And as damaging and prolonged as its downturn has been, it has lasted nowhere near as long as the turmoil that afflicted Europe in the interwar years.

WSJ: Brussels Beat: Parallels With 1920s Raise Worries Over Extremism

In "Ivy Style: Radical Conformists, " out last month from Yale University Press, fashion scholar Patricia Mears traces the history of the modern sport coat to the interwar years, when Princetonians liberated tweed jackets from their matching bottoms.

WSJ: Mastering the Mismatch

The fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, the collapse of trade and migration in the interwar years of the 20th century: all these either slowed the process of globalisation or stopped it in its tracks, albeit only temporarily.

ECONOMIST: Globalisation

But John Maynard Keynes's plans for the post-1945 monetary system were aimed at limiting the imbalances that arose in the interwar system, and have popped up again in the past 20 years.

ECONOMIST: Market discipline works when other controls fail