AHC: WWI & WW2 Never Happen

samcster94

Banned
RayRiceBurroughs said:
Mostly yes.

As I said before. If it wasn't for world war I. The cultural and moral disenchantment of Europe and America that led to the rise of counter cultural the Dadaists in Europe and the Flappers in America would have never come to exist. No disenchantment with the society that led to such horrors, no need for change or really mass rebellion of the youth. (again generally speaking).

Also Adolf Hitler (assuming he would even be born in this timeline) would have never been involved in the war, and his most formative experience would have never come to be. Even if he did join the Austrian military, with no World War I to be involved in, be wounded in, and develop his philosophy and obsession with war in, he would have just at best been another soldier, or at worst just a madman leading a fringe political movement.

With no World War I screwing germany over, no economic crisis to take advantage of and blame on jewish bankers, no Nazi party no Third Reich. No World War in the 30's-40's.

It's anyones guess how this would have impacted Asia and Imperial Japan.



Care to flesh out why you think this?
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I think that because the empire pre-WWI had many ethnic groups that hated each other in it and got different treatments. Only German(especially) and Hungarian speakers(and the Czechs a little bit) really got represented well. The monarch that was relatively benevolent was old in 1914 and would die soon anyway. The United States of Austria was just a fantasy that guy had that had no political traction. Obviously, there is the Balkans, which were already having wars before the Archduke got shot, which would make a conflict even more likely.
 

ShortsBelfast

As I have said before on several occasions, a stronger China is the key. Either the Empress Dowager not being placed in a position of power in the first place or else successfully supplanted by a reformist Emperor and a successful Internal Self Strengthening Movement and China being roughly as powerful as the Ottomans were by 1914 and you do not have a Russia unconcerned about its Eastern flank aggressively backing Serbia to the hilt. Instead you have a Russia concerned about a Sino-German alliance and the risk of being pushed out of Siberia. Plus the equations of power and diplomacy in the Far East are sufficiently altered as to make the Anglo-Russian Convention improbable.
 

Galba Otho Vitelius

All this is a little deterministic. If the European countries can get through the July crisis without a major war breaking out, that should be enough.

The alliances in 1914 were not set in stone. Russia had embarked on a huge French financed military expansion that would have made it clearly the largest military power in Europe. The British had noticed this and Anglo-German relations had started to improve. They could only get better once Edward Grey left the foreign office, which would have happened by 1916 at the latest. There was a problem in Russia in that the domestic position of the tsarist system was really shaky. However, this could go both ways. An actual collapse of Russia into revolution would have left France without an ally. A really strong Russia would probably have seen Britain effectively switch alliances.

Now 1914 was a particularly risky period. The German attitude, at least that of the generals, was that the window was closing where Germany could beat Russia in a war, so if a war was going to start, it had better happened that year. No one really knew how much rapproachment with Britain was possible. The Russian politicians were too worried about the unpopularity of the Russian government to be willing to make concessions and court even more domestic unpopularity, so again the idea was basically start the war before the revolution started.

But if you could just get through 1914, at least you would get a changed alliance system and changed domestic politics, so either no war or the war is very different. And there are lots of things you could do to keep the July crisis from spinning out of control, including just preventing the assassination of Franz Ferdinand which is actually not too difficult.

To undercut what I just wrote, the 1815-1914 period was a really long time to go without a war involving more than two great powers. Multiple great power wars were fought something like every two decades in the eighteenth century. I don't think the realization that war between fully industrialized nations would be very different from eighteenth century cabinet wars was strong enough, so at some point they would have tried a general war. But if that was the case, it could have been very different from the World War I that we know and love.
 

ShortsBelfast

RayRiceBurroughs said:
So the various European powers never having been involved in 'dividing up' China like OTL?
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Indeed. As with the Ottoman Empire OTL they might have dreamt of doing so and had discreet discussions about how to do this if an opportunity presented itself but China would have been strong enough and modernised enough to render this an impracticable proposition at the present time (just like the Ottomans OTL). Russia would have needed a strong military presence on its Chinese frontier and France would have had to worry about a potential invasion of Indochina. And a stronger China would have had little to gain from siding with France and Russia in any conflict (Tsingtao and, if Britain were on the German side, possibly Weihawei and Hong Kong). Siding with the Central Powers OTOH China would potentially gain China Outer Mongolia, Tuva, Kashgar and much of Siberia plus political hegenomy over Indochina. France and Russia knowing this would not I think back Serbia or each other quite as strongly as in OTL. I suspect what would happen would be a Great Power conference and some face saving amelioration of the Austrian terms to placate Russia but the Serbs being essentially pushed under a bus in the interests of avoiding a wider conflagration of the Great Powers. TTL Russia and France would have had more to lose and their generals and diplomats would accordingly have been more cautious. Nor would Britain have been keen to lose Hong Kong or Weihawei or the Portugeuse Macao, all of which would have been indefensible against a relatively modern and well armed China.

OTL Brezhnev was in a much more favourable military and geostategic position than the Tsars but had to be quite circumspect following Nixon's playing the China card.
 

ShortsBelfast

Austria didn't really do anything that (for example) the US wouldn't also have done if the Vice-President was assassinated in New Mexico or Florida and it looked seriously like Mexican or Cuban Military Intelligence was involved. Not reacting against Serbia would have been politically unpopular at home and diplomatically seen as a sign of weakness.
In Germany it was the General Staff and not the Kaiser who were wedded to the risky and outdated Schlieffen Plan and in Russia it was the Army who were pushing for mobilisation and the Russian ambassador to Serbia who was encouraging the Serbs to be recalcitrant. Nicholas wasn't a great Tsar but neither Franz Josef nor Wilhelm were completely stupid. What they were not is men significantly above average in intelligence and strength of character to face down their respective General Staffs about mobilisation or invading Belgium.
 

Deleted member 103950

I found this post on Quora. Does anyone here have any disagreements with it?

https://www.quora.com/If-World-War-One-and-Two-had-never-happened-what-would-the-world-be-like-now

Let’s see:

  1. There would have been numerous smaller wars in Europe, even today. - Both world wars are what it took to convince Europe that its centuries of warfare really were unsustainable. Without them, Europe would remain the seething cauldron of ethnic and racial hatred that it was just after the turn of the 20th century.
  2. Europe would have colonized The Levant, Palestine and portions of Asia Minor when the Ottoman Empire collapsed - There was no way even without WWI that the Ottomans would ruled their empire after 1920 or so. The regime was to decadent and its rulers were too incompetent to have prevented its eventual collapse. European power would have stepped in and divvied up what was leftover when this occurred.
  3. Southern Europe would have likely been either colonized by Northern Europe or fell under its influence - This can be seen by Churchill’s request that Greece fall under British influence after WWII. Southern Europe, particularly the Balkans was exceptionally weak and it would have fell under the domination of the stronger states on the continent.
  4. The Hapsburg Empire would have become part of Germany - Even if Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated, his empire was in a steady state of decay. Eventually Germany would have absorbed major portions of the empire into it and it all would have been a Greater Germany.
  5. The following nations would not now exist - Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Bulgaria (part of a Greater Russia or whatever state took over in that region), any of various states of the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia, Israel, Lebanon, Syria. Libya, Cyprus, the majority of the African states and the majority of nations in Asia, particularly South Asia.
  6. Russia would now be a republic - The Tsar eventually would have been forced to abdicate (his position was weakened after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and never recovered) as he had only a single male heir and he was unlikely to have made it to adulthood due to his hemophilia. Without Germany to return the exiled Lenin to Russia, there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution and so Russia would have become a republic or a democratically-leaning oligarchy.
  7. Islam would have been confined to SW Asia, North Africa Asia Minor. NW India and the islands now known as Indonesia. - Without the governments in Northern and Western Europe being weakened by war, they would have efficiently and effectively suppressed Islam in their colonies. World wars weakened the European powers and thus granted independence for their former colonies. Colonial leaders would not have brooked the spread of Islam.
  8. There would be few independent nations in the Caribbean - Europe would not have allowed its colonies (among their weakest) to become independent.
  9. The United States would be an important world power, but not the dominant one - The United States would have still “ruled” the New World, but it would have far less influence in the world than it does today.
  10. Without the need of warfare to drive their development, many of today’s inventions would have been postponed 10-15 years or simply never invented - This exhaustive list includes: radar, jet aircraft, modern rockets, telemetry, home computers, satellites, the integrated circuit, lasers and, of course, nuclear weapons.
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ShortsBelfast

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire is also not inevitable. The Young Turks weren't terribly nice people but they were competent enough modernisers and Turkey was strong enough to perform fairly well militarily during OTL WW1. Bulgaria and the States that became part of the OTL Yugoslavia being subsumed into Russia also seems implausible. Panslavic solidarity usually stopped short of any desire to be part of the Russian Empire and they are separated from Russia by the sizeable non-slavic populations of Romania and Hungary. The argument about the spread of Islam is frankly bizarre and I am not aware of any of the major colonial powers discouraging that faith.
 

ShortsBelfast

While a Russian Republic is a quite likely contingency it is by no means an inevitability either. The Tsar had no immediate male heirs if the Tsarevitch died of his hemophilia but he had plenty of cousins to succeed him and Michael appears to have had sufficient political nous to preside over a transition to constitutional monarchy
 

samcster94

Banned
ShortsBelfast said:
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire is also not inevitable. The Young Turks weren't terribly nice people but they were competent enough modernisers and Turkey was strong enough to perform fairly well militarily during OTL WW1. Bulgaria and the States that became part of the OTL Yugoslavia being subsumed into Russia also seems implausible. Panslavic solidarity usually stopped short of any desire to be part of the Russian Empire and they are separated from Russia by the sizeable non-slavic populations of Romania and Hungary. The argument about the spread of Islam is frankly bizarre and I am not aware of any of the major colonial powers discouraging that faith.
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Exactly. In 2018 OTL, Lebanon recognizes the Armenian genocide(which was about Turkish nationalism more than Islam), and the British had plenty of Muslim administrators in the Raj.
 
Lusitania

Lusitania

Donor
samcster94 said:
Exactly. In 2018 OTL, Lebanon recognizes the Armenian genocide(which was about Turkish nationalism more than Islam), and the British had plenty of Muslim administrators in the Raj.
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The British imperial interests in Iraq and its oil was very high and where the British commerce interest lay so do the British imperial and its military were always available. So for probabity that Ottoman Empire would of survive longer is much less. The reason for their continued existence controlling most of Middle East is not good. It would not be in the two major colonial powers interest to devide its trrritory up.

You keep stating it could of ruled Greeks, Arabs, Armenians and others non Turks. How do you state that considering all the nationalistic ideas and social economic forces during the 19th and early 20th. Plus everything we read was the Ottoman Empire was considered the sick man of Europe.
 

samcster94

Banned
Lusitania said:
The British imperial interests in Iraq and its oil was very high and where the British commerce interest lay so do the British imperial and its military were always available. So for probabity that Ottoman Empire would of survive longer is much less. The reason for their continued existence controlling most of Middle East is not good. It would not be in the two major colonial powers interest to devide its trrritory up.

You keep stating it could of ruled Greeks, Arabs, Armenians and others non Turks. How do you state that considering all the nationalistic ideas and social economic forces during the 19th and early 20th. Plus everything we read was the Ottoman Empire was considered the sick man of Europe.
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It'd probably be gone by 1950, but the "how" would be unclear.
 

M79

Wilhelm II dies at birth and Henry takes the throne or Phoebe Moses accidentally kills Wilhelm in 1890 with Henry as regent for Wilhelm III. Germany is more peaceful and brushfire wars exist but nothing like the madness of OTL World Wars. Technology is very different, society more conservative, and populations are larger, but violence is frowned upon and diplomacy carries the day more often.
 

Dorknought

The Europeans well understood that a general war meant the end of the 1st globalisation, economic turmoil and poisoned relationships for 50 years, much like MAD stops nuclear wars today. Lower debt, lower government tax rates, lower inflation, stable economies and vastly more money for investment will have Europe and the world 20-25 years in front not behind in industrial and scientific development. The only ones behind against today will be the military mind.
 

Dominic

Yeah, the idea that the World Wars created the post-WW2 prosperity and stability rather than delayed it is ridiculous. Pre-WW1 states were not ignorant of how to run countries, nor were the people in them the equivalent of unchastened youths chafing at the bit to cause chaos. The early 20th century saw continued and steady improvements in the institutions, wealth, and education levels of all of Europe, with particular gains in Eastern Europe. The long-awaited diffusion of the wealth created by the industrial revolution was already occurring. Without the World Wars, Western Europe and North America would likely have been enjoying by the 1940's a standard of living similar to OTL's 1950's America. By today (presuming no other major interruptions to those trends, which obviously is not a guaranteed) it is quite likely that the global economy would be noticeably larger, global population noticeably smaller, and global governance noticeably more advanced. More investment, larger markets, stabler demographics, no communism and likely no far right dictatorships in large countries: what's not to like? Well, probably a more painful and drawn-out decolonisation, but whether that would be better or worse than the OTL version is very hard to say...
 

Gancio The Ranter

Dominic said:
Yeah, the idea that the World Wars created the post-WW2 prosperity and stability rather than delayed it is ridiculous. Pre-WW1 states were not ignorant of how to run countries, nor were the people in them the equivalent of unchastened youths chafing at the bit to cause chaos. The early 20th century saw continued and steady improvements in the institutions, wealth, and education levels of all of Europe, with particular gains in Eastern Europe. The long-awaited diffusion of the wealth created by the industrial revolution was already occurring. Without the World Wars, Western Europe and North America would likely have been enjoying by the 1940's a standard of living similar to OTL's 1950's America. By today (presuming no other major interruptions to those trends, which obviously is not a guaranteed) it is quite likely that the global economy would be noticeably larger, global population noticeably smaller, and global governance noticeably more advanced. More investment, larger markets, stabler demographics, no communism and likely no far right dictatorships in large countries: what's not to like? Well, probably a more painful and drawn-out decolonisation, but whether that would be better or worse than the OTL version is very hard to say...
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The convergence between Europe and the US on income would have happened much sooner (the UK was already basically on par with the US) so we would have seen a spectacular development in consumer products. Also many more markets stay integrated in the global economy for longer, like the rapidly industrializing Russia and even China in the future. Just think about how many inventions, ideas and technologies could have been developed with such a connected world. Even in the fields that benefitted from the world effort, like computing, I only see a faster development in a timeline without world wars, for example the transistor was invented in Germany in the 20s, but it never had the chance to be developed. Also solar power was being pioneered in Africa, the war stopped the development of solar power for at least 50 years
 
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