DBWI: Franz Ferdinand never became Emperor
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Depends pretty much when and how FF has dropped from picture. Assassination is very possible thing. I have heard that there was some conspiracy planned by Serbian terrorists. Unfortunately I don't remember exact details but my history teacher on college said that it could have caused very serious consequences.
Probably not. Kaiser FJ was quiet conservative and stubborn. He might begin operation against Serbia. But it is another thing what Russia and Germany would do. But if Russia would help Serbs, there surely would be earlier Great War.
Probably not. Kaiser FJ was quiet conservative and stubborn. He might begin operation against Serbia. But it is another thing what Russia and Germany would do. But if Russia would help Serbs, there surely would be earlier Great War.
The destabilization of the Habsburg Empire caused by his conflict with the Magyar over a redistribution of power in the Empire certainly didn't help to preserve the peace in Europe. I suppose it's not unlikely that killing him would prevent the Great War as we know it, though similar issues may still have arisen.
There'd be something. The Balkan Front seems pretty inevitable. Maybe there'd have been a French Front if things had been earlier - if so, Britain would've joined earlier and that would have been a big change. Sending the BEF and Canadian EF in to the Battle of Moscow was a pointless waste but France, that would've been easier to work with and you'd get a lot more people fired up about war than over Russia and Serbia.
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True, Europe was both a boiling pot of ethnic and political issues and an entanglement of alliances at that point in history; anything could have really set off the chain of events needed to kick off the First Great War.
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Without Franz Ferdinand there's no way we could get the Great War; the Napoleonic Wars would have ended up being the last war on that sort of scale.
The 20th century was the dawn of a more enlightened age. It needed the disintegration of a great power—which Franz Ferdinand, in his recklessness and his folly, provoked by jabbing a stick at the hornets' nest of the constitutional issues in the Augsleich—to shatter the hard-won peace of the Era of Tranquility. What else could possibly have provoked a war? None of the great powers actually wanted one—oh, sure, the French were unhappy about Alsace-Lorraine but they weren't just going to randomly start a war over it for no reason, and that's the only inter-great power flashpoint that's even remotely plausible. And no way would any of the great powers have let their satellites drag them into war over something that mattered more to their satellites than to themselves. Great powers dictate policy to minor powers, not the other way round. So, sure, there were plenty of aggrieved minor powers like Serbia and Bulgaria, but the suggestion that Russia would have gone to war with Germany, against Russia's own interests, for the sake of Serbia is absurd; the Russians expected Belgrade to follow orders from St Petersburg and act in accordance with the goals and ambitions of St Petersburg, not the other way round. The great powers wouldn't have gone to war for the sake of their petty ambitions. Just look at what happened when such wars did break out in the Balkans in the 1880s and 1900s: the great powers tried to put a lid on it and negotiate settlements like the treaties of Berlin and London that were amenable to all the great powers concerned.
If the great powers were going to war, it would have to be over inter-great power clashes, not the mere posturing of satellite states. And there weren't the necessary inter-great power clashes… until one of the great powers broke down and thus caused the Great War, thanks to the ideologically-driven idiocy of Franz Ferdinand in meddling with a stable constitution which had proven its ability to last for half a century and which should have been left well alone.
There's a reason why the man has gone down in history as the last and worst of the Habsburgs, the man who directly caused the destruction of the fortunes of that once-mighty house. Killing him off, presumably by the success of the 1914 assassination attempt in Sarajevo, would surely have been an improvement over our own history, for Europe. Though, admittedly, that's not hard. I mean a Napoleonic-scale conflict in otherwise-largely-peaceful 20th-century Europe, a bizarre throwback to the 18th and 19th centuries and their brutality… nearly five million young European men were sent off to fight and die in the madness of the Great War, the first Great War and the only one in Europe. How could things possibly have gone worse than that?
OOC: Copying OTL's dominant historiographic interpretation for an ATL is boring. Far more fun to come up with different prevailing orthodoxies about What Was (Allegedly) Always Going To Happen.
The 20th century was the dawn of a more enlightened age. It needed the disintegration of a great power—which Franz Ferdinand, in his recklessness and his folly, provoked by jabbing a stick at the hornets' nest of the constitutional issues in the Augsleich—to shatter the hard-won peace of the Era of Tranquility. What else could possibly have provoked a war? None of the great powers actually wanted one—oh, sure, the French were unhappy about Alsace-Lorraine but they weren't just going to randomly start a war over it for no reason, and that's the only inter-great power flashpoint that's even remotely plausible. And no way would any of the great powers have let their satellites drag them into war over something that mattered more to their satellites than to themselves. Great powers dictate policy to minor powers, not the other way round. So, sure, there were plenty of aggrieved minor powers like Serbia and Bulgaria, but the suggestion that Russia would have gone to war with Germany, against Russia's own interests, for the sake of Serbia is absurd; the Russians expected Belgrade to follow orders from St Petersburg and act in accordance with the goals and ambitions of St Petersburg, not the other way round. The great powers wouldn't have gone to war for the sake of their petty ambitions. Just look at what happened when such wars did break out in the Balkans in the 1880s and 1900s: the great powers tried to put a lid on it and negotiate settlements like the treaties of Berlin and London that were amenable to all the great powers concerned.
If the great powers were going to war, it would have to be over inter-great power clashes, not the mere posturing of satellite states. And there weren't the necessary inter-great power clashes… until one of the great powers broke down and thus caused the Great War, thanks to the ideologically-driven idiocy of Franz Ferdinand in meddling with a stable constitution which had proven its ability to last for half a century and which should have been left well alone.
There's a reason why the man has gone down in history as the last and worst of the Habsburgs, the man who directly caused the destruction of the fortunes of that once-mighty house. Killing him off, presumably by the success of the 1914 assassination attempt in Sarajevo, would surely have been an improvement over our own history, for Europe. Though, admittedly, that's not hard. I mean a Napoleonic-scale conflict in otherwise-largely-peaceful 20th-century Europe, a bizarre throwback to the 18th and 19th centuries and their brutality… nearly five million young European men were sent off to fight and die in the madness of the Great War, the first Great War and the only one in Europe. How could things possibly have gone worse than that?
OOC: Copying OTL's dominant historiographic interpretation for an ATL is boring. Far more fun to come up with different prevailing orthodoxies about What Was (Allegedly) Always Going To Happen.
There'd already been a lot of growling between the powers over the Balkans in the early 20th century - I can't see that one not blowing up. Too much bad blood. (And in Germany's case, wanting to wave its willy about)
Possibly different without Bonar Law. His obsession with stopping Home Rule* meant it was too little too late to bring diplomatic pressure in; we might have been able to get the big nations to back off from going to war themselves, we had a lot of pull. Course, that assumes Germany doesn't call our bluff. Germany were more rapacious than a room of Caligulas. If they'd lost, we wouldn't have had the Second Great War but so it goes.
* One good thing about the losses at Moscow, out he went and that gave Ireland its chance.
But that growling did not result in war. It didn't even in OTL. Sure, the great powers had their pet states in the Balkans, but they decided what their puppets did, not the other way round. Serbia would go to war if Russia made her because Serbia would do what Russia told her; it's bizarre to suggest that Russia would go to war for the sake of Serbia. Great powers do not follow the orders of their satellites.
Just look at OTL. There were plenty of Balkan crises, of course, butt when they happened, the great powers stepped in and fashioned solutions as a compromise between great power interests, ignoring the interests of the small petty countries involved, in order to prevent the cauldron from exploding in their faces. Look at Berlin! Look at London! This is how crisis after crisis was solved!
This isn't the 19th century; the great powers didn't want to go to war. They realised that they were interconnected and war was ultimately damaging to them. War between the great powers of Europe only came about in OTL when one of the great powers (Austria-Hungary) was outright falling apart, and her enemies decided to no longer treat her as a proper great power worthy of deciding her own destiny rather than having it decided for her by the great powers, whereas her allies (naturally) were reluctant to recognise this decline in her status.
I mean, what else could have caused a war? Some bizarre opera-esque misunderstanding where (let's say) Germany thinks Russia is just about to attack Germany and therefore decides to attack Russia first? Obviously that would be ludicrous.
Hmm. Inept politicians like Bonar Law and their mishandling of political crises like the Irish Affair * can do a lot, but we're talking about civilised European great powers here, not petty dictatorships somewhere in the back of beyond; ultimately they can't persuade civilised powerful nations to go to war unless there's a really convincing reason for it.
* OOC: Intended to be an in-universe euphemistic term used by the British, à la "the Troubles" or "the Malayan Emergency".
OOC: It's already stated that there was only one Great War (the First) in 20th-century Europe in TTL. Though it seems that most TLs have precisely 2 Great Wars in Europe, no more, no less, there's no particular reason why it should be that number.
OOC: Clarification: I intended that Germany was in the Second Great War but went outside of Europe to wage it (exactly where and against who, I leave open to whoever wants to run with it).
OOC: I said First Great War; a term which suggests that there was a second.
OOC: I am sorry for wrongly presuming that you hadn't understood. That was rude and unwarranted on my part.
OOC: I noticed. In fact I specifically mentioned that that was the First Great War.
However, there is no particular reason to suggest that there must have been multiple Great Wars in Europe. There are other parts of the world; to pick but one of many possible examples, a war with Japan and Russia fighting China and the USA getting involved could be large enough and destructive enough to be titled 'Great'. And always having two Great Wars in Europe is (a) unrealistically, unnecessarily convergent and (b) dull—hence why I did what I did. If we arbitrarily fix 20th-century European history as being "the same basic set-up as OTL, just a few countries switched around" then there isn't much point discussing what alternative things might have happened in 20th-century European history.
Maybe we've got this wrong. We're assuming the assassination is in August 1914 because of that one group of Serbs but those guys were crap. We only know about them because of the loud anger in Serbia when Austria-Hungary forced a crackdown on 'terrorists'. What if Franz was assassinated later? By 1916, it was clear he was going to chase reform/piss off vested interests who were already unhappy. Someone could've whacked him over it then - one of any number of groups could've pulled it off - and hoped Charles Habsburg-Lorraine would be better.
Which is why the First Great War is best viewed as an extension of the Great Game and colonialism rivalries that had been building for a century. How else do you explain how little bloodshed took place in Europe proper comparatively and how tens of thousands of men could die on the battlefields of Turkey, Syria, and north Africa? The collapse of the Ottoman and Austo-Hungarian's power through out eastern Europe the near east and the scramble for control are one of the major tensions that lead to the conflict.
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That's a really interesting suggestion. By that point, of course, the geopolitical environment was decidedly different; the Anglo-Russian Convention had expired * but the Russian military position was significantly stronger due to infrastructural improvement.
What do you know about Karl's opinions on the Augsleich? Was he broadly sensible enough to recognise a hornets' nest not to be poked at when he saw one? I honestly don't know much about him except that he had a reputation as a peacemaker who was on record aiming for a negotiated peace for the First Great War. Whatever he was like, it's hard to imagine anything he did could possibly have been as disastrous for Austria-Hungary as the actions of Franz Ferdinand, though.
* OOC: Largely due to tensions in Persia, this was very likely to happen in 1915 in OTL, when it was due for renewal or expiry. Even the most pro-Russian voices in the British Foreign Office had basically given up hope on that matter. From that viewpoint, the OTL outbreak of war in 1914 was, bizarrely enough, a godsend for Anglo-Russian relations.
That's a very perceptive analysis, and I agree whole-heartedly. The great powers were more cavalier and willing to assert themselves in struggles that they saw as colonial, unable to affect the metropole. I mean, can you imagine something like Fashoda taking place in Anglo-French relations in Europe?
{edit} OOC: Now that this has been established, we're going to need an explanation for why the French and Germans weren't having a giant dust-up in Western Europe costing lots and lots of lives. My provisional explanation—which, let me emphasise, is just an idea of mine, I am not hereby making it canon—is that neither side invaded Belgium (quite possibly British neutrality), either the French or the Germans launched a huge push along the border, it failed dramatically, and huge amounts of very quick bloodshed (by TTL's standards—meagre by the standards of OTL's Western Front because it didn't last as long) resulted in an essentially defensive posture by both sides (which would be possible because in TTL Germany hadn't overrun a huge chunk of France, thus forcing France to maintain an aggressive posture), tacitly giving up and thus preventing the sustained aggressive warfare that killed so many on the Western Front in OTL.
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OOC: I do like that idea. Britain declares neutrality but guarantees Belgium's defense. France and Germany are forced to face off across a narrow front with serious fixed defenses already in place. A few early battles resulting in massive WWI volume casualties on such a narrow front convinces each side that breaching the French-German border would be too costly and as you said each side adopts a defensive posture while searching for alternative areas of attack. Neutral British control of the North Sea forces the war south and east and into the Med. The question is, what does Italy do in this TL and can we later draw Britain back in? Edit
erhaps a Pearl Harbor style attack on the Suez to prevent the French from moving troops and supplies through it in a desperate attempt to stave off Ottoman collapse?
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OOC: I was thinking that too, Belgium isn't touched so Britain stays out. I was also thinking German and France didn't fight on each other's soil so Britain feels no need to help France - they still fight in other countries and it's a lot more tense than I, in-universe, am acting. A short battle that is too bloody for all concerned and ends before Britain has to respond seems more realistic though. I chucked in Britain w/ Canada intervening and losing in Russia at the last second (I didn't think we'd want it to actually go down) but that could be expanded to more fronts.
Nobody knows much about him, I don't think - after Austria-Hungary dissolved, he stayed in Switzerland out of anyone's way and died in his sleep. Some monarchists in Hungary wanted him to try for a restoration there* but he seemed pretty burned out after everything. He certainly seems like someone who wouldn't want to disrupt anything or poke at nests. Austria-Hungary as was did not seem sustainable but if the King was a more remote, neutral figure, he could have played peacemaker. Austria-Hungary could have 'decolonised' parts of it and paid off the others with Home Rule deals. His talks in Geneva didn't go well and most historians seem to think he was a mediocre diplomat, but he was trying and was the only game in town - just as it'd be during the fall. Russia, IIRC, was very close to cutting a deal.
* A proper restoration, not that "King Otto" movement in the 40s and 50s by Hungarians trying to diss the government.
Nobody knows much about him, I don't think - after Austria-Hungary dissolved, he stayed in Switzerland out of anyone's way and died in his sleep. Some monarchists in Hungary wanted him to try for a restoration there* but he seemed pretty burned out after everything. He certainly seems like someone who wouldn't want to disrupt anything or poke at nests. Austria-Hungary as was did not seem sustainable but if the King was a more remote, neutral figure, he could have played peacemaker. Austria-Hungary could have 'decolonised' parts of it and paid off the others with Home Rule deals. His talks in Geneva didn't go well and most historians seem to think he was a mediocre diplomat, but he was trying and was the only game in town - just as it'd be during the fall. Russia, IIRC, was very close to cutting a deal.
* A proper restoration, not that "King Otto" movement in the 40s and 50s by Hungarians trying to diss the government.
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OOC: I do like that idea. Britain declares neutrality but guarantees Belgium's defense. France and Germany are forced to face off across a narrow front with serious fixed defenses already in place. A few early battles resulting in massive WWI volume casualties on such a narrow front convinces each side that breaching the French-German border would be too costly and as you said each side adopts a defensive posture while searching for alternative areas of attack. Neutral British control of the North Sea forces the war south and east and into the Med. The question is, what does Italy do in this TL and can we later draw Britain back in? Edit
OOC: Alright then. So we end up with the UK having a sort of pro-French neutrality, preventing the Germans from using their navy to attack France (as per what the British considered an obligation in OTL because of Sir Edward's earlier statements) and generally favourable to the French but not actually getting involved without the German invasion of Belgium. As for Russia, we haven't directly heard of what happened to the Russian Empire, but we've heard that Germany "won" the war and Germany certainly didn't win in preserving its Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian allies or in achieving a crushing victory against France, so Germany's successes must have been against Russia, presumably leading to the "Battle of Moscow" that was described—though that must have been an incredibly difficult and bloody set of victories for Germany compared to the relative ease of OTL's Eastern Front, as Russia would have been in a far stronger position militarily if the war started later as we've mandated. As for Italy, I presume that, with Austria-Hungary looking even weaker than OTL (the war being caused by Austria-Hungary falling apart), they're even more eager to join the Franco-Russian Alliance and try for Tirol and Trieste. That leaves the Germans—perhaps through an attempt to use their superior naval strength against France, against the will of the United Kingdom which had already guaranteed otherwise—as the ones to draw the British into the war. Does all of this sound reasonable?
Ah well. He doesn't need to be a great statesmen for Austria-Hungary to survive; it survived a little more than fifty years just fine, until Franz Ferdinand massively destabilised it by angering the Hungarians upon whose cooperation the system depended. After all, it's not as if it's impossible to maintain a multi-ethnic empire. All he has to do is not be an idiot.
I don't think anyone in Austria-Hungary actively wanted the collapse, except some of the petty nationalist radicals among the commoners, and those radicals are of no consequence. If Karl were even trying to placate the ruling elites in both Cisleithania and Transleithania, rather than helping one set and provoking the other as Franz Ferdinand did, I honestly think they would have tried to work with him. They had little to gain and a lot to lose in the destruction of Austria-Hungary; for a time it seriously looked as though the Austrians might have their wish and break up Greater Hungary into a tiny rump Hungary and a whole bunch of feuding microstates for minorities like the Slovenes, Croats and Slovaks. It's extremely fortunate that due to the defeat of Austria in OTL we avoided the massive mess of ethnic nationalism that such an ill-conceived idea would have created.
True. Once Italy were at the door, nobody in Hungary wanted to be a small state and couldn't afford to be at each other's throats even if they wanted to be. Austria had proven that*. It was really lucky for central and East European stability but they probably didn't think that at the time...!
* Finally someone assassinated Ferdinand-- oh, sorry, "he committed suicide". Suicide just at the point where his eldest son was MIA in Tyrol and Princess Sophie would be the fill-in monarch, a teenage girl never expected to rule and who'd follow advisors. Yeah, sure.
You do realise that Franz Ferdinand was assianated IOTL, that was the cause of WWI, he never was emperor of Austro-Hungary. Are you sure you've asked the right question.