With any PoD after the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, have WWI end in a status quo ante bellum peace in Europe. What would the aftermath of such a peace look like? What would be the cultural and economic effects in Europe? Could those borders last until the present day?
Note that only the European theater has to be a white peace. Non-European territories such as the colonies can still change hands.
Bonus points if this happens before the Russian Revolution and /or US entry into the war.
You have to first start with the Germans NOT going through Belgium and focusing east which has been discussed ad nauseam on the impact. You might not get a quick knock out of Russia but you very well could win by end of 1915, early '16. By not going through Belgium the UK needs to find a way to get into the war that the public would support. Therefore, no UK in, no Italy coming in, at least not on Entente side. Meanwhile Germany could sit just a few hundred thousand troops with plenty of artillery and machine guns in very defensible terrain in parts of Alsace-Lorraine and bleed the French or make them violate Belgium and you find out if the UK will truly support Belgium neutrality or not.
No UK, means no Japan as well, so the pacific colonies are untouched. It also means, the French and Russians have to face down the superior HSF, which frankly has a good chance of demolishing the French at sea and instituting their own blockade of Atlantic ports, not sure if they would risk doing that in the Channel and pissing off the English. So Germany and the other CPs that have bloodied up the Entente side and someone finally realizes this is turning into a blood bath and offers white peace but only for the major powers, as Serbia has to be dealt with so they definitely get punished, if not outright split between A-H and Ottomans.
In this way, you have not had a long enough war to completely destabilize the A-H or Ottoman empires and with oil having been found in greater numbers throughout the mid-east, it is only a matter of time before oil money helps get the Ottomans out of debt, they may in fact outlast the A-H empire. This also means the wealth transfer to the US never happens, London stays the financial capital for at least a couple of more decades, and the US stays happy in neutrality and we all avoid the Great Depression because that was largely triggered by a series of events heavily tied to WW1 debt among all the warring nations. The US might still have a major recession kicked off by the same problems as OTL but the excess of the '20s doesn't happened because they didn't get a boom from war loans and arms sales.
The Tsar probably survives but not as absolute monarch, I would still say the war even a short one, is bad enough with recent revloutions already happened that he either agrees to a new constitution and limit on power or he abdicates and his brother agrees to it. While there are lost lives in large numbers, it's not nearly the same as OTL, thus you have the UK, France, and Germany still able to maintain their colonies for even longer periods, possible even up to the 90s, or in Britains case they might have all turned into Dominions that maintained close ties, especially without the Gallipoli campaign. Honestly, if they can avoid a 2nd and even worse war, the world is much better off. Even if there is a second war, they likelihood of the same evil men coming to power and butchering 10s of millions is unlikely. No Stalin, so no 30 million plus dead Soviets and thus no Mao, do no 60 million plus dead Chinese under his rule.
EDIT: Forgot to specify but no, borders don't last, at some point I think you get a rebirth of Poland and the A-H breaks up. But still more stable overall.
