Yay, another Liberal government. With the smallest possible majority...yikes.
The Anglo-Saxon Social Model
- Thread starter Rattigan
- Start date
It doesn't let them do anything wildly radical that would have both the Conservatives and Labour voting against. But in practical terms it is probably not as bad as it looks, when they tack "left" Labour are likely to abstain or have some rebels voting with and when they tack "right" the Conservatives are likely to vote with them. Or perhaps collectivist and libertarian might be a better axis of measurement TTL?
It wouldn’t surprise me if it works out a bit like the SNP minority administrations in practise.
Map of Europe, 2000
I'm going away this afternoon so there probably won't be a usual Friday update this week. As compensation, please enjoy this map of Europe in 2000. As you'll note, I've made a few changes to the borders of Greece from the last European map I posted but this is a retcon rather than territorial redrawing TTL.
As usual, if any of you have any questions or comments about this TL (in general or about the map specifically) then feel free to post and I'll try to reply. Normal Monday-Wednesday-Friday service will resume next week.
As usual, if any of you have any questions or comments about this TL (in general or about the map specifically) then feel free to post and I'll try to reply. Normal Monday-Wednesday-Friday service will resume next week.
CIS was a later development. Before the 1968-69 crisis, the region was governed similarly to OTL: formally independent nation states with the Soviet military presence, puppet governments, and the mandatory ideological alignment with the Soviet Union (to a mesure, I guess). Rolling them all into one polity and formalising the Soviet control was the reaction to uprisings and protest movements, not a way to organise freshly acquired sphere of influence. Remember, ITTL, the Cold War is much more low key than OTL, so the Soviets had to care somewhat about their standing with the Commonwealth and the US who wouldn't have taken outright annexation kindly enough.
Besides, the USSR has plenty of selfish reasons not to incorporate the CIS directly. First, it has the advantage of colonial rule: you exploit the territory, but you don't have to care about the natives past the bare minimum keeping it stable. In a way, CIS is the Soviet colonial empire. Second, if the Soviet leadership fancies to help some [STRIKE]terrorists[/STRIKE] freedom fighters, it can maintain some plausible deniability (and help the other great powers not to lose their face when they don't act upon it, too) by sending them Czech assault rifles and explosives and Prussian advisors. TTL's Soviet Union has developed a quite strong nationalist streak, too (the late 80s attempt at liberalising the government of Europe ends in a blowback because the Soviet public rejects the idea that Soviet citizens may be tried by the Polish or Bulgarian natives!), so they just don't really want giving these uncivilized Europeans all the rights that the Soviet citizen has.
They were originally eight separate countries (Brandenburg, Saxony, Poland-Slovakia, Prussia, Czechia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania) but they were amalgamated into a single entity following the Bucharest Mutiny in 1968-69. There certainly are some hardliners in Petrograd who want to absorb the whole CIS into the Soviet Union but they're a minority.
Just seen this, it definitely explains the point in more detail than I did.
The Monuments Bombings (2005)
The Suicide of Postwar Europe, Part One: The Monuments Bombings
President John Edwards and his wife address the nation on 20 June 2005
As they entered the 21st century, the American people had a great many reasons to look forward to the coming years. Although Henry Luce had turned out to be wrong when he predicted, in the midst of the World War, that the remainder of the century would be ‘the American Century,’ there was little doubt that the US had become incomparably richer and more powerful over the course of the last six decades. Now, with the Soviet Union looking to be in permanent decline amidst repeated political repression and economic stagnation, and China facing an uncertain future as it attempted, blinking, to resume world leadership, the future looked rosy from a geopolitical point of view. Relations with the Commonwealth were periodically strained but, looked at objectively, there was never serious antagonism: if nothing else, few looked forward to the militarisation of the Great Plains or the Caribbean Sea that such hostility would have entailed. In any event, every American musician paid homage to the Beatles and few Commonwealth citizens could have done without their steady diet of Hollywood films. Furthermore, although some might complain, brands and stores such as Marks & Spencer or Wesfarmers were popular sights on the American high street and London-based banks had increasingly taken over established American corporate names such as Lehman Brothers or J.P. Morgan. Culturally there was great fluidity between the two powers. Writing in 1996, Samuel P. Huntington described the Commonwealth and the United States as ‘brother civilizations’ which does come close to describing their friendly but occasionally squabbling relationship.
The environmental concerns that seemed ready to dominate the affairs of the 21st century also left the world open for the Americans to bustle in. Since the Robert Kennedy Administration had faced down the Big Five in the 1980s, the United States had been at the forefront of the battle against climate change, adopting dramatic targets for phasing out petrol-fueled cars and making huge improvements in renewables. The country was also a global leader in the conservationist movement, with the dramatic resurgence of its own megafauna in the second half of the 20th century serving as a huge example to other countries: once more the American plains were home to vast herds of bison, grand families of mastodon and huge flocks of passenger pigeons.
Aside from this, the nation could also look back with pride on its social and racial developments over the previous century. For a nation born in African slavery and the extirpation of Native Americans, it had developed, by 2000, into a genuinely multi-cultural society seemingly largely at peace with itself. By 2000, African Americans were the majority in eight states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee), Native Americans (including Pacific Islanders) were the majority in four (Comancheria, Lakota, Samoa and Sequoyah) and Hispanics were the majority in one (Dominica). Although it could argue with several Commonwealth countries over this title, the US had a genuine claim to being the most successful multi-racial democracy in the world.
While this was not necessarily all an illusion, the facade would be chipped away at most violently on 20 June 2005. On this day, a series of bombings shook Philadelphia and New York City, the nation’s capital and largest city, respectively, targeting civilians, tourists and historic monuments. Four teams of attackers, totalling 19 individuals, set off bombs around various locations in the two cities and then went on shooting sprees. In New York, one team (Uwe Bohnhardt, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Eric Rudolph) successfully set off bombs around the base of the Statue of Liberty, causing the statue to collapse on the thousands of terrified tourists. Debris and the resulting fires caused partial or complete damage to all the other buildings on Ellis and Liberty Islands. 1,402 people died in this attack and 2,861 were injured. The second New York attack (Ilias Kasidiaris, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Richard Poplawski and Richard Baumhammers) involved a bomb at the New York Stock Exchange, followed by a mass shooting in the Financial District. 488 people were killed in this attack and 1,284 were injured. In Philadelphia, another bomb in Independence Mall (Hadži Andrej Milić, Bruce Turnidge, Joshua Turnidge, Jim David Adkisson and Jerry Blanchard) destroyed the Liberty Bell Center, with that blast and subsequent shootings resulting in the deaths of 58 people and injuries to a further 851. The final attack, on the Federal Capitol, was less successful as the attackers (Saša Cvjetan, Tharin Gartrell, Nathan Johnson, Shawn Adolf and James Cummings) were quickly set upon by law enforcement. Nevertheless, this attack resulted in 16 deaths and 31 injuries. In total 1,964 people were killed and 5,027 people were injured.
15 of the 19 terrorists were American citizens, two were from Yugoslavia, one was from Greece and one was from Hanover. All of the US citizens had travelled to Yugoslavia previously for training in the far right paramilitary known as the Deaths’ Heads. Of the 19 attackers, only eight (Bohnhardt, McVeigh, Nichols, Rudolph, Kasidiaris, Milić, Adkission and Blanchard) were captured alive. The remaining attackers were killed at the scene either by law enforcement or by apparent suicide.
The revelation of some of the attackers’ nationalities, combined with the stories of Yugoslavian training camps revealed by the survivors’ interrogations, ignited an immediate global diplomatic crisis. President John Edwards triggered the mutual defence clause of the NATO alliance (for the first time) and received messages of support from the Commonwealth, Soviet Union and China. Only France played a spoiling role, arguing that the Yugoslavian government could not be held responsible for the actions of some of its citizens. (This argument may have held water for some other countries but few thought that the Yugoslavian government did not, at the very least, turn an indulgent blind eye to the far right training camps in their midst.) Something had changed but what would replace it was up in the air.
President John Edwards and his wife address the nation on 20 June 2005
As they entered the 21st century, the American people had a great many reasons to look forward to the coming years. Although Henry Luce had turned out to be wrong when he predicted, in the midst of the World War, that the remainder of the century would be ‘the American Century,’ there was little doubt that the US had become incomparably richer and more powerful over the course of the last six decades. Now, with the Soviet Union looking to be in permanent decline amidst repeated political repression and economic stagnation, and China facing an uncertain future as it attempted, blinking, to resume world leadership, the future looked rosy from a geopolitical point of view. Relations with the Commonwealth were periodically strained but, looked at objectively, there was never serious antagonism: if nothing else, few looked forward to the militarisation of the Great Plains or the Caribbean Sea that such hostility would have entailed. In any event, every American musician paid homage to the Beatles and few Commonwealth citizens could have done without their steady diet of Hollywood films. Furthermore, although some might complain, brands and stores such as Marks & Spencer or Wesfarmers were popular sights on the American high street and London-based banks had increasingly taken over established American corporate names such as Lehman Brothers or J.P. Morgan. Culturally there was great fluidity between the two powers. Writing in 1996, Samuel P. Huntington described the Commonwealth and the United States as ‘brother civilizations’ which does come close to describing their friendly but occasionally squabbling relationship.
The environmental concerns that seemed ready to dominate the affairs of the 21st century also left the world open for the Americans to bustle in. Since the Robert Kennedy Administration had faced down the Big Five in the 1980s, the United States had been at the forefront of the battle against climate change, adopting dramatic targets for phasing out petrol-fueled cars and making huge improvements in renewables. The country was also a global leader in the conservationist movement, with the dramatic resurgence of its own megafauna in the second half of the 20th century serving as a huge example to other countries: once more the American plains were home to vast herds of bison, grand families of mastodon and huge flocks of passenger pigeons.
Aside from this, the nation could also look back with pride on its social and racial developments over the previous century. For a nation born in African slavery and the extirpation of Native Americans, it had developed, by 2000, into a genuinely multi-cultural society seemingly largely at peace with itself. By 2000, African Americans were the majority in eight states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee), Native Americans (including Pacific Islanders) were the majority in four (Comancheria, Lakota, Samoa and Sequoyah) and Hispanics were the majority in one (Dominica). Although it could argue with several Commonwealth countries over this title, the US had a genuine claim to being the most successful multi-racial democracy in the world.
While this was not necessarily all an illusion, the facade would be chipped away at most violently on 20 June 2005. On this day, a series of bombings shook Philadelphia and New York City, the nation’s capital and largest city, respectively, targeting civilians, tourists and historic monuments. Four teams of attackers, totalling 19 individuals, set off bombs around various locations in the two cities and then went on shooting sprees. In New York, one team (Uwe Bohnhardt, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Eric Rudolph) successfully set off bombs around the base of the Statue of Liberty, causing the statue to collapse on the thousands of terrified tourists. Debris and the resulting fires caused partial or complete damage to all the other buildings on Ellis and Liberty Islands. 1,402 people died in this attack and 2,861 were injured. The second New York attack (Ilias Kasidiaris, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Richard Poplawski and Richard Baumhammers) involved a bomb at the New York Stock Exchange, followed by a mass shooting in the Financial District. 488 people were killed in this attack and 1,284 were injured. In Philadelphia, another bomb in Independence Mall (Hadži Andrej Milić, Bruce Turnidge, Joshua Turnidge, Jim David Adkisson and Jerry Blanchard) destroyed the Liberty Bell Center, with that blast and subsequent shootings resulting in the deaths of 58 people and injuries to a further 851. The final attack, on the Federal Capitol, was less successful as the attackers (Saša Cvjetan, Tharin Gartrell, Nathan Johnson, Shawn Adolf and James Cummings) were quickly set upon by law enforcement. Nevertheless, this attack resulted in 16 deaths and 31 injuries. In total 1,964 people were killed and 5,027 people were injured.
15 of the 19 terrorists were American citizens, two were from Yugoslavia, one was from Greece and one was from Hanover. All of the US citizens had travelled to Yugoslavia previously for training in the far right paramilitary known as the Deaths’ Heads. Of the 19 attackers, only eight (Bohnhardt, McVeigh, Nichols, Rudolph, Kasidiaris, Milić, Adkission and Blanchard) were captured alive. The remaining attackers were killed at the scene either by law enforcement or by apparent suicide.
The revelation of some of the attackers’ nationalities, combined with the stories of Yugoslavian training camps revealed by the survivors’ interrogations, ignited an immediate global diplomatic crisis. President John Edwards triggered the mutual defence clause of the NATO alliance (for the first time) and received messages of support from the Commonwealth, Soviet Union and China. Only France played a spoiling role, arguing that the Yugoslavian government could not be held responsible for the actions of some of its citizens. (This argument may have held water for some other countries but few thought that the Yugoslavian government did not, at the very least, turn an indulgent blind eye to the far right training camps in their midst.) Something had changed but what would replace it was up in the air.
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I see cloning (and de-extinction?) technology is being used to great effect ITTL.
9/11 committed by the far-right with shades of Columbine.
Fuuuuuuck.
And going by the title "The Suicide of Postwar Europe, Part One", it's not gonna stop at Yugoslavia.
EDIT: Oh, and a quick quibble. The Statue of Liberty is on Liberty Island, not Ellis Island, unless there was a separate bombing there.
Fuuuuuuck.
And going by the title "The Suicide of Postwar Europe, Part One", it's not gonna stop at Yugoslavia.
EDIT: Oh, and a quick quibble. The Statue of Liberty is on Liberty Island, not Ellis Island, unless there was a separate bombing there.
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What a glorious mess. This is going to end very badly. Yugoslavia is going to be kicked... I wonder if the States are going to pay more attention to the foreign terrorists than to those of their kind.
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Just to clarify this, I'd imagined that the passenger pigeon was saved from extinction and nurtured back to health. The mastodon was brought back: I don't want to go too deep on this kind of science but I imagined that the DNA was recovered somehow and cloned embryos were implanted in Indian elephants until a sufficient breeding population could be released into natural parks. I'd also imagined that similar programmes will have brought back mammoths in Canada and the Soviet Union. If you go back and look at my update for the Steel-Mount coalition I mentioned the bankruptcy of InGen as a cause of a recession in the US in the early 1990s (kind of as TTL's Enron equivalent) so at least the first Jurassic Park movie happened TTL.
Either way, this sort of thing is never going to be anything more than a background detail in this TL but I thought it was fun. If anyone else has a fun candidate for de-extinction then feel free to shout out.
Also, and this is a genuine question and not something that is going to be massively important going forward, but what do people think the US government might do with the destroyed Liberty Bell and Statue of Liberty? Build new ones? Maybe leave them as memorials?
IIRC the Liberty Bell in the visitors' centre right now is a replica anyway so maybe they'd build a new one. As for the statue, I'm open to any cool and/or interesting ideas.
IIRC the Liberty Bell in the visitors' centre right now is a replica anyway so maybe they'd build a new one. As for the statue, I'm open to any cool and/or interesting ideas.
There wouldn't be any surviving dinosaur DNA. It doesn't survive fossilisation, and if you tried to extract it from mosquitos preserved in amber, it would destroy the sample.
Instead, you would need to genetically engineer them. Kentucky Fried Raptor, anyone?
Kentucky Fried Raptor, anyone?
If TTL had the same kind of plutocratic jet set elite as OTL then you can bet that would be a side, no doubt with gold leaf shavings sprinkled on top, available with every dish at Davos...