Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Wow Illorin and Senegal have quite the GDP when compared to OTL. They actually come out higher than quite a few European and American nations
Goes to show how far Africa's climbed in the last few decades. I'm guessing some of that comes from Afro Atlantic trade, some from fiacres, and trade with the french metropole (in the case of Senegal).
What is this international Dollar you speak of?
Goes to show how far Africa's climbed in the last few decades. I'm guessing some of that comes from Afro Atlantic trade, some from fiacres, and trade with the french metropole (in the case of Senegal).
What is this international Dollar you speak of?
Nice! GDP has always been biased against countries with large informal economies, which is probably why Bornu, Buganda, and Rwanda are so low. All of the communal villages are not very good for GDP.
Illorin is almost as wealthy as the UK?
I thought it was said earlier than Africa would probably still not be first-world at the start of the 21st, but Latin-America poor rather than OTL-poor, with some notable positive exceptions: but some of the west Africans are really catching up! I hope this doesn't mean that, like Argentina OTL, they're going to slip relatively over the century...
Bruce
I thought it was said earlier than Africa would probably still not be first-world at the start of the 21st, but Latin-America poor rather than OTL-poor, with some notable positive exceptions: but some of the west Africans are really catching up! I hope this doesn't mean that, like Argentina OTL, they're going to slip relatively over the century...
Bruce
Germany is one of the big economic winners in TTL - it got wrecked during the war, but it had no Versailles reparations afterward, and a highly educated workforce combined with economic hegemony over Central Europe proved to be a very solid base for recovery.
The United States and the Netherlands, which were smart enough to stay out of the war and have been milking their head start ever since, are also big winners, as are the Ottomans - staying together long enough to industrialize and find the oil reserves counted for quite a bit.
The UK, on the other hand, is poorer than at this time in OTL - it isn't a poor country in absolute terms, and it's recovering, but its real GDP is just now surpassing 1910 levels. Spain also isn't doing so well, although it may be starting to turn around.
An international dollar "is a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the US dollar had in the United States at a given point in time" (see also here). It appears to be a McGuffin for generating PPP data without worrying about exchange-rate fluctuations, but I'm willing to be corrected by those better versed in economics than I am.
The reason I used them is that Angus Maddison's historical GDP statistics for OTL used them, so it was necessary to do so in order to get an apples-to-apples comparison.
Obviously, the statistics were compiled by an American economist, given that the dollar will probably be less hegemonic in TTL's 2014.
TTL's - basically Buenos Aires province.
The European nations they outdo are the ones that were marginally Third World in OTL until the 1970s. They aren't about to pass Western Europe, the US or Australasia anytime soon, although they're quite a bit richer than their OTL counterparts were at this time.
Senegal's wealth has a lot to do with investment from France and eighty years of integration into the French economy; for the Niger Valley states, it's the precision instruments, automotive and medical industries.
Afro-Atlantic trade - well, I should have included Liberia, shouldn't I? I'd guess it's somewhere between Adamawa and Oyo.
That, and they also really are poorer than the industrially developed parts of Africa. They probably always will be, too, although that isn't necessarily a bad thing - the Great Lakes states seem tailor-made for a Kerala model.
Remember that the UK ran itself into the ground not very long ago, and is still getting back on its feet. Ilorin is fairly small and urbanized (i.e., not as much poor countryside to bring the numbers down) and also regionally dominant, which gives it a boost for now, but the UK has a wider base and a still-partly-intact imperial network, so it will probably pull away somewhat by the 1940s. In the medium term, the UK is the richer country.
Most of Africa, especially the non-independent regions that aren't listed, is at Latin American levels or below in the 1930s. The exceptions are entrepots like Zanzibar or Liberia, industrial regions like the Niger Valley, and resource-rich states like Kazembe or the Cape. Those are, as I've previously mentioned, on a Malaysia track - there might be some economic chaos during the independence era, but by the 21st century they're likely to be at the bottom tier of the First World or the top tier of the Second, with Ilorin as a possible Nuevo Leon.
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Well, looking at the GDP figures, I get the impression that the concept of the Developed and Undeveloped worlds will be far looser than OTL's, if indeed they even exist in this timeline. The world seems to be on a road to a world in which richer and poorer countries are far more geographically distributed, rather than having rich countries such as Japan and the Persian Gulf states which stand out as rich countries in a sea of poorer ones. Though one could easily argue that this is now the trend in OTL at any rate, which I guess your TL just brought on a lot earlier.
Just two surprises for me on the GDP list:
1) I did not think the USA would head the list, because I figured the United States had to have gained something from its imperialism of OTL, therefore a not-insignificant part of our economic leadership OTL has to be due to having grabbed what we have not grabbed ITTL. Not so much the formal colonial possessions--Hawaii, Philippines, Puerto Rico and Canal Zone--but the informal dominance in places like Cuba and pretty much the whole Carribean and Latin America in those latitudes, getting toeholds in China, that sort of thing. Without what we extorted by force in this manner, it seemed to stand to reason that we would not be as rich. Still I would think among the leading five nations, perhaps when the first one is as far ahead as Germany is here, then number two, but not number one.
However I can see how the counterargument could run--as Jonathan says, we didn't shoot ourselves in the foot with a Great War (well, not both feet--I think the Latin American misadventure of the 1910s involved shooting off a couple toes on one of them--and actually did, apparently, result in just a bit of that greedy hegemony of OTL sticking to our fingers, in Nicaragua...
). Sitting pretty as neutrals in the Great War was an opportunity; the growth of the colonial possessions into self-interested and assertive entities that may or may not tear loose from their metropolis but certainly will only stay based on gratification of local interest means that Americans coming offering good deals will not be shooed away in the name of imperial autarky and preference in every case--so there are ongoing opportunities despite the world being formally sewn up. And there are outright independent powers to trade with. Thus, despite a failure to secure informal imperial puppet strings of our own, opportunity is open for middling honest American business people, and with it honest profit. Given the vast domestic market of the USA which even OTL predominated over global concerns in US business circles at this time, Americans would hardly be drastically worse off. Whereas for a European power to match and surpass American standards of living for their average citizen, they would have to become so wealthy that it offsets the rather medieval conditions some classes of people and some regions have long been mired in. Note--Jonathan has not clarified yet whether Germany has gotten rich by raising everyone's standards, or by an even more drastic polarization than existed before, where a handful of new business aristocrats share wealth on a scale scarcely known to humanity with the other handful of old aristocrats while the poor have scarcely advanced at all.
Now this timeline being what it is and Germany having the nature it had last time we looked, I'm betting on a semi-fair outcome, with the "rising tide lifting all boats" in the Teutosphere, so indeed the rich remain significantly richer, but the working-class Germans also enjoy prosperity unprecedented to them and quite on a par with the average American, or nearly so--this thanks to very assertive unions and lefty political parties they vote for. These parties may not have representation in legislatures and executive government in proportion to the votes they win, due to openly biased vote discounting mechanisms adopted explicitly to keep the commoners from running thing--but if that is the case, the upper/middle class alliance that rigs it that way had all the more better yield on bread-and-butter issues to these masses, lest they be driven to open revolution.
Which brings me to 2)
2) Bohemia is my biggest surprise in Europe. The Protectorate or whatever it is called is hardly mired in poverty of course, it is at least at the European average and perhaps well above it. What it is not, is on a par with Germany. And that's what I would expect! OTL Bohemia was a prosperous, major industrial center despite being under the control of Austria; being under Berlin's management I'd think the Czechs would have been swept up in the rising tide quite as much as any other part of Germany.
That they evidently have not is ominous for the peace of the German possessions. You've already mentioned trouble in Poland ahead; I figured however that Bohemia would stay with the Germans. But here, I see a sign that perhaps they'd rather aid their fellow Slavs; perhaps here even a Czech-Polish union might not be out of the question!
Because quite evidently, it would seem that when the Germans, acting in a public or private capacity, had tough choices to make that meant someone somewhere would suffer and not benefit, they passed the rotten egg onto the Czechs. And Poles of course, as I'm afraid I cynically expected. It would seem that the Slavs under German direction are all treated as second class, and their growth is stunted.
That being the case I fear Germany would be far more ethnically polarized than I hoped. I expected the Poles to be troublesome, defiant patriots no matter how well the Germans treated them--therefore the Germans would tire of doing them favors and Poland would inevitably seek to break free, at any cost. But I thought the Germans would be more businesslike and fair in their dealings with Bohemia and that the Czechs would respond well, becoming an integral and valued part of the German economy and political nation, though not of course ethnically German. But it would appear not, and this bodes ill for continued and extended German hegemony--sadly, super-rich and super-huge Germany may well fall on harder times soon. Thanks to their own shortcomings of course.
Now these statistics don't tell us anything about regional disparities within the nations, which are probably very significant; I expect the American South is as per OTL distinctly poorer as a whole than the Northeast and Midwest for instance--though I also expect it is less so than OTL--but in turn that much of the greater Southern wealth that raises it above OTL regional averages is because Afro-friendly regions are mostly (though not all!) very significantly richer--the Carolinas, South more than North, and Sequoiah are where I have in mind here. But also a slight elevation of the whole South--but despite the near-parity of the Carolinas and Sequoiah with Northern standards, the South is still, I would imagine, poorer than the North.
In Germany too, Bohemia might stand out only because it is not aggregated with the rest of the Hohenzollern Empire; there might be parts of the wholly German lands that are also left behind. But this must mean that other parts are even richer, quite on a par with the USA or even richer still. Perhaps the Bohemians won't feel as alienated if they are in the same boat with other Germans. However, Bohemia clearly has more potential than some of those other regions, and if they aren't averaging with Germany as a whole it means the Empire has dropped the ball developing that potential.
And things could be worse in Bohemia rather than mitigated, if the depressed average of Bohemia resolves into Bohemian Germans--presumably not merely Sudentenland residents but residents in the central cities as well--who do quite as well as the German average, versus Slavic Czechs and others who are all the more seriously depressed down to average European levels or even lower. It would be bad enough for residents of Bohemia to be less well off and feel they are given scanty seconds, but if it is clearly a case of Germans being favored and skimming the cream off of a more deeply repressed Slavic native population--that is a downright explosive mix.
I know the timeline has veered away, to an extent, from the characteristic OTL development of ethnic and racialist consciousness in favor of a less-neat-on-paper political eclecticism that puts more weight on religious affiliation--which is why I had greater hopes the Germans would overlook the non-Germanness of the Bohemian peoples and focus instead on their affinity for a Germanic attitude to business. As for religion, they are Catholic, which is a liability in dealing with the house of Hohenzollern, but should have tied them to the Catholic southern Germans. If however the Slavs of Bohemia feel downtrodden as Slavs (or perhaps as Catholics, if the Catholic Germans are also below the national averages as they might be) then I suspect a turn to a Polish alliance in separatism might be in the cards, since no one is more Catholic than the Poles! (Indeed, the Poles might look askance on aligning with Czechs and Moravians because they might seem too liberal Catholics--but then again the Polish patriots would probably include a lot of radical progressives among them, as per OTL--who might regard Bohemian Slavs as too bourgeois!)
In the worst case for Imperial Germany, the southern Catholic lands, German and Slavic alike, might all be alienated, and looking to ditch Berlin.
But I suppose I ought to take a less impressionistic look at the statistics, and get a better sense of relative magnitudes. If Bohemia is poorer than Imperial Germany aggregated as a whole, is it perhaps still on a par with its southern German neighbors, and are they, though poor compared to North Germans, still doing very well compared to their non-Imperial neighbors? They might have no desire to break loose but a strong one to get more of the Imperial pie for themselves, but at the end of the day count themselves lucky to be within the Imperial system and not outside it.
1) I did not think the USA would head the list, because I figured the United States had to have gained something from its imperialism of OTL, therefore a not-insignificant part of our economic leadership OTL has to be due to having grabbed what we have not grabbed ITTL. Not so much the formal colonial possessions--Hawaii, Philippines, Puerto Rico and Canal Zone--but the informal dominance in places like Cuba and pretty much the whole Carribean and Latin America in those latitudes, getting toeholds in China, that sort of thing. Without what we extorted by force in this manner, it seemed to stand to reason that we would not be as rich. Still I would think among the leading five nations, perhaps when the first one is as far ahead as Germany is here, then number two, but not number one.
However I can see how the counterargument could run--as Jonathan says, we didn't shoot ourselves in the foot with a Great War (well, not both feet--I think the Latin American misadventure of the 1910s involved shooting off a couple toes on one of them--and actually did, apparently, result in just a bit of that greedy hegemony of OTL sticking to our fingers, in Nicaragua...
). Sitting pretty as neutrals in the Great War was an opportunity; the growth of the colonial possessions into self-interested and assertive entities that may or may not tear loose from their metropolis but certainly will only stay based on gratification of local interest means that Americans coming offering good deals will not be shooed away in the name of imperial autarky and preference in every case--so there are ongoing opportunities despite the world being formally sewn up. And there are outright independent powers to trade with. Thus, despite a failure to secure informal imperial puppet strings of our own, opportunity is open for middling honest American business people, and with it honest profit. Given the vast domestic market of the USA which even OTL predominated over global concerns in US business circles at this time, Americans would hardly be drastically worse off. Whereas for a European power to match and surpass American standards of living for their average citizen, they would have to become so wealthy that it offsets the rather medieval conditions some classes of people and some regions have long been mired in. Note--Jonathan has not clarified yet whether Germany has gotten rich by raising everyone's standards, or by an even more drastic polarization than existed before, where a handful of new business aristocrats share wealth on a scale scarcely known to humanity with the other handful of old aristocrats while the poor have scarcely advanced at all.Now this timeline being what it is and Germany having the nature it had last time we looked, I'm betting on a semi-fair outcome, with the "rising tide lifting all boats" in the Teutosphere, so indeed the rich remain significantly richer, but the working-class Germans also enjoy prosperity unprecedented to them and quite on a par with the average American, or nearly so--this thanks to very assertive unions and lefty political parties they vote for. These parties may not have representation in legislatures and executive government in proportion to the votes they win, due to openly biased vote discounting mechanisms adopted explicitly to keep the commoners from running thing--but if that is the case, the upper/middle class alliance that rigs it that way had all the more better yield on bread-and-butter issues to these masses, lest they be driven to open revolution.
Which brings me to 2)
2) Bohemia is my biggest surprise in Europe. The Protectorate or whatever it is called is hardly mired in poverty of course, it is at least at the European average and perhaps well above it. What it is not, is on a par with Germany. And that's what I would expect! OTL Bohemia was a prosperous, major industrial center despite being under the control of Austria; being under Berlin's management I'd think the Czechs would have been swept up in the rising tide quite as much as any other part of Germany.
That they evidently have not is ominous for the peace of the German possessions. You've already mentioned trouble in Poland ahead; I figured however that Bohemia would stay with the Germans. But here, I see a sign that perhaps they'd rather aid their fellow Slavs; perhaps here even a Czech-Polish union might not be out of the question!
Because quite evidently, it would seem that when the Germans, acting in a public or private capacity, had tough choices to make that meant someone somewhere would suffer and not benefit, they passed the rotten egg onto the Czechs. And Poles of course, as I'm afraid I cynically expected. It would seem that the Slavs under German direction are all treated as second class, and their growth is stunted.
That being the case I fear Germany would be far more ethnically polarized than I hoped. I expected the Poles to be troublesome, defiant patriots no matter how well the Germans treated them--therefore the Germans would tire of doing them favors and Poland would inevitably seek to break free, at any cost. But I thought the Germans would be more businesslike and fair in their dealings with Bohemia and that the Czechs would respond well, becoming an integral and valued part of the German economy and political nation, though not of course ethnically German. But it would appear not, and this bodes ill for continued and extended German hegemony--sadly, super-rich and super-huge Germany may well fall on harder times soon.
Thanks to their own shortcomings of course.Now these statistics don't tell us anything about regional disparities within the nations, which are probably very significant; I expect the American South is as per OTL distinctly poorer as a whole than the Northeast and Midwest for instance--though I also expect it is less so than OTL--but in turn that much of the greater Southern wealth that raises it above OTL regional averages is because Afro-friendly regions are mostly (though not all!) very significantly richer--the Carolinas, South more than North, and Sequoiah are where I have in mind here. But also a slight elevation of the whole South--but despite the near-parity of the Carolinas and Sequoiah with Northern standards, the South is still, I would imagine, poorer than the North.
In Germany too, Bohemia might stand out only because it is not aggregated with the rest of the Hohenzollern Empire; there might be parts of the wholly German lands that are also left behind. But this must mean that other parts are even richer, quite on a par with the USA or even richer still. Perhaps the Bohemians won't feel as alienated if they are in the same boat with other Germans. However, Bohemia clearly has more potential than some of those other regions, and if they aren't averaging with Germany as a whole it means the Empire has dropped the ball developing that potential.
And things could be worse in Bohemia rather than mitigated, if the depressed average of Bohemia resolves into Bohemian Germans--presumably not merely Sudentenland residents but residents in the central cities as well--who do quite as well as the German average, versus Slavic Czechs and others who are all the more seriously depressed down to average European levels or even lower. It would be bad enough for residents of Bohemia to be less well off and feel they are given scanty seconds, but if it is clearly a case of Germans being favored and skimming the cream off of a more deeply repressed Slavic native population--that is a downright explosive mix.
I know the timeline has veered away, to an extent, from the characteristic OTL development of ethnic and racialist consciousness in favor of a less-neat-on-paper political eclecticism that puts more weight on religious affiliation--which is why I had greater hopes the Germans would overlook the non-Germanness of the Bohemian peoples and focus instead on their affinity for a Germanic attitude to business. As for religion, they are Catholic, which is a liability in dealing with the house of Hohenzollern, but should have tied them to the Catholic southern Germans. If however the Slavs of Bohemia feel downtrodden as Slavs (or perhaps as Catholics, if the Catholic Germans are also below the national averages as they might be) then I suspect a turn to a Polish alliance in separatism might be in the cards, since no one is more Catholic than the Poles! (Indeed, the Poles might look askance on aligning with Czechs and Moravians because they might seem too liberal Catholics--but then again the Polish patriots would probably include a lot of radical progressives among them, as per OTL--who might regard Bohemian Slavs as too bourgeois!
)In the worst case for Imperial Germany, the southern Catholic lands, German and Slavic alike, might all be alienated, and looking to ditch Berlin.
But I suppose I ought to take a less impressionistic look at the statistics, and get a better sense of relative magnitudes. If Bohemia is poorer than Imperial Germany aggregated as a whole, is it perhaps still on a par with its southern German neighbors, and are they, though poor compared to North Germans, still doing very well compared to their non-Imperial neighbors? They might have no desire to break loose but a strong one to get more of the Imperial pie for themselves, but at the end of the day count themselves lucky to be within the Imperial system and not outside it.
Hold up... Johor is more economically richer than Japan!? The Japanese political fighting must be worse than I thought.
Also, once SE-Asia achieves independence I can imagine there being a race for the title "Economic Tiger". In OTL, the Four Great Tigers were Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea; Malaysia and SE-Asia are (currently) their "Tiger Cubs" so to speak.
I wonder which country will grab that title in this TL. Will the phrase even be the same? How about the "Great Pumas" for the South American states, or the "Celtic Wave" for the Irish? (if they are even economically successful in the next few years, that is...)
Also, once SE-Asia achieves independence I can imagine there being a race for the title "Economic Tiger". In OTL, the Four Great Tigers were Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea; Malaysia and SE-Asia are (currently) their "Tiger Cubs" so to speak.
I wonder which country will grab that title in this TL. Will the phrase even be the same? How about the "Great Pumas" for the South American states, or the "Celtic Wave" for the Irish? (if they are even economically successful in the next few years, that is...)
So how is Ragusa doing? It's one of my favourite historical cities. Sorry to go on about
Has there been any movement towards economic cooperation in Europe? I think you might of mentioned some-sort of Rhennish League a while back.
I've never been to Ragusa, but it looks like an interesting town. I'd imagine that it's fairly similar to OTL at this point, possibly with a boost from the Tunisian trade, and is still a provincial capital.
Europeans are starting to talk about alternatives to the Zollverein, or possibly expansion of that union, but there are issues getting Germany to cooperate with the former, and the countries of southern Europe fear that the latter might be a front for German dominance. This is one of the things that might work out better as post-Westphalianism develops, but on the other hand might not.
There are certainly poorer and richer parts of the world, but there are pockets of relative wealth in nearly all of them. Also, the numbers for large countries mask a great deal of regional variation: some parts of the United States, Germany, China, India and (especially) Russia and the Ottoman Empire are a lot better off than others.
However I can see how the counterargument could run--as Jonathan says, we didn't shoot ourselves in the foot with a Great War (well, not both feet--I think the Latin American misadventure of the 1910s involved shooting off a couple toes on one of them--and actually did, apparently, result in just a bit of that greedy hegemony of OTL sticking to our fingers, in Nicaragua...
The bolded text is the key - even without its own imperial expansion, the United States has entry into many emerging markets, including a huge one in newly-independent India and a somewhat less huge but still considerable one in Brazil.
As noted above, though, there's a lot of regional variation in the United States - places like Mississippi, for instance, are still quite a bit poorer than the industrialized states.
I was imagining Bohemia as being somewhat like the former East Germany after 1990 - it was prosperous by Habsburg standards but not so much compared to Germany proper, and it has spent the past generation catching up. It also hasn't been favored with the massive subsidies that the Ossis got during the 1990s IOTL. At this point Bohemia is as rich as the southern German states - you're correct that there's regional variation within Germany - and might soon surpass them. It's also richer than it was at this time in OTL, and there isn't a significant disparity between ethnic Germans and Czechs.
That's not to say all is sweetness and light, though. Bohemia does dance to Berlin's economic tune, and a lot of people are unhappy about the amount of wealth being expatriated and the degree of favor given to German investors. Right now their main demand is to reform the Zollverein - as you point out, they realize they're better off inside the system than out of it - but if that gets stalled, tensions could rise quickly.
Hold up... Johor is more economically richer than Japan!? The Japanese political fighting must be worse than I thought.
Johor has the same advantage Ilorin does - it's small and highly urbanized, with less of a poor hinterland to bring the numbers down. The Japanese countryside was poor in OTL until the last third of the twentieth century, and the same is true at this time in TTL. The Johor countryside is also poorer than the city, but there's proportionately less of it - the Johor Bahru metro doesn't yet account for half the state's population, but there's been a lot of migration to the city over the past 30 or 40 years.
The Sultans of Johor also managed to piggyback on the British imperial system by investing all over the place - Malay investment in Hawaii has been mentioned, but there's also a fair amount of it in South Africa and Zanzibar.
Hmmm, the Niger Valley Lions? Not that the lion population of West Africa is very high, but what the hell. Pumas or jaguars would seem to be a natural for Latin America - they probably wouldn't care to be called pythons or boa constrictors, and certainly not capybaras.
Update hopefully tomorrow evening or Wednesday, although no promises.
As I remember it last we heard the lower house was properly democratic but the upper house was a wonky mess.
Faeelin
Banned
America was astonishingly rich up until the 1940s compared to the rest of teh wordl. It wasn't because it was extracting resources from Latin America; it was because a well educated people with a massive internal market on top of natural resources will do well compared to people who are huddling behind protectionism and an inefficient agricultural system.
America's "empire" in latin America was the product, not the cause, of this prosperity.
Kind of late to the party, so sorry about that, but the "Southern Symphony" update was exactly what was needed to polish off the civil right's struggle. Each vignette did an excellent job in giving the struggle a human face, and showing the the south, and the US as a whole, attempting to heal the racial divide, from integration to redemption. The finish with Felton was a great way of wrapping it up too. Her final journey was a great metaphor for the transition of southern whites realizing their thinking was wrong, and her passing away to signify the transition of her generation onto the next.
Great job as always Jonathan.
Great job as always Jonathan.
OTL the Imperial Reichstag of the Second Reich was indeed democratically elected with no shenanigans--though the upper house was I'm sure a gerrymandered piece of machinery. The trick there was, the individual principalities Germany was made of were not necessarily so reformed, and Prussia was by far the biggest--by very very far, meaning it dwarfed even the second-largest kingdom, Bavaria. It was I believe well over half the whole population of Germany. And so one of the conservative's dodges was, the Imperial Federal structure was quite weak, and a lot of power devolved to the individual realms, which did, in some cases but quite glaringly Prussia have class-rigged parliaments. Moreover, instead of strengthening the federal structure to take on burdens that some of the principalities were too small to handle well, the Prussian state simply expanded itself to fill some of the roles of these small realms instead. The upshot was, Imperial Germany was largely a facade for Prussian rule--and the Prussian kingdom kept a conservative structure. So--the Reichstag could be considerably more democratic than the Prussian legislature, but it had little power.
Here I think that dodge will not work quite as well, because of the conditions under which the Empire formed--no easy victory, and dependent on revolutionary movements in Bavaria and Baden, and a very assertive working class that had just served arduously and at great cost in the Great War. So the Kingdom of Prussia, which had harder sledding before the war and so is not quite so overwhelmingly hegemonic, is itself more democratized though surely stubbornly holding the line against the masses on some front or other. And the various principalities, including great Bavaria, are radicalized, far less conservative than OTL, and they will be selecting (or providing dynastically) some of the upper house, while the position of Emperor is elective, so the Kaiser and anyone he wants to be his heir have to play politics to gain solid support for the succession. Devolving power to the individual realms and republics might dodge many radical bullets on an Imperial scale, but more of these bailiwicks will be populist and progressive than in OTL, so what they gain by maintaining the occasional conservative bastion here and there will tend to be more outflanked by overall progressivism in Germany as a whole, and if the progressives know what they are doing, the people in the conservative regions might start to think twice about what they value.
Nevertheless I don't think we can discount German conservatism! Sheer complexity might give them enough cover to lead a coalition of many Germans who for various reasons resent the rise of radical democracy and therefore unite to limit it.
But Germany's dynamism comes from industrial progress; it is possible to try to circumvent social democracy by means of technocratic meritocracy, but in the end it is the common people many potential technocrats will be drawn from, and many of them will have strange Slavic names (albeit perhaps somewhat Germanized) or be Jewish. Jewish or Slavic women in fact much of the time, judging by OTL...
Some of whom might be immigrants. The timeline has shunted our OTL Marie Curie off to Africa (where she will live less gloriously, but longer, and is much appreciated where she is) but what of alt-cousins of Lise Meitner? Meitner OTL was actually Austrian, and her politics were hardly radical--she chose to ignore even the Third Reich until the Anschluss deprived her of the cover of being a foreign national, at which point the fact that she was Jewish suddenly put her in a nasty spot. Which up to that moment was for her not nasty at all, being a professor in the top chemical institute in the world, in Berlin. Germany will be attracting in people from all over Eastern Europe, a region rich in remarkable talents OTL. If it can handle them being Jewish, or female, or Slavic, or Hungarian...some of them will be radicals, but judging by OTL many won't be, if their talents can be respected.
It could in fact be a lot like the USA in the Cold War, with foreign-born intellectuals being valued and loved by conservatives when they agreed with them and simply written off as wacky foreigners when they don't.
Here I think that dodge will not work quite as well, because of the conditions under which the Empire formed--no easy victory, and dependent on revolutionary movements in Bavaria and Baden, and a very assertive working class that had just served arduously and at great cost in the Great War. So the Kingdom of Prussia, which had harder sledding before the war and so is not quite so overwhelmingly hegemonic, is itself more democratized though surely stubbornly holding the line against the masses on some front or other. And the various principalities, including great Bavaria, are radicalized, far less conservative than OTL, and they will be selecting (or providing dynastically) some of the upper house, while the position of Emperor is elective, so the Kaiser and anyone he wants to be his heir have to play politics to gain solid support for the succession. Devolving power to the individual realms and republics might dodge many radical bullets on an Imperial scale, but more of these bailiwicks will be populist and progressive than in OTL, so what they gain by maintaining the occasional conservative bastion here and there will tend to be more outflanked by overall progressivism in Germany as a whole, and if the progressives know what they are doing, the people in the conservative regions might start to think twice about what they value.
Nevertheless I don't think we can discount German conservatism! Sheer complexity might give them enough cover to lead a coalition of many Germans who for various reasons resent the rise of radical democracy and therefore unite to limit it.
But Germany's dynamism comes from industrial progress; it is possible to try to circumvent social democracy by means of technocratic meritocracy, but in the end it is the common people many potential technocrats will be drawn from, and many of them will have strange Slavic names (albeit perhaps somewhat Germanized) or be Jewish. Jewish or Slavic women in fact much of the time, judging by OTL...
Some of whom might be immigrants. The timeline has shunted our OTL Marie Curie off to Africa (where she will live less gloriously, but longer, and is much appreciated where she is) but what of alt-cousins of Lise Meitner? Meitner OTL was actually Austrian, and her politics were hardly radical--she chose to ignore even the Third Reich until the Anschluss deprived her of the cover of being a foreign national, at which point the fact that she was Jewish suddenly put her in a nasty spot. Which up to that moment was for her not nasty at all, being a professor in the top chemical institute in the world, in Berlin. Germany will be attracting in people from all over Eastern Europe, a region rich in remarkable talents OTL. If it can handle them being Jewish, or female, or Slavic, or Hungarian...some of them will be radicals, but judging by OTL many won't be, if their talents can be respected.
It could in fact be a lot like the USA in the Cold War, with foreign-born intellectuals being valued and loved by conservatives when they agreed with them and simply written off as wacky foreigners when they don't.
This was arguably the bloody whole point of the Second Reich, at least in my understanding of Bismarck's vision.
In the perspective of the people who engineered it, the classist electoral system of Prussia was an eminent feature of the system, not a defect or an anachronism.
The very reason why Prussian conservative aristocrats bizarrely took the lead of a radical and supposedly democratic national movement was to preserve privilege in a new environment. It could be said that the Hungarian gentry chose an analogous path in accepting and supporting the Ausgleich.
Long-term, the result was Hitler, although Hitler was obviously the product of both the worst of Prussia and the worst of Austrian Germanism. But I digress.
In the context of TTL, nothing like our rotten compromises will occur in either Austria or any part of Germany.
The divergence happens as early as 1866. Hannover survives, and this robs Prussia of her OTL's absolute dominance even within the North German Confederation. Moreover, Bismarck cannot be possibly seen here as the sole architect of the Reich. The Junker class will not have nowhere near the same degree of clout in TTL's Germany when compared to OTL.
There will be no problem whatsoever with Slavs (that was more an Austrian thing by the moment the Butterflies started flapping, if anything, and won't ever come to prominence in a context where Germans and Poles fought together against Austrians and Slovenes).
There would no problem whatsoever in general, I'd say, insofar Germany has, basically, no European opponent at all. France could try to do that, but, for several reasons, she did not. Russia has obviously other issues, although a future conflict is possible.*
Germany ITTL, after the Great War, has not reason at all to foster siege mentality.
And without it, Jews would integrate much more easily into the general German social fabric, to general mutual benefit. Those Jews who for some reason are not fine with Germany (local problems in some states are possible, and some degree of informal discrimination will be there anyway) have plenty of options, mainly in the fairly welcoming Ottoman Empire, or possibly elsewhere: I expect that France and Italy will be emphatically fine with a moderate immigration of relatively well-off, educated non-Catholics; of course, Italy would be less welcoming with destitute refugees, being herself a net exporter of those. And there are the US and probably the Southern Cone too.
* Indeed, I fully expect that some degree of Russo-German rivalry would be a feature of the European politics ITTL for some time about this point. I don't see hints to shooting war, though.
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Sulemain
Banned
Hopefully Germany's leaders and voters will see the future is one of collerbation, not dominance. Of course, there is the Posen problem to consider. It's probably quite Germanised by now, if not by force, by peer-pressure.
On the plus side, the Baltic ports in Russia are probably booming. I was in Riga a few weeks ago; it's very pretty, and will probably be more so without all the devestation.
And to add onto what others had said, this is much less a Prussian dominated German Empire then OTL; which was a Federation in name only.
On the plus side, the Baltic ports in Russia are probably booming. I was in Riga a few weeks ago; it's very pretty, and will probably be more so without all the devestation.
And to add onto what others had said, this is much less a Prussian dominated German Empire then OTL; which was a Federation in name only.