Internal divisions and challenges to authority: WACE Modern History

What this dot point is asking

Every Unit 3 nation faced internal divisions and challenges to its authority. SCSA wants you to identify the social, political, ethnic, religious and economic divisions within a nation, the forms that opposition and dissent took, and how governments responded, whether through reform, repression or both. This thematic dot point gives you a framework to apply to your own nation. It is examined through source analysis and essays in the external paper.

The first analytical task is to identify the divisions. These vary by nation but recur in recognisable forms. Class division pitted workers and peasants against elites in Russia, Germany and elsewhere. Regional and ethnic division strained multi-ethnic states; nationalist movements challenged empires from within, and ethnic minorities faced discrimination or persecution. Religious division shaped Indian politics through Hindu-Muslim tension and Australian politics through the Catholic-Protestant divide exposed by the conscription debates. Political division set left against right, often violently, as in the street battles of Weimar Germany.

The second task is to identify how challenges to authority were expressed. Dissent took many forms: parliamentary opposition, strikes and industrial action, mass protest and civil disobedience, armed insurrection and revolution, and the activity of rival parties and movements. The Spartacist uprising in Germany in 1919, the Kronstadt rebellion against the Bolsheviks in 1921, the labour militancy of the 1949 Australian coal strike, and the assassinations that intimidated Japanese civilian government are all examples of challenges to authority taking different forms in different contexts.

The response to internal division is where the character of a regime becomes clear. Democracies generally relied more on accommodation, managing dissent through elections, courts and reform, though they too used force, as in the dismissal of Premier Lang or the use of troops in strikes. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes relied heavily on repression. The Bolsheviks crushed the Kronstadt rebellion and used the Cheka and later the secret police against opponents. The Nazis used the SS, Gestapo and concentration camps. Stalin's purges and show trials of the 1930s destroyed real and imagined opposition. The scale and brutality of repression is a key measure of a regime's nature.

Yet repression was rarely complete, and examiners reward attention to the persistence of opposition. Even under totalitarian rule, dissent survived: church opposition in Nazi Germany, the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, peasant resistance to Soviet collectivisation, and the underground survival of banned movements. Analysing both the reach and the limits of regime control produces more sophisticated answers than assuming opposition was simply eliminated.

When you study your nation, map its main divisions, identify the principal challenges to authority and the groups behind them, and analyse how the government responded and with what success. Always connect this to the nation's stability and to the broader question of what kind of state it was.

Historiographically, debate centres on how much consent and how much coercion underpinned different regimes. Studies of everyday life under Nazism and Stalinism have asked whether ordinary people supported, tolerated or merely endured these regimes. Debate also surrounds the agency of the marginalised, recovered by social and "history from below" approaches, against older accounts that focused on elites and high politics.