How did these Central European borders come about?

raharris1973

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Below is an illustration of alternate Central European borders.

The PoD can be any time after 1 October 1914.

Explain what military and above all, diplomatic, events transpired to yield the borders shown:

central_europe___1920.png
 
I don't see how. A France that was able to take Wallonia, Alsace-Lorraine and even Saarland would not be losing land to rump-Switzerland of all places, not even voluntarily
 
Agree that the French border ain't plausible.

The German ones are more credible but you need two changes.

1) King Wilhelm gets his way in 1866, and Prussia annexes Saxony and the border areas which a later generation knew as the Sudetenland.

2) WW1 still happens and goes pretty much as OTL, but Germany seeks an armistice a few months earlier than OTL. Its terms are more lenient and Germany is left in a slightly stronger bargaining position. She still loses A/L and Posen, but keeps West Prussia and is allowed to acquire Austria, while S Tyrol gets a plebiscite.

BTW I note that within Germany some provincial boundaries are shown in black and some in yellow. Is there some significance to this?
 
I don't see how. A France that was able to take Wallonia, Alsace-Lorraine and even Saarland would not be losing land to rump-Switzerland of all places, not even voluntarily
It's not "losing land", IIRC Savoy was an independent dukedom whose official "protecting power" under the post-1815 European structure was Switzerland - until the 1860s. At this time when the french Savoy line died out, France forced a referendum on the Savoyards which was apparently significantly less free and fair than the 2014 Crimea referendum, and a majority voted or "voted" for reunification with France (the other options were staying independent or joining Switzerland). If the referendum were to go the otehr way Savoy may have joined Switzerland.

Edit: As to Alsace/Lorraine and Saarland, the former may have become independent as a result of the Franko-Prussian war of 1870 ending up in more of a stalemate with only slight upper hand to the Germans, so that France may have had a better negotiation position at the end - in which case it would make sure that A-L is not entirely incorporated into Germany but is a separate country, or maybe as a German "protected territory". Or maybe Bismarck had a change of mind and decided that an "independent" but German-aligned A-L may be a better outcome for Germany than outright annexation.
However, Saarland has never had any sort of separate identity, never mind sovereignty, before the 20th century, and it's only reason to exist as a separate entity was the coal and steel industry located there. A map that has Alsace-Lorraine as a practical buffer state between Germany and France would not have any reason to have Saarland be anything but a part of the Prussian Rhineland province.
 
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It's not "losing land", IIRC Savoy was an independent dukedom whose official "protecting power" under the post-1815 European structure was Switzerland - until the 1860s. At this time when the french Savoy line died out, France forced a referendum on the Savoyards which was apparently significantly less free and fair than the 2014 Crimea referendum, and a majority voted or "voted" for reunification with France (the other options were staying independent or joining Switzerland). If the referendum were to go the otehr way Savoy may have joined Switzerland.

Edit: As to Alsace/Lorraine and Saarland, the former may have become independent as a result of the Franko-Prussian war of 1870 ending up in more of a stalemate with only slight upper hand to the Germans, so that France may have had a better negotiation position at the end - in which case it would make sure that A-L is not entirely incorporated into Germany but is a separate country, or maybe as a German "protected territory". Or maybe Bismarck had a change of mind and decided that an "independent" but German-aligned A-L may be a better outcome for Germany than outright annexation.
However, Saarland has never had any sort of separate identity, never mind sovereignty, before the 20th century, and it's only reason to exist as a separate entity was the coal and steel industry located there. A map that has Alsace-Lorraine as a practical buffer state between Germany and France would not have any reason to have Saarland be anything but a part of the Prussian Rhineland province.
all of these are pre-1914 pod's
 
After Munich, Hitler leaves rump Czecho-Slovakia alone, demands Poland give him Danzig and Corridor. Western powers are unwilling to guarantee Poland's borders--after all, Hitler has shown that he is only interested in uniting Germans, hasn't he? Poland fights but loses; USSR is tempted to seize eastern Poland but both Hitler and the Western Allies warn Stalin against it, and he backs down. Hitler, as he promised the West in return for its neutrality, incorporates "only" Danzig and the Corridor in the Reich--leaving the rest of Poland as a puppet state. (This alt-Hitler is just as genocidal, just as determined on German domination of Europe as the one of OTL. He's just a little more patient about it.)

This leaves France's boundaries to explain. We'll say that there is a slightly-different Treaty of Versailles which gives it the Saarland outright...but yes, there are a lot of other things harder to explain...
 
I don't see how. A France that was able to take Wallonia, Alsace-Lorraine and even Saarland would not be losing land to rump-Switzerland of all places, not even voluntarily

^This. These borders might be plausable if we're talking an 1866 POD in which Napoleon III gets the Prussians to stick to their promise to intervene posatively in French efforts to annex Belgium (In combination with co-operation with the Neatherlands; any international conference at this juncture is probaby presenting the British with a diplomatic fait accompli since France, Italy, and Prussia at minimum are going to be voting to support the measure among the Great Powers, and Russia and Britain are getting along about as well as a starving lion and bear who both stumbled upon a hunk of meat), but that's really the only plausable scenario I can think of.
 

raharris1973

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I don't see how. A France that was able to take Wallonia, Alsace-Lorraine and even Saarland would not be losing land to rump-Switzerland of all places, not even voluntarily

Actually, when I grabbed this map and modified it in MS Paint, I was not paying attention to any of the areas in white, so the only deliberate modifications were to the colored parts. I grabbed the map because it captured my mental picture of a different German eastern border pretty well

BTW I note that within Germany some provincial boundaries are shown in black and some in yellow. Is there some significance to this?

Nope - just random side effects from when I was modifying the map in Paint.

is Luxembourg in the saarland?

I think the original map had some goofy hybrid state of Luxembourg and Saarland, and I drew lines in to try to correct and bring it in line more with the 2018 Franco-German border.
 
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