7.9 - Causation in Global Conflict
Key facts and dates
Global conflicts from 1900 to the present arose from a mix of technological advancements, challenges to established orders, and the collapse of empires, leading to revolutions and new states. These developments reshaped the world, with causes varying in significance across regions and time periods.
Timeline of key events:
- 1910–1920 – Mexican Revolution challenges political crisis and social inequalities, leading to a new constitution.
- 1911 – Xinhai Revolution ends the Qing Dynasty in China due to internal weaknesses and external pressures.
- 1917 – Russian Revolution overthrows the tsarist regime, eventually resulting in communist rule.
- 1918 – Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, influenced by nationalism and wartime defeats.
- Throughout 20th century – Rapid technological advances in communication and transportation fuel global interconnectedness and conflicts.
The learning objective for explaining causes of global conflict
Global conflict in the period from 1900 to the present stems from a variety of interconnected causes. The main learning objective here is to explain the relative significance of these causes, weighing how factors like technological change and political challenges contributed differently to conflicts in various contexts. This involves analyzing why some causes were more influential in certain regions or eras, helping to understand the broader patterns of worldwide unrest.
Steps to evaluate relative significance:
- Identify primary causes - Start by listing key factors, such as internal empire weaknesses or external pressures, and assess their roles in sparking conflict.
- Compare across cases - Examine how the same cause, like nationalism, played a major role in the Ottoman Empire's collapse but was less dominant in technological-driven conflicts.
- Weigh evidence - Use historical examples to determine if a cause was a direct trigger or a long-term contributor, considering its impact on the scale and outcome of the conflict.
Key concepts on advances in science and technology
Rapid advances in science and technology during the 20th century transformed societies and contributed to global conflicts. These developments altered how people understood the world, improved communication and transportation, and boosted industries like agriculture and medicine. As a result, they often intensified rivalries by enabling faster mobilization of resources and ideas, making conflicts more widespread and destructive.
Major impacts of technological progress:
- Changes in understanding the universe - Innovations like relativity theory and quantum mechanics shifted scientific views, influencing military strategies in wars through new weapons and intelligence tools.
- Improvements in communication and transportation - Technologies such as radio and airplanes connected distant regions, allowing ideologies to spread quickly and empires to exert control or face challenges more rapidly.
- Advances in industry, agriculture, and medicine - Industrial growth fueled arms races, while agricultural improvements supported larger populations, sometimes leading to resource-based tensions; medical progress extended lives but also prolonged conflicts by sustaining armies.
Challenges to existing political and social orders
Around the world, peoples and states actively challenged established political and social systems, resulting in unprecedented global conflicts. These challenges varied in form and intensity, from revolutions to wars, as groups sought to overthrow outdated structures. This process highlighted tensions between traditional powers and emerging demands for change, often escalating into widespread violence.
Ways challenges led to conflict:
- Varying methods of resistance - Some groups used protests or reforms, while others turned to armed uprisings, depending on local conditions like economic inequality or foreign influence.
- Global scale of unrest - Challenges were not isolated; they interconnected across regions, such as how colonial resistance in Asia inspired similar movements in Africa, amplifying worldwide instability.
- Outcomes of challenges - These efforts often dismantled old orders but created new conflicts, as seen in power vacuums that led to civil wars or international interventions.
Collapse of empires and emergence of new states
At the start of the 20th century, Western powers dominated global politics, but both land-based and maritime empires crumbled by the century's end. Land-based empires, which controlled vast territories overland, faced internal decay and external threats that led to their downfall. This collapse paved the way for new states, often born from revolutions, reshaping the political landscape.
Causes and examples of empire collapse:
- Ottoman Empire - This land-based empire, centered in modern-day Turkey, collapsed due to internal factors like corruption and nationalism among subject peoples, combined with external defeats in World War I.
- Russian Empire - Internal issues such as economic hardship and autocratic rule, plus external pressures from World War I losses, triggered its fall, eventually leading to a communist revolution that established the Soviet Union.
- Qing Empire - In China, internal weaknesses like ineffective governance and peasant uprisings, along with external influences from Western imperialism, caused its collapse in 1911, resulting in a republic.
- Shift to new states - As empires fell, new nations emerged, often through violent transitions, challenging the West's dominance and setting the stage for further global conflicts.
The skill of argumentation using diverse evidence
The skill of argumentation involves building a complex case about historical causes by using diverse evidence. This means corroborating, qualifying, or modifying an argument to explain nuances, such as how multiple variables interact. For global conflicts, apply this by connecting causes across periods and evaluating source credibility to strengthen claims.
Components of effective argumentation:
- Analyzing multiple variables - Consider how technology (like advanced weaponry) combined with social challenges (like inequality) to cause conflicts, explaining why one factor might outweigh others in specific cases.
- Making connections within and across periods - Link early 20th-century empire collapses to later events, such as Cold War tensions, showing how initial causes had long-term effects.
- Assessing source significance - Evaluate a source's credibility (e.g., a government's report might be biased) and limitations (e.g., it may ignore economic factors), using this to refine arguments about causation.
- Building complex arguments - For example, argue that while technological advances were significant, social challenges were more pivotal in land-based empire collapses, supported by evidence from revolutions like Mexico's, which arose from political crises.