AHC: Get Austria to Reunify With Germany After 1990

Deleted member 1487

I have no idea. The Austrians did not enjoy their last bout of German unification and aren't particularly friendly to the Germans even today; I studied in Vienna and got told more than once by college aged Austrians that when the German national soccer team lost the European Championships it was almost as good as Austria having won.
 
How about if Germany joins Austria :p
"Shit, is so impudent...I have to take my hat off!"

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On the topic: You really have to change modern day Austrias founding myths. First victim of Hitler, my ass. One way to do this is a different border after ww2. How about Austria gets divided too and the western part joins the FRG. So if the fall of communism comes the other part joins the FRG much like the GDR did.
 
In 1958 about 60% of Austrians still considered them selfs German. You would need the Soviets or Hungarians to violate Austrian neutrality. Have a border incident happen which leads to a Hungarian occupation of the Austrian border area.

Then have some former KPÖ members in the SPÖ refuse to act upon it and have a newly created ÖVP -SPÖ coalition ask NATO for help.

To this the Soviets respond by declaring the Austrian state treaty to be void. They start advancing towards Vienna, but US threats convince them to sit down at the negotiation table. Due to the threat of looming invasion the government agrees. Due to west Austria suffering from a massive refugee wave and being economically week, the government collapses which leads to a new election in Which the FPÖ manages to get nearly 20 percent. The new ÖVP - FPÖ coalition issues a referendum for west Austria to join Germany. The referendum is a landslide in favor of unification. Let's go forward to 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet System. East Austria wants to unify with the rest of the country.
 
Weimar Germany was fatally uninterested in reaching non-zero-sum arrangements with its neighbours, at least its eastern neighbours. This was a huge mistake: Germany ended up losing far more territory than the Corridor after the second war!
 

Deleted member 1487

Weimar Germany was fatally uninterested in reaching non-zero-sum arrangements with its neighbours, at least its eastern neighbours. This was a huge mistake: Germany ended up losing far more territory than the Corridor after the second war!
Well to be fair to the Weimar German leadership, no one anticipated Hitler and WW2, they expected a Soviet-Weimar deal in the long run that would undermine Poland and raise the issue of Danzig enough to get it back eventually. Had the Nazis not risen to power and Weimar survived then they could have gotten back at least Danzig and with it the economic subordination of Poland in the long run.
In terms of actually getting a stable, prosperous Europe and avoiding future conflicts, yes Weimar should have sucked things up and tried to make lemonade out of the lemons that was the situation as of the 1920s rather than try and go backwards.
 
Well to be fair to the Weimar German leadership, no one anticipated Hitler and WW2, they expected a Soviet-Weimar deal in the long run that would undermine Poland and raise the issue of Danzig enough to get it back eventually. Had the Nazis not risen to power and Weimar survived then they could have gotten back at least Danzig and with it the economic subordination of Poland in the long run.
In terms of actually getting a stable, prosperous Europe and avoiding future conflicts, yes Weimar should have sucked things up and tried to make lemonade out of the lemons that was the situation as of the 1920s rather than try and go backwards.

Correct. the SPD and their conservative coalition mates were more interested in solving the Polish corridor issue (Posen et al. being considered ancestral Prussian lands of course)
Austria and the Sudentendland for that matter were never on the table.

How about if Germany joins Austria :p

That would be one hell of a diplomatic coup x'D
 
Well to be fair to the Weimar German leadership, no one anticipated Hitler and WW2, they expected a Soviet-Weimar deal in the long run that would undermine Poland and raise the issue of Danzig enough to get it back eventually. Had the Nazis not risen to power and Weimar survived then they could have gotten back at least Danzig and with it the economic subordination of Poland in the long run.

The underlying logic of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is dangerous: If the Soviets got Poland, they would be on the German frontier. Poland was a status quo power; the Soviet Union most certainly was not.

In terms of actually getting a stable, prosperous Europe and avoiding future conflicts, yes Weimar should have sucked things up and tried to make lemonade out of the lemons that was the situation as of the 1920s rather than try and go backwards.

Any chance of extending Locarno east?
 
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