What exactly is to be gained by making your empire larger...

what exactly is to be gained by making your empire larger? ie what is the main motivation in ruling large chunks of land? Money? influence? why do states go to war over tiny tiny land areas?

More people to tax, more corpses for the army and resources to fuel the rest of your empire.

How can germans even pretend that the Versailles treaty was bordering on cruel when this is what they exerted on Russia. God knows the conditions they'd have wanted to subjugate France and England to.

Also don't know about your question OP. Sorry :c.

i dont think that map is accurate in any way. austria didnt even want territory because it was collapsing and germany for the most part wanted to set up independent and puppet states.

Autism, people want good looking borders and lands that belonged to them according to some ancient saga.

Depends on the specific land you're gaining. But people to tax and prestige to be gained are pretty much always there.

Oh I didn't even mean only those occupation zones, which anyways, would've been temporary, though clearly they were out to shatter Russia and dispel Slavic pride which had been annoying them in the Balkans.

Really, the most appaling of their terms were the financial reparations they exorted from Russia beyond surpassed what would be asked from them by the Entente, and there's also that touchy subject that they kept Russian prisoners long shackled to them by exploiting them as forced workforce.

>tfw what could have been

Empires usually don't make themselves large for no reason. Sometimes they want fertile land though most times it's due to a need for security.

Rome was a small city-state in the middle of the peninsula so they had to conquer their neighbors that were threatending them so they can no longer do so. They had to conquer their conquered guys neighbors because hey it's apart of Rome isn't it? Some of their neighbors are owned by other countries like Syracuse or is coveted by other countries like Sicily so they had to fight with them. But then Carthage was being a dick so as payback they destroyed them and fucked with everyone that supported them. Finally to manage all the territory they got they had to give them to aristocracy who found that they can build their power by expanding said territory (and conquering Rome).

A shitload of civil wars.

Germans are swampniggers.

They deserved much worse than Versailles, everybody knows that.

>tfw assblasted poleshit on Veeky Forums are turning you into a nazi

This.

You gain resources, plunder conquered foes, a larger base to tax and supply fighting men, and you limit what can be gained by your opponents.

Basically Generally expansions of territory happen as the result of the actions of someone seeking to expand their power, both internationally but also often at home: if you conquer something, you get to keep it, and that can signficantly increase your clout and prestige at home. Take the example of Caesar, who conquered Gaul to increase his power in Rome. In fact,a lot of the expansion of the Roman empire took place as a result of individual generals expanding a regional struggle into an all-out war of conquest. The rise of the Empire and the threat of the rebellion a start-up general could(and often did) start by gaining control of a large military force and enough wealth stopped the expansion of the Roman empire past the first century AD.
Because wars are expensive and dangerous to lose, wars of conquest are mostly started by regimes that are already under pressure, or ones that have a clear and decisive goal and believe they have the ample means to achieve it. Most wars of history however have started as a reaction to other events(like a dead Archduke) which makes the people in control feel the need to take forceful action through military power, with the conquest at the end being the natural result of the victory of one state over the other.

>fracturing lands of culturally homogenous population
vs
>forcing release of different ethnicities that were actively seeking independance

Gee, I don't fucking know.

fuck this world desu

Haha what the fuck? Austria wins and gives up it's own territory to a puppet state?

>muh germans dindu nuffin
>treaty of versailles was inhuman he was a good boy

Which one is the Versailles treaty and which one is the one with Russia?
Can't really see which one is which.

>Really, the most appaling of their terms were the financial reparations they exorted from Russia
What are you talking about? The Brest-Litovsk reparations were peanuts

Didn't the treaty lead to widespread starvation through Russia, or is that wrong?

Most of the hunger can probably be attributed to the disruptions of the war and especially the chaos of the civil war. The Central powers did make a separate peace with the Ukrainian people's republic and promised military support in exchange for food. However, only a fraction of the promised food was actually delivered (and thus the hunger situation in Germany and AH didn't really improve).

>the Austrio-Hungarian Empire will never rise again
feels bad man

Prestige and glory.

Men wanted to get laid. That is the source of all creation

That wasn't even close to what the Germans were actually looking to do. They wanted to completely balkanize the Russian empire and enforce political and economic control on all countries from France in the west to Russian far east in the east.

>Cant refute
>resorts to meme

There's some truth to this, especially in the beginning when the conflicts were Italian, but the obvious main reason why the empire expanded to as big as it did was because its leaders wanted power, and its generals wanted glory. All other reasons were secondary or simply propaganda.

Polities are self-maximising and self-interested. They'll grow until they come up against hard limits, collapse, or the cost of expanding is great enough that it threatens their existence

>german empire
>bigotry, niggerotry, violent

>Roman empire
>A progressive society free of hate

having beef with Carthage was probably real

what with a Senator ending every meeting with "and I think we should destroy Carthage"

Nordics had some sweet aesthetics

Are you telling me giving independence to Poland, giving Denmark back it's majority lands and ceding France two Provinces that had wanted to be French since a long time is "fracturing lands of a culturally homogenus population"?

>Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia and Hanover is culturally homogeneous
>Belarus, Ukraine, Russia isn't

retards go to

>:c
Either fuck off or lurk more.

>german sympathizers are worth anything but memes
wew lad

Yeah because Ukrainians are the same as Russians. Lithuania and Latvia should just be one country too amirite.
Alsace-Lorraine was majority German no matter what pre-WWI map you look at.

street cred

Ukraine is not the same as Russia, but very similar, and the two countries have always hated each other

Empire needs to grow to accommodate the needs of a growing empire, war of conquest has many benefits for the empire and its citizen.
Resources, living space, borders further from capital city, large empire will be more intimidating than smaller one meaning small countries don't even dare to fuck with it (see Russia for example).
If your empire is strong you risk revolt by not expanding, if you are a leader of empire and some other asshat comes along and starts talking shit about your passive ways and promises people to bring your empire "back to its old glory" you will have to deal with revolutionaries, revolution can also come when your people see you as too aggressive ruler but if they already see you as overly aggressive you can just start shit like secret police, police state and you can go to martial law or whatever you want to call the poor people beating law set you default to during revolutions.
Reconquista might be compelling reason to fight over tiny lands, old feuds that people barely remember what started them but no one wants to leave old land in the hands of their ancestors enemies.
TLDR; Resources, land, respect, stability (if successful), more citizen to fight in your future wars, food (probably not that important these days thanks to industrial revolution and improvements in agriculture)

And it's majority parties had been for a joining France again ever since Germany took them.

Source?

>that boy in the front getting some sweet /ss/ action later on

austria was collapsing and Ukraine was going to give it bread if it ceded some land