Deleted member 94708
Somehow I NEVER fail to forget that. It’s so out of keeping with what we Americans expect from Germany’s generally center-left/liberal social policy that it somehow edits its way out of my mind.
Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread
- Thread starter carlton_bach
- Start date
GATTACA.
Discouraging eugenics OTL, legality of the abortion of a fetus derives from the medically predicted physical or psychological damage to the mother, not from the predicted defect of the child.
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That's one of the thing I admire from Germany. Even through all of the evil it has experienced and caused, for all of its technological mastery and social whatnot, modern Germany, rural or city remains a deeply Christian society.
Best way to illustrate is Spiegel covers. Probably the only news magazine, which is somewhat left that can print the following covers in the same year,
https://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/image/title/SP/2018/18/300
https://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/image/title/SP/2018/14/300
One very modern, asking question about modern German faith and identity, and the other ? An investigation to the last days of Jesus of Nazareth, with a picture straight out of The Last Supper.
Or this one, linking the eternal life offered by the Lord with Man's efforts for the same.
https://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/image/title/SP/2017/16/300
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Help me out here...my brains are rather shot at the moment. I hate NP-hard problems.
Yeah, but how does that relate to an IRL book? I fried my brains jumping on an iteration of the knapsack problem, so I am probably missing something.
Britain’s Liberal ascendancy, a period that is remembered – inaccurately - today for political comity lasted through the Conservative parliament of 1900-1906, an era during which policy largely continued along the lines set by previous governments. Imperial integration, a continuing commitment to the values of free trade, a rapprochement with Germany, the consolidation of overseas gains and a generally pacific foreign policy all continued. Domestic policy was more contentious, but neither the mooted violent solution to the Irish question nor the widely expected quelling of industrial strikes took place. When the Liberal Party won the 1906 elections, Asquith took office in a climate generally congenial to his plans. For a brief moment, it seemed possible to remake Britain in a Liberal image, peacefully and with the consent of the governed.
The first years of the new government delivered a windfall of unexpected victories at little cost. The Russo-German War that began with a brief scare over potential confrontation with France delivered great profit to British industry while destroying Russian military power, effectively forcing France into a decade of détente. Britain picked up the prizes it had been fighting over for decades – Persia, Afghanistan, the Straits free from Russian threat – at almost no cost. But in the long run, this did not play out in the Liberals’ favour precisely because, not having resulted from a war, these gains were taken for granted, and as foreign policy issues receded from the public arena, domestic issues dominated the debate. No longer needing to stand together against foreign threats, Britons were now free to savage each other.
Britain in the early 1900s had many issues, but the one point, the single sore on the body politic that all discussions sooner or later would return to and nobody could ignore, was Ireland. Conservatives, abandoning their traditional hard line, had tried to buy off Irish demands for separate nationhood as Liberals fought for Home Rule, hoping to keep a self-governing Ireland happy in the Union. The years between the Congo Conference and the end of the Russo-German War, full of international tension and high-stakes diplomacy, had put the matter on the back burner, but never extinguished its capacity to divide the country. By 1910, with no fewer than three Irish bills passed through the Commons but defeated by the Lords, Home Rule dominated the front pages. The Asquith government was just recovering from the naval panic of 1908-09 when the perceived ‘Dreadnought gap’ against France had led senior admirals to publicly express doubt in is ability to keep the country safe. As intransigent Ulster Unionists paraded through Belfast vowing to take up arms rather than accept Home Rule, it was now army officers who suggested the Prime minister would be unwise to rely on the loyalty of their service in imposing the law on Ireland. Many feared that, having already alienated the senior service, the Liberals would prove incapable of keeping good terms with any of the armed forces. Soldiers and sailors, the story went, did not hold with any of this universal freedom nonsense. They knew how reality worked.
Caught between parliamentary obstructionism and the rising threat of violence in Ireland, Asquith sought a reform of the Lords as a remedy for the nation’s ills. This measure would likely have enjoyed greater popular support – it even had the hesitant, but public backing of the new king – if it had not seemed so obviously tied to Irish nationalism. Despite effort to broaden the perspective, resistance among Conservative peers was strong enough to precipitate an election later in the year. The Liberals were able to maintain their majority in the Parliament of 1910 though the Conservatives gained many rural constituencies. From now on, though, Prime Minister Asquith would depend on Irish Home Ruler votes to stay in office. In the light of the coming clashes, this was a dangerous proposition.
Had Asquith’s cabinet been able to resolve the Irish question with the support of these votes, none of this might have mattered in the long run. This, however, was beyond their ability, and it serves as a poignant reminder why ‘genius’ in the context of British politics is not entirely a complimentary term. Skilled in old-style politics and deeply versed in constitutional detail, the Cabinet proved unequal to the wave of popular anger that the Ulster crisis provoked. The rift went straight through even the highest tiers of Society, resulting in social events sorting themselves into Liberal and Tory for the first time in living memory. The newly created Liberal peers whose votes were meant to break the Lords’ recalcitrance especially found themselves blackballed. Some were assaulted in public by Tory supporters, had carriages and London residences vandalised and the legitimacy of their rank questioned in the press. Passions ran high in the early 1910s, and a neutral stance on Home Rule was all but unheard of.
In Ireland, the situation escalated beyond heated words. Following the model of the Ulster Volunteers, Unionist militias formed throughout the country, drilling in public and leaving their belligerent intention in no doubt. Assured of broad support in the police and military, they resorted to intimidation tactics, breaking up political assemblies and Catholic processions. Faced with renewed violent oppression and Protestant triumphalism, the Irish National Party was torn between a principled stand on the constitution and the vigorous defence of its constituents. Candidates faced a hard choice, and seats were lost in 1910 through splitting the Home Rule vote. Irish Nationalists formed their own secret militia groups and sought to procure arms. Who fired “the first shot” in this conflict remains contentious, both sides pointing to violent acts by the other, but the recorded number of atrocities rose quickly: Homes and properties were burned, community leaders beaten or killed, and in 1911, the first Home Rule bombs were set off in Dublin and Belfast, targeting Unionist clubs.
From that point on, the government was lost. Throughout the escalation, Asquith sought to implement a political solution that ever more previously supportive people came to see as ‘giving in to rebels’. British troops were sent to patrol the Irish countryside as their officers hinted darkly at “another Cawnpore” and spoke of “blowing Fenians from cannons”. The initial counterinsurgency – aimed notionally at Unionist and Nationalist militias alike, but always far gentler with the Protestant side – was briefly successful in reducing the number of beatings and riots, but it was powerless against the secret organisations that had formed. Armed with weapons smuggled into the country by American supporters (and, as was then suspected and is now known from declassified documents, funded by French intelligence), they attacked troops, police, and government agencies. By 1913, Ireland was approaching a state of civil war. As Kipling famously declaimed “We are not ruled by murderers, but only by their friends”, the Liberal government seen as responsible for this disaster lost its last tenuous majority in Parliament.
The election of 1913 – the second premature dissolution of parliament in a row – went to the Tories by a landslide. Viscount Long, the designated Prime Minister, had outlined a concerted strategy of securing a Conservative majority in the Commons as the Lords could no longer be trusted to act as a stopgap. Even staid establishment figures embraced Hearst-style populist conservatism, fervently supported by the Tory press. Sensationalist accounts of chaos and violence in Ireland, of strikes, colonial mutinies and fiscal decline filled headlines in the run-up to the vote, and the drumbeat of scaremongering continued, to diminishing returns, throughout the “Long government” (1913-1928). This obvious constellation led some commentators to refer to the era as “the Northcliffe administration”.
With the Conservatives and their Unionist allies firmly ensconced in power, the new government began to implement its policy of restoring a nostalgic vision of Empire encased in amber. Though the competence of many members was beyond question, the promises made hobbled them at every turn. Especially Ireland proved a running sore that resisted all efforts, however violent, to cauterise it. Troop numbers were raised and Unionist militias sworn in as special constables, drawing pay and making themselves thoroughly hated for the duration of the emergency. Armoured cars and artillery were deployed against Nationalist strongholds, temporary press censorship imposed, and various sedition laws dusted off to imprison undesirables. Attacks continued, and spread to the rest of the kingdom. In 1915, a Nationalist bomber slipped through patrols to sink the White Star liner Olympic and HMS Bulldog in Belfast harbour with improvised sea mines. The humiliation to London was immense. Long promised revenge, but neither the perpetrator nor his accomplices were ever discovered.
As Britain entered the run-up to the 1918 elections, the country that Prime Minister Long had promised to unite was more divided than ever. The Irish conflict continued to drain resources that, as opposition politicians were happy to calculate, would have paid for several battleships. Colonial subjects in India, Nigeria and Egypt proved as little amenable to meek obedience as the Irish, and the heavy-handed responses proved more costly and less effectual than expected. The Tory victory of 1918 – even some Irish constituencies were ‘flipped’ to unionist candidates through intimidation and the creative application of emergency powers – owed much to the disarray of the opposition. A Liberal party divided against itself over Ireland could mount no credible challenge, and Labour was limited to the industrial centres where it made considerable gains. Ultimately, though, the new cabinet depended on the votes of Irish Unionists which forced them to double down on the policy of repression. Parts of Ireland now descended into full-blown civil war.
Long’s domestic programme, too, proved to be weaker in practice than it seemed in rhetoric. A “society in which custom ensures the respect due to rank and dignity as law protects the prosperity of cottage and palace alike” did not square well with the needs of an industrial nation. Real wages remained stagnant, even dropping in many industries as immigrants from impoverished Central Europe sought positions across the channel that paid in Sterling. Drums, guns and glory were no long-term substitute for wage increases, social insurance, and health care, especially since guns proved costly and glory in short supply. The jingoistic and often paramilitary Tory clubs – many formed from rural hunts or farmers’ associations – that grandees funded to drum up electoral support rarely made friends with their arrogant demeanour. Their eagerness to offer help to the police quelling disturbances in the cities was appreciated by nobody.
By 1921, it was evident to all observers that the Irish conflict could not be won by any side. Conservative reform policies that might have brought tangible benefits to the people were caught up in the same institutional inertia that had bedevilled Liberal programmes. Facing electoral disaster, Long decided to tie his fortune to a much-mooted, but not yet realistically attempted programme of imperial customs and ultimately political union. It won him re-election in 1924 on the back of hopes for higher wages and better jobs, though the ultimate fallout once customs union was implemented in 1927 proved to be nothing short of disastrous for the global economy.
Meanwhile, even the most ardent Tories in England had thoroughly soured on the Irish question. The cost of pacification was breaking budgets while failing to purchase victory and a steady diet of atrocity stories turned the stomachs of anyone with a conscience. British troops, targeted with bombs, bullets and knives at every turn, resorted to systematic reprisals, taking hostages, burning villages, and firing on civilians. Unionist militias abused their position as auxiliary police to drive out Catholics from their homes to ‘ensure civil tranquillity’. Extreme Unionists even mooted the idea of deporting the Catholic population either to the southern half of the island, or to Australia and Southern Africa. The fact that such obviously illegal proposals could be made without meeting immediate and universal revulsion betrays the degree to which politics had become embittered by the war. “The Irish,” a Unionist leader famously wrote to the Daily Mail’s editor, “are white by accident of nature. They may in no way be considered the equal of the Anglo-Saxon race and merit no more consideration as to their welfare or opinion than the Hottentots and Naga.” Fortunately, by the time this letter was published, the opinion espoused by its author was widely viewed as an aberration, a dangerous form of madness that overcame Iris people on both sides of the sectarian divide.
Prime Minister Long, aware that only a solution – any solution – could save his party decided to call the Unionists’ bluff and craft a face-saving peace proposal that was breathtaking in its complexity, ambition, and idiocy. Since neither side was willing to accept the imposition of the other’s desired outcome on all of Ireland, the matter would have to be decided piecemeal, in provincial referenda on the introduction of Home Rule or the retention of the status quo. As both parties had amassed considerable experience in violently swaying election campaigns, this was what they proceeded to do, making 1926 one of the bloodiest years of the entire insurrection. In the end, the Unionist militias were most successful in Ulster, where no province returned a majority for Home Rule even in constituencies that had regularly sent Nationalist MPs to Westminster. A greater embarrassment for future administration was the number of southern constituencies that returned Unionist votes. In a final effort to sink the entire project, Ulster Unionists called for a division by parliamentary constituencies rather than provinces that would have rendered the entire exercise unworkable. This was defeated and the Government of Ireland Act of 1926 passed narrowly with the support of Liberal MPs who valued peace more than they feared their reduced chances of returning to government without the support of Irish Nationalist MPs.
The results were, in the words of the shadow chancellor, “less than entirely satisfactory”. Designed with the aim of saving face and placating the Ulster Unionists, little thought had been given to the practicalities of governing a country with two parliaments. Neither had anyone developed concrete plans for returning the island to any sort of peace footing after more than a decade of brutal internecine violence. “There is no returning from where we have gone,” the ageing John Dillon famously declared in his final speech, and he proved right. Though the dissolution of Unionist militias (most of which effectively collapsed as government pay was withdrawn) and the withdrawal of troops reduced violence by limiting the number of targets, provinces continued their ‘sorting’ as unwanted elements were encouraged to decamp. Celebrations in January 1927 that were to inaugurate the integration of Ireland as a self-governing member of the greater imperial union (minus Ulster and some pieces of the south) turned into a tense affair as displaced Catholics protested in front of the Irish Parliament. Since South Africa, Canada and Australia had not yet decided to join, it was an anticlimactic outcome.
The election of 1928 ended Britain’s experiment with populist conservatism and ushered in a series of coalition governments whose primary occupation for the first decade was to pick up the pieces.
The first years of the new government delivered a windfall of unexpected victories at little cost. The Russo-German War that began with a brief scare over potential confrontation with France delivered great profit to British industry while destroying Russian military power, effectively forcing France into a decade of détente. Britain picked up the prizes it had been fighting over for decades – Persia, Afghanistan, the Straits free from Russian threat – at almost no cost. But in the long run, this did not play out in the Liberals’ favour precisely because, not having resulted from a war, these gains were taken for granted, and as foreign policy issues receded from the public arena, domestic issues dominated the debate. No longer needing to stand together against foreign threats, Britons were now free to savage each other.
Britain in the early 1900s had many issues, but the one point, the single sore on the body politic that all discussions sooner or later would return to and nobody could ignore, was Ireland. Conservatives, abandoning their traditional hard line, had tried to buy off Irish demands for separate nationhood as Liberals fought for Home Rule, hoping to keep a self-governing Ireland happy in the Union. The years between the Congo Conference and the end of the Russo-German War, full of international tension and high-stakes diplomacy, had put the matter on the back burner, but never extinguished its capacity to divide the country. By 1910, with no fewer than three Irish bills passed through the Commons but defeated by the Lords, Home Rule dominated the front pages. The Asquith government was just recovering from the naval panic of 1908-09 when the perceived ‘Dreadnought gap’ against France had led senior admirals to publicly express doubt in is ability to keep the country safe. As intransigent Ulster Unionists paraded through Belfast vowing to take up arms rather than accept Home Rule, it was now army officers who suggested the Prime minister would be unwise to rely on the loyalty of their service in imposing the law on Ireland. Many feared that, having already alienated the senior service, the Liberals would prove incapable of keeping good terms with any of the armed forces. Soldiers and sailors, the story went, did not hold with any of this universal freedom nonsense. They knew how reality worked.
Caught between parliamentary obstructionism and the rising threat of violence in Ireland, Asquith sought a reform of the Lords as a remedy for the nation’s ills. This measure would likely have enjoyed greater popular support – it even had the hesitant, but public backing of the new king – if it had not seemed so obviously tied to Irish nationalism. Despite effort to broaden the perspective, resistance among Conservative peers was strong enough to precipitate an election later in the year. The Liberals were able to maintain their majority in the Parliament of 1910 though the Conservatives gained many rural constituencies. From now on, though, Prime Minister Asquith would depend on Irish Home Ruler votes to stay in office. In the light of the coming clashes, this was a dangerous proposition.
Had Asquith’s cabinet been able to resolve the Irish question with the support of these votes, none of this might have mattered in the long run. This, however, was beyond their ability, and it serves as a poignant reminder why ‘genius’ in the context of British politics is not entirely a complimentary term. Skilled in old-style politics and deeply versed in constitutional detail, the Cabinet proved unequal to the wave of popular anger that the Ulster crisis provoked. The rift went straight through even the highest tiers of Society, resulting in social events sorting themselves into Liberal and Tory for the first time in living memory. The newly created Liberal peers whose votes were meant to break the Lords’ recalcitrance especially found themselves blackballed. Some were assaulted in public by Tory supporters, had carriages and London residences vandalised and the legitimacy of their rank questioned in the press. Passions ran high in the early 1910s, and a neutral stance on Home Rule was all but unheard of.
In Ireland, the situation escalated beyond heated words. Following the model of the Ulster Volunteers, Unionist militias formed throughout the country, drilling in public and leaving their belligerent intention in no doubt. Assured of broad support in the police and military, they resorted to intimidation tactics, breaking up political assemblies and Catholic processions. Faced with renewed violent oppression and Protestant triumphalism, the Irish National Party was torn between a principled stand on the constitution and the vigorous defence of its constituents. Candidates faced a hard choice, and seats were lost in 1910 through splitting the Home Rule vote. Irish Nationalists formed their own secret militia groups and sought to procure arms. Who fired “the first shot” in this conflict remains contentious, both sides pointing to violent acts by the other, but the recorded number of atrocities rose quickly: Homes and properties were burned, community leaders beaten or killed, and in 1911, the first Home Rule bombs were set off in Dublin and Belfast, targeting Unionist clubs.
From that point on, the government was lost. Throughout the escalation, Asquith sought to implement a political solution that ever more previously supportive people came to see as ‘giving in to rebels’. British troops were sent to patrol the Irish countryside as their officers hinted darkly at “another Cawnpore” and spoke of “blowing Fenians from cannons”. The initial counterinsurgency – aimed notionally at Unionist and Nationalist militias alike, but always far gentler with the Protestant side – was briefly successful in reducing the number of beatings and riots, but it was powerless against the secret organisations that had formed. Armed with weapons smuggled into the country by American supporters (and, as was then suspected and is now known from declassified documents, funded by French intelligence), they attacked troops, police, and government agencies. By 1913, Ireland was approaching a state of civil war. As Kipling famously declaimed “We are not ruled by murderers, but only by their friends”, the Liberal government seen as responsible for this disaster lost its last tenuous majority in Parliament.
The election of 1913 – the second premature dissolution of parliament in a row – went to the Tories by a landslide. Viscount Long, the designated Prime Minister, had outlined a concerted strategy of securing a Conservative majority in the Commons as the Lords could no longer be trusted to act as a stopgap. Even staid establishment figures embraced Hearst-style populist conservatism, fervently supported by the Tory press. Sensationalist accounts of chaos and violence in Ireland, of strikes, colonial mutinies and fiscal decline filled headlines in the run-up to the vote, and the drumbeat of scaremongering continued, to diminishing returns, throughout the “Long government” (1913-1928). This obvious constellation led some commentators to refer to the era as “the Northcliffe administration”.
With the Conservatives and their Unionist allies firmly ensconced in power, the new government began to implement its policy of restoring a nostalgic vision of Empire encased in amber. Though the competence of many members was beyond question, the promises made hobbled them at every turn. Especially Ireland proved a running sore that resisted all efforts, however violent, to cauterise it. Troop numbers were raised and Unionist militias sworn in as special constables, drawing pay and making themselves thoroughly hated for the duration of the emergency. Armoured cars and artillery were deployed against Nationalist strongholds, temporary press censorship imposed, and various sedition laws dusted off to imprison undesirables. Attacks continued, and spread to the rest of the kingdom. In 1915, a Nationalist bomber slipped through patrols to sink the White Star liner Olympic and HMS Bulldog in Belfast harbour with improvised sea mines. The humiliation to London was immense. Long promised revenge, but neither the perpetrator nor his accomplices were ever discovered.
As Britain entered the run-up to the 1918 elections, the country that Prime Minister Long had promised to unite was more divided than ever. The Irish conflict continued to drain resources that, as opposition politicians were happy to calculate, would have paid for several battleships. Colonial subjects in India, Nigeria and Egypt proved as little amenable to meek obedience as the Irish, and the heavy-handed responses proved more costly and less effectual than expected. The Tory victory of 1918 – even some Irish constituencies were ‘flipped’ to unionist candidates through intimidation and the creative application of emergency powers – owed much to the disarray of the opposition. A Liberal party divided against itself over Ireland could mount no credible challenge, and Labour was limited to the industrial centres where it made considerable gains. Ultimately, though, the new cabinet depended on the votes of Irish Unionists which forced them to double down on the policy of repression. Parts of Ireland now descended into full-blown civil war.
Long’s domestic programme, too, proved to be weaker in practice than it seemed in rhetoric. A “society in which custom ensures the respect due to rank and dignity as law protects the prosperity of cottage and palace alike” did not square well with the needs of an industrial nation. Real wages remained stagnant, even dropping in many industries as immigrants from impoverished Central Europe sought positions across the channel that paid in Sterling. Drums, guns and glory were no long-term substitute for wage increases, social insurance, and health care, especially since guns proved costly and glory in short supply. The jingoistic and often paramilitary Tory clubs – many formed from rural hunts or farmers’ associations – that grandees funded to drum up electoral support rarely made friends with their arrogant demeanour. Their eagerness to offer help to the police quelling disturbances in the cities was appreciated by nobody.
By 1921, it was evident to all observers that the Irish conflict could not be won by any side. Conservative reform policies that might have brought tangible benefits to the people were caught up in the same institutional inertia that had bedevilled Liberal programmes. Facing electoral disaster, Long decided to tie his fortune to a much-mooted, but not yet realistically attempted programme of imperial customs and ultimately political union. It won him re-election in 1924 on the back of hopes for higher wages and better jobs, though the ultimate fallout once customs union was implemented in 1927 proved to be nothing short of disastrous for the global economy.
Meanwhile, even the most ardent Tories in England had thoroughly soured on the Irish question. The cost of pacification was breaking budgets while failing to purchase victory and a steady diet of atrocity stories turned the stomachs of anyone with a conscience. British troops, targeted with bombs, bullets and knives at every turn, resorted to systematic reprisals, taking hostages, burning villages, and firing on civilians. Unionist militias abused their position as auxiliary police to drive out Catholics from their homes to ‘ensure civil tranquillity’. Extreme Unionists even mooted the idea of deporting the Catholic population either to the southern half of the island, or to Australia and Southern Africa. The fact that such obviously illegal proposals could be made without meeting immediate and universal revulsion betrays the degree to which politics had become embittered by the war. “The Irish,” a Unionist leader famously wrote to the Daily Mail’s editor, “are white by accident of nature. They may in no way be considered the equal of the Anglo-Saxon race and merit no more consideration as to their welfare or opinion than the Hottentots and Naga.” Fortunately, by the time this letter was published, the opinion espoused by its author was widely viewed as an aberration, a dangerous form of madness that overcame Iris people on both sides of the sectarian divide.
Prime Minister Long, aware that only a solution – any solution – could save his party decided to call the Unionists’ bluff and craft a face-saving peace proposal that was breathtaking in its complexity, ambition, and idiocy. Since neither side was willing to accept the imposition of the other’s desired outcome on all of Ireland, the matter would have to be decided piecemeal, in provincial referenda on the introduction of Home Rule or the retention of the status quo. As both parties had amassed considerable experience in violently swaying election campaigns, this was what they proceeded to do, making 1926 one of the bloodiest years of the entire insurrection. In the end, the Unionist militias were most successful in Ulster, where no province returned a majority for Home Rule even in constituencies that had regularly sent Nationalist MPs to Westminster. A greater embarrassment for future administration was the number of southern constituencies that returned Unionist votes. In a final effort to sink the entire project, Ulster Unionists called for a division by parliamentary constituencies rather than provinces that would have rendered the entire exercise unworkable. This was defeated and the Government of Ireland Act of 1926 passed narrowly with the support of Liberal MPs who valued peace more than they feared their reduced chances of returning to government without the support of Irish Nationalist MPs.
The results were, in the words of the shadow chancellor, “less than entirely satisfactory”. Designed with the aim of saving face and placating the Ulster Unionists, little thought had been given to the practicalities of governing a country with two parliaments. Neither had anyone developed concrete plans for returning the island to any sort of peace footing after more than a decade of brutal internecine violence. “There is no returning from where we have gone,” the ageing John Dillon famously declared in his final speech, and he proved right. Though the dissolution of Unionist militias (most of which effectively collapsed as government pay was withdrawn) and the withdrawal of troops reduced violence by limiting the number of targets, provinces continued their ‘sorting’ as unwanted elements were encouraged to decamp. Celebrations in January 1927 that were to inaugurate the integration of Ireland as a self-governing member of the greater imperial union (minus Ulster and some pieces of the south) turned into a tense affair as displaced Catholics protested in front of the Irish Parliament. Since South Africa, Canada and Australia had not yet decided to join, it was an anticlimactic outcome.
The election of 1928 ended Britain’s experiment with populist conservatism and ushered in a series of coalition governments whose primary occupation for the first decade was to pick up the pieces.
Deleted member 94708
That was rather more of a mess than IOTL.
Britain is not going to come out of this any better than it did the period 1900-1945 in reality, Germany is clearly going to have problems with economic stagnation and class inequality, Japan apparently gets into a war with China and comes out on the wrong end...
Did you slip an America wank in here, or are they broken as well?
Britain is not going to come out of this any better than it did the period 1900-1945 in reality, Germany is clearly going to have problems with economic stagnation and class inequality, Japan apparently gets into a war with China and comes out on the wrong end...
Did you slip an America wank in here, or are they broken as well?
I think you are wrong. I dont think any kind of irish crisis can be as bad as the 2 world wars OTL. The body count will be much lower for Brittain for sure. I admit that it might be worse but its certainly comparable to Ireland.
Aside from being the world's main creditor nation, banking centre, biggest naval power, greatest colonial Empire and unrivalled leader of upper-class culture, indeed, they're not. But that's still a lot on the plus side of the ledger. Britain is learning that being top dog does not insulate you from embarrassing and costly mistakes, but it is as yet top dog and will remain a very significant player for decades to come. Think of it as the country's Iraqi Freedom moment: stupid in hindsight, disastrous for everybody at the sharp end, divisive, but ultimately not a game changer. London is still where you go if you need international banking services, Sterling is what buys you things anywhere on the planet, and the Royal Navy is still the most powerful force around. It's not going to get any better, but that's still plenty good.
Germany has all kinds of problems, but economic stagnation is not one for a long time to come. The country is set for a long expansion, and once the horrendous debt is cleared and the burden of its vast military can be lightened, its people will benefit. Give it a few decades, though. Japan is sitting pretty, controlling two nominally 'independent' allies (Manchuria and Korea) and enjoying the effective protection of Britain against any American and Chinese shenanigans. China would be mad to start a war with Japan, and ITTL, Japan has no incentive to start one against China. So they're just going to quietly hate each other.
You can't help but have the USA come out ahead after about 1860. It's too big and too well-placed not to succeed. But rest assured the USA are making their mistakes just like everybvody else, because most of history consists of people finding out they're wrong. The important difference is whether you find out after an election, or after 50 million dead.
People screw up all the time. History rarely works out for anyone in the long run, and getting half your stuff right is an epic achievement. But you need to understand that claims like 'disastrous financial crisis' and 'terrible war' from the perspective of ITTL mean something different than they do to a world that has seen 1929-1933 and 1939-1945.
I would expect that USA will be significant nerfed, in OTL they plundered the German patents twice, they changed from a debitor to a creditor nation, the Dollars became the world's reserve currency and the other industrial nations industries collapse and had to be rebuild. Also while the American military budget are insane, it ensure a economic dominace in regions where USA won't be in ITTL. USA will have to deal with not having all these benefits.
As for UK I imagine they will end up in decay, the model for that would likely be the Dutch Republic in the 18th century, not the post-War UK decay. So we likely see a slower British de-industrialisation and de-colonisation, while tertiary grows even larger than in OTL. We likely won't see a real competition between New York and London about being the world's financial centre, as London simply will stay far ahead.
As for UK I imagine they will end up in decay, the model for that would likely be the Dutch Republic in the 18th century, not the post-War UK decay. So we likely see a slower British de-industrialisation and de-colonisation, while tertiary grows even larger than in OTL. We likely won't see a real competition between New York and London about being the world's financial centre, as London simply will stay far ahead.
Despite his association with military victory, Franz II Ferdinand (1907-1934) was not a popular monarch. This was unsurprising, given the legendary stature of the emperor he succeeded under such tragic circumstances; The successor to Kaiser Franz Joseph could no more gain by the comparison than could Queen Victoria’s. Too much symbolism lay in the persons of these individuals for them to ever be replaceable. Franz II was wise enough to realise this and never attempted to make the empire about his person. He avoided crisis by agreeing to the exclusion of his wife from the throne and his children from the succession (a humiliation that had poisoned his relationship with the old emperor)and adopted a persona of the empire’s first servant. Indeed, Austria-Hungary may never have had a harder-working ruler than him. He was personally modest, a competent administrator, a moderniser of the army, navy, and civil service, a friend of the small nationalities, supporter of the rule of law, and avid pursuer of peace and prosperity. Yet none of these things could ever outweigh the fact that he was a difficult man to like, and by all accounts a more difficult one to work with. Like Joseph II, posterity would remember him with more admiration than warmth.
His legacy included many things that would stand the country in good stead: a strengthened military with more inclusive career paths and better equipment, a small but competent coastal navy, a reformed parliamentary system and a greatly underappreciated civil service of rare efficiency. Yet the greatest prize eluded him. Having alienated the Hungarian ruling class by insisting on an abbreviated coronation ceremony, he left the magnates in no doubt as to his ultimate intent for their country: Hungary would become a federal nation among nations, no longer able to negotiate special treatment by hiding behind ancient privileges and invented tradition. The endeavour was assured of support from all minor nationalities since most Slavic speakers found Magyar supremacy in the eastern half of the Empire more galling than German arrogance. What it lacked, nonetheless, was the critical mass of votes needed. The Ausgleich of 1917, still negotiated in the afterglow of victory, gave the emperor considerable leeway which a more diplomatic individual might have been able to turn into lasting compromise solutions. Franz II Ferdinand ended up all but threatening the Hungarian government with invasion in the event of civil disturbance, making them hostage to the whims of their national minorities and alienating them enough to ensure that overturning the minority rights ultimately enshrined in law became a rallying cry for Hungarian nationalists. Yet failing to secure equal recognition for the Slavic peoples in a triple monarchy – something he had never promised, but frequently hinted at – ensured that the gratitude of those who owed him most would be lukewarm at best. Memories of Pan-Slavic collaborationism died hard in the Habsburg domain.
Nonetheless, buoyed by victory and held together by a military whose stature was greatly enhanced by its conduct during the war (a matter much redacted for home consumption) the state had a good two decades that not even persistent economic trouble could put much of a dent in. The more rural economy of the Balkans was less affected than the industrial centres of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary which meant that the worst disaffected peoples had least to complain about. Yet the reckoning would come.