AHC: A World without WW1

[Zaealix]

...Okay so I'll admit to not really having the background in history to be sure but...
It's a weird paradox of people not really wanting the war and everybody kind of spoiling for a fight, from what little I know, if only after seeing the Extra Credit videos on WW1.
But I'm kind of thinking if the World War doesn't break out...Well, what are the various nations looking into?
America's 'Lost Cause' thing (Which is a topic I'm very not inclined to look into given it sounds like it basically was a waste of time in terms of successes and laid the groundwork for yet another wound in the Amercian psyche of today) going poof is only one aspect I could see changing- I dunno if the affairs of African Americans improves THAT much, if only because I feel our problems stem from economic inequality more then anything, and thus I consider it actually possible the black man gets resented for stealing jobs and oppertunties instead. Which...
On the one hand, no buffonishly evil 'White Supremecy!' cause to rally around. On the other hand, economic incentive to try and kick a competitor out of your market could lead to a longer-lasting and in some ways more entrenched opinion.
If we allow a minor war I could see Germany&France or a handful of the major European powers creating something like a modern military tournament-esque affair. Two Armys, Two BIG FLAGS, winner is the guy who gets to capture the other flag, the idea being that you've got to deal with the other army first. In effect, doing what WW1 was thought to pull off-ending the idea of destructive war in favor of something closer to war as a sport, almost, with rules and regulations instead of modern conflicts being more destructive then ever before.
Beyond that I don't even have the knowledge to really say what comes next.

 

[bookwyrm]

Weren't there also an awful lot of legislative sessions and electoral progress that died prematurely because of the wartime regimes of censorship, propaganda, and emergency mobilization? Like Britain put Home Rule on pause during the war, Austro-Hungary dissolved the Imperial Council in the name of war, even Belgium was planning on getting around to abolishing its plural voting system that favored landowning patriarchs until the July crisis.

EDIT: oh wait, even a Papal Conclave was affected by the war! If all the elector cardinals were able to freely make it to Rome then the additional votes of the American contingents, among others, could really affect what type of Papacy takes form.

 

[Boot]

Like Britain put Home Rule on pause during the war, [...] .

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That actually strikes me as an interesting last-second PoD: if the matter of Home Rule is resolved just a bit earlier and the threat of British intervention into a potential European war is taken more seriously, you could see the pro-war folks in Germany dive right into 'we've missed our chance, if we go to war now we'll be destroyed by the Russian steamroller!', which makes avoiding big wars a lot easier.

 

[Cetashwayo]

Was the Home Rule crisis viewed as something that would have hobbled Britain in getting involved in a war by German command?

 

[Arthur Frayn]

Spitballing things a little more, I think a lack of a major European war might keep the US solidly in the "frenemy" camp vis a vis the Entente, and really Europe in general. Prior to the war European-American (and Anglo-US relations especially) were pretty off-and-on. Without the US' financial obligations to Britain and France inexorably drawing them into their orbit, you probably see the US continue on its path towards a "third" position on the global stage. Honestly it would probably end up in a similar position to modern day China:

• A large, wealthy, and populous nation that's clearly on a long term trajectory to pose a major challenge to/possibly supplant the current Great Power(s)
• Views an entire region as its natural backyard and takes a dim view of other powers playing around there
• Soft power built around an entirely different form of government (the "China model", for lack of a better word IOTL/democratic republic ITTL)

There's obvious differences - the US foreign policy wouldn't be driven by China's desire to roll back prior humiliations and re-assert themself as a Great Power. The motivating desires of this US are harder to guess - it could be anything from a "We're here, we've got a giant Navy, get used to it" to "Golden Circle 2.0: Exporting Freedom Boogaloo". I think, though, that the US "baseline" position towards Europe would be viewing them as a source of trade and immigration (sometimes), but kept at arms length foreign policy-wise. It'd also be a no-brainer to support anti-imperialism, even if it's just some PR spouted while keeping the boot on the Philippine neck. It instantly gives the US far more room to maneuver with soft power and differentiates them from the European powers.

Domestically, shit is going to be very, very different. Like I said, the Lost Cause isn't going to get turbocharged (yay!), but this and the generally conservative attitude of the world in general probably mean civil rights gets slow walked too. Without the national crucibles of the world war, you'd probably see Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants populations maintain their "ethnic white" status longer, which could have interesting effects on the labor movement.

@Cetashwayo please tell me all of this is world building for a Pro Patria Vivre reboot

 

[Cetashwayo]

@Cetashwayo please tell me all of this is world building for a Pro Patria Vivre reboot

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I was honestly potentially thinking of doing a HOI4 mod as a long-term project if I can figure out how to code, but mostly it's out of plain curiosity. I admit that I was revisiting the old nation game after playing some Kaiserreich and finding out that The New Order: Last Days of Europe started out as a nation game on Facepunch.

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

I was honestly potentially thinking of doing a HOI4 mod as a long-term project if I can figure out how to code, but mostly it's out of plain curiosity. I admit that I was revisiting the old nation game after playing some Kaiserreich and finding out that The New Order: Last Days of Europe started out as a nation game on Facepunch.

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It's more painful and boring than difficult. Have at it!

 

[Boot]

Was the Home Rule crisis viewed as something that would have hobbled Britain in getting involved in a war by German command?

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From what I've read, it was a large part of what led to the whole "they won't go to war over a scrap of paper" idea, as it seemed like it would either be a major source of internal unrest or an outright, army-splitting civil war right around the time the July Crisis was heating up.

 

[Radek]

Was the Home Rule crisis viewed as something that would have hobbled Britain in getting involved in a war by German command?

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With things the way they are, Home Rule passing leads to Ulster going up in flames, followed moments after by the rest of the Emerald Isle. Even worse, the matter hits so close to home London cannot trust Home Island troops to obey commands to handle the situation.
The Dominions are more distant and could perhaps be trusted to help, but they're small and can only provide so many men -never mind what the people already at Ground Zero would think of such.
None of this counts Irish-American views of the mess -and mark my words, the Washington establishment must heed that or see the loss of New England to the opposition in the next elections.
So, fun times all around.

 

[WyldCard4]

My own thoughts.

-The Americas: In some ways the 20th Century looks like America succeeding despite her best efforts to fail, though it is also easy to look at a country like Argentina and think "oh, we're just schoolchildren at trying to mess our country up, that is how you do it." I expect the US to be one of the least changed areas; nobody's invading the US from 1914-1954 almost no matter what, and internal revolution seems pretty unlikely compared to almost any other country.

American strategic insulation, economic dominance, and internal harmony seem unlikely to shift that much. I'd hazard a guess that no World War I or World War II military buildup makes the US economy stronger in an absolute sense, though most of the world not burning all their infrastructure means that in a relative sense American dominance has got to seem lower. An interesting question is if zero sum competition with other powers and a lack of "let's redo the world order on our terms" shifts much of the economic paradigm within the United States or not.

Lack of a KKK revival and other Confederate rehabilitation makes me wonder if the African-American community might have focused on projects of separatism or migration to Africa instead of integration. The Pre-WWI field of black intellectualism was very different from the Civil Rights Movement, and the combination of less institutional racism with the lack of conscription of blacks in the World Wars could produce political movements with divergent goals and expectations.

Latin American changed are difficult for me to predict and the general lack of impact on the rest of the world in our timeline until much later than 1954 makes me think the Americas outside of the United States are probably not going to change the calculation too much unless something weird happens like Argentina mobilizing into a new Great Power or sweeping revolutions across South America. I would guess the Caribbean and Mexico to be stress points for Europe and Japan to try and poke the US in the eye, but have no real intuitions on how this would actually play out.

East Asia: I tentatively expect this to suck even worse than in our own timeline. A multipolar world seems like one where Japan has a lot more freedom to maneuver in China, and being realistic the European colonial masters can get just a bad at times even if they were rarely as consistently awful as Imperial Japan. I would theorize that in 1954 the ground level of China, South East Asia, and other nearby regions is going to be even worse than OTL, which is saying something.

I would guess Maoist strategy gets strangled in the cradle. Air supply of isolated areas rapidly eclipsed a lot of agrarian revolutionary strategies, and without a particular combination of chaos and revolution at a specific technological step it seems likely to me that the shape of revolution in East Asia becomes very different. Lack of Soviet backers would also change a tremendous amount, though other imperial rivalries might step in to fill the gap. I could easily imagine the United States happily funding and supplying a ton of left-wing groups against European and Japanese imperialism in a world with no Soviets to be paranoid about.

Europe: Starting from the east, I wonder if Russia might disintegrate like the Ottoman Empire and Austrian Empire did? Geopolitical factors might make that impossible, but the fall of the USSR suggests to me that without Lenin or with a mix of butterflies you can get a bunch of small unstable states out of the Russian Empire and nothing close to the Soviet period.

The particular end result of the USSR seems like it was far from inevitable even with small points of divergence during the Russian Revolution itself. Even an authoritarian, revolutionary socialist party ruling Russia would probably act quite differently without the World Wars.

Speaking of the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary, I vaguely expect those two empires to collapse even without World War I pressure. None of the multi-ethnic empires in Europe seem to have been remotely healthy, and if we don't have disintegration I expect something similar to OTL Marxism to or some other authoritarian ideology to be filling the gaps.

I think the shifting ideological politics without World War One could make right-wing authoritarianism quite alien in some ways, as countries like Germany and traditional imperial powers have much more historical legitimacy as "conservative" and no Soviet Union as a communist revolutionary template would likely change the entire groundwork for authoritarian rhetoric. I would expect political rhetoric to be one of the most obvious differences in this timeline, as contingent associations of the Nazis and the Soviets did a lot to make various terms and ideas unacceptable in polite society. We'll probably still have the fasces on the Lincoln Memorial in the United States.

One of the more interesting things is that in this timeline France and Germany can't have gone to war from 1914-1954. I assume the two countries were prepared for war in this entire period, but nothing ever set the war off and no one wanted to make the first move or something. I tentatively expect France and Germany to have been tightening into authoritarian malaise and perhaps non-productive imperial projects, but that hunch isn't evidence based. I think neither country can have a revolution without triggering a panicky general war.

The UK is relatively interesting. I expect without World War I and World War II the US to end up much more Anglophobic. No common enemy, zero sum strategic interests, and a bunch of English speakers (well, groups that have to learn English to talk to their colonial masters at least) who are being oppressed strikes me as a combination likely to make the English the boogeyman of the Americans, especially if the earlier suggestions of a less racist US prove true and there is less ethnic solidarity with the British. Lack of de-colonialism makes me wonder about ex-patriots from British colonies forming activist communities in the United States trying to agitate for American intervention.

Africa: My hunch is not much changes from an outside perspective by 1954 and the end of the OP enforced peace. Africa's impact on the outside world seems to be heavily mediated by outside powers in almost all scenarios. I feel unsure if colonialism or de-colonialism is actually bloodier, but would vaguely guess that imperial PR offices would make the continent look a bit quieter even if things actually went much worse.

I wonder if "colonialism" would be remembered in much less racial terms in this timeline, or if "white" is just a less encompassing term? If Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire are all continuing their imperial practices on the European continent (Ireland seems like it should be pointed out specifically) without the Red Scare I imagine racial politics being a tad less binary, but I doubt anyone in 1914 would be guessing that the 2020 US would have decided Irish, Slavs, and Germans all count as "white" while Arabs and Hispanics are "non-white" and it is hard for me to tell if structural forces or contingent events were a bigger factor in this evolution.

Middle East, Australia, and India: The bits of the world I noticed I didn't even vaguely gesture at elsewhere. Oil based commodity economies in the Middle East seem like they only really turned to empowering locals such as the House of Saud because of de-colonialism, the Cold War, and the American attempts at world management. I would guess rival oil supply chains to be folded into imperial systems, and the linking imperial colonies with oil revenues might do a lot to give legs to French and British empires.

Less strained British Empire in India seems like it would probably try to hold onto the territory. My guess is escalating brutality and oppression, but nothing internal to the British or India seems likely to kick the British out if they aren't on the verge of collapse. In the unlikely event Japan feels in control of China and steps between they seem likely to try and break the British hold, but that seems like it'd take a very long time. Germans and Americans would likely really want an independent India, but without a major war I am unsure if it is plausible. Full scale revolution might be inevitable with such an imbalanced zone of control, but no world wars at all makes the thing look tricky.

An Australia in a world with an expanding Japan, a weakening British Empire, and a hostile United States seems like a place the British would value immensely and it is fairly hard to really mess with on a geographic level outside of full scale naval war. Limited economic scope and population makes me fairly dismissive of independent Australian geopolitics, but I can see the Australians becoming increasingly annoyed with their colonial masters or instead becoming increasingly paranoid and fanatical British patriots depending on how they are treated.

Closing thoughts: My guess is most of the world is in worse shape with the probable exception of Europe. I would be rather concerned that 1955 and later, when the OP says major wars can start again, could experience absolutely devastating clusterfucks without the "softer" experience of two world wars providing progressive examples of increased firepower to build memories of how nasty peer powers get when they go to war. It seems likely that the first major war between great powers involves limited nuclear exchanges.

The optimistic take would be that the lack of the World War transfer of power to some of the worst mass murderers in history would offset my pessimistic take. A timeline without Nazis, Stalinists, or Maoists sounds really appealing, and most of my pessimism is tied to assuming various empires escalate their imperial tactics, while it might be just as feasible that the toning down and de-colonialism of our timeline was more a matter of ideological and technological progress than strict power relations. Without major wars and the Cold War we might see a much more rapid global economic integration, particularly if I am wrong on American Anglophobia and American economic and cultural penetration of British colonies is accepted. Most of my focus is also on the pre-1955 period, and that was a really ugly period in our own timeline that is often glossed over because the post-WWII period saw such a consistent set of growth that started in this period.

 

[Cetashwayo]

@Heavy W. Guy This scenario might interest you.

My own thoughts.

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To respond to this without spaghetti posting and to spur further discussion.

On America: The devastation of Europe by two wars had an important effect in driving American capital to take the place of British capital in investments across the world, including in Europe itself. America's role as financier, creditor and investor is a large part of the reason why the depression happened as it did - the British system had been replaced with an as of yet unstable American one. Another think to keep in mind is that America in this case would face stiff industrial competition from the developed economies of Europe, especially Germany.

On South America: You have to keep in mind that Britain had a financially imperialistic or at least hegemonic position in much of South America before the first world war. Its influence was everywhere and it bankrolled significant expansions of primary industry (mostly copper, beef, and other Southern Cone commodities), especially in Chile and Argentina. The British withdrew or cashed almost all their investments in order to finance the Great War - as a result their influence withered away and was comprehensively replaced by the American one. Without the war, you could see a shadow financial competition for investment between the Americans and British - the Americans may have claimed Monroe but American capital was mostly self-investing for most of the nineteenth century. After 1898, though, American imperialism became prominent enough that the British were in political and economic competition in what had traditionally been their economic sphere.

East Asia: One thing to keep in mind is that the most important founding point for both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China was the May Fourth Movement, in direct response to the feeling that China had been fucked over by Versailles. Without the first world war and the galvanizing effect of what was felt like a betrayal, plus the fact that the chaos in China will be much more closely 'supervised' by the hungry eyes of the great powers, you could have an entirely different situation develop there.

Britain and America: There are two potential big pressure points in an Anglo-American relationship. The first is Japan; Britain and it had an alliance before the war. The second is South America. In our timeline, America more or less quietly moved into the areas where Britain had abandoned its leadership and hegemony. Here, they may be in active competition in some areas. There is a significant Anglophilia in America, especially among the elite, but that wasn't immutable and the general assumption was that Britain would simply accede to American manifest destiny. If that does not come to pass, it will cause problems.

On Colonies: I don't think there's any reason for racial politics not to be binary. White supremacy is likely to remain an intense, all-pervasive system throughout the colonies, although there may be those who want to break out of that system, if for national interest more than anything else. The place where you are most likely to see this may be France, which has always had a theoretical commitment to a civic equality that has never been upheld in practice. You could see schemes to industralise French West Africa or Algeria in order to compete with the threat of Germany, but without the concomitant political or economic concessions to make such industralization anything other than a scheme to use non-white labor to achieve white political goals and may backfire tremendously by creating second class proletariats in their own colonies while not providing enough to local elites to justify them not trying to break away as well. Nevertheless, I suspect that autonomist movements will be more popular than independence ones, at least until a major power fucks up or independence movements receive backing from another power (say, the United States, which before the cold war was the favored model for many colonial independence movements).

Further, there is likely to be aggressive settler colonialism in this situation, which will only exacerbate racial divisions in the colonies.

On war after 1955: I think you're forgetting the possibility that multiple powers develop atomic bombs

 

[The Sandman]

IIRC, hadn't Germany effectively given up on the naval race with Britain just before WWI broke out IOTL? I feel like a Germany no longer building a navy explicitly to fight Britain coupled with Russia's ongoing industrialization and presumed subsequent strengthening of their military would lead to a British reassessment of their alignment with the Franco-Russian alliance.

 

[Alane1]

Hmm on Austria-Hungry I think there is a possibility that future emperor Ferdinand might be able to hold the empire together I am just not sure it would continue to hold together after his death, his children were all disqualified from inheriting the throne because his wife was the daughter of a bohemian noble instead of from a royal house which means the throne would pass to another branch of the Hapsburg house.

It would heavily depend on his successor and numerous internal factors within the empire.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

IIRC, hadn't Germany effectively given up on the naval race with Britain just before WWI broke out IOTL? I feel like a Germany no longer building a navy explicitly to fight Britain coupled with Russia's ongoing industrialization and presumed subsequent strengthening of their military would lead to a British reassessment of their alignment with the Franco-Russian alliance.

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IMO Anglo-German rapprochement is DOA as long as Kaiser Wilhelm is around. The man really was that incompetent, and war or no war he's still going to have a chip on his shoulder about his British cousins. After that, it depends on how Wilhelm III shakes out. OTL he flirted with the Nazi's and was fairly positive on fascism, but in a world where fascism never arises who knows how he might turn out.

 

[Alane1]

Even excluding Kaiser Wilhelm, there were also issues on the British side as well from what I recall though ultimately the main British political interest of the period was in no one power becoming a dominate force in Europe and thus become a threat.

 

[WyldCard4]

To respond to this without spaghetti posting and to spur further discussion.

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Snip because yeah, spaghetti isn't good for anyone.

America: I think there's an interesting question on the degree more capital is positive sum vs zero sum in this timeline. Clearly there are diminishing returns to investment, and I believe some of South America's economic problems come from investment in the region usually causing massive inflation, at least in the parts that are harder to get to? American and British investment competition might lead to a lot of local instability even if it is a net benefit.

There are similar questions on American vs European industrial competition. Comparative advantage means higher GDP, but likely lower wages, and without the post-WWII "America sets trade rules" I can see a ton of wasted effort, zero/negative sum competition, and inequality booming. Trade policies in colonies were set to the benefit of the ruling country, and there are definitely selfish reasons for America's idea of a free trade policy. Historically, the American percentage of GDP tied to international trade has always stayed relatively low, and I think things like "the rest of the world blew up their industrial base" and "massive stimulus due to World War II" might be oversold in the popular idea of economic history compared to structural factors inside the US itself. More protectionism in the United States might also offset the economic advantages of this timeline, but I have no idea how to compare it.

I kind of think the push from these factors is still in the direction of American Anglophobia, actually. British and American interests are deeply opposed when it comes to a lot of maritime rule sets so long as there is a British Empire (note World War One OTL had serious issues with the UK infringing on American rights that Wilson ignored) and I imagine America having some intense avarice over Indian markets. I would guess that the economic situation for most of the world is still a good deal better without the world wars, and even within the United States it seems likely to be better, but I suspect the mood is a lot more pessimistic. (This is the situation as of maybe 1954, further in the timeline things could change a lot.)

No World Wars and no Great Depression push strongly against general American regime change, though not sure if the New Deal style reforms happen by 1954 or not. Assuming nothing akin to the Cold War, I'd imagine US politics are much more internalized and the US never becomes as reliable an international partner even if America has to fight a World War level conflict later in the century. I would guess the lack of American popular uprisings, coups, foreign invasions, and similar would stick in this timeline as it has a ton to do with geographic and demographic factors.

East Asia: My impression is that Chinese internal politics barely matters in the 40 year stretch without a World War. The century of humiliation isn't over. I think the biggest factors:

1. No World Wars, so there are more sources of trade goods for Japan to fight the war in China.
2. Lots of continued imperial predation in China from Europe and possibly Russia.
3. Without effective monopolies, direct American and Japanese tensions are going to be much lower. Germany, France, the UK, the Netherlands and the US are all still players in the region and none of them are directing resources on a war footing.
4. China is going to remain unstable in the overhang of foreign imperialism and Qing collapse, even if the specific factions and visions change considerably.
5. Most of the same incentives are present for Japanese imperialism in China.

I am anticipating something very much like OTL's Pacific War within China up until OTL Pearl Harbor, and after that it to continue on much the same path but a bit worse as Japan continues to be able to go to war and lacks the intense pressure of crippling sanctions/war with the United States. China never came close to dislodging Japan, it was the American and Soviet threat to the Japanese and a ton of Communist and Nationalist PR trying not to admit that after the fact.

I think my points 3 and 5 are the weakest, as imperial supply chains might push effective monopolies anyway and Japan might end up very different due to butterflies or my underestimating factors such as the rise of the Soviet Union, but this is one of the areas I see as most likely to get significantly worse than OTL. Without something akin to the Soviet Union providing aid to the early PRC, the Allies beating Japan, and de-colonialism in general I think China has a much harder time than the murderously hard time it had in OTL.

Colonies: Fair enough. I was thinking from an American perspective the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires might make colonialism seem a lot less racial, but every empire has its own racial complexes and those seem unlikely to change to me. I continue to think racial politics in the US might change for the weird from our perspective (different migration patterns and social movements seem like they could do a lot) but I think that's heavily up to chance.

I believe America was seen in much friendlier terms in much of the colonial world before World War I and World War II where the US sided directly with imperial conquerors and replaced them as overseers. America's own history as a colony that achieved independence also gave a lot of common ground and good PR that got washed away no later than the Cold War where the Americans looked much more like an imperial overlord.

I might imagine a case like South East Asia in this timeline has much worse strategic and material outcomes in 2020 than in our timeline due to lack of the American trade regime, general de-colonial pushes, and other Cold War instituted forced stability in the whole neighborhood, but it is likely that anti-Americanism is much lower without the Americans actually being in charge or deciding to fight a colonial war on behalf of the fading French. The more optimistic take is that the lack of wars in 1914-1954 set the groundwork for economic development, international cooperation and de-colonialism that pushed various violence levels pretty far down.

Nuclear War: That one is definitely my biggest concern. 1954 seems early for major nuclear proliferation, but "major" isn't necessary for really bad outcomes and it's not like the war can't wait around for a while. I would be extremely nervous about say, a French-German blowup in the 1960s in this timeline wrecking Europe much faster and harder than our own world, possibly causing a fast forward on our version of the 20th century with de-colonization, European decay, and violent revolution all hitting much faster. The really pessimistic angle is full on nuclear exchange that wrecks the whole world, but I am very unsure if that is likely without the two binary power blocks of our Cold War.

 

[the atom]

Germany would be entirely different, and the Kaiserreich would likely still exist. However, we might expect that the Kaiser's power may be pulled back and weakened, and SPD pressure on the government would continue to rise.

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I thought the Kaisrreich was extremely hostile to democracy though? I can see the office of the Kaiser be eclipsed by the military and/or the Junkers but I don't think more democracy is an inevitable end result. The 20th century frequently demonstrated that authoritarian governments can actually be pretty agile in the face of populist pressure and Imperial Germany was fairly good at resisting it until the very end.

It's not hard to see Britain not getting involved, the policy of splendid isolation was already a thing and may very well continue.

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I'm intensely skeptical that 'splendid isolation' ever actually existed as a policy in any meaningful sense. Britain stayed out of continental conflicts that it didn't feel were in its immediate interests but that's literally always been the case, and it was heavily involved just about everywhere else.

Colonies: Fair enough. I was thinking from an American perspective the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires might make colonialism seem a lot less racial, but every empire has its own racial complexes and those seem unlikely to change to me.

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Their models were the old way of doing things though, settler colonialism and apartheid were the systems that all he modern colonial powers had adopted.

 

[Anchises]

I thought the Kaisrreich was extremely hostile to democracy though? I can see the office of the Kaiser be eclipsed by the military and/or the Junkers but I don't think more democracy is an inevitable end result. The 20th century frequently demonstrated that authoritarian governments can actually be pretty agile in the face of populist pressure and Imperial Germany was fairly good at resisting it until the very end.

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That is actually a pretty common missconception people have about Imperial Germany but it is simply not true.

Bismarck was already riding a wave he could barely control, he introduced the first social security net because the imperial system was really vulnerable.

By 1914 you had an SPD majority, a Reichstag that consistently blocked further military expansion and increasingly economically beleaguered Junker class.

 

[Madam Carstein]

East Asia: One thing to keep in mind is that the most important founding point for both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China was the May Fourth Movement, in direct response to the feeling that China had been fucked over by Versailles. Without the first world war and the galvanizing effect of what was felt like a betrayal, plus the fact that the chaos in China will be much more closely 'supervised' by the hungry eyes of the great powers, you could have an entirely different situation develop there.

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(I promise I'll get to the other stuff in due time but this is the first thing that jumped out to me.)

I'll be honest, my knowledge of Chinese politics prior to the Nanjing Decade but after the Xinhai Revolution is pretty spotty. The big figure to watch in the era in and around WWI is Yuan Shikai. The First World War was bad for China in general, but it was critically bad for his government. After Japan entered the war and seized Germany's concessions, most notably as Qingdao/Tsingtao, Yuan Shikai's government was presented with the 21 Demands. It was an ultimatum that simply killed his government but its refusal would have almost assuredly led to a disastrous war with Japan. So it was a perfect Catch-22 situation: no matter what response he had made, it is likely that it would have ended in disaster. But (mostly) accepting it IOTL destroyed his government's legitimacy and caused Yuan to attempt the rather strange political theatre of declaring himself Emperor of China.

It's entirely possible that, without the diplomatic and political opportunities provided by the First World War, that Japan would not issue the 21 Demands or any similar ultimatum. Moreover, without WWI, European powers and the United States have a lot more resources and reason to pay attention to China. This provides opportunities for China because it can play the rival imperial powers against each other.

So we have to ask ourselves: without the 21 Demands (I'm inclined to believe these would not happen without WWI) and other major acts of Japanese expansion in China, how do things go domestically in China? Yuan Shikai would probably hold on to power and China probably would remain a republic. This is an unstable period in Chinese history and historically-speaking was the precursor to the Warlord Era, so it's entirely possible that Yuan's government could end suddenly with a coup or assassination. But without an ultimatum from Japan, there's no real immediate threat to Yuan's power. He'd probably have at least some period of time to consolidate power and make his mark on Chinese history. This is a largely conservative military officer with a nationalist bent so his response to the political and social changes in China at the time will be interesting to see. Yuan Shikai served the Qing faithfully for decades, it's likely that he only really turned on them when he had more to gain by overthrowing them than he did by remaining loyal.

Some degree of militarism and warlordism would tbh probably still be a problem after Yuan's death (as it was IOTL) regardless of his success or failure in consolidating his regime's rule over China but I'm not sure it would be quite as severe if he had lived longer and successfully presided over at least some limited modernisation and development of China financed by foreign loans. This probably would have proven detrimental at least in some respect to China in the long-term but it's nothing that likely would have come to a head during his lifetime.

How does China fare after Yuan dies or is overthrown at, as a hypothetical, some point in the 1920's or 30's? There's a lot of ambiguity there, but I'd cautiously say better. China getting a brief period of consolidation and development would probably avert the worst excesses of the Warlord Era or at least make them less severe if they do happen.

Ideologically, things get interesting, the kind of conservative nationalist governance provided by Yuan and others like him isn't going to be seen as completely impotent in the face of imperialism. So it could very possibly set China on the path to consolidation under a conservative military leader.

 

[WyldCard4]

Their models were the old way of doing things though, settler colonialism and apartheid were the systems that all he modern colonial powers had adopted.

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I think the Soviet Union's imperialism in the Warsaw Pact and non-Russian parts of the USSR look a lot more like the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires than the settler colonies, and lasted decades after the settler model was being broken down, but the massive ideological shifts do make the continuity a lot trickier. The fact that the Warsaw Pact took over most of these specific territories might also be coloring my perspective.

On the other hand that is also an argument against my point that empires in Europe might make colonialism seem less racial to the US, as "colonialism" was always taken as very distinct from what the USSR was doing. Maybe in a timeline with a USSR and also non-decaying European colonial empires the United States would lump it all together into some kind of European imperialism, but having both systems active seems like a huge stretch even with a PoD that isn't before World War One.

I keep debating in my mind if the US in the no-WWI timeline is ripe for a socialist revolution or other leftist swing, but while that'd make an interesting story I think it's implausible. Greater economic competition and inequality seem like drivers, but the US economy and demography has always been so different from the economies that had successful socialist revolutions I think any American socialism would be an entirely different beast, particularly without any World Wars and especially without something like the Great Depression.

Snip Chinese history.

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Huh, my impression was of a much more consistent line of Chinese state collapse and Japanese expansionism (along with a ton of European and American intervention that wasn't particularly distinct in the eyes of the Chinese) into the region from at least the Russo-Japanese War until the end of World War II. It might be a matter of buying into Japanese and/or PRC propaganda about the situation being enough of a power vacuum that some kind of revolution or invasion was inevitable.

I think the US might be a really big factor in this timeline's Japan, as the British control over Latin American investment brought up earlier in the thread seems likely to create more capital searching for return on investment, and no World War I or Great Depression plus a seemingly stable China might create a ton of chances for partnership. The Americans were sticking their noses into colonial and imperialist projects in OTL, but also might seem like a less hostile devil to a nationalist China than the European powers. Besides general lack of confidence in this projection, the biggest counter-weight seems to be the American ability to cut and run if things get bad, as there is nothing vital for them in the region and the United States tends to be inward focused. Even in OTL, American interest in China was most of why things went hostile with the Japanese. I would guess that American interest in this region would lead to strong resentment, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't help boost Chinese independence and strength.

 

[bookwyrm]

I wonder, Japan's not going to be blind to the fact that Yuan Shikai would be keeping his head above water playing the game with different European powers and then using the European loans and resources to keep the Beiyang Army as his trump card securing his regime, nor to the fact that in general the European great powers are going to be colluding to keep Japan "in check" and without the accouterments of a great colonial empire herself. With this in mind do we have a longer lasting and tighter association between the young modernists of the world, with Japan more strongly supporting the Kuomintang and America also getting in on a little of that action as liberal democracy is still a sexy underground resistance to the powers that be?

 

[the atom]

I think the Soviet Union's imperialism in the Warsaw Pact and non-Russian parts of the USSR look a lot more like the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires than the settler colonies, and lasted decades after the settler model was being broken down, but the massive ideological shifts do make the continuity a lot trickier. The fact that the Warsaw Pact took over most of these specific territories might also be coloring my perspective.

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This fact isn't relevant to someone comparing the two systems in 1914 though. At this point the old polyglot land empires were seen by the rest of Europe as rotten and decrepit, whereas maritime white colonialism still seemed like the wave of the future.

 

[Cetashwayo]

IMO Anglo-German rapprochement is DOA as long as Kaiser Wilhelm is around. The man really was that incompetent, and war or no war he's still going to have a chip on his shoulder about his British cousins. After that, it depends on how Wilhelm III shakes out. OTL he flirted with the Nazi's and was fairly positive on fascism, but in a world where fascism never arises who knows how he might turn out.

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One frankly wonders if there could have been a different outcome to the 1911 Agadir Crisis that could have defused some of these tensions. Willhelm II and the more militaristic German staff fixated on Morocco as a pressure point to cow France and force Britain to abandon them. Instead, the crisis just made Germany look bad, pushed Britain closer to France and all Germany got out of it was Neu Kamerun, a territory which it would only enjoy for 3 years before the war started and it was all taken away. I think Agadir is a critical point to understanding a lot of the immediate buildup to the war because it hardened British opinion of Germany.

I thought the Kaisrreich was extremely hostile to democracy though? I can see the office of the Kaiser be eclipsed by the military and/or the Junkers but I don't think more democracy is an inevitable end result. The 20th century frequently demonstrated that authoritarian governments can actually be pretty agile in the face of populist pressure and Imperial Germany was fairly good at resisting it until the very end.

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To demonstrate what @Anchises is talking about there's a story from the 1880s which is meant to illustrate the coming of democracy to Germany. It's about an old baron who runs for a seat in an East-Elbian riding/borough. He's won every election for years and years despite never actually doing anything because he's the local lord and that's just how things work. He's the guy who wins the election so people vote for him. Then, suddenly, the SPD field a candidate in the area and do vigorous, intense campaigning - the pioneer to the modern election campaign. They win the election and the lord, confused and lost, is consigned to the dustbin of history, living out the rest of his days on his estate, excluded from political life.

And this is a metaphor for much of the democratic push in continental Europe to 1914. Across Central Europe there was growing pressure that was granted in many cases for universal manhood suffrage; in the immediate period before the war parts of Austria, Scandinavia, Italy, etc all granted manhood suffrage. And in the face of this push the old monarchies seemed effectively impotent; the Romanovs were on life support after 1905, the Habsburgs had to give concessions, and even the Kaiser had in 1913 been embarrassed by the Saverne affair where the reichstag expanded its powers into the military. The Kaiser despised the reichstag, of course, but the Kaiser was seen as an antiquated and polarizing figure who was holding back the new Germany.

Also important is that as suffrage expanded so did the socialist parties. Across Europe these parties, which had not yet divided into their social democratic and communist wings due to the war and Bolshevik Revolution, consistently and effectively expanded their voteshare every election. Much of German politics was about containing and maintaining an electoral wall against the SPD, because the SPD winning a majority would have been doomsday for the powers of the executive and the monarchy.

What you are thinking of was the fascist surge after the war, which was of an entirely different temperament. The major difference is that the fascists applied socialist lessons in mass politics and mobilized it for their own benefit; the monarchies were completely incapable of taking advantage of mass politics because their entire mode of operation was pre-political. Their destruction is part of what allowed fascism to fill the vacuum left on the right-wing.

This fact isn't relevant to someone comparing the two systems in 1914 though. At this point the old polyglot land empires were seen by the rest of Europe as rotten and decrepit, whereas maritime white colonialism still seemed like the wave of the future.

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These old empires were also explicitly influenced by the new colonialism. Nicholas II put out guides for foreigners to Siberia that presented it as a new frontier ala the American West, and there was an intense intellectual ferment in Constantiniyye where some saw Turks as bringing a civilizing mission to the Arabs and other less developed minorities of the empire that emerged at the turn of the century.

Ideologically, things get interesting, the kind of conservative nationalist governance provided by Yuan and others like him isn't going to be seen as completely impotent in the face of imperialism. So it could very possibly set China on the path to consolidation under a conservative military leader.

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Really interesting stuff. How would Yuan Shikai have dealt with the warlords? I am not really very familiar with the contents of his reign other than he declared himself emperor. How would Sun Yat-Sen fit into this? As the major opposition to Shikai's conservative order?

I wonder, Japan's not going to be blind to the fact that Yuan Shikai would be keeping his head above water playing the game with different European powers and then using the European loans and resources to keep the Beiyang Army as his trump card securing his regime, nor to the fact that in general the European great powers are going to be colluding to keep Japan "in check" and without the accouterments of a great colonial empire herself. With this in mind do we have a longer lasting and tighter association between the young modernists of the world, with Japan more strongly supporting the Kuomintang and America also getting in on a little of that action as liberal democracy is still a sexy underground resistance to the powers that be?

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America's main concern in China was threefold: One, maintain an open door for missionary work and trade. Two, prevent any European partition or invasive annexation of Chinese territory that would threaten this open door. Three, to influence China in their direction. Yuan Shikai could be a real problem for them comparatively because he may seek out friendship among some of the Europeans (especially Britain) and act as, well, a conservative emperor and nationalist rather than a liberal. But at the same time, he's a stable guide for the country, so I doubt America would stop doing business with him. It may play host to all kinds of Chinese opposition sections, though, especially if Shikai cracks down and Sun or other opposition leaders have to flee China.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

I wonder, Japan's not going to be blind to the fact that Yuan Shikai would be keeping his head above water playing the game with different European powers and then using the European loans and resources to keep the Beiyang Army as his trump card securing his regime, nor to the fact that in general the European great powers are going to be colluding to keep Japan "in check" and without the accouterments of a great colonial empire herself. With this in mind do we have a longer lasting and tighter association between the young modernists of the world, with Japan more strongly supporting the Kuomintang and America also getting in on a little of that action as liberal democracy is still a sexy underground resistance to the powers that be?

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't a major driver of Japan's turn towards militarism/monarcho-fascism/whatever (putting an ideological label on WW2 Japan is a slippery thing) the perception that Japan got stiffed/disrespected by the other Great Powers at Versailles? No Versailles means no squabbling over Germany's East Asian/Chinese holdings, no feeling of being stiffed, etc.

One frankly wonders if there could have been a different outcome to the 1911 Agadir Crisis that could have defused some of these tensions. Willhelm II and the more militaristic German staff fixated on Morocco as a pressure point to cow France and force Britain to abandon them. Instead, the crisis just made Germany look bad, pushed Britain closer to France and all Germany got out of it was Neu Kamerun, a territory which it would only enjoy for 3 years before the war started and it was all taken away. I think Agadir is a critical point to understanding a lot of the immediate buildup to the war because it hardened British opinion of Germany.

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It's an interesting idea, though honestly I'm convinced that as long as Wilhelm II is around any kind of Anglo-German (or really Anyone-German) realignment is going to be tricky. Wilhelm was basically a proto-Trump: bullying but indecisive, obsessed with the pomp and ceremony of their position but utterly disinterested in the day-to-day minutiae, convinced on their own brilliance, reckless, and self-absorbed. What's more is that, much like Trump, there was basically no adult in the room who could reign him. Even if you had a different cabinet that managed to avoid/defuse the Agadir crisis, you'll still have a series of unforced errors like the Daily Telegraph Affair.

The outbreak of the war gave the cabinet an opening to sideline Wilhelm - absent that opportunity you're still going to have him running around sticking his dick into foreign policy matters willy nilly (wokka wokka).

 

[Cetashwayo]

It's an interesting idea, though honestly I'm convinced that as long as Wilhelm II is around any kind of Anglo-German (or really Anyone-German) realignment is going to be tricky. Wilhelm was basically a proto-Trump: bullying but indecisive, obsessed with the pomp and ceremony of their position but utterly disinterested in the day-to-day minutiae, convinced on their own brilliance, reckless, and self-absorbed. What's more is that, much like Trump, there was basically no adult in the room who could reign him. Even if you had a different cabinet that managed to avoid/defuse the Agadir crisis, you'll still have a series of unforced errors like the Daily Telegraph Affair.

The outbreak of the war gave the cabinet an opening to sideline Wilhelm - absent that opportunity you're still going to have him running around sticking his dick into foreign policy matters willy nilly (wokka wokka).

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You could potentially have an interesting situation happen where Willhelm II fucks up Agadir (ie he provokes France too much and has to backpeddle rather than get Neu Kamerun), then when Saverne in 1913 rolls around the military and conservative portion of his cabinet along with Willhelm II himself panic because they think that between Agadir and Saverne the monarchy is facing a critical loss of face. So they try to escalate and dig their heels in on Saverne and when the SPD trigger mass protests there's an incident where they open fire on protestors - and the public by and large turns against the monarchy and the government collapses because if they don't there could be a general strike. Thus Germany becomes embroiled in an insular political scandal and becomes diplomatically FUBAR for the next few years with the Kaiser out of commission.