RousseauX
Donor
That's true, it's probably less trolling and more ignorance on your part. I'll give you that oneYou sound salty friend, you should unrustle those jimmies before you get us in trouble. Just because I'm not being overly serious about the discussion doesn't mean I'm trolling.
No, that's not what you saidI'm not sure how you got that out of what I said, I said it would be out of Character for the two not to view each other as rivals.
France wanted to dissolve Germany as a -defensive- move, not because it wanted to be European hegemonyIt had no ambition to do so? It's desire to dissolve the German Empire into smaller states after ww1 suggests otherwise,
No, they didn't have the ambition to do so before 1914, which is why I keep saying 1871-1914Germany didn't have any ambitions to carve up the Russian empire until the opportunity to do so fell into it's lap. It's easy to say they had no ambition when they had no opportunity.
The balkans wasn't part of the European heartland: the Balkans -were- more like a colonial conflict than a European one. The annexation of Bosnia was the Austrians expanding into what had being the Ottoman Empire, it was colonial expansion into a collapsing empire. Note they did not challenge a traditional European heartland objective like Silesia. This proves my point: the European powers were interested in border revisions away from traditional intra-European power struggles.Mhmm I don't recall saying colonies werent of interest but Prussia was quite clearly interested in revising European borders only just before that and so it seemed was Austria who annexed Bosnia and also Russia to some extant, who was very interested in the Balkans.
The French analogue like this would be expanding into North Africa (into the collapsing Ottoman Empire) which is what they did OTL post-1871, and in neither the Balkans nor North Africa are the Germans and the French "natural" enemies in any way. In TTL, the natural French expansionist tendencies are still going to be directed towards the colonies.
am I allowed to count the one that caused WW1?
But no, not really, the July crisis was over the Balkans on the imperial periphery, not the European heartland.
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