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During the Cold War, Finland, while democratic, did not join NATO and was closer diplomatically to its neighbor the USSR than it was to the US. Was there a possibility that Castro's Cuba becoming a Caribbean version of that - Marxist, but still friendly with the US? What effect would this have...

I'm not sure precisely how bad the Detroit automakers' finances were in late 2008/2009, but the argument was certainly made that without the bailouts they would go bust. What if one (or even two) actually did due to a different administration or whatever refusing to bail them out? Chrysler would...

Could this have happened? I know Scotland was a center of early Protestantism itself. How would it have affected Anglo-Scottish/ Anglo-Irish relations?

Tony Blair stepped down in 2007 in OTL after much pressure from his party and Brown in particular. What if he'd done so earlier - even before Iraq? (though that's probably unlikely given his personality, and Lab's popularity giving him no obvious reason to). Could Labour have stayed in power...

A major element of Nazi propaganda was the so-called stab in the back myth - that Germany had not been truly defeated on the battlefield and had lost the war due to traitors in Berlin overthrowing the Imperial government. What if there had been no revolution, and the Entente had had to occupy a...

It's not too well remembered today, but a similar situation to the current crisis occured in the 1990s regarding North Korea, in the last years of Kim il-Sung's reign. NK hadn't tested a nuke yet but the US was getting seriously alarmed at its plans and for a time things look like they might go...

In the early 1900s, when family ties among European monarchs were even closer than today, it was not unusual for what were in effect family members to go on hunting trips together - IIRC George V took his cousin Nicholas II in the early 1910s. What if, during some such trip, one monarch ended...

Something that popped into my head. Which OTL cities of small or medium size could have become large global cities, either in their country's OTL borders or in an ATL's?

A-H was at a rather pivotal moment in its history in 1914. Franz Joseph was in his last years, and the next renewal of the Ausgleich in 1917 was coming up. Absent the war and its stress, Franz Joseph might have lived a bit longer, so the Ausgleich might have gone fairly smoothly in terms of...

I say 1912, but this can apply to any election under the Kaiserreich. The German Empire had universal suffrage on the federal level, but electoral boundaries were never changed to keep up with urbanisation and so rural areas had disproportionate influence. What if the SPD had won a majority in...

Yes, I posted a thread with the same title a few months ago, but that didn't attract any responses. Is there any way that the six founding Coal and Steel Community members (the Benelux, France, (West) Germany and Italy) could have federated by the present day?

Providing LBJ had assumed the presidency in the same way as historically, how would his presidency have gone without escalation in Vietnam? (I'm not sure how plausible this is. I've read that his decision to escalate was largely down to him being inexperienced in foreign policy and influenced by...

Bit of a cultural WI here: During the early twentieth century Germany was well known for its popular and innovative film industry. How can it come to be that it becomes (more properly put, remains) Hollywood's great rival on the global stage?

What if, instead of continuing northwards during the first UN counteroffensive of the Korean War in late 1950, Douglas MacArthur halts (or is ordered to halt) north of Pyongyang, where the peninsula is narrowest? In this situation I doubt the Chinese intervene, and what remains of the North is...

If, for some reason, the Holocaust hadn't happened, what would have become of Europe's large Jewish community? Let's assume a post-WW1 WI, with WW2 either not happening or, if it does, Jews not suffering proportionally more deaths than the other ethnic groups in their countries. Europe in the...

What the title says. Is it possible to have the six founding members of the European Economic Community (France, (West) Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands) merge into a single state by 2014, ideally as part of a "two-speed" model of European integration?

What if, instead of a reformist like Gorbachev, the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party went to another Brezhnevite unwilling to rock the boat? Would the Soviet system's inherent flaws have caused its collapse as in OTL, or could the USSR have lurched on as it had for decades...

With a POD after the end of the Cold War, what is the worst relations between the US and the EU can get? Is it possible to force them into confrontation?

The Licence Raj was a system of bureaucratic regulation in India established after independence and lasting until 1991. The pseudo-centrally planned economy it established is widely blamed for India's low growth rates throughout this period. Had the system never been introduced, and a more...

With a POD of 1900, make both major presidential candidates in a US presidential election be A-list Holllywood actors. Bonus points if they've been in the same movie.