WW1 without Britain

Could/should Britain have stayed out of WW1?

  • Britain could stayed out of WW1 and should have

    Votes: 55 57.9%
  • Britain could have stayed out of WW1 but should not

    Votes: 21 22.1%
  • Britain could not have stayed out out of WW1 but Britain should have

    Votes: 11 11.6%
  • Britain could not have stayed out of WW1 and neither should Britain

    Votes: 8 8.4%

  • Total voters
    95
Everyone did, hence the "Hungry Forties" that were one of the inspirations for Marx and Engels

But while the German States, reeling from effect of the revolutions and blight, still send food aid to Ireland, while Great Britain was busy exporting food from the place
 
In the short run perhaps, but in the medium to long-term (in large part depending on how the German government chooses to deal with it's debt) Germany would be strengthened against the neutrals as well, as now it's population, resource base, trade routes - and especially if a Mitteleuropa trade zone is established - will be enlarged, and then there's the inevitable Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway......

Without being cheeky, so what? A stronger Imperial Germany is worse than a stronger British Empire? A stronger Imperial Russia? A stronger USA? It is all relative, to the elite in London it might look gloomy and the boys in the pub pipe down and lose bragging rights, English may not be the language of Air Traffic Control some decades later but what makes anyone care? It is an alternate time and a re-ordered world, Britain has lost some power relative to Germany, in OTL she lost it all as the USA dismantled Empire, things change, but I fail to see just how the Germans do anything more than what befell belligerent Britain. Less loss of life, no crippling debt. fewer monuments to Generals and Admirals, we might not miss those at all, but I would miss the story of War Horse, it was quite a tear jerker. Perhaps more German cars on British roads? If anything I would predict that the British Empire survives and London is far more than one of my favorite tourist destinations.
 
Without being cheeky, so what? A stronger Imperial Germany is worse than a stronger British Empire? A stronger Imperial Russia? A stronger USA? It is all relative, to the elite in London it might look gloomy and the boys in the pub pipe down and lose bragging rights, English may not be the language of Air Traffic Control some decades later but what makes anyone care? It is an alternate time and a re-ordered world, Britain has lost some power relative to Germany, in OTL she lost it all as the USA dismantled Empire, things change, but I fail to see just how the Germans do anything more than what befell belligerent Britain. Less loss of life, no crippling debt. fewer monuments to Generals and Admirals, we might not miss those at all, but I would miss the story of War Horse, it was quite a tear jerker. Perhaps more German cars on British roads? If anything I would predict that the British Empire survives and London is far more than one of my favorite tourist destinations.

I never said it was a bad or good thing in general, just that the British at the time would have looked on it as a potentially very bad thing. They didn't know back then they were going to lose India anyway if they didn't drastically change their attitudes, to them the gravest threat to the empire (should have been the understanding of political realities) was a Germanic or American Navy hellbent on surpassing them, a fear which very well may have been vindicated if this timeline were allowed to play out.
 
This commonwealth that you describe here is something that might happen after world war 2. Before the opinions of the British elite was just to against such ideas. If a commonwealth should exist before ww2, then British and British settler colonies need to have some privileges.

If the commonwealth had implemented these liberal and universal rights between Indians and Britons, then overtime the what was the British empire would become the Indian empire as Indians eventually become a larger piece of the pie that rules this commonwealth.
This commonwealth that you describe here is something that might happen after world war 2. Before the opinions of the British elite was just to against such ideas. If a commonwealth should exist before ww2, then British and British settler colonies need to have some privileges.

If the commonwealth had implemented these liberal and universal rights between Indians and Britons, then overtime the what was the British empire would become the Indian empire as Indians eventually become a larger piece of the pie that rules this commonwealth.


It goes without saying the British would not - this early in the TL - replace the formal empire with a CoN, that part I certainly agree with you. CoN - such as we've been discussing - is more in the context of imagining what an imperial confederated British Empire eventually turns into, what it eventually gets named later on down the road, or perhaps more likely, if the POD is very late in the game like in the 1930s/40s, though as I say earlier I suspect the British would prefer to have their own British Commonwealth without India rather than the looser connections of a CoN with India, and thus the search for a different name that wouldn't just become a loose connection.

The second point is both true and not true. On the one hand, any empire/commonwealth/UK that keeps India, long-term the empire eventually has to come to be as much an Indian empire as a British one, since the whole point of it would be that "consolidation of union between England and India" so talked about by Sir Allan Hume. But that doesn't mean India has to dominate the thing operationally, representation in an Imperial Council can easily be capped at 50%, and if you base representation partly or wholly on contributions (I think half of representation should be based on it), then it will be quite some time before India would be approaching that 50% threshold anyway, and of course all of this only applies to a confederated scheme, not an alliance system of CoN. Her GDP - using 1990 dollars - was pretty big in 1914 ($215 billion versus $226 billion for Britain), but that was mainly because of her POP, and her taxable income would for a while remain far, far short of Britain's. Will India one day wish to lift that 50% cap? Perhaps, but by the time that happens so what? The British by the turn of the 21st century would be inclined to give it to her.
 
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But while the German States, reeling from effect of the revolutions and blight, still send food aid to Ireland, while Great Britain was busy exporting food from the place
The Choctaw sent food to Ireland during the Great Famine. However Britain wasm't interested in such.
 
The deciding factor, at least publicly, was Belgium. If the Germans respected the neutrality, the British would have had a much harder time entering the war. We might even see a CP victory in a scenario where Belgium isn't attacked.
 
In Prussia-Germany the state existed over and above society. The individual's rights and obligations were always subordinate to the powers-that-be who were, in the Lutheran scheme of things, ordained by God and that the state was a spiritual entity, as the philosopher Hegel had taught, namely the hand of God on earth, under a monarch who was ‘God’s anointed one’ and as such it was anything but a mere cooperative association for the facilitating of commerce. Above all it was a warrior state. The government ruled the Empire according to the requirements of the army, and that is the true definition of militarism, namely the prioritisation of the perceived needs of the defence forces over all others. And further, just to underline the difference between imperial Germany and western powers at the time, there existed in the Reich a separate constitution for the army Wehrverfassung. The essential feature of this arrangement was that the Empire was divided into military districts under the command of a general officer who was constitutionally controlled by an independent military cabinet that exercised the so-called Kommandogewalt meaning that the military stood under no other authority than that of the Kaiser, the all highest himself. Only the administrative structure was subsumed under the authority of the regular bureaucracy. But what is crucial was the fact that the Kaiser in times of national emergency could decree that the Kommandogewalt of the army should assume responsibility for all normal government policies and actions. The civilian bureaucracy would have to submit to the ultimate authority of the army, SDP majority or not.

The British army generally did not see itself as the guardian of British institutions beyond the authority of Parliament. It was the servant, not the master. No one in the United Kingdom seems to have understood that in Germany the opposite was true. The German General Staff saw itself as the guardian of the state. The Kaiser himself, who thought he was the state, had been sidelined in 1908 after giving a notorious interview to a British newspaper. In 1914 the General Staff ruled Germany, a situation which became more obvious during the war.
your intetpretation of Hegel is grossly inaccurate...but this is not the place to talk about philosophy, therefore I am going to avoid going deeper inside the discussion
 
Did they not?? A six month war where reparations were 25% of french gdp, a french region and trade clauses that remained in force til 1914.



Given that Germany was still at war with UK USA and France the draconian peace treat can be seen in a different light.
well I hate to be that guy, but Alsace-Lorraine was not a traditionally french territory. France had stolen Alsace by use of sheer force back in XVIth century, but it was a largely german-speaking place. Now I despise the prussians, but freeing the region form their french occupiers was one of the few right things they have ever done in their long, brutal, dishonourable history
 
Does it matter that he's flawed? He had immense influence on his contemporaries. If we want to get into their heads, we should pay head to his theories.

No, if you want to get into their heads then read their biographies, researched from their papers and diaries and other scholarship that Mahan wouldn't have had access to. But someone would dismiss this as 'English Propaganda'.
 
Actually I would have liked it if you explained a bit more your stance on Imperial Germany.

I wont dispute for a moment that Bismarck was fundamentally a conservative monarchist - though he was ready to work with anyone if it furthered his goals. I also wont dispute that the Reich was intentionally set up as a not democratic state and left significant powers in th hand of the monarch. IMO its hard to imagine a more conservative way of fulfilling the liberal goal of creating a unified german state.

Reading your posts in this thread you come across to me like someone who dislikes Bismarck and Imperial Germany with a passion. The reason seems to be how undemocratic it was. Thats certainly true if compared to present day however doing that is foolish. Comparing it to the other states of the era makes sense. And than looking at the GP's of the time it was certainly better than either A-H and Russia, and it can be argued that in certain aspects better than Brittain or France. Italy is a special case but I think Germany beats that as well. In social welfare it was the best place at the time. And undemoctratic as the reich was, the Reichtag still had a very potent tool in its hand and that was that they could decide about the finances of the Empire. Thats the reason that the chancellors, even Bismarck had to secure a majority in the Reichtag - and its hard to dispute that the Reichtag was democratically elected.

So if you only singled out Germany because of this I think than you are plain wrong.

It's simpler to stick to one topic at a time. I'm not singling Germany out in particular, all the powers before WW1 were grappling with the problems in their systems and they all seemed to see external war as a fix to their internal problems.

I could talk about Tirpitz, von Bülow and Treitschke's influence (often called 'radicalisation' these days) however the point is that the political culture of Bismarckian-Wilhelmine Germany was very different from the West, a fact both celebrated and resented by some leading German literary figures. Nation and politics constituted a dualism in Germany, meaning that the nation was not co-terminus with the people but was the military class that perceived itself as distinct from the Volk who were left to play politics by forming various parties, liberal, socialist, conservative and Roman Catholic.

This political settlement was endorsed by the Protestant middle class and aristocracy as meeting the nation’s essential needs both domestically and internationally. Only the burgeoning labour movement, Social Democrats and trade unions, the Catholic Centre Party and a handful of more radical liberals and pacifists opposed it, but they had no means, short of revolution, of modernising the constitution.

They knew full well that they would not win in a revolution and this is why the leader of the SDP (by 1912 Germany's largest vote puller) was feeding military information to the British so they would be ready for what may come because he knew that a Prussian Military, victorious in any general European war, would crush the growing German Left for a generation.
 
I haven't had time to click on and follow the debate, but it seems to assume the Germans invade Belgium like OTL. I was somewhat surprise to see it posited that Britain remaining neutral even after the German invasion of Belgium was a real option, though Ferguson in "The Pity of War" seems to favor this position.

There is another long thread that looks at what would have happened if the Germans had not invaded Belgium, and many people have cogent arguments that Britain would have gone to war against Germany anyway, though on the whole opinion seems to be leaning in the other direction.

Thinking about this, it seems the invasion of Belgium is a really big deal, more than I thought. These are the reasons:

1. Germany is now invading a neutral country. There is no invasion of a neutral country otherwise, and otherwise its hard to make the case that they are fighting anything other than a defensive war.

2. The British guarantee of Belgium.

3. Germany takes over major coal producing regions and Germany armies are in Flanders, which is particularly sensitive to Britain. This doesn't happen, and its actually hard to see where the British send the BEF if Flanders isn't a theater of war.

4. Invading Belgium gives the chance of Germany knocking France out of the war early, which was the whole point, and now you get hegemonic Germany. They can't knock France out of the war early by going through the Lorraine fortresses. No invasion of Belgium and France is guaranteed to survive any peace no worse off than they were before, except for the war losses.

5. Seizing the industrial areas and the Belgian nitrate stockpile really helped Germany and without an invasion they don't get these advantages. So they will probably "win" a two year war, given the OTL German and Russian military performance, but we are looking at a two year war, a bigger version of the nineteenth century wars, where the German army performs somewhat worse than OTL and the gains are limited.

From the British perspective, the Germans occupying Belgium makes them a threat. If they don't occupy Belgium, they are not a threat. Its as simple as that. That is why the invasion produced a consensus for war. Otherwise, there were British elites wanting a fight but no consensus and it would make even less sense for them to declare war.

As to my opinion of whether the declaration of war after the invasion by Britain was a good idea given hindsight, I am leaning to the view that they had to do it, but should have fought the war differently, with no continental commitment or conscription and war aims limited to a German withdraw from Belgium and northern France, plus reparations for actual damages. This would have given a chance of a more limited war that the British were better equipped to fight.
 
I never said it was a bad or good thing in general, just that the British at the time would have looked on it as a potentially very bad thing. They didn't know back then they were going to lose India anyway if they didn't drastically change their attitudes, to them the gravest threat to the empire (should have been the understanding of political realities) was a Germanic or American Navy hellbent on surpassing them, a fear which very well may have been vindicated if this timeline were allowed to play out.

We know that the threat of German naval dominance was in part the British inventing a fear to meet, it served the RN well in funding fights and rallied the citizenry, and by 1912 the Germans were scaling back their ambitions. Any good RN planner can see how bottled up the HSF really is and geography does not serve Germany, an honest planner would recognize that Germany needs a cruiser fleet to safeguard her trade and her coal fired battle line is a local force designed to keep the North Sea open or dominate the Baltic. And pride should allow the RN to be able to handle an aggressive Germany.

Germany after a victory is only benefited by having more money. The Treaty era proved that Britain could retain dominance by cooperation, better here if she is not an enemy, just as the USA and UK reached an agreement. But I agree, in 1914 that is a bitter pill to swallow, but was the Liberal Cabinet willing to go to war to hopefully see Germany destroyed by Russia and France, two traditional enemies now unfettered by German might? That is where I always find it incredulous, the Empire throwing one wolf to two and hoping it can serve biscuits after.
 
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