PODs for a United Europe
- Thread starter quixo
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A Eurofed timeline on the Roman Empire, or a Germanwank by the same poster.
That's about it.
You can unite a large part of Europe, you can have something like the EU earlier (theoretically), but Europe is almost inevitably going to have multiple small states scattered here and there without central authority being able to be imposed on the continent pre-1900.
Nevermind pre-19th century.
That's about it.
You can unite a large part of Europe, you can have something like the EU earlier (theoretically), but Europe is almost inevitably going to have multiple small states scattered here and there without central authority being able to be imposed on the continent pre-1900.
Nevermind pre-19th century.
No worries. Just pointing out that even in the 19th century this is nuts, earlier you'd have a hard time just holding it all in one coherent state if somehow you managed to merge everything together.
China was separated by a few rivers, being a vast plain. Furthermore, they displaced all non-ethnic Han people such as the current inhabitants of Vietnam from Southern China. Even then, they weren't united until the 200s BC and didn't have a lot of natural barriers, as well as only having to worry about a single frontier to defend regularly against migrating peoples, their northern one. And even then, generally, migrating peoples went west, not east. It also had a very homogeneous culture which led to its long unity.
Unless you were being tongue-in-cheek.
Ignoring the times it wasn't for the sake of giving this an honest answer:
"For this political diversity Europe had largely to thank its geography. There were no enormous plains over which an empire of horsemen could impose its swift dominion; nor where there broad and fertile river zones liek those around the Ganges, Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, Yellow, and Yangtze, providing the food for masses of toiling and easily conquerable peasants. Europe's landscape was much more fractured, with mountain ranges and large forests separating the scattered population centers in the valleys
and its climate altered considerably from north to south and west to east.
This had a number of important consequences. For a start, it both made difficult the established of unified control, even by a powerful and determined warlord, and minimized the possibility that the continent could be overrun by an external force like the Mongol hordes. Conversely, this variegated landscape encouraged the growth, and continued existence, of decentralized power, with local kingdoms and marcher lordships and highland clans and lowland town confederations making a political map of Europe drawn at any time after the fall of Rome look like a patchwork quilt. The patterns on that quilt might vary from century to century, but no single color could ever be used to denote a unified empire.
...
To say then that Europe's decentralized states system was the great obstacle to centralization is not, then, a tautology. Because there existed a number of competing political entities, most of which possessed or were able to buy the military means to preserve their independence, no single one could ever achieve the breakthrough to the mastery of the continent."
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, italics in the text.
For whatever reasons, this did not work in China, but despite continuous efforts including that of the Romans, this always got in the way. What POD can you do to radically reshape something where crushing independent power centers is difficult and where they are scattered all over so even uniting say, Germany (let's use Imperial Germany's borders for the sake of that term) still leaves many others.
Impi, you ninja.
I'd like to think my quotation of Kennedy elaborates on how Europe isn't like that, though, so you're forgiven.
IMHO this is impossible without someone uniting it at gunpoint. The Best candidates are the Nazi's, Napoleon, USSR, or Romans
I think people are being too negative on this point. Southern Europe obviously had a lot of physical barriers to prevent centralisation, but that's not true of Northern Europe. The big issue there was the Latin-Germanic divide. If the Roman Empire had conquered Germania before it fell, it's quite possible there could have been a dialect continuum across the entire Northern plain. If the area north of the Alps became a centralised nation state by the time the industrial revolution rolled round, it's feasible it could then force the rest of the continent into some sort of federation.
Eurofed
Banned
Sigh, geographical determinism is the dumb stepchild of geopolitics, and its rigid application to Europe in order to mandate its inevitable Balkanization is actually based on false premises.
I actually strongly resent Jared Diamond (a rather overrated historian IMO) for peddling this faulty meme as respectable, as it concerns world and European history.
First of all, the northern half of Europe is actually one big rolling plain, with little geographical obstacles from the English Channel to the Urals. Anyone that would manage to unite say France and Germany from the Roman times onwards would have the resources to suppress any separatist drive in Iberia and/or Italy, and anyone that dominates the Western-Central core of the continent rules it, to the possible exclusion of the British Isles and Russia, period. Moreover, mountain ranges like the Alps and Pyrenees are actually rather overrated as obstacles to political unity. Italian history indicates that the Alps were never a serious obstacle for otherwise strong powers on either side of them to project power across them.
Second, the Romans had effectively erased "national" differences that might drive cultural-based separatism in the lands they ruled, until the Volkervanderung undid their work. If they had timely absorbed Germania, the Migrations may never happen. And they were a prime example of how a premodern polity could harness the administrative capability to rule Europe as an efficient unity. They failed for reasons (political instability, failure to conquer Germania and Mesopotamia during their prime) that had nothing to do with sheer overextension.
I actually strongly resent Jared Diamond (a rather overrated historian IMO) for peddling this faulty meme as respectable, as it concerns world and European history.
First of all, the northern half of Europe is actually one big rolling plain, with little geographical obstacles from the English Channel to the Urals. Anyone that would manage to unite say France and Germany from the Roman times onwards would have the resources to suppress any separatist drive in Iberia and/or Italy, and anyone that dominates the Western-Central core of the continent rules it, to the possible exclusion of the British Isles and Russia, period. Moreover, mountain ranges like the Alps and Pyrenees are actually rather overrated as obstacles to political unity. Italian history indicates that the Alps were never a serious obstacle for otherwise strong powers on either side of them to project power across them.
Second, the Romans had effectively erased "national" differences that might drive cultural-based separatism in the lands they ruled, until the Volkervanderung undid their work. If they had timely absorbed Germania, the Migrations may never happen. And they were a prime example of how a premodern polity could harness the administrative capability to rule Europe as an efficient unity. They failed for reasons (political instability, failure to conquer Germania and Mesopotamia during their prime) that had nothing to do with sheer overextension.
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Rex Romanum
Banned
Yeah, especially those who have formed an Anti-Eurofed alliance...
Poor Eurofed...
Anyway, there are already a lot of threads with similar premise. Some of them:
United States of Europe
AHC-a united Europe
A China-like Europe?
EDIT: At last...Eurofed has came...
You said this a number of times. So why don't you write an essay detailing your views on the matter and rebutting his assertions? I'd be interested in reading if for no other reason than that I want to see an opposing view point. I'm sure it would generate some discussion since he's such a popular author around here.
For a determined and organized polity, geography will only pose a nuisance... but in pre-Modern times this sort of state is very rare and the main engines of political, cultural and social change are groups of people moving around looking for the places to settle and practice agriculture, and/or fleeing from marauders. These groups take no conscious path to a distant objective - they drift around generation by generation and are inevitably funneled, guided, split up and compressed by the geography of the regions in which they travel, so to deny that geography has a determining effect on the accretion of cultures and states is just absurd.
Furthermore, Eurofed, the Roman Empire could not possibly have expanded any more than it did. It had enough problems maintaining itself at its historical borders without the burden of maintaining even more legions in economically worthless regions like Germania.
Furthermore, Eurofed, the Roman Empire could not possibly have expanded any more than it did. It had enough problems maintaining itself at its historical borders without the burden of maintaining even more legions in economically worthless regions like Germania.
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I really like that book. There is also, though, a bit not much further in, in 'The Hapsburg Bid For Mastery' where he goes into this question again:
'Nevertheless, the fact remains that had the Habsburg rulers achieved all of their limited, regional aims-even their defensive aims-the mastery of Europe would virtually have been theirs... (goes into imagined victories in specific regional conflicts) ...Although Europe even then would not have approached the unity enjoyed by Ming China, the political and religious principles favored by the twin Habsburg centers of Madrid and Vienna would have greatly eroded the pluralism that had so long been the continent's most enduring feature.'
So what I would infer is that a power in a similar position or one a bit better would be able to plausibly achieve something similar, and the OTL level of political unity in Europe shouldn't be taken as the maximum possible.
Depends on the period. A successful Habsburg Empire of the sort Kennedy details is theoretically possible. A Roman Empire of the sort Eurofed envisions at times? No.
On the geographical question:
Geography isn't destiny, but it is a barrier, and a barrier that no polity has overcome to the extent necessary to unite all of Europe as one cohesive state despite multiple attempts by various people of the sort that would have succeeded if it was possible.
JamesPhoenix said:
Not so much just Eurofed as that a Eurofederation state where all obstacles are magically handwaved and centralization builds on success and is never hindered by failure is what you'd need here.
A great big Roman Empire sized state is already straining the limits of a state to control all the area within its borders so given its internal problems, and the internal problems plus any kind of external enemies worth worrying about are the kind of combination that has stopped every attempt at total mastery of the continent.
Ever. Single. Attempt. Except in HRE-wanks, Napoleon-wanks, Nazi-wanks Roman Empire-wanks, and similar wanks of AH.
OTL isn't the best that can be done. But it ought to be considered why things worked out as they did OTL before saying that there's a real possibility of something better.
The problems weren't something you can just hit with butterflies to make go away. Individual elements, yes, but having none of the areas be a problem? Not possible.
Geography + distribution of power centers + lack of any easily conquered areas that allow for dominance of the continent + random and not so random factors of other sorts (famine, plague, bad leadership, succession crisis...)...
To those saying a northern Empire is possible: Yes, and the Carolingian state is such a fantastic success story that all we need is a little more luck. NOT.
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I also liked Germs, Guns and Steel, but I'm not so sure that Jared's theory of geographic determinism is so compelling after all: it's just a bit too pat, IMHO.
Europe has had for centuries a common culture and a common language for culture (latin) and a common religion as well as the historical records of an Europe-spanning empire. There were no racial issues worth talking about (certainly much less than in China) and there was a reasonable facsimile of mandarinate (the Church structure) which produced regular crops of (more or less) educated people who could be (and effectively were) used for administration.
I am quite surprised that no one mentioned the two most reasonable post-Roman opportunities for re-unifying Europe: Charlemagne and Charles V.
My money would be on the former: it would take just a bit of luck (begetting a son worth of the father) and possibly the abolition of the Frankish inheritance laws (splitting the property among all male sons): the latter one would make everything easier, and the lure of an imperial crown should be a good enough incentive.
Charles V would certainly find it much more difficult to unify Europe: I think that the key would be to co-opt under the imperial mantle the supporter of a full reform of the church, and carry it out in a decisive way.
Europe has had for centuries a common culture and a common language for culture (latin) and a common religion as well as the historical records of an Europe-spanning empire. There were no racial issues worth talking about (certainly much less than in China) and there was a reasonable facsimile of mandarinate (the Church structure) which produced regular crops of (more or less) educated people who could be (and effectively were) used for administration.
I am quite surprised that no one mentioned the two most reasonable post-Roman opportunities for re-unifying Europe: Charlemagne and Charles V.
My money would be on the former: it would take just a bit of luck (begetting a son worth of the father) and possibly the abolition of the Frankish inheritance laws (splitting the property among all male sons): the latter one would make everything easier, and the lure of an imperial crown should be a good enough incentive.
Charles V would certainly find it much more difficult to unify Europe: I think that the key would be to co-opt under the imperial mantle the supporter of a full reform of the church, and carry it out in a decisive way.