The First World War was followed by a series of socialist revolutions in many parts of Europe, perhaps inspired by the successful Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In the Netherlands too, the socialist SDAP thought that the time was ripe for the proletariat to seize power. The party leader, Pieter Jelles Troelstra, made an inflammatory speech in parliament more or less demanding the resignation of the government in favour of his party. However, this proved to be a miscalculation: the public responded by demonstrating their loyalty to queen and country and the revolution failed to materialise. In 1920 the Netherlands became a member of the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations). The League had been established to increase international cooperation and promote peace and security. In 1922 another change to the constitution gave women the vote and opened the way to greater autonomy for the colonies.

In 1929 the world was shaken by the crash on the New York stock exchange. This led to a serious worldwide economic crisis. The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies were hard hit. Because of the contemporary belief in boom and bust liberal economics, it was initially assumed that the economy would revive automatically and that the depression would be followed by a period of strong economic growth. However, the government's policy of keeping the guilder on the gold standard actually exacerbated the crisis and led to an unprecedented decline in exports. The consequences were alarming. By 1935, unemployment was running at 40 per cent and in 1936 the Netherlands was finally forced to abandon the gold standard. It was the last country in the world to do so.

Despite these problems, the period between the two world wars was not all gloom and doom. It was marked by an influx of new fashions, new music and new mass media entertainment from the United States. Clothing became less constrictive and formal, especially for women. New cinemas opened to show the films arriving from Hollywood and fashionable clubs and bars began to swing to the sound of jazz. The first radio broadcast in the Netherlands was made in 1924 and a national public broadcasting association (AVRO) was set up in the same year. However, its lack of special political or religious affiliation made it unacceptable to large parts of the strongly segmented Dutch society of the time, and it was soon followed by the Protestant NCRV, the Catholic KRO, the socialist VARA and finally the dissenting protestant VPRO. Even today, all of these broadcasting organisations still compete for time on the Dutch air waves.

In the cultural arena, the leading Dutch figures on the international scene were architects Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud and Gerrit Thomas Rietveld and the painter Piet Mondrian. They were all associated with a periodical called De Stijl ('Style'), which artist Theo van Doesburg had established in 1917. The principles of the movement initiated by this periodical included the banishing of any reference to perceived reality, a philosophy taken to the ultimate extreme in Mondrian's completely non-representational paintings. The movement had a major influence on the contemporary arts, extending beyond architecture, painting and sculpture to inspire poets and writers to seek to reveal and express the universal harmony which, it maintained, controlled the universe and human life.

Queen Wilhelmina's mother, Emma, and her husband, Prince Hendrik, both died in 1934. Three years later, her only daughter, Princess Juliana, married a young German prince, Bernhard van Lippe-Biesterfeld. The marriage was to produce another direct heir to the throne, Princess Beatrix, and three other daughters.