Awesome map! I would love to see more from this universe!
notes on the scenario:
Map is based on a radical global cooling scenario in approx 2030. This is the result from early adoption of nuclear technology and a big fission based Nuclear war in ttl's 1950's or 180's. This leads to substantial global cooling and sea-level drop of about 30m. Antagonists in the nuclear exchange were UK(loser) and France(winner). England population at the time the map is set is about 22 Million. Early adoption of nuclear-tech is the result of low investment in oil technology due to US not existing. France tends to fluctuate between extreme republican radicals and reactionary coups but is very populous and muscular in ttl. ttl's France is the master of Europe. Scenario is quite implausible and I think that speed of sea level drop is basically impossible.
( edit: in case it is of interest here is the deviantart link: https://www.deviantart.com/qazdr6/art/Winter-in-England-840047115 )
Map Thread XIX
- Thread starter water123
- Start date
- Status
Thanks very much, actually there is quite a bit of stuff I've done on this universe, including a couple low quality world maps and some unfinished character designs
Spots the lack of large sea between France and England
Boi the Anglishmen are gonna take it the hard way
Boi the Anglishmen are gonna take it the hard way
You know, after going to a MUN conference where I was an Austrian delegate attending the Congress of Vienna, this sort of scenario is kinda a dream come true.
Nice map too! I don’t think this sort of scenario is plausible without seriously screwing over some major historical players within both the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, but I like the scenario and map style.
@ETGalaxy is right, to me it seams as bordering ASB, but I do not know about background if there is some. There are also some internal G. borders I do not like, but man, as a whole, I really, really like it! Felix Austria...
GERMANY: THE TARGET
(aka "Turn the fash into nuclear ash")
When Germany Repudiated Versaille, Remilitarized and annexed Austria, we gave in;
When Germany Dismembered Czechoslovakia and Reshaped Central Europe, we gave in;
When Germany Invaded Poland, we gave in, not daring to attack;
And When our troops were defeated in Northern France, we gave in to the Nazis, leaving them a free hand to conquer the East.
One by one cities fell to the Germans: Kiev, Leningrad, Moscow. The Soviet people fought fervently but they couldn't win decisive battle against the Wehrmacht and eventually, they split without a leader. Then, we started to hear rumors, hearsays from the occupied territories, too terrible to be believe. Until what happened became clear, Death and Slavery on an industrial scale, Engineered famines that depopulated countries, the systematic destruction of the culture and memory of entire peoples. And it was too late to intervene, the Germans were fortifying the Atlantic Wall after shifting their ressources west and the awakened American Giant was focused on the final confrontation of the Great Pacific War.
Germany and Britain hunkered down on their positions, putting pressure on each other while the Free World led by America was working together to counter the Nazi Empire but despite the nuclear superiority an invasion was still deemed too costly. Instead, we sat on our hundreds of airfield and bases, focusing on merely containing Fascism, more and more confident it would eventually burn itself out if it couldn't spread.
And Indeed, the supposedly Thousand-Year long Reich collapsed, an extremely militarised state centered on the cult of personality of its leader who could only keep the cutthroat branches of the fanatical state from killing each other. It only needed his death, and a bomb in Germania. Everybody was expecting it, yet nobody was prepared for the Chaos.
As germany became a battleground the oppressed people of Europe rose up, from Brest to Moscow every desesperate groups decided to strike at the same time despite the lack of coordination, some misjudged the local forces and were crushed others carved out their freedom from the Nazi Empire, everybody took the opportunity, everybody except us.
Why the Free world didn't directly intervene is still a mystery a few years later, some say it was a conflict of interest between the various free countries, other advocated patience and measure to eventualy deal with the last Fascist contender standing, many were afraid of the German missiles. But it doesn't matter, the freedom fighters of Europe looked up to us and we failed to helpd, despite a decade of preparation we did not dare to do more than timid strikes at the periphery and giving indirect support to the most prominent revolutionaries. At the most crucial moment, we gave in once more.
The inevitable then happened: After months and months of fighting, one of the Nazi contender seized Germany proper, a wasteland for sure, but that faction, more fanatical than ever, still controlled the most productive wasteland across a devastated Europe. Slowly but surely they have been retaking freed cities, Prague, Bratislava, Kracow, determined to retake their conquest and destroy all who betrayed them, and with every passing months their nuclear stockpile, initially insignificant and terribly late compared to ours, grows larger and larger and as we have seen from Warsaw, they are clearly not reluctant to use them.
Across Europe, In France, in former Russia, in Poland, resistant groups are still strong, but there is no doubt that alone they cannot withstand this fanatical onslaught. We are at the crossroads, either we act decisively and destroy the Nazi Empire at its very center, or we would have yielded one final time, like cowards who let a Continent be destroyed.
Against a nuclear armed Germany resolute to destroy what is left of Europe one final time there is only one option: the immediate strategic atomic destruction of Germany. Yes, this would sign the death warrant of millions of Germans, and put at risk millions of Britons and other freed or oppressed European but for every week we wait untold victims are dying, the massacre can only end with the instant decapitation of the Nazi Empire, whatever the cost.
Future pundits will wonder if it would have been worth it, why bring more death to a country which has already undergone a civil war? Would the destruction of some of our cities have been worth it? But they will have the benefit of hindsight and they will be removed from the ongoing massacre, a massacre that surpasses what anyone has done in History, surpassing even what the Nazis did to Russia last decade. It is a moral obligation to strike now and put down Fascism forever.
We need a joint strike to preserve what is left of Europe.
A Genocide of a dozen millions to save a hundred.
---
Well this was rather fun to make, I started this map more than a year ago and only restarted working on it with the lockdown, this is supposed to be in a divergent scenario of a TWR mod timeline, really any where one of the civil war factions wins early after a short civil war, I purposely made the writeup vague, showing a poster advocating for the destruction of Germany
That was Actually a plan IRL, to take Bornholm as a naval base from denmark, it was favoured by goering IIRC.
Thanks!
Yes I know is very close to ASB, and that's why I did not include it in any TL. The idea in the background is Prussia to be divided in 1806 and Russia to be defated by a coallition led by Austria in an extra final chapter of the war, after the withdrawal of Napoleon. Thus, they finally do not get neither Finland nor Poland. Instead of the idea of the Concert of Nations, Austria negotiates a solid alliance with the UK in order to the British to approve their dominance in the continent as long as they favour the British interests overall (i.e. they might allow the British to take the Dutch Indies, as the Netherlands are not restored), keeping both France and Russia at bay. The Ottomans start to disintegrate earlier.
A Government for Each - Central-South Europe
For too long have the linguistic groups of the world been unfairly grouped into states who claim to represent them. It is clear that large and diverse areas of the world have been stereotyped as belonging to some single uniform nation that large states tend to destroy and assimilate local cultures.
This is a map re imagining the political structure of central-south Europe to be more considerate of this fact. I am sure that it can be hard to orient yourself, so try to look in the top-middle of the map, where you will likely start to see the outline of the modern day Czech Republic. I hope that you can start to navigate the map from there.
My Deviantart
The main problem with the sea level drop is, that the Baltic and the Black Sea receive more water from their rivers than is evaporating. So if the sea level drops by more than ~30 meters the water in these two "seas" would stop droping and outlet rivers would form through the Bosporus and the Kattegat.
notes on the scenario:
Map is based on a radical global cooling scenario in approx 2030. This is the result from early adoption of nuclear technology and a big fission based Nuclear war in ttl's 1950's or 180's. This leads to substantial global cooling and sea-level drop of about 30m. Antagonists in the nuclear exchange were UK(loser) and France(winner). England population at the time the map is set is about 22 Million. Early adoption of nuclear-tech is the result of low investment in oil technology due to US not existing. France tends to fluctuate between extreme republican radicals and reactionary coups but is very populous and muscular in ttl. ttl's France is the master of Europe. Scenario is quite implausible and I think that speed of sea level drop is basically impossible.
( edit: in case it is of interest here is the deviantart link: https://www.deviantart.com/qazdr6/art/Winter-in-England-840047115 )
This implies waterfalls around Istanbul and Copenhagen, which would be quite impressive to see.
I see so like the opposite of the med. sea levels would rise untill water could flow out I to the Atlantic (Baltic) or Med(black)
The Great Cyber War was finally over, the day that the last known cyberman was killed and remaining cyber forces fled Earth was welcomed with great victory, across the world in capitals of all nations, horst wessel lied, The Internationale, Star Spangled Banner, God save the Queen, San Min Chu-i, La Marseillaise and all the anthems of the world were played.
It was a definite odd sight to see Soviet, American and German soldiers all with different ideologies hugging it out. Pictures of Indian soldiers kissing french nurses. The mood on earth was of celebration and the greatest celebration the world had ever seen commenced in the following week, so much alcohol was consumed it was said that you could of filled the entire ocean with the amount drunk.
After the celebration though, it was time to get final borders settled. The Cybermen had converted large swathes of human population leaving areas depopulated of any human life. So armies of foreign nations moved in and occupied them. This caused several international protest, specifically with the Germans protesting and threatening absolute hell fire upon the french with there occupation of the western half of the country, but eventually relented as they knew the wehrmacht was in no fighting mood and the grip of the nazi regime was starting to rapidly unwravel with the death of Hitler.
The Soviets and Chinese worked out agreements to transfer small bits of land to each other, and south africa claimed much of the former colonies of the European powers. In the United States, arrangements were made with Mexico and Canada for exchange of lands, and it was generally settled peacefully, though there was quite a lot of intiial public out lash.
South America who had fought on each others sides and had kept the Cyber menace back for decades through military unity, put aside there differences and realized as a power bloc, they be powerful united, so formed the South American Union of Nations. In Iberia the devastated portugese population had no other choice but accept spanish union, begrudgingly though. In eastern Europe the soviets moved in and formally annexed territories, but created SSR's out of the remaining populations and split Turky between them and the greeks.
New states were created, the state of Israel was formed in middle east as a home land for the jewish population.
Finally once the borders were set, the world settled and agreed to create a brand new, far more formal league of nations known as the United Nations, creating with U.N a formal but weak U.N military police and a United Nations space navy to protect Earth space from any un wanted invaders or any more cyber attacks.
So on November 23rd 1981, peace was formalized in the treaty of the future, signed in Rome. By the end of the war all major powers at the start were utterly devastated with populations dramatically reduced.
Soviet Population 60 Million
American Population 50 Million
British Population 20 Million
French Population 30 Million
German Population 18 Million
Japanese population 8 Million
Italian Population 20 million
Chinese population 250 million
While other nations like South Africa and South American Union were left relatively unharmed with large swelling populations.
South American Union Population 233,949,480
South African Population 40 Million
In the coming decade, the disgusting breeding camps were slowly shut down, as new technology came about to assist human population grow aiding fertility rates slowing down aging and even curing forms of cancer, leading to a massive baby boom and population growth during the 80s and early 90s. In places like United States where Democracy had been shut down for decades, many called for reopenings of elections, which were once again let open, with a new constitution adding onto the old one, abolishing the senate and merging it with the house, along with creating a proportional representation system and abolishing electoral college.
Immediately after this, new elections were called and elected to President with a popular mandate was Walter Mondale of American Popular Party. Second place was Alice Roosevelt of the American Labor Federation. Third was General George S Patton of the American Salvation front, Patton had been able to survive the war and was a major commanders in many campaigns against cyber forces, and with new cyber technology had been able to prolong his life. Fourth Was Gerald Ford of the Republican Party. Fifth was John F Kennedy of Democratic Party and finally Sixth was the demented aged William Dudley Pelley of Christian Heritage party, he had lead his silver legion, renamed White Legion into Cyber territories for a crusade against the metalic foes. Everyone assumed he had died, but it turned out after 30 years we discovered him and his friends leading a coalition of resistance fighters in occupied America against cyber forces, a lot of his views were still wickedly unpopular, but he appealed to some in the south and was able to get into the brand new Congress.
In other places across the globe similar stories occured, the Soviet Union slowly liberalized, allowing more freedoms then before. In UK, the British Republic was formed, because UK had lacked a monarchy for 40 years and was simply held vacant. But with soaring victory of Republicans in the labor party, and a soaring victory for the labor party in the 1981 general election, they had passed a bill that would formally dissolve the monarchy and formally reorganize the UK into a constitutional republic.
By 1999 many of the nations of Earth were recovering with brand new populations and work forces coming in, many plans were made to start to settle reclaimed land and repopulate the areas, hoping by 2020 there would be a brand new population base in many of these areas, though in some cases this would lead to clashes and anger, leading to the worsening relations of the worlds nations leading into the 2000s.
Soviet Population 100 Million
American Population 90 Million
British Population 40 Million
French Population 40 Million
German Population 37 Million
Japanese population 14 Million
Italian Population 33 million
Chinese population 450 million
Back in the heady days of 2016, when I thought that the worst that could happen in the world was Brexit, I threw together a Kaiserreich map about an equivalent in that world. I decided to mess around with it a bit lately, and here's the result. No Munroist type stuff, since I still have yet to learn how to do that, so instead enjoy a big ol' essay which I'll spoil for the sake of your scroll bar.
(not super happy with the Volga-Ural region, but them's the breaks)
It is March 27, 1947. For over a year and a half, the forces of Mitteleuropa and the International Commonwealth of Socialist States (informally, the Internationale) have fought what would come to be called the “Phony War” following the final collapse of the Union of Britain as German forces stormed the beaches of the doomed leftist state in Operation Schwertwal. Carrier raids and submarine strikes against Mitteleuropan transports continue, but every week another French resistance cell is betrayed, another guerilla is gunned down in the Scottish Highlands, and Fortress Europa adds another brick to its wall. Today, though, a Union of American Socialist Republics task force is seen off the coast of the Shetland Islands. It is the German Empire’s best chance yet to unleash its new weapon. At a little past 1 pm, the world’s first atomic weapon used in combat kills over 10,000 sailors. It will not be the last. The detonation confirmed Internationale officers in Iceland’s worst fears, and UASR President Alfred Wagenknecht reluctantly authorized Operation Damocles, which had sat waiting since a test at Los Almos in September 1945.
The sunrise on Heligoland the next day would be the last that thousands on that island would ever see. A B-31 Stratofortress (Laffayette), with two observation planes, dropped a thermonuclear weapon on the German naval base that nearly scoured the entire island into the sea. A year of peace demands promising “utter obliteration for the reactionary regimes of Mitteleuropa” were no empty threat, with dozens of nuclear weapons (albeit very few thermonuclear ones) in the Internationale’s arsenal. The truth of the matter, though, was that the Internationale lacked the will to muster up the millions of troops needed to break Berlin’s will, even if every nuclear weapon on a German-controlled port or city hit. The American people in particular had been through a civil war, the War of the Americas against the Entente and its reactionary Latin American allies, and the fall of Syndicalist Europe in the past decade, and it showed. Integrating English Canada was another source of internal tension, not to mention the embarrassing spate of reactionary terror across the old South that led to the creation of the New Afrikan Autonomous Socialist Republic. And so it was that Foreign Secretary Foster and Franz von Papen signed the uti possidetis Peace of Alexandria the next month, and the Second Thirty Year’s War came to a close. (A naval showdown in the Mozambique Channel over the Bharat-backed Malagasy People’s Republic in July brought fears of a reignited war, but Germany ultimately decided that a colony that had barely ever been in their grasp wasn’t worth fighting for)
Global peace would last barely a decade, but it would be seen as the pinnacle of Mitteleuropa. Although the periphery of Europe was not yet integrated, Berlin and Pressburg had time to consolidate and attempt to stamp out Syndicalist affections. The rebuilding of Europe in a monarchist image was tarred by the outbreak of the Kongo Wars/Liberation Wars (depending on your ideological leanings) in the late 50s. Years of mismanagement in Mittelafrika, the growth of a bourgeois nationalist class across the colonies, and the beacons of Chicago and Calcutta showing a different path caused revolts, first in the Kongo province but quickly across what was left of the colonial world. The desperate attempts to hold on to Germany’s prestige stretched across the entirety of the 1960s, as Europan soldiers fought against the confusing multisided factions of a collapsing colonial state, and frequently (although neither faction would admit it for fear of starting a global nuclear war) Internationale troops. Ultimately most of Indonesia would be lost to the Asian Prosperity Sphere, while Mitteleuropa was forced to accept dominion status for East Africa, Kamerun, and Togo while watching most of the rest slip away into chaos and/or Socialism.
Mitteleuropa expanded despite those setbacks, however. The Nordic states had entered by the time Patrice Lumumba made his famous demand for independence. Serbia’s attempt to “free” Serbs in Illyria (thinking Mitteleuropa distracted by the Kongo Wars) brought about the Fifth Balkan War, with Illyria saved by the intervention of the Danubian Federation and Bulgaria. The fracture this caused in the Bucharest Pact opened the way for the entire peninsula to join by the end of the decade. Spain and Portugal, having failed to pacify Mozambique’s syndicalist revolution, turned to Mitteleuropa to get the troops necessary to save Angola. And after the 4th military coup in five years, Russia turned to Mitteleuropa for stability, gaining a new Tsar after over a half-century. By the 1980s, Europe was united in purpose, from Lisbon to the Urals.
THE PRESENT DAY
ASIA
The corporations of the Empire of Japan stretch from the sunny Pacific islands to the chilly but multicultural Siberian Republic, Astrakhan to Jakarta, and increasingly are a fixture in the non-syndicalist parts of Africa. Tokyo is one of the (if not THE, considering Berlin’s tendency towards protectionism) centers of global capital, and it shows. Glittering, massive, and wealthy, the twentieth century was good to Japan. Even as it gave Korea home rule, it was learning that economic imperialism was a lot easier than outright military control, and a lot of the more… headstrong officers dying fighting against the Mad Baron and the German colonial empire spared it political instability. Although it stands head and shoulders among its allies (and certainly not neocolonialist puppets), the Empire of Oceania does hold enough sway to be considered one of the secondary powers of the world, as Empress Elizabeth rules over a collection of exile descendents and refugees.
The Tian Dynasty finally ended the moribund Qing and the South China Special Economic Zone by the 60s, but the effort had ended up leaving China at its smallest in centuries. Which to a certain extent fit the Tian just fine, being able to spread their Teachings more efficiently, while having less to administer and defend. But inevitably, the Hermit Middle Kingdom found itself lagging behind, and began to open itself up to foreign investment at the turn of the century (to the relief of flagging global capital). German and Japanese corporations have only recently been allowed to look into China, but Oceanic, Danubian, and even some Africaine investment has seen excellent returns. But is it enough?
Bharat, to some extent, stands alone in the International. More orthodox Syndicalist than basically any other country on the planet, it has had to walk a narrow line between maintaining the system that has worked for its billion+ inhabitants at the cost of being able to get things done at levels beyond the local at speeds beyond a snail’s pace. Electronics help, though. In foreign policy, though, Bharat has been far more aggressive, keeping up the anti-imperialist doctrines of the International (despite that being more Leninist) after the end of the Kongo Wars, which despite Chicago’s muted displeasure did eventually lead to the world-altering Thai Crisis. Which of the two titans of the International is feared more tends to depend on geographic proximity, but Calcutta’s drive to hack off capital’s knees by going right for its exploited nations has proven to be a fruitful path to take.
AFRICA
Nationalist France embarked on a mission of radical reform, democratizing and creating a system of law for all its peoples, in the name of getting the buy-in from what would otherwise be its subjects and create an army capable of liberating France… only to watch Germany march in and dismember their homeland. Had it not been for mass riots at the news of the plan to end France as a concept, there would have been three or four “Grand Duchies” where there was once l’Hexagone. Even as it stood, the new Kingdom of France had half the territory even the Commune had. In this new darkest hour for the exiles, General De Gualle declared that he would rather spend the rest of eternity buried in Algiers than spend a single day as a German lapdog. The shaky democracy agreed with him. New exiles bolstered the population, but all the time it felt less like France-in-exile and more like something new as Arabs, Europeans, and Africans learned to coexist where once all had been pitted against each other. And so it was that L’Union Africaine was officially born in 1961. The years following were not always easy, but a continued antipathy towards Germany, as well as pride that unlike seemingly the rest of the continent the UA was managing to stay stable helped to make being Africaine a lasting citizenship.
The rest of post-colonial Africa was not nearly so lucky, thanks in large part to Berlin’s refusal to accept the truth on the ground, but things are finally somewhat stabilizing. The Kamerun Union is fairly well-off, if rather militarized, and Ostafrika has been a loyal and stable dominion of Germany for decades. The International-aligned states range from “hard to distinguish quality of life from your average American International state” (Ghana) to “plagued with reactionary holdouts and is generally pretty authoritarian” (Workers Union of the Kongo). Of lesser note is Biafra, or “for the dozenth time please stop selling the capitalists oil”.
THE MIDDLE EAST
The Middle East is a paragon of stability, consisting basically of the Sultanates of Egypt and Libya and the Sultanate of All Arabia and its minor hanger-on allies. Oil money keeps things very secure, and having crushed Wahhabism, religious fundamentalism isn’t really the issue. Hashemite Arabia is pretty accommodating to its minorities (the establishment of the Judaean Governate was… contentious) and Egypt has finally started to take advantage of its considerable population with Japanese aid. Were this world divided between Japan and Germany, Egypt might just tip the balance. However…
THE AMERICAS
From Tierra Del Fuego to the Bering Strait, the red flag flies. The average native who remembers life under capitalism is an octogenarian. And unlike the International members in Africa and Asia, there are no threats save that which threatens the whole planet. Welcome to Semi-Automated Comfortable Pansexual Planetary Communism.
The UASR is decidedly more Marxist/State Socialist than Syndicalist (the IWW leaders got hit pretty hard during the Civil War and the Communists and fellow travellers made up the majority of the convention), but even so, to live in the International is to be a union man. The IWW split a few decades ago (global warming related, ultimately Appalachia got a bunch of green tech factories put in but it took a while), but the various Big Unions are getting back to amicability, and there’s talk of remaking that which was broken. With truly only a need for a massive (just the UASR’s section of the International Navy would make the British Fleet at its zenith blush) Navy for protection, the UASR has basically solved “to each according to his need”.
The rest of the American Internationale varies, but basically all of it would be considered First World by OTL standards. Things aren’t as great if you’re living deep in the jungles of South America or in the more ignored parts of the Andes or Patagonia, but unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary (and again, we’re talking three generations under leftist rule with no hope of support from the rest of the world) you still feel good about the life you have. Even the Canadians, annexed to the UASR (aside from Quebec) are pretty well assimilated and happy. “Canada” has become a shorthand for the North, to the chagrin of what we’d call the Upper Midwest.
The main political debate here is how to handle the non-International world. After the end of the Liberation Wars, a “we will bury you” school of thought took hold, as interventionism died down and instead a focus on defensive posturing and infrastructure building became the norm, waiting for capitalism to contradict itself into collapse. The last quarter-century, though, has seen a slow return to confrontation (finally, says the Bharati establishment). The Angolan War started back up, and with the Angolan Worker’s Liberation Front dropping the demands that Cabinda (full part of Portugal since 1987 [the oil money helped]) be included in an independence referendum will likely see a new leftist state in Africa. Who knows where its eye will fall next?
---
So that’s where things stand. Two capitalist powers jockeying for leadership of the “free world”, and a semi-cohesive International building up their own strength and trying to finally bring stability to a chaotic Africa. This could easily go on for some time, especially since global warming’s gotten a lot more mitigated than OTL.
And yet.
There is a malaise in the capitalist world. No one wants to talk about it, but everywhere you go you can feel it. From simple things like a spraypainted gear on a dilapidated building in a slum, to the fact that the International can make serious threats of sanctions to Berlin due to how nightmarish the Integralist regime in the Cossack Domain of the Don, Kuban, and Caucasus has gotten with repression, and that for the first time Mitteleuropa has to listen.
And then, the riots. 2017 saw such massive protests across Russia marking a century since Red October that the government had to flee Petrograd for a week. Official body counts have yet to be released. Last year the whole of what was once France went into lockdown for months, and travel into Europe from the International was suspended for most of the year. Similar draconian measures are expected for 2025 in Britain. And for all that, all they have done is breed more resentment, more disillusionment with the status quo, more eyes that look to a red dawn.
The rest of the world is not much different. A massive corruption scandal in the UA has shattered confidence in the political establishment, and the left aims to take advantage of that in the snap election to come. The Empire of Central Africa is beginning to crack, and the Kongo is getting better all the time. Japan might be the glittering center of global capital, but the next recession could be The Big One, and the JCP already has 30% of the Diet. And for all that Tian China is getting development, what’s really happening is what happened to OTL China, and there’s no red paint to cover what’s happening to the workers this time. How long will they stand it?
If this is the start of the long decline for capitalism, for monarchy, what will it look like? And in the back of every person’s mind, if it does come to that, will the Powers That Be accept their fate and loss, or take the whole world with them?
The sunrise on Heligoland the next day would be the last that thousands on that island would ever see. A B-31 Stratofortress (Laffayette), with two observation planes, dropped a thermonuclear weapon on the German naval base that nearly scoured the entire island into the sea. A year of peace demands promising “utter obliteration for the reactionary regimes of Mitteleuropa” were no empty threat, with dozens of nuclear weapons (albeit very few thermonuclear ones) in the Internationale’s arsenal. The truth of the matter, though, was that the Internationale lacked the will to muster up the millions of troops needed to break Berlin’s will, even if every nuclear weapon on a German-controlled port or city hit. The American people in particular had been through a civil war, the War of the Americas against the Entente and its reactionary Latin American allies, and the fall of Syndicalist Europe in the past decade, and it showed. Integrating English Canada was another source of internal tension, not to mention the embarrassing spate of reactionary terror across the old South that led to the creation of the New Afrikan Autonomous Socialist Republic. And so it was that Foreign Secretary Foster and Franz von Papen signed the uti possidetis Peace of Alexandria the next month, and the Second Thirty Year’s War came to a close. (A naval showdown in the Mozambique Channel over the Bharat-backed Malagasy People’s Republic in July brought fears of a reignited war, but Germany ultimately decided that a colony that had barely ever been in their grasp wasn’t worth fighting for)
Global peace would last barely a decade, but it would be seen as the pinnacle of Mitteleuropa. Although the periphery of Europe was not yet integrated, Berlin and Pressburg had time to consolidate and attempt to stamp out Syndicalist affections. The rebuilding of Europe in a monarchist image was tarred by the outbreak of the Kongo Wars/Liberation Wars (depending on your ideological leanings) in the late 50s. Years of mismanagement in Mittelafrika, the growth of a bourgeois nationalist class across the colonies, and the beacons of Chicago and Calcutta showing a different path caused revolts, first in the Kongo province but quickly across what was left of the colonial world. The desperate attempts to hold on to Germany’s prestige stretched across the entirety of the 1960s, as Europan soldiers fought against the confusing multisided factions of a collapsing colonial state, and frequently (although neither faction would admit it for fear of starting a global nuclear war) Internationale troops. Ultimately most of Indonesia would be lost to the Asian Prosperity Sphere, while Mitteleuropa was forced to accept dominion status for East Africa, Kamerun, and Togo while watching most of the rest slip away into chaos and/or Socialism.
Mitteleuropa expanded despite those setbacks, however. The Nordic states had entered by the time Patrice Lumumba made his famous demand for independence. Serbia’s attempt to “free” Serbs in Illyria (thinking Mitteleuropa distracted by the Kongo Wars) brought about the Fifth Balkan War, with Illyria saved by the intervention of the Danubian Federation and Bulgaria. The fracture this caused in the Bucharest Pact opened the way for the entire peninsula to join by the end of the decade. Spain and Portugal, having failed to pacify Mozambique’s syndicalist revolution, turned to Mitteleuropa to get the troops necessary to save Angola. And after the 4th military coup in five years, Russia turned to Mitteleuropa for stability, gaining a new Tsar after over a half-century. By the 1980s, Europe was united in purpose, from Lisbon to the Urals.
THE PRESENT DAY
ASIA
The corporations of the Empire of Japan stretch from the sunny Pacific islands to the chilly but multicultural Siberian Republic, Astrakhan to Jakarta, and increasingly are a fixture in the non-syndicalist parts of Africa. Tokyo is one of the (if not THE, considering Berlin’s tendency towards protectionism) centers of global capital, and it shows. Glittering, massive, and wealthy, the twentieth century was good to Japan. Even as it gave Korea home rule, it was learning that economic imperialism was a lot easier than outright military control, and a lot of the more… headstrong officers dying fighting against the Mad Baron and the German colonial empire spared it political instability. Although it stands head and shoulders among its allies (and certainly not neocolonialist puppets), the Empire of Oceania does hold enough sway to be considered one of the secondary powers of the world, as Empress Elizabeth rules over a collection of exile descendents and refugees.
The Tian Dynasty finally ended the moribund Qing and the South China Special Economic Zone by the 60s, but the effort had ended up leaving China at its smallest in centuries. Which to a certain extent fit the Tian just fine, being able to spread their Teachings more efficiently, while having less to administer and defend. But inevitably, the Hermit Middle Kingdom found itself lagging behind, and began to open itself up to foreign investment at the turn of the century (to the relief of flagging global capital). German and Japanese corporations have only recently been allowed to look into China, but Oceanic, Danubian, and even some Africaine investment has seen excellent returns. But is it enough?
Bharat, to some extent, stands alone in the International. More orthodox Syndicalist than basically any other country on the planet, it has had to walk a narrow line between maintaining the system that has worked for its billion+ inhabitants at the cost of being able to get things done at levels beyond the local at speeds beyond a snail’s pace. Electronics help, though. In foreign policy, though, Bharat has been far more aggressive, keeping up the anti-imperialist doctrines of the International (despite that being more Leninist) after the end of the Kongo Wars, which despite Chicago’s muted displeasure did eventually lead to the world-altering Thai Crisis. Which of the two titans of the International is feared more tends to depend on geographic proximity, but Calcutta’s drive to hack off capital’s knees by going right for its exploited nations has proven to be a fruitful path to take.
AFRICA
Nationalist France embarked on a mission of radical reform, democratizing and creating a system of law for all its peoples, in the name of getting the buy-in from what would otherwise be its subjects and create an army capable of liberating France… only to watch Germany march in and dismember their homeland. Had it not been for mass riots at the news of the plan to end France as a concept, there would have been three or four “Grand Duchies” where there was once l’Hexagone. Even as it stood, the new Kingdom of France had half the territory even the Commune had. In this new darkest hour for the exiles, General De Gualle declared that he would rather spend the rest of eternity buried in Algiers than spend a single day as a German lapdog. The shaky democracy agreed with him. New exiles bolstered the population, but all the time it felt less like France-in-exile and more like something new as Arabs, Europeans, and Africans learned to coexist where once all had been pitted against each other. And so it was that L’Union Africaine was officially born in 1961. The years following were not always easy, but a continued antipathy towards Germany, as well as pride that unlike seemingly the rest of the continent the UA was managing to stay stable helped to make being Africaine a lasting citizenship.
The rest of post-colonial Africa was not nearly so lucky, thanks in large part to Berlin’s refusal to accept the truth on the ground, but things are finally somewhat stabilizing. The Kamerun Union is fairly well-off, if rather militarized, and Ostafrika has been a loyal and stable dominion of Germany for decades. The International-aligned states range from “hard to distinguish quality of life from your average American International state” (Ghana) to “plagued with reactionary holdouts and is generally pretty authoritarian” (Workers Union of the Kongo). Of lesser note is Biafra, or “for the dozenth time please stop selling the capitalists oil”.
THE MIDDLE EAST
The Middle East is a paragon of stability, consisting basically of the Sultanates of Egypt and Libya and the Sultanate of All Arabia and its minor hanger-on allies. Oil money keeps things very secure, and having crushed Wahhabism, religious fundamentalism isn’t really the issue. Hashemite Arabia is pretty accommodating to its minorities (the establishment of the Judaean Governate was… contentious) and Egypt has finally started to take advantage of its considerable population with Japanese aid. Were this world divided between Japan and Germany, Egypt might just tip the balance. However…
THE AMERICAS
From Tierra Del Fuego to the Bering Strait, the red flag flies. The average native who remembers life under capitalism is an octogenarian. And unlike the International members in Africa and Asia, there are no threats save that which threatens the whole planet. Welcome to Semi-Automated Comfortable Pansexual Planetary Communism.
The UASR is decidedly more Marxist/State Socialist than Syndicalist (the IWW leaders got hit pretty hard during the Civil War and the Communists and fellow travellers made up the majority of the convention), but even so, to live in the International is to be a union man. The IWW split a few decades ago (global warming related, ultimately Appalachia got a bunch of green tech factories put in but it took a while), but the various Big Unions are getting back to amicability, and there’s talk of remaking that which was broken. With truly only a need for a massive (just the UASR’s section of the International Navy would make the British Fleet at its zenith blush) Navy for protection, the UASR has basically solved “to each according to his need”.
The rest of the American Internationale varies, but basically all of it would be considered First World by OTL standards. Things aren’t as great if you’re living deep in the jungles of South America or in the more ignored parts of the Andes or Patagonia, but unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary (and again, we’re talking three generations under leftist rule with no hope of support from the rest of the world) you still feel good about the life you have. Even the Canadians, annexed to the UASR (aside from Quebec) are pretty well assimilated and happy. “Canada” has become a shorthand for the North, to the chagrin of what we’d call the Upper Midwest.
The main political debate here is how to handle the non-International world. After the end of the Liberation Wars, a “we will bury you” school of thought took hold, as interventionism died down and instead a focus on defensive posturing and infrastructure building became the norm, waiting for capitalism to contradict itself into collapse. The last quarter-century, though, has seen a slow return to confrontation (finally, says the Bharati establishment). The Angolan War started back up, and with the Angolan Worker’s Liberation Front dropping the demands that Cabinda (full part of Portugal since 1987 [the oil money helped]) be included in an independence referendum will likely see a new leftist state in Africa. Who knows where its eye will fall next?
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So that’s where things stand. Two capitalist powers jockeying for leadership of the “free world”, and a semi-cohesive International building up their own strength and trying to finally bring stability to a chaotic Africa. This could easily go on for some time, especially since global warming’s gotten a lot more mitigated than OTL.
And yet.
There is a malaise in the capitalist world. No one wants to talk about it, but everywhere you go you can feel it. From simple things like a spraypainted gear on a dilapidated building in a slum, to the fact that the International can make serious threats of sanctions to Berlin due to how nightmarish the Integralist regime in the Cossack Domain of the Don, Kuban, and Caucasus has gotten with repression, and that for the first time Mitteleuropa has to listen.
And then, the riots. 2017 saw such massive protests across Russia marking a century since Red October that the government had to flee Petrograd for a week. Official body counts have yet to be released. Last year the whole of what was once France went into lockdown for months, and travel into Europe from the International was suspended for most of the year. Similar draconian measures are expected for 2025 in Britain. And for all that, all they have done is breed more resentment, more disillusionment with the status quo, more eyes that look to a red dawn.
The rest of the world is not much different. A massive corruption scandal in the UA has shattered confidence in the political establishment, and the left aims to take advantage of that in the snap election to come. The Empire of Central Africa is beginning to crack, and the Kongo is getting better all the time. Japan might be the glittering center of global capital, but the next recession could be The Big One, and the JCP already has 30% of the Diet. And for all that Tian China is getting development, what’s really happening is what happened to OTL China, and there’s no red paint to cover what’s happening to the workers this time. How long will they stand it?
If this is the start of the long decline for capitalism, for monarchy, what will it look like? And in the back of every person’s mind, if it does come to that, will the Powers That Be accept their fate and loss, or take the whole world with them?
(not super happy with the Volga-Ural region, but them's the breaks)
In 1898, tensions rise between the United Kingdom and France over the Fashoda Incident, souring relations and leading to the possibility of war between the two European powers. Cooler heads prevail, and France relents, but just two years later, Edward, Prince of Wales, is killed in Brussels by a Belgian anarchist. The United Kingdom decides that closer relations with the European mainland is not worth it, and that the complex alliance system on the continent is enough to reign in the likes of Russia, Germany, and France without direct British intervention.
Subsequently, in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated by a Serbian nationalist, leading to the Serbian Intervention, pitting France/Russia/Serbia against Germany/Austro-Hungary/Ottomans. The French and Russians lose, and soon afterwards, Russia descends into a state of civil strife as the imperialist powers and empires of Europe continue unheeded.
This is a map I cobbled together in a few minutes, just to test the waters. I might do a more detailed map if I can smooth out the major events of this timeline. The most major difference from OTL of course, is that World War I is a much smaller conflict, and the lack of any real world war in 1914 allows the empires of Europe to continue far beyond OTL.
coffeebreakcigarette
Banned
The world in 1980, when Gorbachev is the leader of the Soviet Union.
Multiple PODs
Antebellum
-Rhodesia joins South Africa
-1934 Mao dies in the Great March
-1936 Algerian Citizenship passes
WW2
-Thailand wins the Franco-Thai War in 1940 and doesn't join Japan , leaving Japan with only Vietnam
-Ho Chi Minh dies of dissentery during WW2
-Ireland joins the Allies for the promise of Northern Ireland. The Brits keep their promise considering their condition post-WW2
-(Actual) Partially failed Attempt On Stalin, FDR and Roosevelt (only this guy dies) in Operation Long Jump so they agree on the Roosevelt Plan for Germany post-WW2
-People's Republic of Korea actually stays on , but in Park chung-hee Coup in 1961 succeeds.
Beginning of the Cold War
-FDR has better health and is followed by two Truman terms, barely passing each time (the Republicans return to the White House only in 1962, with a healthier Eisenhower) and concedes more to Stalin, that proceeds to annex Manchuria ("todays" known as Man'chzhuriya Krai )
-Greek Civil War won by the communists, the losers go in to exile in Crete and Cyprus
-Beria Plan with Greek Partecipation , the USSR invade and divides Turkey
-No 1953 coup in Iran
-1958 Lebannon Crisis sees the annexation of Lebannon into Syria and De Gaulle dies in the May Coup
-Congo Crisis : Katanga succeeds (helped also by an healthier Eisenhowr first US Republican president since 1932), Lumumba isn't couped and has to join the Warsaw pact to survive
-14 July Revolution happens and both kings of Iraq and Jordan are under Abd al-Karim Qasim, before being couped later in the 8 February Revolution
-Togliatti is assassinated and leads to a second Italian Civil War, the Communists get wrecked or exiled in the (TTL expanded) Warsaw Pact
-Some people live longer/avoid mysterious deaths in Italy : Olivetti, Mario Tchou and Mattei
-Khruscev isn't putsched out of power, after his death in 1970 is followed by Kosygin
-Biafra, also helped by Eisenhower, secedes and Nigeria collapses into a multisided civl war. The Result are the formation of Arewa, Yorubaland and another country
-formation of the East African Federation (Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya)
-In France Mitterand is elected in 1969
-Somalia asks help to Italy against Siad Barre
-Italian backed Somalia goes to war against Ethiopia, exiling Haile Selassie and the country dismantles after Somali gains and Eritrean independece
-In the Indo-pakistani War of 1971 Afghanistan partecipates on the side of India. Kashmir, Khalistan (Sikh Punjab) and Sindh are indipendent, while Baluchistan and the Pashtun areas of Pakistan are passed on to Afghanistan, so the Afghan King's cousin stop complaining and doesn't overthrow him.
-1972 South Yemen wins the border war and 1972 The Italian Social Movement is elected and sparks a war involving Malta (Labour Government) , France (Non Soviet Democratic Socialist Government) and Yugoslavia (Tito). They loose (and I am trying to find a way in which Italy can actually win, maybe first Yugoslavia then France or vice versa?)
-1973 Israel is better prepared in the Yom Kippur War
-1974 the Federation of Arab Republics succeds (halfway)
-Portugal keeps the colonies (all of them)
-1979 -economic, political and cultural unification of Syria-Lebannon and Iraq-Jordan
-1979 Park chung-hee survives his latest assassination attempt.
-Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso isn't assassinated, joins the Warsaw Pact
-1985 after Sigonella, Italy leaves NATO (maybe ASB, a large part of the Italian Social Movement was very Atlanticist)
Epilogue of the Cold War...Or Not.
-Kosygin is succeded by Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, manages to reform just about right
-The Warsaw Pact hangs in the balance
Great map - but I think you might have made a mistake with the text for Central West Bavaria, it has the same area/population/capital as Central Bavaria.
I think you'd either have a Belarusian state, or a larger Lithuania. Nice job otherwise, @ItsMyKetchup
One has only to replace nuclear-weapon states under the Non-Proliferation Treaty with Non-NPT nuclear powers and dystopia writes itself.
- Status