The Empire Parnell Built
- Thread starter Rattigan
- Start date
As of 2022 it's a fully independent parliamentary republic with a symbolic president chosen by the legislature.
Wow, 10% of the German population was on a list of traitors at one point? Did Thadden have a GDR-esque surveillance state going on?
Or were they just guilty of "voting for a non-Thadden approved candidate"?
Why not a combination of both GDR-esque surveillance and that?
Being an informant is kind of TTL Germany's equivalent of a federal jobs guarantee...
Or being guilty of other crimes such as "attending university" and things like that...
It looks like Germany went from being TTL's Brazil equivalent to TTL's Colombia equivalent, if not Somalia. Damn. But that's what I like about this TL's use of parallelism. Instead of just taking Country A's history and pasting it into Country B, it puts enough twists to keep things original while still being recognizable.
How is Japan doing in this timeline? They where pretty far down on the Asian GDP list
Japan is under what's called "Joint Sino-British Administration" and has been since the end of the Nine Years War. What this looks like in practice is that the British and the Chinese each appoint a Chief Commissioner (commonly known as the "Gaijin Shogun" or "Yami Shogun" by the Japanese, for obvious reasons) who have the power to sit in cabinet, appoint defence ministers and have a generally large influence over government policy. There is an Imperial Diet which elects a Shogun to be the head of government and do prime ministerial things but all candidates have to be vetted by the Chief Commissioners' offices before the election. Given that the British and Chinese Empires haven't always been the best of friends over the past few decades, this basically means that the Japanese government has been dominated by moderate technocrats who try and be as inoffensive as possible. The Broad Pond Society has been the party of power since the 1950s and they pursue a generally economically and socially conservative programme. In terms of economic development, think of something broadly similar to a OTL Eastern Bloc country of the same time.
Once we reach 2022, maybe we can focus on TTL's pop culture and the like as we haven't touched much on it?
I don't have specific plans for that, as there's another TL I already want to embark on when I'm done with this one. However, I'm happy to answer any questions you have as, as usual, I have hordes of notes on this sort of things...
In-universe, the explanation is that they thought they could force Britain's hand by occupying the islands. Out-of-universe, it's a bit of a victim of my little France-Argentina swap and, you're right, is pretty suicidal...