‘The main cause of global conflict in the 20th century was

Imperialism’ How far do you agree?

I would argue that it is both imperialism in itself, and the struggle for freedom from
colonisation that was behind nearly all the conflicts of the last century. If we focus on
the two so-called world wars first we can view the struggle for supremacy as the
leading force as these were wars fought between huge imperial powers struggling for
land and power and to impose their own regimes on the lands of the people whom
they wanted to conquer.
In World War 1 the German Empire which had existed since the 1870s was in
alliance with other neighbouring empires such as the huge industrially advanced
Austro-Hungarian empire and the Ottoman Empire whose lands spanned large parts
of eastern and southern Europe. These empires all comprised of smaller nation
states. In Western Europe was the British Empire at that moment a truly global
power with countries known as colonies all over the world from parts of Africa, most
of India, Australia and Canada as the main colonies with many smaller territories
around the world. Inn 1922 The British Empire governed a fifth of the worlds
population and about a quarter of its land area. France also had a massive world
empire from Africa and notably Indochina which is modern day Vietnam, Cambodia
and Laos.
There was a struggle for dominance of the less industrially advanced countries for
their resources. The colonies enriched the home nations and gave resources as well
as huge amounts of manpower in the form of soldiers and navy seamen, and
enabled the actual war efforts on both sides of World War 1.

If we take Imperialism to mean the desire of a nation to expand its empire to

dominate other countries then we can see that World War 2 also was the major
cause of actual war in Europe and later across the continents. The Third Reich of
Hitler’s Germany which had replaced the monarchy, then the democracy of Germany
with a dictatorship had imperial demands. First of all this was over its neighbours, for
example the Sudetenland – a part of Czechoslovakia with a German speaking
population, Austria and then Poland. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939
it still had a far-reaching empire and conflict between empires in the far east, such as
Japan and China which became part of this world war.

The other aspect to suggest that imperialism was a cause of conflict can be seen in
the major struggles for independence from the huge Empires which were established
at the end of the 19th Century and the start of the 20th. After World War 1 the violent
process of decolonisation was set in motion. Some countries gained their freedom
relatively peacefully, transitioning to independence under a Commonwealth for
example. But others suffered huge damage. A famous war of 1947 was about the
ending of colonial rule in India, which created partition between India and Pakistan
along religious lines, and included the uprooting of millions of people from their
homelands. Ethnic tension, violence and religious conflict in this part of the world,
and, it could be argued continue to this day in the 21 st Century as a direct result of
the project of Political Imperialism.