1910-1912 : The Liberation of South Tirol
It had been a long war. It had lasted 6 years and cost is 15m pounds. But luckily, the defeated powers were paying war reparations.
Germany would have now liked a long period of peace. Many factories had gone bankrupt while we were concentrating on the war, and the easy way out was chosen, letting the Liberals govern. The bankrupt factories would then disappear automatically.
In the year 1910, though, Germany was at war again. In April 1910, there were three major wars in the world : Russia's conquest of North England, The German-Austrian Brother's war and Italian Liberation of South Tirol.
What had happened ? Russia had declared war on a weakened UK, but that wasn't our problem.
Italy had been fighting the Great War at our side, and had gotten three provinces from Austria : Lombardia, Veneto and Istria. But somehow, they weren't content and they wanted South Tirol as well. They declared war on their old enemy, Austria, who regrettably was allied with France. So our ally was at war with two Great Powers at the same time.
We like a fair fight, but we couldn't just join in this war, since Italy was the aggressor. But we could take out Austria using our Cultural Hegemony Casus Belli, which was always available. So in April 1910, Germany was at war again, with Austria, and sending war subsidies to Italy.
Italy obviously needed help, since it could not fight against Austria and France at the same time...
Therefore it was a relief for them that we opened a second front. As history had already shown, Austria is not able to win a war against Germany.
In June 1910, Italy was still struggling. We had sent relief troops there, to push back the Austrians.
and we were confident that Austria would be soon out of the picture.
In July 1910, there was a distraction - a communist revolt.
To crush it, we mobilized, since our professional army was at the front. In August 1910, the revolt was defeated.
That didn't distract us from our war against Austria. Now Italy could concentrate on the French front, and we were confident they would be able to equalize.
At last, Italy made a white peace with France and Austria. They didn't achieve their goal, acquire Southern Tirol, but it could have gone much worse for them without our intervention. In January 1911, another distraction, a Reactionary Revolt.
The war with Austria dragged on until October 1911, when we were able to occupy all of it and get a 100% score.
There was another minor front, since Austria had a couple of colonies in Africa, which of course we occupied.
Since we are a good ally, and we liked the way Italy fought at our side during the Great War, we made Austria cede South Tirol to Italy. Now hopefully Italy would be happy and we would not be dragged into another war. The Ottomans acquired Dalmatia, the Netherlands acquired Western Hungary (Transdanubia) and Krakow acquired Austrian West Galicia.
Belgium acquired a colony too, which wasn't that helpful since they were in France's sphere.
Meanwhile, the UK was struggling against communists in their overseas territories. But the revolt had been crushed in the British Isles.
Their war with Russia had ended in Status Quo.
In June 1912, Germany was at peace. But two unpleasant things happened. First, Italy would not give us military access and it had even allied with Russia. Now that was mildly annoying, since we had built our long-term strategy on being able to move troops from Germany all the way to Persia. Now our troops in the Balkans and beyond would have to come back to Germany by ship.
The relationship with Italy had been getting tenser, as they were trying to get some of our spherelings into their sphere of influence. Of course we would not allow that and we would discredit them.
As Austria had been weakened it had become a Secondary Power and at their place Scandinavia became a Great Power. They used to be our sphereling, now they were just our ally and they too, for some reason, refused to give us military access. That was bad news, since we were planning to use their province in England as a springboard to invade Britain.
The loss of Scandinavia was more than compensated by the acquisition of Spain in our sphere of influence.
But at least we had a good balance sheet and our finances were again over 10M pounds. As we had Laissez Faire, the industry was running itself.
We had a literacy rate of 95%, which was the fifth highest in the world, and we were technologically advanced. Only in navy technologies we were lagging behind, but that didn't worry us, since after defeating the UK hardly any navy could threathen us.