Map Thread XVII

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lukedalton

thisisspacejesus said:
Italy already controls Corsica, Savoy, and Nice, however, which makes backstabbing like that a hard sell. As for the war against Austria-Hungary, Italian war aims include not only South Tyrol, but also the Adriatic coast of A-H. Seizing that territory will cause problems for A-H, and will only hasten its collapse.
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Honestly in this scenario A-H, unless has done some pretty strong reform to the armed forces is basically toasted; Wien facing all his neighbourgh at the same time will stretch her resources to the breaking point...expecially if Italy is in a better shape than OTL as it's seem that the war for Libya and French territories happened at least 10 years ago, giving the nation time to recover.
France will probably stay on the defensive on the initial stage, except for Brittany taking back the place will be vital to avoid a two front war and negate the British a foothold in the continent
 

Tsar of New Zealand

My magnum bloody opus. Writeup first.

The map is Europe in the For All Nails TL, an expansion to Robert Sobel's For Want of a Nail, written by the folks over at the Sobel Wiki (http://fwoan.wikia.com/wiki/For_All_Nails). Credit for the concept of The Statist magazine goes to FANTL contributor Noel Maurer, and I have taken care to make sure the details of the maps and writeup correspond with his work, and that of the rest of the FAN cabal, as closely as possible.

The postwar consensus is dead.


That’s what the talking heads on the vita are saying, anyway. Here in North America, the nation is still reeling from the severance of its last constitutional ties with the United Kingdom after Mister Gold tried to appoint a new Viceroy to clip Governor-General Skinner’s wings, in response to which he turned around and to quote a Councilman from Northern Vandalia, “spoke the ‘no’ which has been heard around the world.”

Now the CNA and Mexico are actually partnering up, after Vicente Mercator’s horrifying thermonuclear attack on Bali decapitated Kramer Associates, leaving El Pulpo – the Octopus – flailing. In Mexico, then, the “state within a state” Mercator built through the omnipresent Department of War has been dug out by his successor, Immanuel Moctezuma, the larger-than-life figure who has dragged the United States kicking and screaming into the 1970s.

With all of this happening on the casual North American’s proverbial doorstep, it is easy to forget that it has been at least as eventful a decade for Europe.

Germany entered 1970 under the leadership of Adolph Markstein standing astride Europe like a colossus, though as the seemingly universal outpouring of popular anger at Berlin throughout the Outer Empire that year showed, the façade hid a cracked foundation. [1] The Empire entered the decade as a military power without rival on its side of the Atlantic, only Britain capable of threatening it in any meaningful fashion – and even then, it was the atomic rockets emplaced in ruined Kent and Sussex, and on the Channel Islands, which presented a noteworthy threat. [2]

Now, Markstein is dead, slain by a Serb assassin, and his successor has withdrawn the Occupation from Occupied Europe in pursuit of a more sustainable order, establishing after last month’s conference at Versailles what has been called a “European Union”. Whether it will be a true community of nations, as its founders claim, or merely a further expression of German hegemony remains to be seen.

To the east, a geo-political game continues in the Russias, where the Scandinavians wrested a break-away from a break-away and expanded their sphere of influence into Petrograd, masking their own quest for a nuclear deterrent. Until, of course, Christian Gustav II announced that kingdom’s membership of the fraternity of nations in possession of nuclear weapons, and began a brief but dramatic bid to place his nation in the highest circle of international affairs by developing a “first-strike” nuclear capability, forming alliances with the United Empire and with Kramer Associates (or its Taiwanese subsidiary; that is to say, the nation-state of Taiwan), and then spearheading the European invasion of New Granada after the Christmas Bomb was detonated on Bali by Vincent Mercator.

As with Icarus, however, Christian Gustav flew too close to the sun, and withdrew abruptly from public life only weeks after the Bornholm Understanding secured his nation a diplomatic coup. Whether or not its monarch remains a commanding figure within Scandinavia, the genie’s lamp has been uncorked: Scandinavia is neutral no more, and must endure the realities of opting into London’s alliance network.

What of the Mother Country, then? Certainly Britannia rules the waves, between the Royal Navy’s ongoing blockade of New Granada (extending, it ought be noted, to humanitarian aid) and Scandinavia’s immense armed and merchant marine, and the warming of relations with Germany has eased a decades-long chill across the English Channel. But the domestic situation remains parlous; Britain spent a greater proportion of its Mason Aid on the martial than productive sectors of its industry in the wake of the Global War than recipients such as Japan or Australia, and now faces the consequences in the form of continuing inflation and a sluggish recovery in the southeastern areas devastated by the abortive German efforts to invade throughout the nineteen-forties.

In London, uneasy lies the crown on the head of Mister Gold, then, even if it lies somewhat more securely on that of Henry, who until so recently was even our notional head of state. The gulf of the Atlantic yawns wider than ever before; as the divide of the Rocky Mountains reaches perhaps its narrowest point ever, it will take adept leadership to prevent the United Empire from losing the respect of the Confederation in preference of its own traditional enemy in Mexico.

It is terribly difficult to argue with those vitavised commentators.

[1] As described in both the original book and the FAN TL.

[2] This does a disservice to His Britannic Majesty’s Armed Forces, but the author has their reasons for being less than impartial where Britain is concerned.
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And writeups for the Big Three, spoilered to save the wall of text.

Germany

For the European hegemon, the Seventies have seen an effort to shift German foreign policy from a unending struggle to stay at the top of the pile to a more sustainable long-term system – turning Europe from a barely-contained cauldron of simmering anti-German resentment to a political community which would, at the very least, bear some of the costs of their membership in the German-led order.

This didn’t happen overnight, naturally; the process began with small steps, like allowing the French to take a joint role in investigating the assassination of a German policeman in France in 1972, which snowballed into other “trust-building” (read: cost-saving) measures like restoring French authority over all internal policing functions by June 1974. Even the failed North American effort to remove German missile positions from Boricua (Puerto Rico) by force didn’t provoke the Germans back into real militarism, not least because Burgoyne’s implicit acceptance of the missile installations – which absolutely didn’t exist – meant the Germans had all they wanted, and had a strong interest in cooling the situation.

The chill in relations with Scandinavia also meant Markstein had the excuse of shifting Germany’s focus to the north and east, where Copenhagen was stirring up anti-German sentiment as part of its own push for prominence. As it happened, the sheer profusion of anti-German groups across Europe, such as the Ukrainians who tried to assassinate Frederick of Poland, was one of the things that convinced the Germans of the necessity of trying to be loved rather than loathed.

This was all too little, too late where the Serbs – chafing under Croat rule – were concerned, as it was a Serbian bullet which killed Adolph Markstein in June 1974. His assassination kicked off some dark months for Germany, as New Granada and Britain stepped up their attempts to turn pro-German governments in the Americas and Africa, the Scandinavians meddled in the Russias, and Markstein’s Germany Party lost direction under his hopelessly incompetent successor, Angela Bitterlich. Defeat in the special elections later that year caused Exterior Minister Joshua Merkel to take four dozen of his party colleagues into the alternative coalition established by the Democrats, elevating David Grauer to the Chancellorship.

The constitutional crisis this might have caused was headed off by the Christmas Bomb on Bali which decapitated Kramer Associates and triggered the international manhunt for Vicente Mercator. Germany signed up to the Bornholm Pact with the British and Scandinavians and lent support to the invasion of New Granada, before Geoffrey Gold’s megalomaniacal instincts got the better of him and the German leadership was compelled to pull out of a war which was rapidly expanding beyond comfortable parameters.

After jumping off the war bandwagon in April ‘75, the Democratic-led government got to work with reforming the Empire at a fast clip, their replacement of the Germany Party’s use of ‘the Empire’ in foreign policy missives with ‘Germany’ reflective of their attitude to the Empire and Germany’s place within (rather than atop) it. After another coalition reshuffle brought the Socialists into the government as a junior partner, Merkel floated a Polish policy for Imperial reorganisation past Grauer – the European Union.

As things stand now, Germany is laying the foundations for its Union, a conference at Versailles in September having gained the support of the Outer and External Empires for the crazy new scheme. Maybe it’ll even succeed.

Britain

Thirty years since the Global War ended in mutual exhaustion, Britain remains psychologically scarred; austerity has continued almost unabated as the cross-Channel relationship, often frosty and never more than coolly formal, has forced her to rely on the Empire for trade and wealth, a losing prospect as formal possession of the African and Asian colonies ended by dribs and drabs over the years.

This isn’t the stagflation and punk-rock Britain of OTL’s 1970s, though; far higher emigration rates, three-year conscription with practically no exemptions (conscientious objectors have a laundry list of reasons to emigrate), a far larger proportion of GNP dedicated to defence, and a chip on the shoulder which makes OTL Russia look contented makes the UK a considerably more militaristic state than IOTL (inflation is still plenty of a problem, though). This has caused a certain degree of military adventurism, with frequent (and often hush-hush) participation in the brushfire wars around the German Empire’s periphery keeping the British Armed Forces lean, mean, and frighteningly competent.

This is reflected in domestic politics, with the ruling National Renewal Party reflective of the popular consensus. Somewhat like an OTL Popular Front, the NRP is authoritarian, pro-military, and dedicated to recouping the vision of the United Empire as a globe-spanning association of British and British-descended nations. They’re far from Designated Bad Guys, though; the NRP vision of the Renewed Empire is decidedly cosmopolitan, with room for people of other races and cultures –so long as they’re not German.

Since late 1966, when Mosely Leigh-Oswald’s National Renewal Party swept into power with a promise that, in his own words, “the British people will never again be bluffed out of certain victory” in the way the Whig-Tory coalition was perceived to have been, the NRP has maintained a solid majority, choosing to invite a few minor and similarly-minded parties into coalition to reshape Britain into the heart of the Renewed Empire. In doing so, they have had the wholehearted backing of King Henry X, who has nursed a furious hatred for the Germans since his mother perished in the air raid which destroyed Buckingham Palace during the Global War.

This single-minded determination has yielded mixed results. Things were on the up through to 1974, with the Scandinavians swinging towards Britain and a marriage between the King of New Granada and Princess Sophia bolstering the British bloc. Even the Christmas Bomb offered Geoffrey Gold (who succeeded Leigh-Oswald after his assassination by Gerald K. Fitzjohn in 1971) a seemingly perfect opportunity to announce Britain’s re-emergence onto the world stage, by performing a rapid about-face on New Granada and spearheading the invasion of its erstwhile ally in early 1975, raising the curtain on the American War.

However, things have gone rather pear-shaped, even before the first Limón boots hit the beach in Venezuela. Lennart Skinner’s CNA flatly refused to support Britain in the invasion, with the Caribbean members of the United Empire following suit and placing themselves under the CNA’s defence umbrella. What this has meant is that Britain is stuck doing the heavy lifting in a tropical quagmire; even the opening of a second front by the Australians and Taiwanese did little to relieve the pressure, and the establishment of a puppet government in Venezuela has done little more than give Novogranadense guerrillas someone to focus on killing as oil production has slumped to under a third of pre-war production.

An attempt by Gold to punish the Johnnies for their intransigence in the wake of the invasion of New Granada – including aid shipments to the Novogranadense – by unilaterally appointing a new Viceroy (in violation of the Second Britannic Design, under which the North Americans had selected their own Viceregal candidate) backfired horrifically; faced with the de facto removal of their head of state by Britain’s efforts to use it as an instrument of control, the North Americans simply did away with it in April this year, replacing the office of Viceroy with that of President. (In lesser, but still significant, news, New Zealand voted by referendum to abolish the monarchy a few weeks before the North Americans).

Gold would be stunned if he had time to be; for now, the casualty totals from New Granada are enough to keep Whitehall occupied, as Gold comes under fire even from within the NRP. Britain has caught a tiger by the tail, and now it’s stuck on the ride.

Scandinavia

One of the most surprising success stories of the decade has been Scandinavia. [1] Beginning the decade as neutral (on paper; proximity to Germany made and continues to make them natural British allies), the ascension of Christian Gustav II to the throne in 1971 after Frederik Gustav’s death (airmobile accident, Baltic Sea, no survivors) brought with it a sovereign interested in asserting Scandinavian power independent of the German hegemon in Europe. Within a year, German agents in Copenhagen were being quietly arrested by Royal Security, a policy of supporting supporting the kind of enterprising start-ups whose aims, while laudable amongst certain demographics, were not exactly in correlation with those of Germany (yes, terrorists, exactly) was adopted, and feelers to Kramer were being put out to strengthen Scandinavia’s naval position.

Then, of course, things went off the rails when a Serb revolutionary severed his ties with Scandinavian intelligence and shot Adolph Markstein. While the Scandinavians tried to take advantage of this by supporting a breakaway faction in the Free Russian Republic, German forensics traced the bullet back to Scandinavian sources. The deciding factor in really pissing off the Germans was Christian Gustav’s vitavised speech, where the King announced Scandinavia’s deployment of forces to the FRR, alliance to Taiwan (read: Kramer Associates), and development of nuclear first-strike capabilities, all dressed in rhetoric of Scandinavia taking its rightful place as a power on the world stage. This rhetoric, jumpier observers noted, was strongly reminiscent of that Fanchon used before the Hundred Day War. Things might have escalated further from there, but the Germans contented themselves with accepting Scandinavia’s breakup of the Free Russian Republic in return for some extremely punitive economic countermeasures.

Things might have gone further, when Mercator’s attack on Bali put the invasion of New Granada at the top of everyone’s list. Christian Gustav eagerly offered to hold a conference on Bornholm, where representatives from the major powers (Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, Siam, and Taiwan – all, incidentally, nuclear powers themselves) signed an undertaking to deal with the runaway President Mercator with extreme prejudice. It would be under the Bornholm Pact’s auspices that the two-and-a-half poles of Europe turned the rockets they had levelled at one another in the Caribbean south, towards New Granada, and charged into the bomb factory in Ciudad Camacho in pursuit of Mercator. Scandinavia had scored a diplomatic victory. Then, Christian Gustav went too far. It came to the attention of the Scandinavian General Staff that he was planning to – and in the process of writing a speech announcing his decision to – order the launch of nuclear-armed Barbarossa missiles at Camacho City. This caused no small amount of consternation in the Government, which delivered a pointed missive to the King before he could make his announcement, advising him to seek a more reserved role in the political life of the nation.

Since then, things have been reasonably quiet, Scandinavia having settled into its role as one of the middling great powers in this multipolar world. Yet, compared to the position of profitable neutrality it enjoyed at the start of the decade, there is the sense that it may have traded invaluable security for worthless prestige.


[1] Formed from the personal union of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Schleswig-Holstein, and Iceland, the Faeroes, and Greenland. Also holds the Baltic grand duchies of "Eastland" under “protection”.
 

Tsar of New Zealand

It's a biggie, so if the image below is as blurry as I think it's going to be, here's the link for number one and the link for number two.
Map 1 - Europe, Political and Physical
europe_in_for_all_nails__1976_by_bolshiekiwi-dbzj91n.png



Map 2 - the German Empire and the European Union
c69be71b6566c277b925513701d55339-dbzjchn.png
 
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Bob Hope

Bob Hope

Selvetrica said:
Well horses have a pregnancy rate a little longer than humans. From what I could find,(since horse population is not something a lot of people keep track of) Illinois has somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 horses. So lets say there are about 300,000. Now assuming a growth rate between 1-6%, you could get anywhere from 800,000- 121 million. Now I will admit I dont know the most about horse growth and and am just using an exponential growth modifier. How hard is it to breed horses? I assume its not panda level haha. Yet I figure you could get enough. While resources are a bit scarce there would be plenty of land for horse breeding.
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Sounds like you know a lot more about horses [now] than I do

I agree that the trails are eminently viable
 

fashbasher

Banned
Tomislav Addai said:
I thought High English would be used by the Lords amd conservative voters in the south, while the working labour classes in the north would use Low English
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It's based on identity, not on class. Those who strongly identify with Britain use the more British standard, while those who identify as a unique people use the Southern-based standard.
 

Tsar of New Zealand

245 said:
hows Ireland and how did it got annex by England.
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Well, with a 1770s POD Ireland never became independent. As detailed in this update on the wiki, the population peaked at 7.5 million ITTL, and as of 1971 has crashed to 2.8 million through an absolute haemorrhaging of the population.

The Irish economy is overwhelmingly agricultural, industry having withered on the vine for lack of political incentives to subsidise it - and even then, Irish farming depends on London's subsidies to promote self-sufficiency. There were plans to relocate British industry to Ireland, which led to the construction of one of Europe's best locopista networks, but the rapidly-expanding range of German airmobiles, and the rising nuclear threat through the 1960s made this a moot point. The excellent roads have, since then, mostly funnelled people from the counties to the exit ports.

Ireland's biggest export is its people; England itself has seen far higher emigration than OTL, and Irish labourers make up the balance. Before the shift in British demography in the 1950s, most Irish went further afield: the Confederation of North America, Mexico, Australia, South America and, more than any other country, Quebec, which saw a century of immense Irish immigration (the lineage of Étienne Finnegan should be self-evident).

The Irish language is functionally dead in the same manner as Scots Gaelic IOTL. The story of Ireland, in the FANTL-verse, is not a happy one.
 
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