DBWI: What if Emperor Franz Ferdinand I was assassinated?

But why? Surely Austrian retaliation would have been limited to the Serb border, at most taking Belgrade. And this would not have been seen as unreasonable given the offense. Vienna would of course make its war aims known to assuage Russian fears. It would be irrational for Russia to turn a short skirmish into a war between major powers.
Remember that many people high-up in Russia have serious Panslavic tendencies regardless of how the Slavs in Austria really felt.

Speaking of which, remember who was in charge in Austria as well. The Chief of Staff was a warmongering buffoon and so was the Governor of Bosnia (they both called for a punitive expedition despite the assassination having been foiled) and the Minister-President of the Austrian half was suppressing the legislature. The Hungarian parliament wasn't that much better, but thankfully cooler heads like Minister-President Tisza and ambassador Mensdorff-Pouilly prevailed (and I think Franz's successor at the time, his brother Karl, might have intervened as well, but I'm really not sure about that).

Seriously, 1914 was a year where really dumb decisions could've been taken. Tensions were high and despite how unpopular Franz was, I'm sure A-H wouldn't have just let some Serbian upstart murder a member of the imperial family.
 
Remember that many people high-up in Russia have serious Panslavic tendencies regardless of how the Slavs in Austria really felt.

Speaking of which, remember who was in charge in Austria as well. The Chief of Staff was a warmongering buffoon and so was the Governor of Bosnia (they both called for a punitive expedition despite the assassination having been foiled) and the Minister-President of the Austrian half was suppressing the legislature. The Hungarian parliament wasn't that much better, but thankfully cooler heads like Minister-President Tisza and ambassador Mensdorff-Pouilly prevailed (and I think Franz's successor at the time, his brother Karl, might have intervened as well, but I'm really not sure about that).

Seriously, 1914 was a year where really dumb decisions could've been taken. Tensions were high and despite how unpopular Franz was, I'm sure A-H wouldn't have just let some Serbian upstart murder a member of the imperial family.
And all that's not even mentioning the fact that Russia was part of an alliance with Britain and France called the Entente, a short lived alliance that dissolved once France went fascist.
 
OOC: I know this thread has been pretty inactive but I still wanted to create the present day map so here it is! Hopefully this will help with bringing back attention to the DBWI, I found it to be pretty fun.

View attachment 351233
Here's a short little guide to this world which will change if people have other ideas:

First Tier Nations (Superpowers)

The United Austrian Empire is the most technologically advanced nation in the world and rules over East Europe. It is one of the five nations on Earth to have Lunar colonies alongside the UK, Russia, the USA, and China.

Great Britain is the other First Tier nation and is Austria's rival in the Great Race. The UK is a colonial master and controls much of Africa.


Second Tier Nations (Great powers)

The USA is another very powerful nation and was the founder of the Pacific Federation, an economic and political union. The USA has a great economy and is the dominant nation in the Americas.

China has been the great power of Asia ever since its victory in the Pacific War against Japan. Still, China's economy is beginning to go downhill and not even the Pacific Federation can save it.

The Russian Empire has been a close ally of the UAE ever since the 1920s. The Tsar is still the ruler of Russia, however, the Duma had allowed the nation to become somewhat democratic.


Other Nations

France has been partitioned into the British occupied Francian Federal Republic and Austrian occupied Kingdom of France ever since the end of the Great Continental War. The region is still recovering.

After the Continental War Germany was plunged into civil war in the 1950s and the Kaiser fled to the UAE. Bavaria and Wurttemburg joined Austria while the rest of Germany became the British-allied German Republic.

The only communist nation in the world is the Socialist Republic of the Rhineland, or the SRR. Despite being called communist it is actually a stable democracy.​
 
Expect a World War, entangling alliance are well entangling. It will be the Central Powers: Germany, AH, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria versus the Allies France, UK, Russia, Italy, and later the USA. The war will be bloody and seen as futile. After the war, liberalism manifests itself across Europe as empires are broken. Russia becomes communist while Germany gets a raw deal at the peace treaty signing. Lots of reparations doesn't help the economy. This period will be marked by unrest until fascism soon comes to countries. Out of these an Anti-Semitic dictator will flaunt the treaty and remobilize and take over land. The British and French will appease Germany at first but when Germany invades Poland, they will declare war. Germany breaks the non-aggression pact signed with a ruthless communist dictator now bringing Russia, called the Soviet Union to war. The USA enters later when the Imperial Japanese bomb a harbor in Hawaii as they want to dominate the Pacific. War rages but the Allies turn the tide thanks to British intelligence, American steel, and Russian blood. Germany surrenders as the dictator kills himself while Russians march on Berlin. When the US detonates two nuclear devices, the first of its kind, on Japanese cities, the Japanese surrender and the war in the Pacific ends. As the Second world war comes to a close, it is revealed that the fascist Germans killed people they considered undesirable, leading to a horrible genocide. With fascism defeated, the two new superpowers, USA and the Soviet Union battle have an ideological war trying to affirm their ideologies of capitalism with USA and communism with the Soviet Union. This leads to nuclear proliferation, the division of Europe, proxy wars, coups, and countries joining other sides. The European empires begin to decolonize. At some conflicts like one in where a communist Cuba wants nuclear weapons, it seems that the world might annihilate themselves but people manage to muddle through it. Stagnation due to communism leads to a new leader of the USSR to try liberalizing the country; however, this leads to even more unrest and soon in the early 90's the Soviet Union breaks apart and communism falls. This leads the US as the worlds sole superpower. As the Internet dawns, and a communist China begins to liberalize, soon a new threat emerges. Islamic fundamentalist causes terrorist attacks in the US which leads to the US commencing a War on Terror. Now the world continues battling issues like radicalism, climate change, and poverty as humanity develops and advances in new technologies. The world and humanity constantly moves onward.
 
Expect a World War, entangling alliance are well entangling. It will be the Central Powers: Germany, AH, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria versus the Allies France, UK, Russia, Italy, and later the USA. The war will be bloody and seen as futile. After the war, liberalism manifests itself across Europe as empires are broken. Russia becomes communist while Germany gets a raw deal at the peace treaty signing. Lots of reparations doesn't help the economy. This period will be marked by unrest until fascism soon comes to countries. Out of these an Anti-Semitic dictator will flaunt the treaty and remobilize and take over land. The British and French will appease Germany at first but when Germany invades Poland, they will declare war. Germany breaks the non-aggression pact signed with a ruthless communist dictator now bringing Russia, called the Soviet Union to war. The USA enters later when the Imperial Japanese bomb a harbor in Hawaii as they want to dominate the Pacific. War rages but the Allies turn the tide thanks to British intelligence, American steel, and Russian blood. Germany surrenders as the dictator kills himself while Russians march on Berlin. When the US detonates two nuclear devices, the first of its kind, on Japanese cities, the Japanese surrender and the war in the Pacific ends. As the Second world war comes to a close, it is revealed that the fascist Germans killed people they considered undesirable, leading to a horrible genocide. With fascism defeated, the two new superpowers, USA and the Soviet Union battle have an ideological war trying to affirm their ideologies of capitalism with USA and communism with the Soviet Union. This leads to nuclear proliferation, the division of Europe, proxy wars, coups, and countries joining other sides. The European empires begin to decolonize. At some conflicts like one in where a communist Cuba wants nuclear weapons, it seems that the world might annihilate themselves but people manage to muddle through it. Stagnation due to communism leads to a new leader of the USSR to try liberalizing the country; however, this leads to even more unrest and soon in the early 90's the Soviet Union breaks apart and communism falls. This leads the US as the worlds sole superpower. As the Internet dawns, and a communist China begins to liberalize, soon a new threat emerges. Islamic fundamentalist causes terrorist attacks in the US which leads to the US commencing a War on Terror. Now the world continues battling issues like radicalism, climate change, and poverty as humanity develops and advances in new technologies. The world and humanity constantly moves onward.
Is that a timeline you've been working on? It's pretty interesting, albeit a litttle implausible at times (Germany wouldn't go fascist; we all know that they've always been subject to communist uprisings). A communist dictatorship is a bit crazy too, but the SRR wasn't all that democratic during the 50s after its independence.
 
Assuming a war that I'll just call the "Serbian War" happens, would radical ideologies be more popular? There was a decent amount of communists in Russia prior to the reforms.
 
Assuming a war that I'll just call the "Serbian War" happens, would radical ideologies be more popular? There was a decent amount of communists in Russia prior to the reforms.
If the war goes on for a while, definitely. The Russian communists were rather terrifying, too, since their ideologues pushed a much more authoritarian strain of marxism than their western counterparts. The SRR is a good example of socialist democracy inspired by the more syndicalist and democratic ideas developped out of marxism. Makes you glad that the SRs took over the SDLP as the main leftist opposition in the Duma.
 
If the war goes on for a while, definitely. The Russian communists were rather terrifying, too, since their ideologues pushed a much more authoritarian strain of marxism than their western counterparts. The SRR is a good example of socialist democracy inspired by the more syndicalist and democratic ideas developped out of marxism. Makes you glad that the SRs took over the SDLP as the main leftist opposition in the Duma.
Do you think Russia could become communist? Also what nations would participate in the Serbian War? Would it just be the Triple Alliance VS the Entente?
 
Do you think Russia could become communist? Also what nations would participate in the Serbian War? Would it just be the Triple Alliance VS the Entente?
Sure, if a Serbian War is involved and Russia is defeated, they have a good chance (as do all kinds of radicals, but I would argue either factions of the SDLP had a better chance than any right-wing radical).

Well, in a Serbian War, you can easily involve the entire Balkans. Turkey against the Entente, Bulgaria's a wild card, but likely CP if Serbia's on the Entente side, Greece and Romania are wild cards too, with pro-German monarchs but Greece as plenty of reasons to go against Bulgaria and Turkey, and Romania would probably jump at trying to get Transylvania (even though invading through the Carpathians is a stupid idea logistically). Finally, Albania is in chaos with a German theoretical monarch, so it'll probably be swept up into it in the end.

Italy's a wildcard as well. They claim a lot of A-H lands, but are technically CP. I can totally see them switching sides, though.

Belgium will get involved despite their neutrality since the Germans planned to invade France through it. How they planned to take Paris in a mere couple of months without a motorised army and tanks is absolutely ludicrous considering the logistical nightmare involved.

I honestly don't think the USA will get involved directly. They'll happily support the Entente with arms and finances, but probably no troops accross the Atlantic.
 
Sure, if a Serbian War is involved and Russia is defeated, they have a good chance (as do all kinds of radicals, but I would argue either factions of the SDLP had a better chance than any right-wing radical).

Well, in a Serbian War, you can easily involve the entire Balkans. Turkey against the Entente, Bulgaria's a wild card, but likely CP if Serbia's on the Entente side, Greece and Romania are wild cards too, with pro-German monarchs but Greece as plenty of reasons to go against Bulgaria and Turkey, and Romania would probably jump at trying to get Transylvania (even though invading through the Carpathians is a stupid idea logistically). Finally, Albania is in chaos with a German theoretical monarch, so it'll probably be swept up into it in the end.

Italy's a wildcard as well. They claim a lot of A-H lands, but are technically CP. I can totally see them switching sides, though.

Belgium will get involved despite their neutrality since the Germans planned to invade France through it. How they planned to take Paris in a mere couple of months without a motorised army and tanks is absolutely ludicrous considering the logistical nightmare involved.

I honestly don't think the USA will get involved directly. They'll happily support the Entente with arms and finances, but probably no troops accross the Atlantic.
Who wins? Assuming Russia goes communist then they'll leave the war and France was very weak (hence why they went fascist in OTL) so I'd say the Central Powers would win.
 
In my opinion, the "Russia becomes communist superpower" thing is cliche and ASB. First of all, communism was meant for industrialized nations, and in OTL its only happened in one of the most industrialized parts of the world, the S.R.R. Their problems with transitioning to a service economy seem to support this. A notable exception is a timeline I read a while ago about a different Irish Crisis that led to communism being adapted to local conditions, but the methods in that TL couldn't really be applied somewhere as vast as Russia. Even if Russia went communist, there's no way it would become a world power. It just isn't developed enough. In OTL Russia didn't catch up with Europe and the US until the post-Continental War boom in Russia, the UAE and the Ottoman Empire. In Manitobot's scenario Eastern Europe would be devastated by war, but so would Russia. Besides, I've done a bit f research into the Bolsheviks, and it turns out they were horrible at economic planning.

Besides, the Bolsheviks just didn't have enough popular support in Russia. They existed, and would have grown if Russia was in a devastating war in the 1910s, but the socialist movements in France Germany etc would have grown as well and still would remain larger than the Bolsheviks. While I could I could see a more moderate socialist faction allying with liberals, there's no way the Bolsheviks would do that.
 
Who wins? Assuming Russia goes communist then they'll leave the war and France was very weak (hence why they went fascist in OTL) so I'd say the Central Powers would win.
I would argue that it can go either way. 1914 is right in that awkward transition period in military technology and doctrine, the latter being ridiculously behind the former. All countries were obsessed with 'élan' and offensive tactics despite indirect artillery, machine guns and barbed wire effectively making mass assault little more than suicide and heavily favouring defenders. Military aircraft hadn't developped too far yet (remember that while experiments had started, synchronisation gears for aircraft MGs weren't widepread until 1918 or so; war might be able to push that earlier if the combat usefulness of warplanes are realised soonee than OTL) and armoured vehicles were rare and relatively new- tracked armoured vehicles pioneered by Renault's Char FT and Burstyn's Motorgeschütz came at around 1919 despite the latter being almost a decade-old design and it still took until the 20s when their potential was really realised). Therefore, the weapons that could counter the likely stalemate of a war in 1914 were not in service yet and since doctrine was attrociously slow to adapt, I would expect casualties to be extremely high and lead to a devastating war of attrition that, I would argue, could be won by either blocs. The first side to modernise their doctrines and get rid of their old, incompetent generals, a process that couls take years, is the winner, and both sides have that potential.

In my opinion, the "Russia becomes communist superpower" thing is cliche and ASB. First of all, communism was meant for industrialized nations, and in OTL its only happened in one of the most industrialized parts of the world, the S.R.R. Their problems with transitioning to a service economy seem to support this. A notable exception is a timeline I read a while ago about a different Irish Crisis that led to communism being adapted to local conditions, but the methods in that TL couldn't really be applied somewhere as vast as Russia. Even if Russia went communist, there's no way it would become a world power. It just isn't developed enough. In OTL Russia didn't catch up with Europe and the US until the post-Continental War boom in Russia, the UAE and the Ottoman Empire. In Manitobot's scenario Eastern Europe would be devastated by war, but so would Russia. Besides, I've done a bit f research into the Bolsheviks, and it turns out they were horrible at economic planning.

Besides, the Bolsheviks just didn't have enough popular support in Russia. They existed, and would have grown if Russia was in a devastating war in the 1910s, but the socialist movements in France Germany etc would have grown as well and still would remain larger than the Bolsheviks. While I could I could see a more moderate socialist faction allying with liberals, there's no way the Bolsheviks would do that.
Calling it ASB is incredibly narrowminded and underestimates the potential of radical far-left revolutionaries in corrupt agrarian societies as well as underestimate Russia's industrialisation. The SDLP just needs to play their cards right. For example:

War in 1914; attrition takes a huge toll to the giant Russian army. Add poor harvests during the war and while not much of Russia might get occupied, dissent is inevitablen made worse that Nikolai II is a complete moron of a Czar and had far too much power, then it's ripe for revolution. The far-left, pacifist and anti-war (non-revolutionary ones, that is) as they usually were, decry the war as nothing but an imperialist slaughter and demand an end to the war. The war-weary population agrees and with enough propaganda and the soldiery inevitably tired of suicidal attacks and shooting strikers, a revolution happens, pulling Russia out of the war. Of course, any violent revolution is followed by a violent reaction and either a civil war happens or a massive purge.

Would a Communist Russia be successful? Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how pragmatic their leaders are when it comes to applying and adapting doctrine and ideology, and decide what works and what doesn't. It could utterly fail because of poor central planning, or it can succesfully adapt to the situation on the ground.

Communism and other far-left ideologies, despite Marxism focusing on industrialised countries, was always popular in agrarian countries when the revolutionaries focused on the equalitarian aspects of socialism: Land reform and anti-manorialism were both used heavily in less industrialised countries to gather support, and were successful when they played their cards right. After all, ideologies adapt depending on the situation on the ground and pragmatism wins out most of the time.
 
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