By 1890 modernization developed in countries such as France, Germany, Japna and the United States and it began an intenational competition between these. It created an atmosphere of tension and this tension broke out in 1914 with the First World War. It caused the lost of the faith of generations in liberal democracy, capitalism and the Victorian idea of progress. Instead science and industry had not produced a good world. The war marked also the end of European state's power and the beginning of the USA and Russia's power.

In the 1870's and 1880's there was an economic depression, which caused serious probloems. As a result the State decided to accept some responsabilities and this laid to the Welfare State.

But some elements in the working class parties believed that it was time to give up capitalism and to do what Marx had suggested in 1848: to offer a new idea of future.

Another problem was the religion, in confilcts with the Victorian age: individual was afraid to be only a superior and isolated animal. God doesn't exsist and man must decide alone what was right and wrong.

Also Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physic put in discuss and in 1906 Albert Einstein said that space and time didn't exsist as separated and past and future exist together with present.

In litterature there is no more the omniscient narrator, but there is the shift of point of view, so the reader decides what thinks.

The most significant figures are V. Woolf, J. Joyce, T.S. Eliot and E. Pound.