Neutrality Maintained

When the year 1914 began nobody knew that the powder keg lying beneath the European powers was about to explode very soon, but when news of the assassination of the Austrian heir Franz Ferdinand reached the major cities of the continent, the tension was nail-biting. German high command led by field marshal Moltke the Younger, which had anticipated for a war against Russia and France, had recently revised the Schlieffen plan of 1905 to due information that the British Empire seemed more willing to join a continental war than previously thought. So a change of tactics was necessary: while originally Germany wanted to knock out France through a two-pronged attack going through Alsace-Lorraine, a German territory, and the neutral country of Belgium, German high command instead chose a different method to deal with France. By merely occupying Luxembourg and stalling a few miles near the Franco-German border until the relatively weaker Russian Empire was defeated, Germany hoped to avoid an escalation of the war. And it worked. German troops managed to capture and hold several key positions in French Lorraine early on, while the combined forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary and from spring 1915 onward Romania captured vast amounts of territory from Russia. Furthermore Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria managed to occupy all of Serbia by the end of 1915. And Great Britain remained neutral, as did Italy after being promised some Italian-inhabited territories from Austria.

In the spring of 1917, the war was over. Millions of lives were lost, the economies of the warring nations were exhausted. And the Central Powers had won. In the Treaty of Strasbourg France ceded small but strategically important pieces of territory to Germany and neutral Belgium, and they sold most of French Equatorial Africa as well as French Dahomey to Germany, too, in exchange for a lowered amount of reparations. In the Treaty of Budapest Serbia had to cede about half of their territory to Bulgaria and the rump state had to pledge allegiance to the Habsburgs, maintaining only nominal independence. The Treaty of Königsberg formalized a few changes to the Treaty of Riga, a temporary peace deal between Germany and Russia, which saw the independence of Finland, the United Baltic Duchy, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as the Romanian annexation of Bessarabia. 

But while there no longer was war between nations, within nations there was still unrest. The death of Franz Joseph and economic problems caused Austria-Hungary to dissolve in 1921, with various complex compromises being made in order to avoid bloodshed and chaos. Russia had already seen the abolition of the tsarist monarchy during the late days of the war and a civil war between republican forces, communists and nationalists erupted, which saw the birth of several new states. Lastly France too saw fighting: the socialists, who only reluctantly agreed to support the war effort, revolted in France's big cities. Within a few weeks several neighbors of cities like Marseilles, Lyon, Montpellier, and Paris were under red control. In late 1920 the elected government fled Paris and the European mainland to Algiers, with only areas such as Brittany and parts of the Provence centered around the navy port of Toulon were still under firm government control. The French retreat had big consequences. Several French colonies were occupied by foreign powers, often with implicit French consent, and several were turned into Council of Nations mandates. Furthermore many conservative Frenchmen escaped the hexagon, heading for North Africa and the Senegal, causing a drastic demographic shift there. 

What will the future bring after the catastrophic Great War and the revolution which followed? Only time (and maybe future maps) will tell...