deals. And the competition is only one-third the whole business of arming rebel groups and propping up dictatorships.
I’m not sure that without the Great Depression and World War II things would have been
that smooth in Europe. One has to recognise that the 1950s and 1960s “Green Revolution” would have broken (as it did in actual history) the power of the landed upper classes who kept anti-Communist dictators in power in the Balkans, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic States, Austria, Spain and Portugal. Once those nations developed comparative disadvantage in agriculture due to high land costs, there would be a certainty of radical political change since once-hegemonic large landowners became less and less wealthy and the radical working classes grew larger and larger as these nations’ areas of comparative advantage shifted away from farming. It is no certainty that the absence of a Great Depression would have saved democracy in most of these nations. Even in Austria, the wealthiest and most industrially developed, historians trace the breakdown of democracy as far back as 1927, and in most it had broken down by 1926.
That would mean that, without Stalinist regimes taking over eastern Europe, most of the region would in the 1950s or more likely the 1960s have been subject to revolutions similar to or possibly more violent – and certainly more widespread – than Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” of 1974. It’s not implausible that a radical Communist regime would have come to power in more than one of these nations, since the working classes – though tiny – were still seen as a grave threat. This could have put Eastern Europe in a worse situation that it was under Stalinist regimes after the war, unless a democratic or Communist regime settles matters rapidly enough – and if it were the latter they would potentially be an enemy of both power blocs.
Then, with the US, the Civil Rights era would have occurred in the face of declining economic competition, which would have greatly increased white resentment and hostility.