I have three major criteria when picking maps to feature on Map Monday: 1) the map is well done, 2) the scenario is unique and interesting and 3) your reaction on social media when I share it with you is generally positive. Now occasionally I will ignore one of those three points if I feel there is something important to say about the map, like this one:
This is "
Europe After a Central Powers Victory" by Blomma. As you can see this is a good map. The colors are nice, the borders are realistic and the art style is more complex then the usual MSPaint jobs you see in our community (no offense, Bruce). That being said...I don't know how plausible the scenario is. Reading up on the short nations descriptions that went with the map and this
brief timeline, I find this comes off more like a German-wank then a realistic post-WWI Europe where the Central Powers were victorious.
For one, I don't see Germany annexing all of Belgium. Although their post-war plans for that nation were vague, Germany did try to foster
Flemish nationalism and Robert Cowley in his
What If? series penned a counterfactual scenario regarding a Germany victory in WWI that had a map of Belgium. Cowley speculated that the Germans would annex some territory in the east, but he believed a "tributary state" (called Flanders-Wallonia) would have been created by the Germans from the rest.
Additionally, the eastern borders don't make much sense. It ignores actual German client states carved out of Eastern Europe during the war; like
Poland,
Courland, the
Don Republic and
Belarus. While in some areas local control was minimal, annexing so much territory causes problems. You will need to keep troops to occupy the area and assume the costs of administration. Someone has to pay for this and demanding the locals to do it will lead to resentment and rebellions. The Germans wanted to create buffer states in the east to protect them from Bolsheviks and while the military wanted more direct control, peace-time Germany would have less reasons as time goes on to listen to the army.
So if I have so many issues with the scenario, why did I choose to feature this map? As I said before the map is good and I have been on a WWI kick lately, so this map just caught me in a good mood. Although it has its issues, it sparked some fun imagination of what I thought Europe would look like after WWI. Its for those reasons that I decided that Blomma's map deserved a closer look by others.
