Global Conflict

1905: the rehearsal

Russia industrialized rapidly in the 1890s under state direction, financed heavily by French loans, and the result was a large industrial workforce concentrated in a few cities, alongside a peasantry that was the overwhelming majority and short of land. That combination, a modern proletariat and an unreformed countryside under an autocracy with no legislature, is the setup.

Defeat by Japan in 1905 supplied the shock. On Bloody Sunday in January, troops fired on a peaceful crowd marching to petition the tsar, and the killing of demonstrators who had come to appeal to him personally destroyed something specific: the belief that the tsar was the people's protector against bad officials. Strikes, mutinies and peasant risings followed through the year.

Nicholas II conceded the October Manifesto, which promised civil liberties and an elected legislature, the Duma. He then spent the following years restricting its franchise and dissolving it when it displeased him. That is option three from section 01 taken and then half-withdrawn, and it produced the worst of both: a legislature real enough to organize an opposition, and too weak to give it a stake.

February 1917: the autocracy goes

The war did what the war does in this chapter. Russia mobilized an enormous army and could not supply it; the railway network moved troops or food but struggled to do both; cities went short of bread and fuel through the winter of 1916 to 1917; casualties were immense. Nicholas took personal command at the front in 1915, which attached every subsequent defeat to him by name.

In February 1917 bread queues and strikes in Petrograd turned into mass demonstrations, and the decisive moment is when the garrison ordered to suppress them refused and joined instead. An autocracy whose troops will not fire has nothing left, and Nicholas abdicated in March.

Two bodies then claimed authority in the same city, which is the arrangement to name: the Provisional Government, drawn from the Duma and composed largely of liberals, and the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies. The Soviet's Order No. 1 instructed soldiers to obey the Provisional Government only where the Soviet agreed, which tells you where practical power sat. This is dual power.

The one fatal decision, and October

The Provisional Government continued the war. The reasoning was not stupid: it was provisional, unelected, bound by treaty commitments to allies whose loans Russia depended on, and it believed only a constituent assembly could make a decision of that size. But it meant asking an exhausted population to keep dying for a policy it had not chosen, from a government nobody had elected.

It also postponed land redistribution to that same future assembly, while peasant soldiers were deserting to be present when the land was divided. Two enormous questions, peace and land, both deferred by a government with no mandate to defer them.

Lenin returned in April and offered the opposite: peace, land, bread, and all power to the soviets. The Bolsheviks were a minority for most of 1917, and what changed was the Kornilov affair in August, when a general's attempted march on Petrograd was stopped substantially by Bolshevik-organized workers, after which the party gained majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. In October they seized the government buildings in a rapid and relatively bloodless operation, in the name of the soviets.

Then the part students often omit: the Bolsheviks allowed the Constituent Assembly elections, lost them to the Socialist Revolutionaries, and dispersed the assembly after one day in January 1918. They signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March, giving up enormous territory to end the war, and fought a civil war until 1922. Taking power in October was the beginning of the fight, not the end.

The positions, briefly and fairly

German responsibility. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles assigned responsibility to Germany and its allies, and the case rests on the blank cheque, on a plan that required invading two neutral or uninvolved countries, and on arguments that German leaders were willing to risk a general war. A major twentieth-century restatement pushed this further, arguing for deliberate German aims, and the argument it started has run ever since.

Shared responsibility. On this reading every capital made choices that raised the risk: Vienna wanted a war with Serbia, Berlin backed it, St Petersburg mobilized, Paris encouraged its ally, London was ambiguous about its intentions long enough for Berlin to gamble that it might stay out.

Systemic causes. On this reading individuals mattered less than the structure: two armed blocs, plans that rewarded speed, and a diplomatic system with no mechanism able to stop a crisis once mobilization began. Nobody chose the war and the system produced it.

You do not have to pick, and if you do pick you should say why. What a strong answer does is name the positions, weigh evidence, and then commit with a reason, in that order.

How to write about a dispute

Three habits, and they transfer to every contested question in this course. Separate the underlying from the immediate. Imperial rivalry and the naval race are underlying; the blank cheque and the ultimatum are immediate; the assassination is a trigger. A cause that had been present for thirty years cannot explain the timing, and a trigger cannot explain the scale.

Ask what each explanation predicts. If the alliances alone caused the war, Italy should have fought alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, and it did not. If the standing tensions alone caused it, section 02 should not exist. An explanation that survives its own counterexamples is worth more than one that has not been tested.

Name the dispute in the essay. "Historians continue to disagree about the balance of responsibility, and the strongest case for X is Y" is a better sentence than a confident verdict, and it is also a better sentence than a vague one. The Topic 7.9 chapter is built around exactly this skill, so treat this section as the rehearsal for it.

The two events of 1917

Russia left. The revolutions of Topic 7.1 took Russia out of the war, confirmed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, which released German divisions for the Western Front. That is why Germany attacked hard in spring 1918: a window had opened and everyone knew it would close.

The United States entered. German unrestricted submarine warfare, resumed in 1917 in the hope of starving Britain before America could matter, plus the Zimmermann telegram proposing a German alliance with Mexico, brought the United States in that April. The immediate military effect was limited because the American army had to be raised and shipped; the effect on the arithmetic was immediate and decisive, because it added an industrial economy of enormous capacity, and credit, to one side.

Put the two together and you have the German calculation for 1918: win in the west before American strength arrives. The spring offensives used the new infiltration tactics, advanced further than anything since 1914, and could not be sustained, and from August the Allied counteroffensives, with tanks, aircraft and coordinated artillery, pushed steadily forward.

Capacity failing, and the shape of the ending

What ended the war was not the capture of Berlin. It was the failure of the Central Powers' capacity, in exactly the terms of section 01: Germany's allies collapsed in sequence through autumn 1918, the blockade had degraded food supply and civilian health badly, an influenza pandemic was spreading through exhausted populations worldwide, naval crews mutinied at Kiel, and revolution spread through German cities. The Kaiser abdicated and a new German government signed an armistice on 11 November 1918.

Note the sequencing, because it matters enormously for Topic 7.6. The armistice was signed when German armies still stood on foreign soil and no Allied army had entered Germany. That fact, entirely explicable in terms of collapsing capacity, was later exploited by the claim that the army had been betrayed at home rather than defeated, which became a foundation of Nazi politics. A war that ends through the failure of a home front is a war whose ending can be denied.

The costs are enormous and the figures are estimates rather than counts, so use ranges. Military deaths are usually put at somewhere around nine to ten million, with civilian deaths of a comparable order once famine, disease and displacement are included, and the 1918 to 1919 influenza pandemic killed a further number that modern estimates place in the tens of millions worldwide. Attach any figure you use to what kind of number it is, exactly as the Topic 4.3 chapter teaches.

The problem Stalin was solving

After the civil war, Lenin's New Economic Policy had restored a limited market in agriculture and small trade. The leadership argument that Stalin won was about whether that could continue, and the case for ending it was strategic: a largely peasant economy could not equip a modern army, the Soviet Union expected eventual attack by hostile industrial powers, and the capital for industrialization would have to come from inside because foreign lending was not available on any terms it would accept.

"Inside" meant agriculture. The state needed grain to feed industrial cities and to export for the machinery it could not build, and it wanted that grain at prices it set rather than prices peasants would accept. Collectivization is the instrument: consolidate peasant holdings into collective and state farms, which the state can requisition from directly, and eliminate the independent peasant producer as a category.

The Five-Year Plans: what they achieved

The first Five-Year Plan from 1928 set output targets across the economy, with overwhelming priority on heavy industry: coal, steel, electricity, machinery, chemicals. New industrial cities were built from very little, Magnitogorsk being the standard example, and enormous projects like the Dnieper dam became emblems of the effort.

The results in heavy industry were real and rapid, and honesty requires saying so. Steel, coal, electricity and machine-tool output rose several times over across the 1930s, and the Soviet Union entered the Second World War with an industrial base capable of out-producing Germany in tanks and artillery, which the Topic 7.7 chapter shows mattered decisively. Treat the published figures carefully, because targets were political and reporting was pressured, so plan fulfilment claims are propaganda documents as well as statistics; the direction and the rough scale are well established even where specific numbers are disputed.

The costs inside the plan were also structural rather than accidental. Consumer goods and housing were starved of investment for a decade, quality was frequently poor because plans rewarded quantity, and shortage was chronic. A system that can build a steel plant quickly is not thereby a system that can supply shoes.

The cost to the population, stated plainly

Collectivization was violently resisted and violently enforced. Peasants who resisted were labeled kulaks, a category applied far beyond any real class of prosperous farmers, and were dispossessed, deported to remote regions or sent to camps. Many slaughtered livestock rather than surrender it, and Soviet herds took years to recover.

Famine followed, and its worst incidence was in Ukraine. The famine of 1932 to 1933 killed millions across Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus and other grain regions. Estimates vary substantially and the historiography is contested; ranges commonly given for Ukraine alone run into the millions, and totals across the affected regions higher again. What is not in dispute is that the state continued requisitioning grain, restricted peasant movement out of starving districts, and rejected outside acknowledgment of the crisis. Ukraine names this the Holodomor and a considerable number of governments and scholars classify it as genocide; others argue for a catastrophe of policy directed at peasants and resisters generally rather than at Ukrainians as a nation. Name the dispute and note that the human facts are agreed either way. The Topic 7.8 chapter takes this up as atrocity, and the fact that it appears in both chapters is the argument.

Forced labor was built into the system. The camp network expanded enormously and prisoners were used on canals, railways, mining and timber in remote regions, so a share of the industrial achievement rests on it directly. And the purges of the later 1930s executed or imprisoned very large numbers, including much of the army's senior officer corps, with consequences visible in 1941.

Manchuria, 1931

Japan had held economic and railway interests in southern Manchuria since its victory over Russia in 1905, protected by its own garrison troops. In September 1931 officers of that garrison staged an explosion on the railway near Mukden, blamed Chinese forces, and used it as the pretext for occupying the whole region. In 1932 Japan established Manchukuo, nominally an independent state under the last Qing emperor Puyi and in practice under Japanese control.

Two things to take from this. It is territorial expansion by a major power thirteen years after a peace settlement built on self-determination, which answers the criteria directly. And the motive is the economics of Topic 7.4: Manchuria offered coal, iron, soybeans and land to a resource-poor industrial state facing the Depression and pursuing self-sufficiency, which is autarky pursued by conquest.

The League sent a commission of inquiry. Its report, in 1933, found that Japan's action was not justified as self-defense and that Manchukuo was not a genuine independence movement, and recommended non-recognition and an autonomous Manchuria under Chinese sovereignty. Japan's response was to leave the League. The report was accurate, the process worked, and nothing happened.

The mechanism of the failure

It is tempting to write that the League failed because nations were selfish, which explains nothing. The failure has specific structural causes and naming them is worth more.

No armed force. The League had no army and no power to raise one. Its instruments were publicity, arbitration and economic sanctions, and sanctions require members to bear costs willingly during a depression.

Unanimity. Key decisions in the Council required unanimity, which gave interested parties enormous obstructive power and made timely action difficult by design.

Absent members. The United States never joined, despite the League being substantially Wilson's idea, because the Senate did not consent to the Treaty. The Soviet Union was outside for years, joining only in 1934 and expelled in 1939. Germany joined in 1926 and left in 1933; Japan left in 1933 and Italy in 1937. An organization for collective security whose membership excludes several of the world's most powerful states at any given moment cannot deliver collective security.

Members with a conflict of interest. Britain and France were the leading members and were also imperial powers with mandates, colonies and exposed interests, so they had strong reasons to avoid confrontations that might cost them elsewhere.

The Ethiopian case in 1935 to 1936 is the confirmation. Italy invaded, the League condemned it and imposed sanctions that pointedly excluded oil and left the Suez Canal open, and Italy completed the conquest. Emperor Haile Selassie addressed the Assembly in Geneva to warn that a system which would not defend a member state had announced what it was. After Ethiopia, few governments planned as though collective security were real, which is a direct input into Topic 7.6.

The sequence

1931. Japan takes Manchuria; the League reports and does nothing, as Topic 7.5 describes. 1933. Germany leaves the League. 1935. Germany announces conscription and an air force, openly breaking the treaty's military terms; Italy invades Ethiopia and sanctions fail. 1936. German troops reenter the demilitarized Rhineland, a direct treaty violation, and France and Britain do not act; the Spanish Civil War begins, with German and Italian forces intervening and serving as a proving ground. 1937. Japan invades China proper, beginning a full war in Asia.

1938. Germany annexes Austria in the Anschluss; at Munich in September, Britain and France agree to the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany, without Czechoslovak participation in the decision, in exchange for assurances of no further claims. March 1939. Germany occupies the rest of Czechoslovakia, which breaks the Munich assurance and ends the policy. August 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, publicly a non-aggression treaty and secretly a division of eastern Europe, removes the risk of a two-front war. 1 September 1939. Germany invades Poland; Britain and France, having guaranteed Poland in March, declare war on 3 September.

Appeasement, on its own terms

Appeasement is easy to condemn and the condemnation is worth little unless you can state the case. Here it is, as it looked in 1938.

The memory of the last war. Everyone deciding had lived through 1914 to 1918. The prospect of repeating it, with aircraft now able to bomb cities, was regarded with horror by populations and governments alike, and avoiding it was a legitimate aim rather than cowardice.

Some German claims looked defensible. If self-determination was the principle of 1919, then German-speaking populations in Austria and the Sudetenland asking to join Germany were awkward to refuse on principle. That is the treaty's selectivity returning as a weapon.

Military and imperial weakness. Britain and France had disarmed substantially, were financially strained by the Depression, and Britain had imperial commitments across the world with Japan hostile in Asia. British rearmament was accelerating, and time was thought to favor the defender.

The Soviet problem. An eastern front required the Soviet Union, and Britain, France and Poland all had strong reasons to distrust Stalin, while Stalin had strong reasons to distrust them after Munich, to which he was not invited. That mutual distrust is what the pact of August 1939 exploited.

Now the case against, which is stronger. Each unopposed move improved Germany's position and lowered the expected cost of the next one; the Rhineland in 1936 was the cheapest moment to act; Czechoslovakia had substantial defenses and an army, and Munich handed those to Germany rather than buying time neutrally; and the assurances were worth nothing because the aims were not limited, which March 1939 demonstrated. The judgment to write is that appeasement was a defensible reading of a limited-aims opponent applied to an opponent whose aims were not limited, and that the evidence for the second was available and was discounted.

And the war in Asia, which began earlier

One correction to the standard chronology belongs here. For much of the world the Second World War did not begin in September 1939. Japan's full-scale invasion of China began in 1937, and its occupation of Manchuria in 1931, and the war in Asia was already enormous and enormously destructive before Germany invaded Poland.

Japan's causes run parallel to the European ones and are not identical. A resource-poor industrial state hit hard by the collapse in world trade pursued self-sufficiency through an empire in Asia; civilian governments lost control of an army that acted on its own initiative in Manchuria and was not restrained; and an ideology of Japanese leadership in Asia supplied the justification. Write the war as having two origins that later merged, and your account of 1941 becomes much easier to make sense of.

Strategic bombing, and what it did and did not achieve

The reasoning was stated openly before the war: if an enemy's capacity to fight rests on factories and workers, then bombing both should shorten the war and might avoid another trench deadlock. Practice diverged from theory almost at once, because bombing accurately was extremely difficult, and area bombing of cities became standard for night raids.

The sequence includes Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, German raids on Warsaw, Rotterdam and the Blitz against British cities, and then a sustained Allied campaign against German cities, including the firestorms at Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945, and against Japanese cities, where the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed on a scale comparable to the atomic bombings.

The assessment is genuinely contested and should be written as such. The postwar bombing survey found German armaments output rising into 1944 despite the campaign, which undercuts the simplest claims made for it. The stronger cases made for bombing are that it forced Germany to divert enormous resources to air defense, destroyed the oil and transport that everything else depended on once those were targeted systematically from 1944, and gave the Allies air superiority. The case against is that area bombing killed very large numbers of civilians for effects that could have been achieved more precisely and later were. Present the dispute; do not resolve it by assertion.

Siege, occupation, and the war in Asia

Bombing is the visible case and not the largest. The siege of Leningrad, lasting close to nine hundred days, killed civilians in enormous numbers, primarily by starvation, and was a deliberate strategy rather than a side effect. German occupation policy in eastern Europe involved planned starvation, forced labor and mass killing on a scale that Topic 7.8 treats directly.

In Asia the war was longer and its civilian toll immense. China had been fighting since 1937, and Chinese civilian and military deaths across that longer war are usually estimated in the many millions, with wide ranges. Japanese occupation policies across China and Southeast Asia included massacres, forced labor, and the enslavement of women in military brothels, euphemistically called comfort women, which remains a live diplomatic issue. The Bengal famine of 1943, in British India, killed on the order of millions, and its causes are debated among crop failure, wartime requisitioning and shipping priorities, and the response of the colonial administration.

A student writing about this war should be able to say that it was global, that Asia's war started earlier and lasted longer, and that most of the people who died in it were not soldiers.

The atomic bombs

The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and on Nagasaki on 9 August, killing tens of thousands immediately in each city and many more subsequently from injuries and radiation. Japan announced surrender on 15 August. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria on 9 August, between the two bombings.

The debate over the decision is a genuine historiographical dispute and belongs in a chapter like this one as a dispute. The traditional case holds that the bombs ended the war quickly and avoided an invasion of Japan whose projected casualties, on both sides, would have been enormous. A revisionist case holds that Japan was already close to surrender, that the Soviet declaration of war was at least as decisive, and that the bombs served a diplomatic purpose toward the Soviet Union. A middle position holds that the bombs and the Soviet entry together broke the deadlock in the Japanese leadership. Estimates of what an invasion would have cost were themselves contested at the time and are contested now.

Two things are worth adding whatever position you take. This is the logic of total war reaching its endpoint: a weapon whose purpose is the destruction of a city is only usable if a city is a legitimate target, and four years of area bombing had already established that it was. And the weapon changes what the next fifty years look like, which is where Unit 8 begins.

The law

Nuremberg, 1945 to 1946. The International Military Tribunal tried surviving German leaders, with parallel trials in Tokyo for Japanese leaders. Its lasting contribution is two principles: that individuals, including heads of state and officials, can be held personally criminally responsible under international law, and that following orders is not by itself a defense. It also established the category of crimes against humanity. The standing criticism, made at the time and since, is that it was victors' justice, applying law partly formulated after the acts and not examining Allied conduct such as area bombing.

The Genocide Convention, 1948. Adopted by the United Nations after Lemkin's campaign, it defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such, and obliges parties to prevent and punish it. Two features matter for using it accurately: the requirement of intent to destroy the group as such is what makes legal classification genuinely difficult and is why several cases in this chapter are disputed, and political groups were excluded from the definition during drafting, which is why the Cambodian killings, largely of the regime's own population on political and class grounds, fit awkwardly.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. Adopted the day after the Convention, and a claim that rights attach to people as such rather than being granted by states, which is the Unit 5 argument of Topic 5.1 restated as an international instrument.

The institutions, and the record

The Convention obliged prevention and created no court to enforce it, and for decades there was none. The Cold War of Unit 8 froze the Security Council, and prosecutions did not follow.

That changed in the 1990s. The United Nations created ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and for Rwanda in 1994. The Rwanda tribunal produced the first conviction for genocide by an international court, and also the first conviction of a media figure for incitement, which is a legal consequence directly shaped by the mechanism of section 02. The Yugoslav tribunal indicted a sitting head of state. The International Criminal Court, established by the Rome Statute of 1998 and operating from 2002, is the permanent successor.

Assess it honestly, because the criteria ask for consequences rather than for praise. The ICC has real limits: several of the most powerful states, including the United States, China and Russia, are not parties, it depends on state cooperation to make arrests and has no police force, proceedings are slow and expensive, and it has faced sustained criticism, particularly from African governments, that its early caseload focused disproportionately on Africa. Set against that, the principle that a head of state can be tried is now established in practice rather than only on paper, which was not true in 1900.

Rwanda's own response is worth knowing as a distinct model. Facing more accused than any court system could try, Rwanda revived and adapted gacaca, community courts in which local panels heard cases publicly, with reduced sentences for confession and participation in reconstruction. They processed an enormous caseload and are assessed variously: as a pragmatic route to accountability and public truth-telling that no formal system could have delivered, and as proceedings lacking defense representation and vulnerable to false accusation. Both assessments are held by serious observers.

Cultural trauma is the third consequence and it is not soft. It shapes the politics of the societies involved for generations: German memory culture and its legal prohibitions on Holocaust denial, the centrality of the genocide to Rwandan national policy, the Armenian diaspora's recognition campaigns and the diplomatic consequences of denial, and Cambodia's tribunal decades later. These are political facts with measurable effects, not merely feelings.

The vocabulary the criteria name

Weighing language does the work a list cannot, and these are the phrases to have ready. "The most significant cause was X, because..." commits and then justifies. "X was the underlying cause and Y the immediate trigger" sorts by the timing test. "X was a necessary condition, though not a sufficient one" is the single most useful construction in this unit and is exactly the Versailles finding. "X mattered more than Y because..." is a direct comparison and must be followed by the criterion. "While X is usually emphasized, Y better explains..." signals that you know the standard answer and are departing from it deliberately.

And the phrases to avoid, because each one abandons the task. "There were many causes" concedes the question. "It was a combination of factors" is true of everything and therefore says nothing. "Equally important" is almost never defensible and usually means the ranking has not been done.

A worked thesis

Take the prompt: Evaluate the relative significance of the causes of the Second World War in Europe.

Weak. "There were many causes of World War II, including the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, appeasement, and Hitler's aggression." That is a list, it ranks nothing, and it could have been written before reading the unit.

Strong. "The Treaty of Versailles was a necessary condition for the Second World War in Europe but not a sufficient one, since the Nazi Party remained marginal in 1928 when the treaty was fully in force; the Great Depression was the decisive cause, because it supplied the mass constituency and the elite panic without which a party polling in single figures could not have been handed power in 1933; and appeasement is better understood as a cause of the war's timing and shape than of its occurrence, since it determined that the war began in 1939 over Poland rather than in 1936 over the Rhineland."

Look at what that sentence does. It ranks three causes. It uses necessary and sufficient correctly. It supplies evidence from Topics 7.6 and 7.4. It applies the timing test explicitly to appeasement. It names a criterion for each judgment. And it is arguable, which is the point: a grader can disagree with it, and that is what makes it a thesis rather than a summary.

Now note what a different question does to it. Asked instead why the war was so destructive, the ranking inverts entirely and industrial capacity from Topics 7.3 and 7.7 goes first, with the political causes explaining only why the fighting started. Same unit, same evidence, different criterion, different answer, and both defensible.