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Crisis opens the door; a leader walks through it: An authoritarian state usually rises out of a crisis. When people are frightened and desperate, they will often give up their freedom in return for order, food and national pride.
The leader rarely causes the crisis. Instead, they take advantage of one that is already happening — and offer themselves as the strong hand who will fix it.
Here is the story you need to tell for Paper 2. Long before a dictator seizes power, something has already gone badly wrong in the country.
Your job is to explain those underlying problems, which the IB calls the conditions for the emergence of an authoritarian state.
The IB sorts these problems into four official factors: economic troubles, social division, the impact of war, and the weakness of the government already in place. Think of them as four cracks in a wall that a determined leader can push through.
The clever part is that these four cracks feed each other. A lost war wrecks the economy, economic misery deepens the hatred between rich and poor, and a shaky new democracy then looks helpless to fix any of it.
The strongest essays show how the factors worked together, rather than ticking them off one by one.
Memory hook: SEWS: The four conditions spell SEWS: Social division, Economic crisis, War impact, System weakness. Picture the old order coming apart at the SEWS.
Two words examiners want you to use correctly: An authoritarian state limits opposition and gives people little real political choice. A totalitarian state goes further and tries to control everything: ideas, the economy and culture too. Not every authoritarian state is totalitarian, so use the stronger word only when you mean it.
Now walk through each of the four conditions in turn. For every one, keep two real examples in mind from different regions, because Paper 2 always asks for two states chosen from two different IB regions.
1. Economic crisis
Mass unemployment, poverty, and money losing its value make people desperate enough to back radicals who promise jobs and order. Germany suffered hyperinflation in 1923 and then the Depression after 1929, while Russia's economy collapsed under the strain of the First World War.
2. Social division
When a country splits into hostile groups — rich against poor, or one religion or race against another — people grow afraid. Frightened landowners, business owners and the middle class often backed a strongman to protect them from a feared workers' revolution.
3. Impact of war
Defeat, national humiliation and armies of angry, jobless ex-soldiers create a ready pool of violent supporters. The First World War shaped Germany, Italy and Russia, and later civil wars in Russia from 1918 to 1921 and in China hardened militarised movements.
4. Weakness of the political system
Fragile new democracies and squabbling coalitions often could not solve any of these crises. When the government looks paralysed, a strong leader promising decisive action starts to look like the only way out.
Money, hatred, war, weakness: the four cracks in the wall.
Mini-case: Weimar Germany: By 1932 more than 6 million Germans had no job. Their new democracy shared out seats by proportional representation, so no single party could rule alone — the result was one weak coalition after another.
Worse, a rule called Article 48 let the president rule by decree, skipping parliament. A broken economy plus a government that looked useless gave Hitler his chance in 1933.
Italy: Mussolini (Europe)
- Italians felt cheated by the peace deal after the First World War. They called it a 'mutilated victory' because they won far less land than promised.
- Waves of strikes and factory takeovers after the war frightened landowners and business owners.
- The weak government kept swapping coalitions and could not bring back order.
- Mussolini sold himself as the cure for both the chaos and the threat of communism.
Russia: Lenin then Stalin (Europe)
- The First World War made the army collapse and the economy fall apart.
- People had hated the Tsar and the rich elite for a very long time.
- The Provisional Government of 1917 was weak and could not decide what to do.
- The Bolsheviks seized power, then won a brutal civil war to keep it.
| Condition | Germany (Europe) | China (Asia) |
|---|---|---|
| Economic | 1923 hyperinflation, 1929 Depression, mass unemployment | Rural poverty, heavy warlord taxes, wartime disruption |
| Social division | Middle-class fear of communism after 1918-19 | Angry peasants in conflict with landlords |
| War impact | Defeat in WWI, humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, embittered Freikorps veterans | Warlord fighting, Japanese invasion, long civil war |
| Weak system | Weimar's PR produced unstable coalitions | A weak central Republic with authority split among rivals |
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How this is tested (Paper 2): Paper 2 is a comparative essay with no sources. You must use two authoritarian states from two different regions, such as Hitler in Europe and Mao in Asia. The top marks go to essays that judge which conditions mattered most and weave the two states together, not ones that tell each country's story separately.
Examine the conditions that led to the emergence of two authoritarian states, each chosen from a different region.
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.
Common mistakes: Do not write two separate mini-essays side by side, and do not pick two states from the same region.
Avoid pure narrative that just says 'then this happened', and do not drift into how the leader ruled once in power, which belongs to a different topic. Stay on the conditions for emergence.