AH Challenge: best off possible 20th century

witch a latest POD of 1880 how can the 20th century be made better? The rules are is that a european war between at a minimum 2 powers around 1910-1920 msut still happen in some way. Extra poitns if we have a bad evnet like WWIII or a second great depression and the TL is still utopic as of 2004. I'll post my own entry later it deals with trotsky siding with another faction.

Better for who? Germany winning WW1 would be better for world as a whole but worse for E Europe. Arabs winning war of 1948 would be better for Palestinians but worse for Jews.

"worse for E Europe"

Why? A bunch of semi-independent states w/ German/Austrian princelings as kings (probably semi-constitutional, like the German Kaiser) strikes me as far better than the Russian Civil War (10 million dead, incl. 500,000 to 1.5 million Jews killed in pogroms in Ukraine), Stalin's collectivization program (between 7 and 14.5 million dead), the purges, the German invasion of Poland (1/6 of Poland's population dies), the Holocaust (12 million dead), the brutal Nazi war in the Soviet Union (20-odd million dead), the ethnic-cleansing of the Eastern Germans (15 million booted; between 2 and 5 million killed), and the long night of Bolshevik domination.

At the very least, the German preoccupation with order and safety means that angry mobs bent on trashing the Jewish shetls and neighborhoods would get the proverbial smackdown laid on them.

Best possible 20th Century...

1) "Great Man" way of going about it...

Hitler becomes an artist or priest

Stalin becomes a priest

Mao becomes a "gentleman farmer" (his dad was one; perhaps he continues in his footsteps)

Lenin becomes a lawyer or bureaucrat (the path he was on before his brother was hanged by Alexander III, which radicalized Lenin).

Trotsky seduced by the Paris high life and forgets about fomenting revolution in Russia

Nicholas II isn't so dense and decides to quit interfering with the Duma. This'll lead to the lower classes having more of an interest in the maintenance of the established order and thus less radicalism.

2) Better Scenarios

Perhaps the "Wilhelmine Regency" scenario comes around and Germany manages to stay out of WWI (though perhaps they help out Austria in some limited capacity). Austria attacks Serbia and Russia attacks Austria and both empires eventually collapse into their constituent ethnicities. Germany assimilates the majority-German regions (Austria, Sudetenland) of Austria, there's an independent Hungary, and the smaller Habsburg-ruled groups (Croats, etc) shake off Hungarian domination and become independent.

Serbia and Austria-Hungary partition Bosnia. I'm not sure how that would go around; perhaps the Empire decides that taking on another batch of minority groups isn't good for stability and thus Serbia gets the Serb parts of Bosnia in exchange for certain things, while Austria (which already has Croatia) gets the rest. How did the Hapsburgs treat Muslims? Regardless of that, this scenario probably will prevent the stuff that led up to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand