Day 12: Austria

[ingemann]

Well back to the issue, well Austria is a nice enough country; well functioning, nice cuisine, both culture and nature for the tourists, a general pleasant population etc.

As for history, the stupidest thing the allies did was to weaken it to the degree they did, ensuring that the Austrians would seek a union with Germany, while dissolving central Europe into minor states which Germany could easily dominate, the intelligent thing the allies could do, was to do their best to keep the former empire together as some kind of union, of course they likely wouldn't succeed, but their historical acts was moronic.

[ingemann]

  A couple thoughts.  A conserva-green could be  a supporter of the Ecological Democrats in Germany perhaps?  IIRC they once got 3% of the vote in a Bavarian parliamentary election.  
   Concerning Austria, its a shame that it wasn't allowed to keep the northern half of the South Tyrol and at least part of the Sudetenland after world war one.  Merging the southern and western part of the Sudetenland would have created a really funky border, but would have been the just decision, clearly, in terms of ethnic self determination.
    Some of my best memories of trips to Europe are from Austria.  A week spent on the Worthersee when I was 15, visiting the Salzburg area and then Vienna when I was a college student.
I hope to visit in the next few years as well.

Why on earth would anyone split South Tyrol in half? The whole of South Tyrol was at the time, and is still today safe for Bozen, ethnically homogenous German Tyrolean.

You do realize South Tyrol includes the (overwhelmingly Italian) Trentino?

When Austrians speak of South Tyrol, nobody includes Trentino.

South Tyrol is only the nothern part of Trentino-Alto-Adige.

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The problem with that is that Überetsch-Unterland is 64% German speaking, while Bozen is 26% German. So Bozen plus Überetsch-Unterland would be 45-50% German speaking. Of course some serious gerrymanding where only the Adige valley in Überetsch-Unterland was included we would see a clearer Italian majority.