Get to 2012 without a World War? Is it possible?-

Is it possible to get to 2012 without a World War?


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What would have to happen to get to 2012 without any World Wars? What would a 2012 look like that has not experienced either of the World Wars, or any other wars of such size?
 
The trick would be to break up the big, multi-state alliances that make world wars possible. Give many different powers many different, incompatible agendas. Then, instead of a few huge wars there'd be a lot of smaller but still sizable wars. I'm not sure that's an improvement.
 
In the global conditions that prevailed at the time of the world wars, those wars were inevitable. The powers that existed at those periods,the relations between those powers, the armed forces and the armaments they had amassed, the absence of mutual trust among them were all factors that led to the outbreaks of the world wars. If all these factors were to be changed, a large number of butterflies were required and that is the field of ASB.
 
To say it with IBC's mantra: Nothing is inevitable.

You just need some more rational, cooler heads prevail until the democratisation process has reached a certain point, where the major powers are truely democratic or at least have enough understanding of the destructive power at their hands, that they would fear a war.

The mind-boggling thing is - that at least in Germany - the decision-makers in the military and the civilan government were certain that the next war would be:
a) a pro-longed war
b) would be devastating even for the victor
c) likely a global war
d) and horrible, horrible, horrible

That they still decided to go to war, is a decision somewhere between extreme risk taking and fatalism bordering madness.

There were numerous military publications out there, which predicted the wars fought then in astonishing detail. There are poems out there which did the same. There were even live examples of a modern war, the ACW and the Russo-Japanese War, which gave clear hints of what to expect.

If the conclusion of the decision-makers had been akin to the theories behind MAD in OTL, then the world wars would not have happened. And avoiding ww1 is a great help in avoiding ww2, because the devastating effects on the world economy will not happen. That is not to say that there will not be other chances for the world economy to tank (see the economic crisis now), but after a certain point of development it is more likely that the states big enough to cause such a war, will be also stable enough in their system to not fall for war in times of an economic crisis.

To summarise:
The longer a world war is avoided the greater the likelihood of it to be avoided all together.

Kind regards,
G.
 
The First world-war was not avoidable political, thanks to Bismarck and emperor Franz-Jopsef of Habstburg
and first world-war let to second world-war
and the second one let almost to a third world-war in 1961-62...
 
What's the PoD limit? Nothing before January 1st 1900? For reasons already suggested, by then it's probably too late to stop Something Happening in Europe before 1925. And then who can tell? So I went with butterflies are too great.

Even if, say, the Tunguska Event somehow destroys Berlin and Europe unites to rebuild a shattered brother nation, there's a lot of things that can go wrong in that process, and the rise of Japan in the far east would only be accelerated, bringing with it increased US naval build up and hey presto a war no-one saw coming.
 
Yes. In the immediate sense, any POD before June 1914 gives more time for the usual antagonism between Britain and Russia to flair up again and ruin any alliance which includes the two.

Long-term, anything can happen.
 
Well, the goal is to avoid world wars, not wars. The latter is ASB, the former just hard.

My (likely flawed) try: The assassination attempt on Archduke Ferdinand fails (very easy, just make Gavrilo Princep not hungry so he doesn't stop for a sandwich). The Balkan powderkeg fizzles for a few more years, but when it finally does blow, Germany, which will be more scared of the Franco-Russian alliance by this point, doesn't issue the blank check. So A-H isn't so eager to throw its weight around, Russia has less incentive to intervene, and so long as cooler heads prevail, WW1 or a TTL analogue can be avoided.

If the Balkans can be calmed down (perhaps A-H agrees to respect Serbia's sovereignty in exchange for Russia telling Serbia to shut up or they will throw them to the wolves) the big threat to European peace is Alsace-Lorraine. The French want it back (justly), but the Germans aren't going to give it up. I'm not sure how to work this one out, but if it can be resolved, the reason for the alliance blocs go away.
 
It most certainly is possible, but you must project your butterflies trajectories very, very carefully to ensure the perfect storm required to bring this about, if the year 1900 is your earliest point of divergence. You need to bring back Bismarckian fellows with rugged realism to the planning tables in Berlin and take every possible step to ensure a warm relationship with Russia. I don't quite know how to deal with the Austro-Russo-connection, but you need to make sure that when the mess breaks out on Balkan (if you manage to butterfly that away in a plausible manner I stand in awe), it remains a strictly local affair.

A thing I've often thought about was the possibility of Austria-Hungary dissolving completely on its own, caused by internal revolution, with the rest of Europe just standing by, everyone very reluctant to intervene. As struggles go on mainly around Austria, Czechia and Hungary, many Serbo-Bosno-Croatian sees this as their glorious opportunity to declare independence and encounters very little opposition in practice.
 
One of the questions asked was, almost, what would the world be like. I think it would be more like living in the late '70's/early '80's war is always good for tec stuff.
 
One of the questions asked was, almost, what would the world be like. I think it would be more like living in the late '70's/early '80's war is always good for tec stuff.

More advanced, probably. Tens of millions of potential engineers, scientists and inventors died either as soldiers or were civillian casualties, not to mention the immense economic destruction. You can have rapid military development without a war, and after a while the more advanced civillian technology will start pushing military hardware ahead, too.
 
The trick would be to break up the big, multi-state alliances that make world wars possible. Give many different powers many different, incompatible agendas. Then, instead of a few huge wars there'd be a lot of smaller but still sizable wars. I'm not sure that's an improvement.

I think this is the key requirement. Absent some serious ASB work France and Germany were going to have round 2 at some point. Remember where the word Revanchism came from. But just as the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars don't count as world wars might a Franco-Austria war vs. Germany sneak under the bar if we can keep Britain and Russia out. While such an alliance system is difficult to achieve such a war would finally settle the two big issues, the future of Austria and Alsace-Lorraine.
 
You have autocratic states where it only takes a single person to start a war. You have the Balkans that are a constant witches brew and Alsace Lorraine preventing real peace between France and Germany. You have colonial rivalry all over the globe and territorial ambitions by every power. You have an alliance system that is very unlikely to be dismantled; you make alliances out of fear not from simple convenience. You have populations and statesmen who don't know what a large war is like. Whose experiences with war have all been small colonial affairs that were painless. (Except for Russia and Japan.) You have nations who fear NOT going to war more than they do war itself.

To think this could stand for a hundred years is simply ridiculous. At some point a major war in Europe is inevitable. Even if the British Empire were somehow neutral as long as France and Germany are involved there will be fighting in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Atlantic, and Pacific. That would certainly constitute a world war.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
It is difficult, but doable. Wars will happen, but world wars are avoidable. France is too weak to take on Germany alone, so a good German/Russian relationship goes a long way. They don't have to be allies, just have a commitment to stopping wars between them. Likely just replacing Willie with Prince Henry or removing Tsar Nicholas is enough. You still need to defuse the Balkans to some extent, but with Russian/German focus, this should be doable. Something as simple as Russia pushing hard for the third crown in personal union (Southern Slavs) with Austria-Hungary probably is enough. Lots of other ways too if one is looking for a face saving solution that leaves the Hapsburg dominant in the western Balkans with the Slavs having some of the best rights in Europe.

Or one can have the UK less paranoid about German domination, and stay out of the war. WW1 would be a 4 power war, and if the UK/USA threw its weight to keeping the war to Europe, it would never expand. The UK alone is strong enough to force both sides not to attack colonies or merchant shipping. Combined with joint USA/UK mediation offers (mediate or else), it can be a shorter war. Other ways exist too.

Now the question makes it seem that it takes a hundred years of good luck. We really only have to get to the nuclear age. A lot of people say wars speed technology development. They don't. They speed up the deployment of base technologies that exist to military applications. The greatly slow general R&D and civilian use technologies that will have military usages when fully developed. Without WW1, we have 30-50% more scientist, and some of them will be of the Nobel prize in physics caliber. By 1933, the basic discovery is enough one could begin working on a bomb IOTL or at least on a new power source. No war probably moves the technology forward by 5 years or so. So the technology could start as early as 1928, but lets assume about the 5 year delay from OTL before it serious military potential is recognized. This means about 1933 start date. It will not be an emergency crash program of OTL.

So lets look at the cost. 2 billion USD which is about 1.2 billion pre-devaluation, which is 4.8 billion marks or just about 2 years of the German defense budget. If we spread over 20 years, it becomes possible but very expensive. But there are some factors that make it much cheaper in the ATL.

1) Not Crash program - So avoid emergency spending mentality which drives up costs.

2) Not Crash, so probably only goes one of two paths, not both.

3) Early on, the project is probably largely funding with existing budgets to physic departments of universities.

Now it may have the interesting effect of being seen as a power source first, so we may move the reactors before the bomb. Once you have a pile to make plutonium, you have the key component needed for a reactor of Chernobyl style. So by the mid 1950, we should have multiple nations with the bomb, maybe early with a big war scare. And we are now in the nuclear, no big WW stage. Hopefully. Or I have just written the 0.1% of ATL where which is worse than OTL.
 
You have autocratic states where it only takes a single person to start a war. You have the Balkans that are a constant witches brew and Alsace Lorraine preventing real peace between France and Germany. You have colonial rivalry all over the globe and territorial ambitions by every power. You have an alliance system that is very unlikely to be dismantled; you make alliances out of fear not from simple convenience. You have populations and statesmen who don't know what a large war is like. Whose experiences with war have all been small colonial affairs that were painless. (Except for Russia and Japan.) You have nations who fear NOT going to war more than they do war itself.

To think this could stand for a hundred years is simply ridiculous. At some point a major war in Europe is inevitable. Even if the British Empire were somehow neutral as long as France and Germany are involved there will be fighting in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Atlantic, and Pacific. That would certainly constitute a world war.

But at the same time you have a growing democratisation even in countries like Germany, a weakening of the aristocratic diplomatic game that created the alliances before WW1, a stronger social democratic pacifism in most countries (that IOTL was killed by the nationalist fevor during WW1), a stronger Russia, an Austria-Hungary that soon will lose Frans Josef and enter the 20th century and suffragets demanding voting rights for women. All these factors would act against a world war - at least in Europe.
 
What would have to happen to get to 2012 without any World Wars? What would a 2012 look like that has not experienced either of the World Wars, or any other wars of such size?
That arguably means the POD has to be far enough back to avert the French Revolutionary & Napoleonic Wars, which were on a far larger scale than any of their precursors and effectively at least as global in scope as WW1, and were definitely referred to as "the World War" by some politicians and/or writers around that time...
 
Actually, weve got a problem. Given that we are in the post 1900 forum, its already too late. The 7 years war and napoleonic wars were already world wars.

If what you want is to avoid warss CALLED world waars, then its trivial. Simply renaame the existing wars. Wwi wasnt called that until wwii, so The Great War and The Second Great War, gwi and gwii would be easy with a pod as late as 1939.

What is ,,world war,, that you can steer between scylla and charybdis and and avoid both falsehood and triviality?
 
The reason there has been no world war, or even a war between great powers, for 67 years is due to the existence of nuclear weapons. They alone made a serious war too dangerous for countries to enter into lightly. It is one thing to say, 'give me what I want or I will kill you.' It is something very different to say, 'give me what I want or I will kill us both.' Minus atomic weapons there certainly would have been a World War III in the 40's or 50's between the US and USSR and their respective allies.

If you somehow manage to avoid a world war until the 1940's or early 50's and if atomic weapons are developed by multiple nations at about the same time; say Germany, France, UK, and USA. Then maybe the nations are rational enough to understand a war between them is no longer worth the risk. Even then if either France or Germany is the first to have them there might be a willingness to use them in a preemptive war.

Even the above is highly unlikely as I don't see an additional thirty years passing without a major conflict.
 
Well, the goal is to avoid world wars, not wars. The latter is ASB, the former just hard.
Exactly.
[...] If the Balkans can be calmed down (perhaps A-H agrees to respect Serbia's sovereignty in exchange for Russia telling Serbia to shut up or they will throw them to the wolves) the big threat to European peace is Alsace-Lorraine. The French want it back (justly), but the Germans aren't going to give it up. I'm not sure how to work this one out, but if it can be resolved, the reason for the alliance blocs go away.
Right before the start of ww1 Alsace-Lorraine was no longer a serious problem between Germany and France, at least according to some historians, the most prominent being[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif] Keiger (take for example his biography Raymond Poincaré[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, sans-serif], Cambridge University Press 1997) and his primary sources and conclusions - although not all might be flawless - are quite sound on that point. After all the issuewas 43 years old then and the first generation of people who could remeber that have died. Avoiding ww1 at that time means only that ever more time passes until things are finally forgotten. Just look at the development of the German Bund der Vertriebenen (League of the Expelled People). It lost a lot of members (although they like too inflate the numbers drastically) and its influence is next to non-existent. Nobdy cares about that anymore. One of my grandparents were from the Sudetenland and were expelled in 1946. They still had strong connections to their old home and if the circumstances had been a bit different (no super-evil Germany), they might have thought of regaining that land a voting issue. My mother still thinks a lot of that, although she was very young, but I seriously doubt that it would have been relevant (even under different circumstances) to cause any effect on her voting pattern. And I am just curious from a historical perspective, but could not care less. Things change, especially those. France and Germany were on their way to a solid dentente as were Germany and the UK. Even the relationship with Russia was improving ever so slowly. Sure, there were tensions in the Balkans, which could provoke a world war, but they could also end like the second Balkan war - with the UK and Germany working for peace together.
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The First world-war was not avoidable political, thanks to Bismarck and emperor Franz-Jopsef of Habstburg
and first world-war let to second world-war
and the second one let almost to a third world-war in 1961-62...
Bismarck had nothing to do with it. He avoided war after all for the 29 years after the unification. He understood perfectly well what a war would entail.
More advanced, probably. Tens of millions of potential engineers, scientists and inventors died either as soldiers or were civillian casualties, not to mention the immense economic destruction. You can have rapid military development without a war, and after a while the more advanced civillian technology will start pushing military hardware ahead, too.
Exactly!
You have autocratic states where it only takes a single person to start a war. You have the Balkans that are a constant witches brew and Alsace Lorraine preventing real peace between France and Germany. You have colonial rivalry all over the globe and territorial ambitions by every power. You have an alliance system that is very unlikely to be dismantled; you make alliances out of fear not from simple convenience. You have populations and statesmen who don't know what a large war is like. Whose experiences with war have all been small colonial affairs that were painless. (Except for Russia and Japan.) You have nations who fear NOT going to war more than they do war itself.

To think this could stand for a hundred years is simply ridiculous. At some point a major war in Europe is inevitable. Even if the British Empire were somehow neutral as long as France and Germany are involved there will be fighting in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Atlantic, and Pacific. That would certainly constitute a world war.
No. As I already said earlier in this thread and and in this posting, Europe had started a serious consolidation and the democratisation process was underway in all 'autocratic' states. If the German Reichstag had been serious about not wanting to go to war, than that would have been a very difficult situation. After all without money no army and without army no war. Germany had already one of the best suffrages in Europe these days and was phasing in true secret ballots. A-H had similar developments going on. Only Russia was lacking behind in development, but looking at the situation there, it was only a question of time until the system would break down. And the colonial rivalries were in the process of getting settled. Morocco was no longer an issue, Germany and the UK had reached an understanding on the Portuguese colonies and their other respctive interests.

Not to mention the fact that especially German decision-makers were fully aware of the scope and the consequences of the next war (very, very horrible). They knew it. And if they had acted accordingly - that is not taken the huge risk of war (or in some cases wishing it would realise) with an attitude of fatalism and/or social drawinism in its worst form, than there would have been no world war. I can give dozens of PoDs between 1900 and 1914 to avoid a world war. Dozens really.
But at the same time you have a growing democratisation even in countries like Germany, a weakening of the aristocratic diplomatic game that created the alliances before WW1, a stronger social democratic pacifism in most countries (that IOTL was killed by the nationalist fevor during WW1), a stronger Russia, an Austria-Hungary that soon will lose Frans Josef and enter the 20th century and suffragets demanding voting rights for women. All these factors would act against a world war - at least in Europe.
Exactly! You have spoken out of my heart.
[...] Wwi wasnt called that until wwii, [...]
Sure about that? As far as I know the decision-makers in Germany and the UK were speaking of a world war even before it started.
The reason there has been no world war, or even a war between great powers, for 67 years is due to the existence of nuclear weapons. They alone made a serious war too dangerous for countries to enter into lightly. It is one thing to say, 'give me what I want or I will kill you.' It is something very different to say, 'give me what I want or I will kill us both.' Minus atomic weapons there certainly would have been a World War III in the 40's or 50's between the US and USSR and their respective allies.

If you somehow manage to avoid a world war until the 1940's or early 50's and if atomic weapons are developed by multiple nations at about the same time; say Germany, France, UK, and USA. Then maybe the nations are rational enough to understand a war between them is no longer worth the risk. Even then if either France or Germany is the first to have them there might be a willingness to use them in a preemptive war.

Even the above is highly unlikely as I don't see an additional thirty years passing without a major conflict.
As I said earlier the deterrence potential was already there in 1914. The German military was well aware of that, as was the chancellor. Moltke had written to his wife in 1905:
„Es wird ein Volkskrieg werden, der nicht mit einer entscheidenden Schlacht abzumachen sein wird, sondern ein langes, mühevolles Ringen mit einem Land sein wird, das sich nicht eher überwunden geben wird, als bis seine ganze Volkskraft gebrochen ist, und der auch unser Volk, selbst wenn wir Sieger sein sollten, bis aufs äußerste erschöpfen wird.“

Translation by me: „It will be a war of the people, which will not be brought to an end by one decisive battle, but will become a long, agonizing struggle with a nation, that will not acknowledge defeat until all of its people's power is broken, and which will leave our own people utterly exhausted even if we can stay victorious.”
It only needed any one of those in the know to react accordingly.

To summarise: There is and will be potential for further wars in Europe for quite some time. But Europe was on its way to consolidate itself. The idea of international peace conferences to resolve a crisis peacefully was already developing and gaining traction. We already see the beginnings of armament agreements. We see how people realise that war is costly and that even the preparation of war is costly. The democratisation process was already returning large gains for parties which advocated peace. There was an ever-growing international peace movement.
There is nothing inevitable about a world war in 20th and the following centuries.
Kind regards,
G.
 
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