IGCSE History: International Relations Depth Studies — Revision Notes

Condensed for the final weeks. For the full explanation, use the International Relations Depth Studies study guide.

The Treaty of Versailles, 1919

The Big Three wanted different things, and that conflict explains the treaty’s shape:

Leader	Country	Aim
Clemenceau	France	Revenge, security, cripple Germany
Wilson	USA	Fourteen Points, self-determination, League of Nations
Lloyd George	Britain	Middle course — punish Germany but preserve trade

Terms — BRAT: Blame (Article 231, the war guilt clause), Reparations (£6,600 million), Army (100,000 men, no air force, no submarines, six battleships), Territory (Alsace-Lorraine to France, Polish Corridor, Saar, all colonies as mandates, Rhineland demilitarised, Anschluss forbidden).

German reaction: a Diktat — a dictated peace with no negotiation. The war guilt clause was resented as unjust, reparations were seen as unpayable, the loss of territory divided German-speaking populations, and the “stab in the back” myth undermined the Weimar Republic from the start.

The treaty’s real problem was that it was harsh enough to embitter Germany but not harsh enough to keep her weak. That single sentence answers most evaluation questions on Versailles.

The League of Nations

Aims: prevent war through collective security, encourage disarmament, improve living and working conditions, enforce the treaties.

Successes: the Åland Islands (1921), Upper Silesia (1921), Bulgaria (1925), and lasting humanitarian work on refugees, health and slavery.

Failures: Vilna (1920), the Corfu incident (1923), the Ruhr, Manchuria (1931) and Abyssinia (1935).

Why it failed — the causes are structural, not incidental:

• The USA never joined, so the League lacked the world’s greatest economic and military power.
• No army of its own; it depended on members supplying forces.
• Decisions required unanimity, so any member could block action.
• Germany and the USSR were initially excluded.
• Sanctions were ineffective without American participation.
• Britain and France pursued their own interests — the Hoare–Laval Pact over Abyssinia showed the two leading members negotiating secretly with the aggressor.

Manchuria and Abyssinia are the decisive pair: they demonstrated that a determined aggressor faced no real consequence, which directly encouraged Hitler.

The road to war

Hitler’s aims: overturn Versailles, Lebensraum, unite German-speaking peoples, destroy communism.

Sequence: rearmament (1935) → Rhineland remilitarisation (1936) → Rome-Berlin Axis → Anschluss (March 1938) → Sudetenland and the Munich Agreement (September 1938) → occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia (March 1939) → Nazi–Soviet Pact (August 1939) → invasion of Poland (September 1939).

Appeasement — argue both sides:

• For: Britain was militarily unprepared and rearming; public opinion feared another war; many thought Versailles genuinely unjust; the USSR was seen as the greater threat; the Empire would not support a war.
• Against: it fed Hitler’s ambitions, betrayed Czechoslovakia, lost a potential ally, and let Germany grow stronger relative to Britain and France.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact is the immediate enabler. It removed the risk of a two-front war and gave Hitler a free hand in Poland — which is why war followed within days.

The Cold War

Causes: ideological opposition between capitalism and communism, wartime suspicion, the atomic bomb, disagreement at Yalta and Potsdam over Poland and Germany, and Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe.

Yalta (February 1945) saw the Allies agree the division of Germany and free elections in Eastern Europe, but the wording of that agreement was ambiguous enough to be interpreted differently by each side. By Potsdam (July 1945), the situation had shifted: Roosevelt had died, the war in Europe was over, and the atomic bomb had been successfully tested — Truman’s harder line and Stalin’s presence in Eastern Europe made the disagreements explicit rather than merely implied.

Key developments: Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947), Cominform, Berlin Blockade and Airlift (1948–49), NATO (1949), Warsaw Pact (1955), Hungary (1956), Berlin Wall (1961), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), Czechoslovakia (1968), détente, Afghanistan (1979), and the collapse of 1989–91.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is the standard case study: causes (Bay of Pigs, US missiles in Turkey, Soviet desire for parity), the thirteen days, and consequences (the hotline, the Test Ban Treaty, and a shift towards managed coexistence).

Your Section A source booklet

Section A (the Peacemaking/League or Cold War Crises option, whichever your centre teaches) is entirely source-based. Three of its five sources are released in advance — 1 February for a May/June sitting, 1 July for an October/November one — with the other two unseen until the exam itself. No notes or annotations may be brought in; you are given a clean copy of all five sources on the day, so your preparation should build the contextual knowledge and familiarity you need to use them cold, not annotations you can’t actually bring in.

Answering the questions

Source questions (Section A): there are four, each with a different task. Question 1 (4 marks) uses a source’s content and/or provenance with your contextual knowledge to support a given claim; Question 2 (6 marks) explains a difference between two sources; Question 3 (8 marks) explains how a source is useful to a historian studying a given issue, using its content, provenance (who, when, why) and your own contextual knowledge together; Question 4 (12 marks) evaluates a given issue or development using a range of the sources and your own knowledge. On Question 3, usefulness is not reduced by bias: a biased source is useful evidence of what its author wanted people to believe. Reliability is not a separate question type on this paper, and evaluating a source’s limitations (how it is not useful) is explicitly not required.

Essay questions: examiners reward weighing, not listing. Give the factors, explain how each contributed, then judge which mattered most and why.

Exam traps

• Listing treaty terms without explaining German reaction.
• Saying the League failed only because the USA stayed out — there were several structural causes.
• Treating appeasement as simply cowardice, with no consideration of the case for it.
• Describing sources instead of evaluating them.
• Omitting dates and figures.
• Concluding without actually judging.

Self-test

1. What did each of the Big Three want at Versailles?
2. What does BRAT stand for?
3. Give four structural reasons the League of Nations failed.
4. Give two arguments for and two against appeasement.
5. When are Section A’s three pre-released sources published, and what must you not bring into the exam?

Answers: 1. Clemenceau wanted revenge and security; Wilson wanted self-determination and a League of Nations; Lloyd George wanted a middle course punishing Germany while preserving trade. 2. Blame, Reparations, Army, Territory. 3. The USA never joined; the League had no army; decisions required unanimity; key powers were initially excluded; sanctions were ineffective; Britain and France pursued their own interests — any four. 4. For: Britain was unprepared and rearming, and public opinion feared war. Against: it emboldened Hitler and sacrificed Czechoslovakia. 5. 1 February for a May/June sitting, or 1 July for an October/November sitting; no notes or annotations may be brought in, since a clean copy of all five sources is provided on the day.