You completely lose sight of the massive drawback of colonial Empires:
They aren't going to last. Eventually self determination will triumph. India, Indochina and Africa all will turn into battlefields at some point. Sure, with stronger European nations we might talk about a bloody struggle that starts in the 1970s but it will happen. And that ignores the other indirect drawbacks that "enforced markets" tend to have.
Germany on the other hand will have several venues to expand into economically and politically. Tsarist Russia is going to collapse or at least not going to exist in its current form forever. A-H will collapse.
By 2018 Germany is probably going to enjoy the benefits of economically dominating a vastly richer Eastern Europe. France and Britain are probably still adjusting to the loss of their colonial empires.
And
you lose sight of the mutations that an alternate world means for colonialism. The colonial aura in 1914 will not last forever, but it was the First and Second World Wars which fundamentally undermined Western colonialism's economic structures, moral superiority, ideological justification, and economic, military, and political might that made it possible. Without them, some regions are inevitably prone to collapse - British India perhaps - but the rest will either be continued parts of the metropole or closely associated with the imperial system (French North Africa, the British white dominions, various important colonies around the world and important resource zone), and the rest will be in neo-colonial statuses that different very little from that. Even India would be closely linked to the British, as any discussion of a more successful British Empire in World War II clearly indicates. It took two major world wars to destroy the imperial-colonial system, without it its appearance may mutate, but its fundamental structures will stay the same. Even two world wars simply changed French Sub-Saharan Africa's color on a map while doing very little to actually shift around French economic and political control there, in a world without world wars the colonial powers would still be very much on top.
Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary will both survive. It took years of constant brutal warfare to destroy them. Austria-Hungary in particular is given sorely little credit for its resiliency in surviving for four years and with continued loyalty among the governments and members of the state, despite its antiquated government system. It wasn't until 1917 that the Czech exiles for example, actually arrived at the previously unthinkable conclusion that the vast economic block of Austria-Hungary would actually crumble and that that might be allowable - that despite years of the most violent and bloody war in European history. Without that, Austria-Hungary would continue to exist, with doubtless constant political battles in parliament, but nevertheless as a unified state. Tsarist Russia showed that even in the travails of defeat in 1905 and 1906 it never came close to actual collapse, and that was only achieved in the darkest days of world war in 1917 - and
even then, with armies occupying much of its Western borders and with constant ideological civil war, it only shed a tithe of its territory with Western provinces breaking off. The large land-based empires are not nearly as vulnerable as people on this board assume.
By 2018 Germany will be a small fish in a very large pond indeed, surrounded by either very large oceanic-maritime-imperial states to the West, or large continental spaces to the East, and with the advantages of neither in between. Again, in essence a very large (and highly militarized) Netherlands.
bad@logic I know. You are right it was more like 2:1 but looking at the growth 1913 to 1950 Germany just went up 10% France more than 50% the USSR more than 100%... it seems that Germany had the slowest growth rate of all of Europe 1913 to 1950. So saying it came out relatively better...And yet you argue that without the world wars Germany would be comparatively even smaller. How could this be? Would Germany grow less without the wars? Hardly. What Germany loose much of its territory and industry again? Would France, Russia and the UK and more or less every state in Europe grow that much faster? A Russia without the enormous industrialization of the Soviets? And the economical heart of Europe has been the famous banana from London vie Flanders, the Rhine and down to Northern Italy for centuries, why would that suddenly change? I agree that the Balkans would be better off, Poland (well in WWi Poland was a benefactor) and Russia as well, but moving the economic center from where it had been for centuries...
And how are Russia and the Balkans better poised to capitalize on any advantages? By their good education system? The well developed and working bureacracy, the unbribabale justice system? The lack of any internal rivalries, the very good infrastructur? The already existing lead in several new technologies and industries?
Have you looked up a map where the Vistula flows? What towns will make up your economic center of Europe?
Both France and the USSR lagged behind Germany in 1913 and were able to make it up, especially in light of the temporary post-ww2 German economic crisis. How do you think that the Russian Empire would have performed if not for the devastation of the First World War, the Russian Civil War, and then the death of tens of millions in the attempted genocide that the Germans attempted to impose upon them? The growth which the Soviet Union made was in per capita terms essentially just continuing the growth that it was making in the Tsarist era and experiencing a period of growth catch up after the devastation of the First World War:
In GDP per capita terms they essentially followed the same course. And yet that also included a far larger population that died, and the population would be significantly smaller under the Tsarist regime. The low German GDP growth vis-a-vis the other European states is not a bug: it is a feature, in that Germany fundamentally has less room to grow economically than most European states, with the exception of a few Western European states that were at a similar level of development.
Russia and the Balkans don't have to match the German education system, bureaucracy, judicial system, infrastructure, etc. What you're missing is that again, this is a relative comparison. Moving from a bad education system, bureaucracy, judicial system, and infrastructure system to an average level is a far bigger relative growth than moving from an excellent system to a slightly-better excellent system. States which are less economically advanced inherently have an easier time growing and catching up to those states which are advanced. In fact, they don't even have to make much of an improvement to their economic system as a whole to still surpass Germany by a hefty margin: the population of these regions was kneecapped by the Great War and even more importantly by the Second World War, and Russia simply maintaining its historical level of being around 40% of the United States gdp per capita consistently, with the much larger population of Tsarist Russia as compared to the travails of Soviet Russia, would be enough to constantly shift the economic center of Europe in its direction.