So, I was reading about the First Weltkrieg awhile back, and I got to thinking... what if the Entente won? Of course, you probably think this is an unrealistic scenario, but it's actually more likely than you'd think.
The Germans had this military plan (called the Schlieffen Plan, after the guy that came up with it), which probably would've been disastrous if they'd actually implemented it. Since I'm assuming, this being a rather obscure* military plan that was never really enacted, I'm going to tell you about it so you don't have to look it up on Weltnetzlexikon. The plan was to get around the heavily fortified French border by invading through Belgium instead. This may seem like a very good idea at first: the French border was a meatgrinder for the German troops, after all, but Belgium had one key ally: Britain. Although Britain did eventually join France in resisting the German invasion, the Schlieffen Plan would've caused them to join the war much earlier, while Russia was still involved, which probably would've spelled disaster for the Germans. Fortunately, the German high command realized at the last minute how stupid the Schlieffen plan was, and scrapped it, but they were very, very close to enacting it and quite possibly dooming themselves to defeat in the process.
Of course, even with the Schlieffen Plan enacted, the German Empire would probably still have a 50/50 chance of winning, assuming the Russian Revolution still happened, but the only other way I saw that Germany might realistically have lost was if the United States (the USA, not the UAHS. I'm an American, and we call our country the United States, too)*** somehow got involved in the war, but they were crazy isolationist back then and rarely ever got involved in national politics until the Second Weltkrieg, so that's unlikely.
Anyways, kinda got off topic there, but still... what if the Entente had won? What would a French (and maybe British or Russian) victory look like? Would Austria-Hungary still become the United Austro-Hungarian States without a strong German military to help keep the peace while the complex issue of reordering a horribly inefficient, problematic, and authoritarian system into a more reasonable and democratic one, or would Austria-Hungary descend into turmoil? Would Rock music have had an easier time of becoming popular in a more socially liberal environment (I mean, I know we've all seen that viral video of the Kaiser jamming out to some awesome heavy metal, but Rock wasn't nearly as well received when it first came out)? Do you think they would've had a conflict similar to the Second Weltkrieg? What other ways would this world be different?
OOC * I'm pretty sure most of you guys know what the Schlieffen Plan was. This was just an excuse for exposition on how the Central Powers won TTL.
** Weltnetzlexikon is the TTL's equivalent of Wikipedia. The Internet is called the Weltnetz, which is German for World Network. The English term is sometimes used, but not nearly as often.
*** TTL the United Austro-Hungarian States is also called the United States. It's confusing.