Europe and its Wars-

In the last millennium there were 3 major wars Europe, the thirty year war that ended with defragmentation of the Holly Roman Empire to hundreds of non imperial fractions. Then we have the hundred years war that started with William the Conqueror winning by accident a very improbable victory at 1066, and ended with the “Entente Cordiale” peace treaty, signed between France and Great Brittany at 1904. This would make this war rather a thousand than hundred years war. After all what were the eighteen century colonial wars between England and French, if not part of the same event at 1066, and luckily ended with establishment of United States of America, or the Napoleon wars if not continuation of the same war? And then we have the eighty years war what started as the Great War, than changed its name to WWI after the WWII came to existence, and continued practically uninterrupted until the disassembling of the Soviet empire at 1992. It lasted only 78 year, but lets drop this detail.

You are probably right about the conspiracy of the Prussian generals, but even they couldn’t do what they have done, if the two Caesars would not have a great problem with their political legitimacy. After all, during their long reign, ( at the eve of the Great War in Franz Josef’s case it was 66 years and Wilhelm’s 55 years), the countries they ruled went throw major changes. The most important is the rapid industrialization, that created huge growth of urban population, that happened to learn lately to read newspapers, after the basic education became obligatory. Fables and fairy tales ceased to be good enough to give legitimacy to these rulers. As to the Czar, in his case the problem was not the over literacy of the population, but rather the literacy of the Czar himself, who believed in the fables and fairy tales on which he based the legitimacy of his rule. Non of these three clowns thought for a moment, about having problem of their legitimacy. Who did understand the problem of legitimacy, was Franz Ferdinand, The Poor Ferdinand, who was killed while working on finding solution to the problem of legitimacy of the Hapsburg anachronism.

Pity, if not killed, probably Russia would have become major economic power of the continent within 20 years, being in balance only with Great Brittany and France. Germany would probably shrink into today’s size, plus some more portal cities in the Baltic See (Koenigsberg for example). Russia would probably under pretext of Slavophilism and orthodox church philism kick out the Turks from Europe and northern Anatolian, and the Ottoman empire, would shrink to small Turkey, Kurdistan and Arabia, and being neglected by others in their backwardness, ignorance and rigor religiousness until someone would discover the oil reserves in the Arab desert.

Conclusion, my alternative history thesis just proves the historical determinisms, since more or less this is what happened anyway, just in the way were murdered at least 100 million Europeans and only God knows how many non Europeans, if we count the Communistic murderers of Asia as part of the story.