"Europe as it should be"--1916

"A map created by the author to represent what he felt the layout of Europe should be in 1916 after WWI. " http://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/125424785782/europe-as-it-should-be-1916-source-l-p

There are a number of oddities. Wales not only gets independence but gets Cornwall. (Why not give it Brittany too?--it has a lot more Celtic-speakers than Cornwall...) Switzerland is dismembered even though its German-, French- and Italian-speakers seem to have been attached to it rather than to their "linguistic" fatherlands--yet while France gets Suisse Romande, it does not get Wallonie. Meanwhile, a separate Flemish state is created, though from a purely linguistic viewpoint it should become part of the Nertherlands. The Lithuanians are grouped together with the Letts ("Lithuanians and Letts do it"...), while the Czechs and Slovaks are recognized as separate peoples, and apparently Catalans are just Spanish and Ukrainians and Belorussians just Russian. The "Gaels" (not Scotland as a whole) get independence, though Gaelic was a minority language even in the Highlands by this time.

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Baffled as to why there is a combined Croat Serb state, yet s separate Slovene one. Of the three, the Croats and Serbs are the most volatile combination. A combined Slovene and Croat state is much more likely if you wish there to be a division.
 
I feel that Germany has far too much Baltic land.

Note that Estonia, even though it is in the same color as Germany, is not meant for a German state but it is lumped together with the Finns in (it seems) a Finno-Ugric state.

The Finnish borders are a bit wonky - at the time, the areas east of the Murmansk railway did not have a Finnic majority, so there the area is too big. On the other hand, most of the Karelian isthmus up to the very gates of Petrograd was majority Finnish, which is not reflected on the map. Interestingly, this setup of more land in Eastern Karelia but less on the Karelian isthmus resembles the "equitable" OTL offers presented to a Red Finland by the Soviets in 1918 and 1939.

The map also omits the Swedish-speaking Ålands altogether, as well as the small areas of the Finnish coast that had a Swedish-speaking majority. About the Sami state up north - I suspect that the area did not have a Sami majority even in 1916, and a state in those borders might well have more Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish than Sami inhabitants - and Russians as well.
 
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Yeah, well, what's with the obsession of creating 100% homogenous nation states? In what way is this world better than the one we had? Trying to create such perfectly homogenous nation-states will just lead to more bigotry at the few minorities that do mess up the plans. I have no idea why the author felt this is Europe as it "should be".
 
Baffled as to why there is a combined Croat Serb state, yet s separate Slovene one. Of the three, the Croats and Serbs are the most volatile combination. A combined Slovene and Croat state is much more likely if you wish there to be a division.

Linguistically, though, Serbian and Croatian were commonly regarded as one literary language (though "From the very beginning, there were slightly different literary Serbian and Croatian standards") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian whereas Slovene was considered a separate though closely related language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_language ("Although Slovene is almost completely intelligible with the Kajkavian dialects of Serbo-Croatian (especially the variant spoken in Hrvatsko Zagorje on the border with Slovenia), mutual intelligibility with other varieties of Serbo-Croatian is hindered by differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. The Slovene language also has many commonalities with the West Slavic languages.")

Of course the fact that Orthodox Serbians, Catholic Croatians, and Muslim Bosnians spoke mutually intelligible tongues did not necessarily make for harmony. I once read an argument that it may even have hurt intergroup relations, since each side could understand the others' hate propaganda...
 
Dennis Wheatley has something similar, although not on such a micro scale (in 'Stranger than Fiction' I think), with Europe divided up into linguistic Kingdoms. If I remember correctly he's as interested in sticking it to the French as he is in dismembering Germany...

Just found it. After carving up Europe he then says "...we are left with only our two enemies and the country which betrayed our cause to consider."

And later "With regard to the rest of France that...must be left...to get out as best it can of the muddle into which the supineness of its people has plunged it."
 
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These borders aren't that bad, honestly. It seems that the author tried to create a "fair" solution (various countries on both sides of the war are enlarged and reduced in different ways), and generally tried to honor the principle of self-determination as well. Although the Baltics, Britain and a few other places show he fumbled it a bit. Also not sure about the Spanish half of Sardinia. And if you're going to leave Slovenia out of Yugoslavia, you may as well separate Serbia and Croatia from each other too.
 
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