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I believe the best way to start any discussion is with an agreement, and I hope everyone here with me that the first half or so of the short 20th century (1914-1991) was a series of movements from one un-mitigated disaster to the next. From the break-down of the old European order into general war, a war which devastated the world in ways we're still feeling today, to slow slide of Germany, and then the rest of the world, into economic and social collapse with the rise of the Great Depression, through to the horror story that was World War II, I think it's pretty hard to argue the point. The flower of a generation was bled on the fields of the Somme and Marne; scientists, engineers, artists, and authors the world will never know because of the silly, foolish actions of a Serbian terrorist group and the sillier yet ambitions of the Austrian monarchy.

And yet, must the world have never known them? If a certain Mr Princip hadn't been able to pull the trigger, might millions of lives have been saved? Indeed, as the Great Depression and the second World War can almost certainly be traced back to the happenings of the first, might we really be saving tens of millions? Of course, it's easy to see how the whole thing might have fallen apart anyway, unfortunate wrong turn by an Austrian driver or no. The geo-political situation in 1914 was unstable.

There was an arch-conservative, militarist, nationalist monarchy in Germany, ever more aggressive as time went by with a thirst for its own place in the Sun. There was a revaunchinist France, waiting for the first opportunity to reclaim its land and its honor from upstart Germany. Russia was on the rise once more, modernizing at a rate alarming to everyone. The British Empire, while at its height territorially, was showing cracks, both inwardly and outwardly. The status quo she had been fighting to maintain since the end of the Napoleonic Wars had been successively shattered over the last century. All the while a Giant slept fitfully across the Water.

Something had to give.

So, it's pretty obvious we can't just butterfly away individual events in the immediately ante-bellum years and hope for the best. If the Archduke hadn't been killed in Sarajevo, it would have been some other spark that set the tinder pile alight. Europe had been looking for just such a happening for more than a decade at this point. We have to go back further and examine the reasons why the world was and had been speeding towards bloody confrontation, to understand what they were and how to cut them off at the source.

The first and most obvious driver here was the antagonism between France and Germany. The sort of ethno-nationalistic fervor boiling between the two countries is the kind of stuff you only see in the Balkans and other areas today. France had a strong claim and belief in the rightness of their soveriegnty over Alsace-Lorraine and was severely under threat from a Germany that just didn't seem to be stoppable. Germany believed as strongly that the province was theirs, and more importantly that so was a significant part of the French colonial empire -- France herself just being one more obstacle in the way of Germany's desired world hegemony. This particular duality traces its way back to the 1870's, or more particularly the 1860's.

Prior to the 1870's and 1860's, you had the rather fragile situation of a German Confederation of states, dominated by Austria-Hungary and (to a lesser extent...at first) Prussia. Germany's nationalism was less of a problem, the Confederation could not challenge France directly and because the symbolic Rhine provinces were still in Paris' hands. Any dreams of state-driven, world-wide empire were stuffed away in the closet, as no individual German state could afford to run a colonial empire. Likewise, Germany's naval threat to Britain was non-existant in this period. This, too, was an internally unstable situation. The rise of Prussia with respect to Austria-Hungary promised to break it, and it eventually did. Only through the masterful diplomacy of Bismarck was it a problem solved relatively bloodlessly.

One of the other things which contribute to the war was the imminent rise of Russia. This one actually also relates to Germany, as the increasing industrialization and modernization of Russia was one of the things which pushed it to feel it must fight as soon as possible, lest the threat become too much to handle. This particular cat comes out the bag early, in the period after the Crimean War. The Crimean War was, to Russia, a sort of wake-up call, an indication that the world was changing drastically and Russia had to change with it or fade into nothing. The old system of serfdom ended by the 1860's, and the next several decades were ones of trial and error, but by the dawn of the 20th century the Russian Empire had started to get things down, with a few rude awakenings in the form of being slapped around by the Japanese a few times to keep them chipper. If trends continued as they were going, Russia would have a healthy lead on Germany by the 30's or 40's.

The ultimate thread that this all leads through, though, is this idea of the 'Rise of the Rest'. The British Empire was, in 1914, not in the dominant position it had been in in 1815. The Congress of Vienna had set up a geopolitical situation which Britain had fought to maintain for the better part of a century, but it was slowly cracked and shattered over the course of that century. By 1914, there were two clear challengers to British dominance -- the US, and Germany. Britain was not in the financial position to sit across the Channel and simply finance continental allies against Germany as she had done during the Napoleonic Wars. Importantly, Germany was aware of this fact, and acted accordingly. The international system that had existed prior to the 1860's and 70's, with a number of independent states and Britain as a sort of guarenteeing power, simply stopped functioning in 1914, failing to adapt to changes in the world's political structure.

So, it becomes obvious what needs to be done. We need some way to either change the structure of international relations come 1914, or to keep Britain strong enough that the old system can continue functioning. I've decided to try to start on both ends and meet in the middle, as it were. I honestly believe the first chink in Britain's armor appeared early on in the 1860's, when the rise of the Republican Party in the USA led to protective tariffs against foreign goods. The inability of Britain to do anything about these tariffs may have been a contributing factor to a loss of prestige, but more importantly they cut British manufacturers off from one of the largest markets on the planet. From then on, industrial growth driven by American demand would be in the US, not the UK.

So, in order to begin to find a way to preserve things, we need to find a way to avoid protectionism in the US. Free trade as a political dogma was settled on in the English speaking world during the 1830's and 1840's. I think a political solution to the problem is best because a military intervention -- say, something to do with the Trent Affair -- is likely to inspire protectionism in even a defeated United States. To do this, I'm dragging the PoD all the way back to the 1820's, to perhaps the first legally contencious election in American politics, that of 1824. This election represented the first real 'break' in the early American Republic, a time when the Virginian dynasty of early presidents was brought to an end and the North finally got a say. John Quincy Adams, the man eventually elected president, was notable for two reasons: He was the first elected president who did not sign either the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, and he was the first president elected by Congress and not the Electoral College.

The second bit is important. You see, John Adams didn't win the Electoral or the popular vote, Andrew Jackson did. However, because of the four-way split of voters between candidates, Jackson failed to attain a majority of electoral votes, so the election was thrown to the House. The man who played Ralph Nader to Andrew Jackson's Al Gore (or Ross Perot to his George HW Bush) was a guy named William H Crawford. He went ahead and won Virginia and Georgia, just the two states Jackson would have needed to push himself over the fifty percent line, and just the two states Jackson would have been likely to win had Crawford not been in the running.

Now we finally get down to the PoD. Crawford had, prior to being nominated by the Congressional Caucus (an informal method of nominating presidential candidates within the early American political parties.), suffered a terrible stroke. The specific PoD I will use is that Crawford turns down the nomination, just as he did in 1816. Instead the Congressional Caucus nominates someone else, someone with even less pull in Virginia and Georgia and so both of those states come down on the side of Jackson. Instead of the election going to the House as OTL, in this ATL Jackson manages to get a majority of electoral votes and is elected as the first non-Founding Father president of the United States.

I'll gp ahead and post what I have here for now and continue on writing for the next bit. I've pretty much summed up what I have in mind for the PoD, and my reasoning for dragging it so far back. The social and political conditions that led to a breakdown in the existing European civilization of the day in 1914 can really only be avoided by going that far. Otherwise things will come to a head at some point. Germany almost certainly will eventually form, so we need it to do so in a way that doesn't threaten France so much, and the PoD must be before 1871 at the latest. Russia must have some sort of competitor because it will eventually modernize, but that competitor must also not be one that will too much upset the existing balance of power. Finally, Britain must retain her ability to moderate political conflicts, or must be able to pass it peacefully to someone better able to handle it.

Discuss away. I'll be writing more.
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