For Want of A Sandwich - A Franz Ferdinand Lives Wikibox TL

The World in 2020
Hello all,

The endeavour for this TL started back in 2013, when after the abandonment of my Ross Perot TL, I searched for the ideas of my fellow members of Alternatehistory.com in redacting a new timeline - Having Archduke Franz Ferdinand survive his fateful trip to Sarajevo on June, 28 1914 seemed perfect, as this event had numerous consequences for the whole century. The TL had a few missteps, yet I pursued the redaction of a complete timeline, country by country, year by year, from 1914 to 2020 : in the end, it seemed that it would be impossible to make a linear TL as I had first imagined, and the great TL Our Fair Country and the success of the edited Wikibox persuaded me to launch a new format, as a history atlas illustrated by Wikibox, showing the whole perspective of the world from 1914 to 2020 and leaving the reader to find the marks of the world. Without further ado, let's begin for once this completed TL, in collaboration with you !

I must acknowledge the many readers of A Giant Sucking Sound ; one could find a few similitaries with the Kaiserreich TL, on which I once participated in my younger years for Mexico and France.

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The World in 2020
 
Emperor and King Ferdinand II & VI of Austria, Hungary and Bohemia
Franz Ferdinand.png

Ferdinand II (Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph von Habsburg-Lothringen) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia (as Ferdinand VI) and the first Head of the Danubian Federation. The eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, he became the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne following the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 and the death of Karl Ludwig in 1896. He married morganatically Sophie Chotek in 1900, after he renounced his descendants’ rights to the throne after his courtship caused conflict within the Imperial Household.

Ferdinand succeeded his uncle to the thrones of the realm in November 1916. A believer in greater autonomy for the various ethnic groups of Austria-Hungary, especially the Slavic ones, he nevertheless considered Hungarians as too much of a threat for the Habsburg dynasty and announced his plans to reform the Empire, dismissing numerous hardliners, such as Minister-President of Austria Karl von Stürgkh or Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf. As he came to the throne in the onset of the Great European War (1916-1921), Ferdinand II had to postpone his reforms until after the war, honoring his alliance with Germany while having to deal with ethnic strife, war economy planning and military setbacks until the Treaty of Kiev in 1921.

Ending the war with a ravaged country that hadn’t taken any advantage from the conflict, Ferdinand II moved on with his reformist program, repeatedly locking horns with the opposition, from the Austrian Social Democrats (who unsuccessfully tried to vote a motion of no-confidence in 1923) to nationalist revolts (Ukraine, 1921-1923 ; Bosnia, 1922), and became sworn enemy to long-time Minister-President of Hungary Istvan Tisza, who benefited of an absolute majority in his own Parliament and who was worried over Ferdinand’s plans for a lesser Hungary. On July, 18 1925, nevertheless, Ferdinand II & VI managed to open the Pressburg Conference, sitting along with various nationalists from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to discuss the future of his realm.

Ferdinand pushed repeatedly for Bohemia and Croatia to have the same degree of independence within the Empire, on the same level than Austria or Hungary, but Tisza only agreed to grant his wishes for Bohemia (that lost its German-speaking parts to Austria), not Croatia. The Conference lasted for more than a year, providing the mainframe for the establishment of the Danubian Federation on September, 14 1926, replacing the Dual Monarchy with a federalist Trial Monarchy and increasing autonomy and rights for all of its peoples, yet it was still unacceptable to Tisza, who refused to ratify the Treaty, fearing it would break eventually Hungary apart due to Slovak, Romanian and Serbian pressures. It resulted in Tisza being arrested and deposed on grounds of high treason, igniting the rage of Hungarian nationalists.
Having been the victim of numerous assassination attempts (Sarajevo 1914, Ragusa 1924), Ferdinand II was worried after the assassination of his cousin and ally in Hungary, Archduke Joseph August, but nevertheless headed to Prague to attend his coronation as King of Bohemia, that was to take place on January, 1 1927 in St. Vitus Cathedral. As he exited the New German Theatre on December, 31 1926, after attending a performance of the Merry Widow, his carriage was targeted by a hand grenade thrown by Bohemian ultranationalist Jan Rys-Rozsevac, a medical student who felt that the Pressburg Conference didn’t get far enough in granting Bohemia independence. He was succeeded by his nephew Charles I, III & IV as Head of the Danubian Federation and survived by his wife and three children. His assassination was among the leading causes of the Danubian War (1927-1933).

AssassinatFranzFerdinand.png


The legacy of Ferdinand II & VI is very mixed in the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Danubian Federation. He is viewed very positively in Bohemia and Croatia as a reformer, far more progressive than Franz Joseph and inclined into granting more rights to the minorities of the Empire. Austrians view him as an ineffectual monarch, who didn’t went far enough to prevent to dislocation of the Habsburg realm and turned Austria-Hungary into a German puppet, beginning from the Great European War, not earning anything from the end of the war and culminating with the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1955. For Hungarians, he was a conservative motivated by his hatred of Magyars and the only man responsible for the Danubian War.
 
As of now, a small enquiry for you readers : what kind of content would you like to see for the first days of this TL ? On which country should we focus first ? Comments and feedback are well appreaciated.
 

Ficboy

Banned
As of now, a small enquiry for you readers : what kind of content would you like to see for the first days of this TL ? On which country should we focus first ? Comments and feedback are well appreaciated.
Same guy behind A Giant Sucking Sound. In my opinion even without Franz Ferdinand being killed there still would have been a World War I given that there were conflicts in the Balkans and the Anglo-German arms race. Especially with a failed assassination and Austria-Hungary finding out who was responsible they would have declared war on Serbia and their respective allies would have done the same thing like OTL with some slight differences. Plus there would be a lot of ethnic tensions that Austria-Hungary might collapse when TTL's Great Depression or whatever it is called.
 
As of now, a small enquiry for you readers : what kind of content would you like to see for the first days of this TL ? On which country should we focus first ? Comments and feedback are well appreaciated.

Hey, glad to see this project finally update! I'll make a request and say that I want to see some Argentine history!

Keep up the good work!
 
Same guy behind A Giant Sucking Sound. In my opinion even without Franz Ferdinand being killed there still would have been a World War I given that there were conflicts in the Balkans and the Anglo-German arms race. Especially with a failed assassination and Austria-Hungary finding out who was responsible they would have declared war on Serbia and their respective allies would have done the same thing like OTL with some slight differences. Plus there would be a lot of ethnic tensions that Austria-Hungary might collapse when TTL's Great Depression or whatever it is called.
There is an equivalent to this conflict, it was mentioned in the Ferdinand ll article.

Yeah, it can be good from time to time to read the text :)

Hey, glad to see this project finally update! I'll make a request and say that I want to see some Argentine history!

Keep up the good work!

Duly noted :)

I'm naturally biased but I'd be curious to see just what has caused Australia to still hold such a large chunk of Southern New Guinea!

Should you look closer, you could see that Bali and the Lesser Sunda Islands are the same color than Australia.

I assume Mesopotamia is a Shiite Arab Homeland.

Not a homeland, rather a country of separate identity...
 
I haven't read over everything posted thus far, but to hazard a guess, I assume it's due to the Kingdom taking advantage of the collapse of the British Raj to score some of the historically-contested territories,
According to the map, there Nepal holds ladakhi and Bihari lands.....both groups which old Nepalese elite considered 'mongrels' and 'barbarians'......no one would have had the appetite in the early 20th century to annex Bihari and ladakhi lands in the Nepalese government.....despotic as the Rana's were, they were even more racist than the normal Nepali aristocrat.
 
According to the map, there Nepal holds ladakhi and Bihari lands.....both groups which old Nepalese elite considered 'mongrels' and 'barbarians'......no one would have had the appetite in the early 20th century to annex Bihari and ladakhi lands in the Nepalese government.....despotic as the Rana's were, they were even more racist than the normal Nepali aristocrat.
That's a reasonable objection, I'll admit that I'm not as well-versed in our people's 20th century history as I'd like to be. That being said, it could be that the racist elites took a decent amount of inspiration from the CUP and the Ottomans and decided to annex said lands for the purpose of expelling the so-called mongrels and barbarians in order to settle more Nepalis in the area, which is horrific, but something potentially plausible given the attitudes of the Ranas. Also, it seems like Nepal's outright annexed Bhutan, which I'm okay with tbh. Regardless, we don't know the history or what MaskedPickle's got planned for the Subcontinent, so this could all just be wild speculation.
 
Great to see you've brought this back, MaskedPickle! Consider me subscribed.

Belinda von Stronach, though? I see what you did there...
 
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