Conflict & Tension

Part one: Peacemaking

• The armistice: aims of the peacemakers; Wilson and the Fourteen Points; Clemenceau and Lloyd George; the extent to which they achieved their aims.

• The Versailles Settlement: Diktat; territorial changes; military restrictions; war guilt and reparations.

• Impact of the treaty and wider settlement: reactions of the Allies; German objections; strengths and weaknesses of the settlement, including the problems faced by new states.

Part two: The League of Nations and international peace

• The League of Nations: its formation and covenant; organisation; membership and how it changed; the powers of the League; the work of the League's agencies; the contribution of the League to peace in the 1920s, including the successes and failures of the League, such as the Aaland Islands, Upper Silesia, Vilna, Corfu and Bulgaria.

• Diplomacy outside the League: Locarno treaties and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. • The collapse of the League: the effects of the Depression; the Manchurian and Abyssinian crises and their consequences; the failure of the League to avert war in 1939.

Part three: The origins and outbreak of the Second World War

• The development of tension: Hitler's aims and Allied reactions; the Dollfuss Affair; the Saar; German rearmament, including conscription; the Stresa Front; Anglo-German Naval Agreement.

• Escalation of tension: remilitarisation of the Rhineland; Mussolini, the Axis and the AntiComintern Pact; Anschluss; reasons for and against the policy of appeasement; the Sudeten Crisis and Munich; the ending of appeasement.

• The outbreak of war: the occupation of Czechoslovakia; the role of the USSR and the NaziSoviet Pact; the invasion of Poland and outbreak of war, September 1939; responsibility for the outbreak of war, including that of key individuals: Hitler, Stalin and Chamberlain.