ארבעה קווים למאה שנים

The course's last set of claims

• Total war and political instability in the first half of the 20th century gave way to a polarised state order during the Cold War and eventually to efforts at transnational union.
• The stresses of economic collapse and total war engendered internal conflicts within European states and created conflicting conceptions of the relationship between the individual and the state, as demonstrated in the ideological battle between and among democracy, communism, and fascism.
• Diverse intellectual and cultural movements questioned the existence of objective knowledge, the ability of reason to arrive at truth, and the role of religion in determining moral standards.

And a fourth, about everyday life

• Demographic changes, economic growth, total war, disruptions of traditional social patterns, and competing definitions of freedom and justice altered the experiences of everyday life.
• Five causes listed for one effect — the CED is signalling that daily life has multiple, simultaneous drivers.
• 6.1's everyday-life thread returns, now with war and competing definitions of freedom added to it.

One chain from the First World War to the Second: Versailles, the Depression, fascism and appeasement

'Total war' is a technical term here

• It means a war in which the state mobilises the whole society — labour, industry, food, opinion — not only an army.
• That is why the CED can put total war in the same sentence as internal conflict and everyday life.
• A war of that kind changes the state whether it is won or lost, which is 8.2's central point.

An ideological battle among three

• Between and among democracy, communism, and fascism — the CED names three, not two.
• The extra phrase and among allows for conflict within each camp as well as between them.
• So an answer that reduces the century to a two-sided contest has lost a dimension the CED preserved.

Writing the context

• The objective is the context in which global conflict developed in the 20th century.
• Conditions: unit 7's alliance system and Balkan crises, industrial capacity capable of total war, and no shared standard for settling disputes.
• Each of those was already in place before 1914 — that is what makes it context rather than cause.