I recently found an excellent blog named Strange Maps that, as its name says, posts strange and interesting maps online. Today I would like to comment on one in particular.

I have never heard of this footnote in history before but my mind is racing from the possibility of a United States of Greater Austria. The idea, championed by Aurel Popovici, was dreamed up by a group of intellectual advisers to the Archduke of Austria-Hungary. Just imagine what a huge alteration to history this could have been if it was adopted.

If you can’t imagine it, allow me to give you a brief history lesson. It was the assassination of this same Archduke that began the First World War. The assassin was fighting for Bosnia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to unite with Serbia. The First World War laid the foundation for the Second World War. The devastation of that war created the international system we have today. The most famous component of this is the UN, but it also includes organizations like the IMF and the World Bank. Today’s Middle East troubles began with the partition of the Ottoman Empire after WWI and escalated when Israel was created following WWII.

The question that will define this alternate history is if this new government satisfied the minorities in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire would there still have been a First World War? I’ve often heard it taught that the assassination of the Archduke was merely the spark that ignited the war. The implication being that if the Archduke survived, something else would have provoked the war because everyone was itching for it anyway. Is that really true?

The answer really depends on how comfortable the ethnic groups would be in the USGA. If Popovici’s plan worked these ethnicities would be satisfied with the autonomy given them within the federation. This should end most of the terrorist violence plaguing the country. The hardliners that remained would not have public support and as a result there would be little desire for war. On the other hand, if the ethnic groups still weren’t satisfied, the same scenario would play out as it did in our history.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic but I would like to think the USGA, by giving these people a stake in their own governance, would have turned them away from war. I don’t think any country would have been bold enough to invade another. Certainly most countries wanted war but they didn’t want to play the part of the aggressor. Everyone was simply waiting for an excuse to come to them. Since the Balkans would have been pacified by this representative government, I can’t think of another area in Europe chaotic enough to give a pretext for war.

Without a WWI, Tsarist Russia would have remained strong enough to suppress the Bolshevik revolution. This would have meant no cold war, or at least not an anti-communist one. The German Empire would have remained intact and there would have been no WWII. Without the economic consequences of WWI, the world’s economy would have continued to expand uninterrupted. However I don’t know if the Great Depression was inevitable. Economists are still arguing about what caused it.

Don’t let me paint too rosy a picture of the world. Although China would not have become communist because there was no USSR to prop up the Chinese communists, the country would still be ravaged by feuding warlords and an aggressive Japan. I think war between the US and Japan was inevitable too. Nuclear politics would be drastically different. Since Germany did not suffer defeat, there was no Nazi party around to seize power and chase Jewish physicists away to the US. Plus without the fright of a WWII the US probably wouldn’t have thrown much effort into a nuclear program. These two possibilities together mean Germany likely would have been the first country to develop a nuclear bomb.

I wish I knew the details of this proposed United States of Greater Austria. Would it be a republic or a constitutional monarchy? Would it have a parliamentary system or presidential one? Did Popovici model this new government after the USA or did the similarities end with the name? If you know of any good books covering this, let me know in the comments.