Would a world without the World Wars be better or worse?

if you ask someone what would they do if they had a time machine, they would say 'kill Hitler' or 'stop Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated'. They say this because they believe the world would be better off without the carnage of the World Wars.

Of course, said beliefs are formed from our opinions, whether they are informed or not. We will never know for certain if the world would be better off without the wars. That, however, does not stop us from speculating, hence the existence of the genre of alternate history.

So, with that being said, in your opinions, would the world be better off without the World Wars?
 
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A world with 40 -80 million more people each with a pair of hands and a brain? Untold billions of dollars not spent on war which destroys wealth, but in the hands of citizens who create wealth? Resources spent on technology people actually want and not on the tech needed for mass war?

Umm. I'm thinking better.
 
This needs a POD that stops the Great War. There was more to the Great War kicking off than the assassination of the Austrian heir.

The Germans for instance had been itching for a war for years, and saw it as necessary for their long term hedgemony. You'd be better off taking out Bismarck, without who there'd be no German unification and thus no Great War as we know it, and so no WW2 and Hitler would have just been a mediocre artist in Vienna.

Of course that means no return to Republicanism in France - how long before they'd start eyeing up the left bank of the Rhine?
 
For who? It has taken a long time, but the effects of those wars include the destruction European systems of government based upon total power for one man, the dropping of the colonies, and the internatoinal I becoming more based on economics, so that people just had to pay if they wanted to get resources rather than invade an area lest their competitors shut off access to them. Though there are exceptions for everything, of course.
 
For who? It has taken a long time, but the effects of those wars include the destruction European systems of government based upon total power for one man, the dropping of the colonies, and the internatoinal I becoming more based on economics, so that people just had to pay if they wanted to get resources rather than invade an area lest their competitors shut off access to them. Though there are exceptions for everything, of course.

Democracy was already going forward. Germany and Austria-Hungary were going towards British style parliamentarism. Russia was only clearly absolute monarchy who participated to WW1.

Very unlikely that we can avoid world wars. WW1 is probably impossible but it is easy to avoid second one. But if there is not WW1, there is not too revolution in Russia or at least not rise of Bolchevism. And so not Hitler too.
 

NoMommsen

Donor
Without WW1 and WW2 in its wake - however avoided - EUROPE might have suffered less and might have come of better the last 100 years. Slower but perhaps "softer" slip of Germany as well as Russia towards kind of constitutional-more-democratic rule than 1914, avoiding the revolutions.

But the "REST" of the WORLD ?

"No losses" would also mean (much ?) faster grow of european population, which ultimatly and eventually would (have to) flow into the colonies, making decolonization much more difficult, prolonged and bloodier.
(Though there might be someone, arguing, that a slower change to first augmented autonomy, than autonomy and only them to independance could have also avoiden millions of civil war deaths in the 3rd world).
There would have been a much lesser "consciousness" adn "conscience" about genocide without the Nazi-caused-holocaust. How many "smaller" "holocausts" might then happen duriong i.e. said prolonged decolonization ?

With war in Europe avoided in 1914 and further on, warfare actually IN Europe might have become rendered impossible or useless or ... too costly somewhere in the twenties, shifting armed conflicts between the "powers" toward the colonies and other "3rd-World"-regions.

Probably overall the worldwide "deathcount" of victims-of-war would be at least the same as IOTL, very possibly even higher.


As cruel, as it may sound : the world wars have teached humanity at their time a damn awfull lot, of what our societies are awfully proud of today.
 
Democracy was already going forward. Germany and Austria-Hungary were going towards British style parliamentarism. Russia was only clearly absolute monarchy who participated to WW1.

Very unlikely that we can avoid world wars. WW1 is probably impossible but it is easy to avoid second one. But if there is not WW1, there is not too revolution in Russia or at least not rise of Bolchevism. And so not Hitler too.
Eh, WWI is easily enough avoided; it's all a question of how far back one is willing to place the POD. :p

Despite what you say being true, as mentioned above, there were certainly a number of positive benefits to the world wars.
I'm not so sure they outweigh the death, destruction and suffering they caused, but then gain... without the utter horror of those two wars, would the world have developed the aversion it has today to war as a means of furthering a national agenda?

...
And I was about to go on, but @NoMommsen just said what I was about to write out.
Ninja'd. :)
 

longsword14

Banned
The Germans for instance had been itching for a war for years, and saw it as necessary for their long term hedgemony.
Odd that they did not jump in to clobber the Russians before 1914.
You'd be better off taking out Bismarck, without who there'd be no German unification
You should consider what the man himself had to say:
"The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past."
 
Potentially. That was my answer in the last threat along this line. We tend to believe that wars give us social and technical progress as the fruit born from such misery and deprivations. Blood soaked history offering shining leaps forward. I am not convinced that war was the harbinger of enough good to counter its destruction. 1914 was a sort of perfect storm for a war to break out among the Great Powers, like a tectonic plate the forces had built over so many years that it took very little indeed to engulf Europe and then the world. As I see them the World Wars are too linked to be truly separate, so alter the First and you may butterfly the Second, or you may unleash something else. Push off 1914's release and you may yet have a war. World War One was the war that broke the peace for the balance of the century, it gave us the scourge of revolutionary communism as twisted under Lenin and later Stalin and their heirs, it sowed the seeds for Fascism and its ugliest spawn Nazism, it gave us the Super Power, on and on. Without these might we have lived in peace, prosperity and fraternity? You can argue it was possible if unlikely, in any event I think you have other wars, other spasms of hatred, exploitation, destructions and creativity, new technologies, new movements and new alignments of the stars to guide culture, politics and economies. This site is replete with both dystopia and utopia in the alternatives. My mind prefers to steer a little better, not the best, reality grounds that, but I think towards a modest yes.
 
As I said in a pre-1900 thread about a world without the US: a world without World War I or II is a different world. Not necessarily a better or worse one, but a different one.

You're probably butterflying a lot of technological and medical advancement, for one. And without war there may be less incentive to R&D that stuff. And I think there's a risk of what we saw in Red Alert - getting rid of the monster we know may allow a monster we didn't (or a minor one being worse).
 
If it's without *any* world wars--nor just "World War I and World War II as we know them"--then, yes, I'd say it would be a better world. I don't believe world wars are necessary for technological progress--there was plenty of that between, say, 1870 and 1914...
 
The way to avoid the World Wars is actually to go back to 1870 and tell Napoleon III to ignore the Ems Telegram. That might prevent the issues that led to WW1 taking hold.

It’s been speculated that without the WW’s and the Cold War and the boost they gave to technology then we might be at around the technological level of 1970 with aviation about another 10 years further back. The biggest impact would be that the colonial empires would have survived a lot longer, probably until the 1980’s. So a more peaceful and less advanced world which is probably still going through decolonisation.
 

Coulsdon Eagle

Monthly Donor
The common thought that wouldn't history (Q - whose?) be better if Princip / Hitler / Stalin / Mao had been killed off before they "achieved their potential" has a darker side. We often bemoan the lost generations - those politicians, artists, scientists, doctors, etc. whose bright futures were snuffed out in 14-18 or 39-45, but how do we know that one or more of those lost could have been an even worse choice for humanity? A Hitler without his weaknesses, a British PM who would not hesitate to meet calls for independence for India with genocidal crackdowns, the atomic scientist who gives the Bomb to Stalin (or without Stalin would we have had someone like Beria?), a US President determined to conquer Mexico...
 
Democracy was already going forward. Germany and Austria-Hungary were going towards British style parliamentarism. Russia was only clearly absolute monarchy who participated to WW1.

Very unlikely that we can avoid world wars. WW1 is probably impossible but it is easy to avoid second one. But if there is not WW1, there is not too revolution in Russia or at least not rise of Bolchevism. And so not Hitler too.
Yes to the first point, Hmm to the non-avoidance of WW1. 1914 may have been the period of peak vulnerability to war breaking out, avoid the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and tensions generally could have eased. By 1917 Germany would have been uneasy about giving a blank cheque to Austria-Hungary while the UK, having won the naval race, wouldn't be so keen on backing a Franco-Russian hard stance on the Balkans.

But how the world would have developed without WW1 is very unclear. To me anyhow!!
 
A world with 40 -80 million more people each with a pair of hands and a brain? Untold billions of dollars not spent on war which destroys wealth, but in the hands of citizens who create wealth? Resources spent on technology people actually want and not on the tech needed for mass war?

Umm. I'm thinking better.
you are forgetting the spanish flu, which pretty much was a direct result from ww1 (without ww1 it likely would not have existed, or in a much much less dangerous form), so that is another 150-250M people in their most productive age (it struck mostly in the 15-45 bracket)
As I said in a pre-1900 thread about a world without the US: a world without World War I or II is a different world. Not necessarily a better or worse one, but a different one.

You're probably butterflying a lot of technological and medical advancement, for one. And without war there may be less incentive to R&D that stuff. And I think there's a risk of what we saw in Red Alert - getting rid of the monster we know may allow a monster we didn't (or a minor one being worse).
war delays other sectors, so total development might not be too different. with so much more people alive earlier, and less economic devastation you probably see a lot more development (people not dying, other ones being born that will contribute), and there are more people around to give economic impetus to tech development.
 
In my opinion the world would mostly be better, however, speculation of this alternate 21st Century is difficult. Assuming that a massive global conflict never happens (this is very unlikely, even if Franz Ferdinand was assassinated it's likely Europe would descend into warfare sooner or later) then there would possibly never be a Russian Civil War, so no Stalinism or Iron Curtain. Mussolini may still rise to power, however, there would be no Hitler because Germany would never be humiliated. The Pacific War would probably still happen, but it's most likely that Mao never takes over China. There may not be any terrorism from the Middle East either because the Europeans would never draw artificial borders in the Middle East after WW1. The downsides to this world would be the potential continuation of colonies and monarchs remaining in power longer.
 

Devvy

Donor
So many things got firmly killed off by the world wars for the better. They brought forth women’s rights and women working, killed off antisemitism and eugenics firmly, great medical advances to treat soldiers. Definitely different, I don’t know if better. While nuclear weapons might be bad, the impetus to develop brought forth nuclear power which is generally good if used properly.

I’m tempted to say better in short term, worse in the long term.
 
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