Board: AQA | Option: 2K | Component: Component 2 (Depth Study) | Assessment Objective: AO3
This option covers the origins and outbreak of two world wars, examining the alliance systems, imperial rivalries, nationalist tensions, and diplomatic crises that produced war in 1914, the failures of the peace settlement that followed, and the collapse of collective security that allowed a second global conflict in 1939. It is one of the most historiographically rich options in the AQA specification, with major interpretive debates on both wars.
What this option covers
- The European alliance systems and imperial rivalries 1890–1914
- The July Crisis 1914: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the road to war
- War guilt and the origins of the First World War: who was responsible?
- The Paris Peace Settlement 1919: Versailles, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and the ‘diktat’
- The League of Nations: structure, achievements, and weaknesses
- Appeasement: the British and French response to Nazi expansionism
- Hitler’s foreign policy: opportunism or a ‘programme’?
- The outbreak of the Second World War 1939
Key historiographical debates
- The origins of the First World War: Fischer’s German war aims thesis vs the revisionist case for shared responsibility
- The Versailles settlement: a just peace or the seeds of the next war?
- Appeasement: cowardly capitulation or rational statecraft? (Taylor vs Churchill tradition)
- Hitler’s foreign policy: programmatic (Trevor-Roper, Hildebrand) or opportunistic? (Taylor)
Historiography reference pages
The Explaining History library includes reference pages directly relevant to this option:
- The Causes of the First World War — Fischer, revisionism, and the July Crisis debate
- The Causes of the Second World War — Taylor, Hitler’s programme, and the appeasement debate
Debate 1 — Who was responsible for the First World War? (free sample)
Did Germany’s bid for world power cause the war, did all the Great Powers ‘sleepwalk’ into it together, or should responsibility shift east to Russia? This first debate is free and open to all. The full pack adds three more debates (below).
Fritz Fischer — German responsibility. Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961; English 1967). Germany pursued expansionist war aims and bears primary responsibility for 1914 — overturning the comfortable consensus of shared guilt. (source)
Christopher Clark — shared responsibility. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Allen Lane, 2012). No single guilty power: Europe’s leaders sleepwalked into war through mutual miscalculation and misread signals. (source)
Sean McMeekin — Russian responsibility. The Russian Origins of the First World War (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2011). Russia and its foreign minister Sazonov actively pushed the Balkan crisis toward general war to seize the Straits — blame should shift east. (source)
Comparison task. Compare Fischer’s and Clark’s interpretations of responsibility for 1914. To what extent does McMeekin’s case for Russian responsibility reopen the war-guilt question that Clark tried to close?
Mark-scheme note. Top-band answers distinguish ‘war guilt’ (deliberate aggression) from systemic causes (alliances, miscalculation), and weigh how each historian’s choice of archive directs blame toward a particular power.
Provenance prompts. (1) Fischer wrote in 1960s West Germany using German Foreign Office records; McMeekin used Russian archives — how does each archive shape who is blamed? (2) Why might a German historian in 1961 reach a conclusion so unwelcome at home? (3) Whose diplomatic records survive most fully, and how might that skew the assignment of responsibility?
The full pack — three more debates
Subscribers get the full AO3 pack as a downloadable PDF: Debate 1 above plus three more, each with named historians, a comparison task, mark-scheme guidance and provenance prompts.
- The Versailles settlement: a just peace or the seeds of the next war? — John Maynard Keynes, Margaret MacMillan.
- Appeasement: cowardly capitulation or rational statecraft? — A.J.P. Taylor, R.A.C. Parker.
- Hitler’s foreign policy: a programme or opportunism? — Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Download the full pack
The full pack — four debates, eight sourced writers, AQA-style comparison tasks, provenance prompts, and a review checklist — is available to subscribers.
£9.99 per pack
