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If the Schlieffen Plan had worked, the Germany that emerged victorious would be unrecognizable — an authoritarian monarchy with a rubber-stamp house of represen
by cstross 10y ago
If the Schlieffen Plan had worked, the Germany that emerged victorious would be unrecognizable — an authoritarian monarchy with a rubber-stamp house of representatives that had demonstrated decisively that militaristic aggression got results.
There would still — probably — have been a round two in the 1930s or 1940s; WW1 was in some respects a revenge fight for the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. But without the gridlock of the western front to force the hothouse development of new weapons and tactics, the military tools of that second conflict would be much closer to those of our actually-existing WW1; that is, I don't believe we'd have ultimately avoided the bloodbathe of trench warfare — we'd just have postponed it (and retarded the development of civil aviation as an accidental side-effect).
The real question is whether the ancien regime would have survived (no collapse of the monarchies; the Hapsburg, Wilhelmine and Romanov dynasties survive into the second half of the 20th century, and those guys called Lenin and Trotsky and Hitler are just fringe radicals) and if so, what the consequences would have been further down the line. One thing's for sure: no European Convention on Human Rights!
(Source: lots of speculation here, but I'm an SF author with a track record in alternate history and this stuff is meat and drink ...)
- danieltillett 10y agoWhile I agree with you that that this is a really interesting topic to think about, I don't agree that Germany (Prussia really) would have remained an authoritarian monarchy with a rubber-stamp democracy. There was already a cultural shift before the Great War towards greater democracy and human rights - the war can be seen as the last gasp of the dying monarchies to hold onto power in the face of this movement. We also would not have had the singular individual who was Hitler and all the damage he did. I think we would have ended up with something very close to a full intergrated EU economically dominated by Germany with a few internal borders shifted around and a declining U.K. outside the EU.
- cstross 10y agoI suspect a declining UK facing a continental hegemonic superpower — anathema to British foreign policy going back half a millennium or more — would not have gone down quietly. And with an overseas empire behind it, the result could well have been an even more ruinous escalation of the Dreadnought Race of the 1900s, possibly leading to a full-blown naval war and/or British attempts to overturn the post-Schlieffen War settlement. Whatever, it would have been messy — very messy. (However, the move towards social democracy in Germany was a thing pre-war, and if anything it was the capitulation to nationalism of the moderate left that opened the door to the radical left and communist fringe across Europe; it's interesting to speculate where things might have ended up if the standard bearer for hardline socialism had been someone like Rosa Luxemburg rather than Vladimir Lenin.)
- danieltillett 10y agoYes the Great War was a continuation of British foreign policy of the last 500 years. I think the Germans would have had their hands full intergrating their EU that the UK would have been allowed its slow decline in peace. I really do think the Great War broke the long slow march towards democracy and moderation that had started in the 19th C. Germany in the early 20th C was the centre of modernisation and Liberalism and if it wasn't for the war there is nothing to suspect that this wouldn't have continued.