Great Cold War between Allies and Central Powers

Inspired by someone, and I think this is an interesting idea. Let's say World War One ends in a stalemate. What would be the effect of a Cold War situation between the Allied powers and the Central Powers? Take into account the possibilities of Bolshevik Russia and that the United States may not have gone into the war before the stalemate.
 
Inspired by someone, and I think this is an interesting idea. Let's say World War One ends in a stalemate. What would be the effect of a Cold War situation between the Allied powers and the Central Powers? Take into account the possibilities of Bolshevik Russia and that the United States may not have gone into the war before the stalemate.

It probably wouldn't be that interesting to be honest. IMO if the war ends around when it actually did Germany will probably have a revolution very quickly. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire will probably collapse. The allies win, bim bam boom.

I think a more interesting cold war would be one where a communist east (assuming that's the kind of revolution Germany has) versus a democratic west. Just like the OTL one only without the US and forty years earlier.
 
It probably wouldn't be that interesting to be honest. IMO if the war ends around when it actually did Germany will probably have a revolution very quickly. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire will probably collapse. The allies win, bim bam boom.
I was positing it ending earlier than the OTL collapse for that reason. The Empires still remain, and the world is divided.

I think a more interesting cold war would be one where a communist east (assuming that's the kind of revolution Germany has) versus a democratic west. Just like the OTL one only without the US and forty years earlier.
That'd be interesting too.
 
You need a specific scenario to explain why the two camps are separate and in rivalry and yet not once again at all out war with each other.

OTL, perhaps even if nuclear weapons had not existed maybe the West and Soviet camps might possibly not have come to blows anyway. But certainly The Bomb goes a long way toward explaining why that path was not taken over more than a generation.

Also, it is clear why, even if relations between the blocs had been less strained, they'd still have been quite distinct from each other; Cold War or Warm Peace, capitalist/liberal and Leninist socialist blocs would clearly be different worlds.

So that's why a Spartacist Germany is the easy way out to technically achieve your stipulation, EN, because if the "Central" bloc is in fact a Red revolutionary alliance of successor regimes, the nature of the ongoing conflict, even if hot war is avoided, is clear.

If on the other hand you mean, as I assumed you did, that the post-war CP is essentially a bloc of basically liberal capitalist states (perhaps distinctly less liberal and more aristocratic, but imagining that difference to be far more dramatic is imagining a very different Germany than existed before the war, so I assume not) then it is unclear why, if the conflicts between them and the Entente are so drastic as to make a divide, they don't just go to war again. And if not so drastic, presumably the Concert Of Europe keys up its orchestra again and the various states start horse-trading and soon the alliances are reconfigured out of all recognition.

In any event, if a state of peace exists, and both sides are left in a comparable economic state, trade presumably resumes, businessmen cross state lines, it's hard to see a hard bloc division persisting.

So that's what you have to give us--a specific scenario that shows how Europe gets divided in the peace in a way that reasonably would persist, when the regimes on each side of the line are essentially mirror images of each other.

Or of course, default to Spartacist or proto-Nazi Germany. Or heck, assume it's the Entente nations that diverge in some radical direction and that it's the CP nations that muddle along as liberal capitalist societies.
 
The Great War was, at the time, I believe the bloodiest conflict in human history. And much like the Atomic Bomb decades later, new machines were making conflict brutal as never before. Maybe that, coupled with grinding stalemate (and perhaps some good ol' Imperial stubbornness), could be the reason; a war between the great alliances of Europe is considered too bloody to be desirable once again. That doesn't mean another war could not break out later, as, while the mechanization of the early 20th Century are unprecedentedly horrible to the mind of the people of the times, they are not civilization destroying like the atomic bomb. But it could ensure the alliances entrench themselves. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there was a globalization which grew during the 19th century which was shattered by World War One, and could remain shattered. But, perhaps you're right and things could just get jumbled back up and return to an economic normality, eroding political division.

And the two sides are different. The French and British are democratic, while the Central Powers are more Autocratic (a complaint leveled at the CP victory leading to sunshine and flowers is, of course, that the CP was worse, Germany more autocratic and brutal a colonial power to the natives, etc). Russia, meanwhile, is Bolshevik, depending on the POD.

Btw, if you guys want to introduce the whole "Central Powers go Red" thing as an alternative interpretation of this, as has been done already, feel free.
 
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