The clash of ideologies in Europe 1900 to 2000: liberal democracy, communism and fascism, the impact of two world wars, the Cold War division of Europe, and the collapse of communism by 2000.

What this dot point is asking

This is an A2 1 change-over-time topic, so the examiner tests whether you can trace how three ideologies, liberal democracy, communism and fascism, competed across the whole century, how the two world wars and the Cold War shaped that contest, and how it resolved with the collapse of communism by 2000. The premium is on a sustained judgement about change and continuity, supported by precise evidence and, where possible, the interpretations of historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Mark Mazower, Ian Kershaw and Tony Judt.

Three competing ideologies

In 1900, constitutional and liberal ideas dominated Britain and France, while autocratic dynastic empires ruled central and eastern Europe. Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Extremes, 1994) frames the "short twentieth century" (1914 to 1991) as defined precisely by the three-cornered struggle between these systems.

The impact of the world wars

The Great Depression from 1929 helped authoritarian regimes spread as democracies struggled to manage mass unemployment; democracy survived in Britain, France and Scandinavia but collapsed across much of central and eastern Europe.

The Cold War division of Europe

After 1945 Europe was divided between a communist East under Soviet control and a liberal-democratic, capitalist West. Churchill named the Iron Curtain at Fulton (1946). The division was institutionalised by the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947), the Berlin Blockade (1948 to 1949), the founding of NATO (1949) and the Warsaw Pact (1955), and made concrete by the Berlin Wall (1961). Soviet control was enforced by military intervention in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) under what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

The collapse of communism

• Economic failure. Command economies stagnated against Western consumer prosperity, and the arms race strained the Soviet budget.
• Reform. Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), from 1985, loosened control and unintentionally exposed the system's weakness.
• Popular pressure. Solidarity in Poland (from 1980) and mass protest across the bloc challenged communist rule.
• 1989 to 1991. The abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine removed the threat of force; the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, communist regimes collapsed across Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.

By 2000, liberal democracy was the dominant model across Europe, with much of the former Eastern bloc seeking membership of the EU and NATO. Tony Judt (Postwar, 2005) is the standard synthesis of this trajectory.

Examples in context

A model A2 paragraph might weigh the role of the First World War: "The First World War was the decisive catalyst that converted Europe's ideological contest from theory into armed reality. Before 1914, communism was a marginal doctrine and fascism did not yet exist; by 1923 both had taken state form. The war destroyed the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and the resulting vacuum allowed Lenin's Bolsheviks to seize power in October 1917 and build the first communist state. The same upheaval, the bitterness of defeat in Germany and the disorder of postwar Italy, gave fascism its opening, so that Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922 and the Nazi movement grew from the trauma of Versailles. Yet the war did not determine the outcome alone: it was the Great Depression of 1929 that made Nazism a mass movement, and the internal economic failure of communism, not war, that brought the system down in 1991. The wars were therefore the great accelerators of ideological change, but economic forces shaped which ideology prevailed at each stage." This sustains a judgement across the whole period while weighing the named factor against alternatives.

Try this

Q1. Which two ideologies emerged from the upheaval of the First World War? [2 marks]

• Cue. Soviet communism after the 1917 Revolution, and fascism (Italy, 1922) and Nazism (Germany, 1933) in reaction to it.

Q2. Explain why the Cold War froze the ideological division of Europe after 1945. [6 marks]

• Cue. The Yalta and Potsdam settlements, Soviet control of the East enforced by the Brezhnev Doctrine, the rival alliances (NATO 1949, Warsaw Pact 1955) and the Berlin Wall (1961) hardened the line between the blocs.

Q3. How far did the collapse of communism by 2000 represent the triumph of liberal democracy? [20 marks]

• Cue. Weigh the spread of democracy and markets after 1991 against the persistence of nationalism, economic disruption and authoritarian survivals. Reach a substantiated judgement.