20th Century World History 12

The rise pattern repeats: economic crisis + national grievance + weak institutions + a promised restoration — Weimar Germany, post-Tsarist Russia, and interwar Italy each supplied the ingredients.

Revolutions share anatomy: an old regime discredited (war, famine, inequality), an organized alternative, and a trigger — Russia 1917 and China 1949 both fit.

The toolkit crosses ideologies: propaganda and controlled media, secret police and terror, cult of personality, one-party state, and scapegoated minorities.

Decolonization ran on two tracks: negotiated transitions (India's mass movement forcing Britain's hand) and armed struggles (Algeria, Vietnam) — the colonizer's posture usually chose the track.

Left-right labels matter less than the mechanism — Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany opposed each other while ruling with parallel instruments.

The 1948 Universal Declaration set the standard the century's movements invoked — nonviolent mass action, legal challenge, and international pressure became the shared playbook (US civil rights, anti-apartheid).

Genocide — coined by Raphael Lemkin, defined in the 1948 UN Convention — means acts intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such; the Holocaust's six million murdered Jews stands at the definition's centre, with the Armenian genocide and Rwanda 1994 among the century's named cases.

WWI's causes stack: militarism, alliances, imperialism, nationalism — with the July 1914 crisis as trigger; industrial war then delivered slaughter no one had planned for.

Indigenous peoples movements worldwide pressed distinct claims: land and treaty rights, cultural survival, and self-determination — building through the century to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).

Genocides follow recognizable stages: classification of an 'other', dehumanizing propaganda, organization, and escalation — the point of learning the stages is recognizing them early.

Borders moved people: Versailles's new states, the Partition of India (some 14 million displaced), and postwar Europe's expulsions each converted lines on maps into caravans of families.

The League of Nations tried and failed — no enforcement, absent powers — and its failure designed the UN (Security Council teeth, universal membership).

Push and pull ran together — war and persecution pushed; labour demand and reunification pulled; the refugee became a defining 20th-century figure with new legal machinery (the 1951 Refugee Convention).

Bretton Woods built the economic architecture (IMF, World Bank, trade rounds) that wired national economies together.

Diasporas reshaped the receiving societies — the century's cities are its migration ledger.