Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10975360-20131129121937/@comment-32656-20131130142911

No, the Brits went to war with Germany because the Germans violated Belgian neutrality. Wasn't really "over" Belgium. Germans would not take any territory other than possibly parts of the Belgian Congo. There's simply no logical reason for them to take over any portion of Belgium itself.

Of those, only A-H was in decline. Both France and Russia - especially Russia - were getting stronger. Heck, that is a significant part of why Germany was so willing to back A-H.

Italy, the second the Germans allied with A-H, was on the way out as an ally. They'd have ceased to be an ally within a few years had the war not started.

Germany would have remained mildly more powerful than the rest of mainland Europe on an individual basis, like they were before the war. No more.

As for the concept of a fleet on that scale, the answer is simply that they would not do it. Germany building such a fleet was unpopular within Germany, and excessively expensive. The last German Naval Bill prior to WW1 barely happened - another would not have went through. Brits, no similar problem.

France probably would have become one again. And, as I noted, under a Bourbon. Dreyfuss Affair was fairly insignificant, imo - not something that there was a remote chance of a government turnover with.

With a 1914 loss, you'd now have both the Bonapartes and Republicans viewed as failures. Orleanists, not so much. You'd see one of the two Bourbon pretenders - probably the Legitimist one - declared king, likely by the military.

The reason why there was not a King named after 1870 is because there was two branches - Orleans and Bourbon - and no decision could be made between them. This was a major political undercurrent of French politics until the 1880s, actually.

After the 1890s, those two branches became the same - so there was a very solid claim. The other "Bourbon" claim, more or less insignificant and only in theory as the man did not make any sort of active claim to the throne.

Remember, Sam, through the last couple of centuries there has been three factions to French politics - Bonapartists, Bourbonists, and Republicans. Republicans have been on top for past while, but given a sufficient political will and crisis, that could change.

You'd see a military government, and then a constitutional monarchy declared.

Mussolini came to power because of WW1. Without a big war and Italian involvement, he's not coming to power. The vast majority of what Italy desired with regards to territory was part of A-H, remember. And A-H did not have long.

In the German system, that would have gotten him into the German Parliament. The amount of votes needed to get into that is far less than you'd think. And anti-semites got quite a bit more votes than 1-2% in the last German election prior to the war.

Germany would have been the strongest economic power like before the war. But not its center - most European countries were not geared towards the "European Economy" at that time.

In many ways, the US was already a superpower by the time of WW1. Without WW1 getting them much of anything, Japan would not be in a position to fight such a war.

His position was not "untenable" - WW1 made it that way. He would have had to eventually reform things to some degree.

The idea that the communists had an organization that was like that is vastly overrated. Many groups were far, far, more organized than they were. Truth be told, the Bolsheviks got lucky.