Good point and makes sense. Semi-retconed it so that BC makes preliminary moves to join, but doesn't join until a Conservative government agrees to start the project and London basically pays for it all later (in the 80's as part of a ploy to strengthen Canada against Russian Alaska).
Dixieland: The Country of Tomorrow, Everyday (yet another Confederate TL)
- Thread starter TastySpam
- Start date
I think communal tensions are somewhat less due to no Bengal partition, but I don't think underlying issues are totally changed.
Yes, but IIRC, that happened in the 1890's? I think after that period.
Chapter 126 - The Magdeburg Republic
The Magdeburg Republic
Although antisocialist laws fervently banned labour strife in the North German Confederation, very little was offered towards North German voters. The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck had long argued that the conservative establishment needed to pass its own laws to counteract the rising Socialist Democratic Worker's Party of Prussia. However, his political career flailed in the aftermath of the failed Franco-Prussian confrontation, and his later attempts to crawl back into power failed to leave a long-term impact. The failure of the SDAP and Ferdinand Lassale's General Saxon Worker's Association to reach a compromise, in the face of withering criticism by Karl Marx, did not dampen the rise of the party. Abuses in North German Namibia quickly catapulted the SDAP's August Bebel into being a globally known figure, for his withering criticisms of North German colonialism and King Wilhelm II's policies in Africa. However, the SDAP's radical youth wing wanted to go significantly further than Bebel, who still believed in electoralism (despite leading a party that was de facto illegalized).
The solution of radical German socialists was a violent strike. With the bulk of the North German military abroad, socialist militants fired back when the Prussian police arrived to violently crush a strike of predominantly Polish workers (who had always been more radically anti-establishment given that Bismarck's most successfully enacted policy platform was the brutal persecution of Poles). Humiliated and exhausted by an increasingly pointless war in far-away Africa and Portugal, as well as what was seen as a humiliation by Brazil, large swaths of Prussian police simply walked off the job. Within a few months, half of Prussia's industrial workers had gone on impromptu strike, even as hundreds were shot to death in the streets by police and private security forces. The Prussian government responded by shutting down the universities, which only gave radical students more free time. Although radical socialists were prominent in the protests, their actual demands were much more simple: "peace with honor", old age benefits, an end to child labour, maximum work hours, social insurance, and an end to the three-class voting system in Prussia.
The Prussian military, oddly enough, had largely been winning. Most of their colonies in Africa had been restored, with the exception of Namibia, and the Portuguese Republican government was actually winning and ironically with the Battle of Alceife, had actually finally been supplying North German troops. Ironically, the vigorous reform program of what were initially a puppet government in Lisbon actually inspired many German soldiers, who saw much to admire in their supposed client state, so some were actual sympathic to the strikers.
The King refused to budge. Wilhelm II rejected any negotiations with the strikers, but quickly found that the Prussian General Staff, loyal as they were to him, did not have much of an appetite to crush them with pure force. As a result, they turned to their youngest member, the brash Ludendorff, who had planned the sack of Lisbon. He had started this mess - thus it would be his job to fix it. Ludendorff quickly found himself with unprecedented control of the Prussian military on the home front - with one order: to crush the rebels.
One issue - Ludendorff at this point had grown to hate everyone else. He knew he was despised by the other generals and they were preparing to scapegoat him. His relationship with Wilhelm II had significantly deteriorated - both brash men essentially blamed each other for everything that went wrong and took no responsibility. As a result, Ludendorff was beginning to think outside of the box. Most major leaders of the SDAP and other radical parties were bracing for total annihilation, especially given a long history of violent antisocialist repression (with hundreds murdered). The example of Sicily often loomed over the Prussian strikers, where the monarchy remained in power by simply massacring everyone. So when Ludendorff came with a deal, they swallowed their pride and took it.
After a great deal of bickering, they agreed. The make-up of the Constitution was not yet decided (the revolutionaries were meeting in Magdeburg), but Ludendorff would retain his control of the army and had some sort of Presidential position. In exchange, he took his armies and simply marched into Berlin, absolutely shocking the solidly monarchist Prussian military elite. Ludendorff himself was an ardent monarchist as well, but personal ambition triumphed ideology. Still a relatively popular war leader (as most war leaders tend to be), he did command enough support from the rank and file by simply being a vicious partisan of the North German army in all ways, and when he invited socialist and liberal leaders onto the same stage to announce the creation of a Republic of Prussia, conservative soldiers and peasants surprisingly didn't revolt. A furious Wilhelm II simply took his entourage out into Russia, vowing revenge after the greatest humiliation of life, even worse than the Congo affair. It was clear that almost every leader on that stage personally loathed each other completely, but they at least pretended temporarily to be united in their disdain of the fleeing King.
Oddly, this didn't change the constitutional structure of any other North German state or the North German Federation. As part of the Grand Compromise of the North German Revolution, the monarchies of the other (much smaller) North German states were not changed. Constitutionally, the King of Prussia was automatically the President of the North German Confederation, which that the North German Federation was rapidly heading towards being a gaggle of tiny monarchies led by a republic. Relatively unconcerned about domestic policy, Ludendorff was fine with liberal and socialists reforming the electoral system, which involved simply meant allowing the lower house to overrule the the upper house and moving to abolish the three-class system. Ludendorff didn't particularly care about domestic welfare policy either - he believed only the military held true power, and he had it (he made it very clear what would happen if anyone questioned military spending).
The first thing the new government did was simple: contact the British to arrange for peace between their two erstwhile allies. Now was the time to test North German diplomacy. He got what he wanted from this war. Now, he was preparing for the next Great War.
I kinda zoned out of this TL for a bit, but boy was I wrong to do that. This is great!
Question: What's the status of Confederate blacks so far ITTL?
Question: What's the status of Confederate blacks so far ITTL?
So a revolution by military means took place, leaving a Prussia without a King (In name, anyway) and a military that is and truly believes that it should decide all the things that actually matter. On top of that, the leadership has decided to simply abandon this war to prepare for the next one.
I'm just waiting for the match to meet the powder at this point.
I'm just waiting for the match to meet the powder at this point.
Holy! That was a twist if there ever was one! I doubt Ludendorff will last long but damn this is a twist. How does the rest of the military leadership react?
Called it! Although of course there was a messy revolution involved that only complicates the situation. Wouldn't be a TastySpam timeline otherwise! 
A bit of a random question but I've been meaning to ask: Is thee Sweden-Norway union still intact?
A bit of a random question but I've been meaning to ask: Is thee Sweden-Norway union still intact?
I find it very amusing that all of the great powers are essentially playing Russian roulette with world wars. They keep starting them, one after another, and we know eventually one is going to get out of control and ruin everyone WW1 style. But they don’t know that, so it ends up feeling like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
I know right?
I will admit that I do like timelines which avoid the OTL pattern of two big wars - where the second consists of the main loser of the first round trying to get revenge. Just because Germany did that OTL doesn't mean any country that loses a big war in the early 20th century must do something similar. So, I do like how TTL's WW1 and WW2 so far have avoided that. (In fact, has a single country involved in WW1 joined in WW2 yet? I don't think so)
You forget the part where the main organizer of the second war only gets crushed even harder than the first time. Unless his rival, and WW1 winner, is Germany, in which case Mitteleuropa explodes, the German Empire dissolves in a seven-way civil war, and the loser becomes the winner and imposes his brand of "justice" on the world.
Prussia becoming a Republic? Didn't see that one coming. And it seems like WW2 will be a bunch of more loosely interconnected wars than anything else.
Chapter 127 - The Hohenzollerns Outside Germany
The Hohenzollerns Outside Germany
A furious King Wilhelm II simply decamped from Prussia, heading towards Russia. Filled with Baltic German aristocrats, the King-in-Exile quickly built himself a large social circle where he spent more time disseminating his ideals. In exile, he became a rather unusual booster of the reign of Nicholas II. Obsessed with "race war" and believing that a conspiracy of liberals, Jews, freemasons, and socialists (he viewed radical right-wingers like Ludendorff as socialist parvenu) had thrown him out of this throne in conjunction with African "traitors" (in North Germany's colonies), Wilhelm's praise for the Russian monarchy actually went far beyond what the Russians actually supported. Wilhelm celebrated Nicholas as the "savior of the white race" and a "bulwark against the Asiatic hordes." This quietly embarrassed the actual Russian monarchy, which had sought alliances with Persia and Japan. Regardless, his ideas became influential among many Russian aristocrats, especially those who spoke German. Many scholars view Wilhelm II as a very important figure in the rise of "reactionary radicalism", a catch-all term applied for a variety of political ideologies that stressed (psuedo)-scientific 'progressive' ideologies such as racial darwinism, combined with support for prevailing political and economic structures (in short, a belief that the popular "masses" were a threat to the true national character of the body politic, as understood best by ruling elites).
To Germans in Austria, reactionary radicalism was appealing, but few signed onto Wilhelm's hostility towards the North German government, itself also run by military leaders not entirely unsympathetic to its ideas. Realistically, Berlin wasn't actually that opposed to those ideas - the main difference was that Berlin's rulers were essentially fine with progressive economic policy on the domestic front if it was to build a more "united home front." In that sense, Berlin itself was more populist, being run by military leaders who fervently believed in the power of mass mobilization, and saw itself as best aligned with the Progressive movement in Canada and the Confederate States. German nationalists in Austria generally cared little for the distinctions, and essentially still felt happy to align with Berlin.
Most notably, despite being also ruled by a Hohenzollern king, Romania seemed rather sympathetic to North Germany. Despite having earned its independence as a result of Imperial Russia battering the Ottoman Empire, by the turn of the 20th century, Romanian politics had become marked by hostility to Russia and it's closest ally, Bulgaria. The Treaty of San Stefano notably granted maximalist Bulgarian claims at the expense of Romania, and Russian troops easily trespassed on Romanian land while traveling to the front. In the end, Romania saw itself shorn of both of Bessarabia (which went to Russia) and Dobruja (which went to Bulgaria), totally landlocking Romania. Russian alignment with Austria then further encircled the nation, which built an even deeper sense of alienation and loss. Although the Russians and Austrians had come in a sense to a "fair and just entente" in the Balkans, the Moscow-Vienna axis clearly led at least one nation alienated - Romania. It helped that King Carol generally favored North Germany and Great Britain, in distinct opposition to many Francophile Romanians, who were generally concentrated in the cultural and business elite (and increasingly detested by middle-class Romanians).
The other Hohenzollern monarchy, Spain, was in a different sort of crisis. The humiliation by Japan was a gruesome body blow to Spanish imperial pride. On paper, the war was a tie between the two nations, but the Spanish felt it was a total indictment of the current political disorder, generally viewing Japan as s second-rate power that was bulldozed by Qing China the last time they went at it. Spanish officers increasingly rejected the liberal centrist of the Hohenzollern monarchy, believing that the Confederate States was humiliated by Spain for being too "decentralized and democratic", while a centralized monarchy in Japan then accordingly humiliated Spain. Anti-monarchy forces like Carlism and anarchism exploded in popularity, as anarchic bombing became widely omnipresent on Spanish streets. On paper however, Spain still had its entire colonial empire (from Augusta to Cuba to Puerto Rico to the Philippines to Melanesia), which meant that both liberals and conservatives quickly rallied around the monarchy in opposition to both sides.
The problem for Spain was that the empire was still rickety, as everyone on the inside very well knew, but sensible neutrality was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. French and British ships regularly confronted each other around the Strait of Gibraltar, and control of the Mediterranean quickly became a hotbed issue. The inability of the Great Powers to stop the Russians from getting a serious foothold into the Mediterranean (through Bulgaria) meant that the next area of similar such naval confrontation would be near Spain. It seemed as if every Great Power, from Italy, Austria, North Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain had some sort of interest in the Mediterranean. Foreign money flooded into the Spanish parliamentary system, making the ruling liberals and conservatives even more venal and corrupt. Meanwhile, intellectuals on both sides of the political extremes grew increasingly disillusioned with the system. The Republican coup in North Germany only meant the Spanish monarchy clamp down harder on possible labor unrest (as well as regionalists), simultaneously weeding its army out of (talented) officers who they feared could run a coup.
I see no way whatsoever for something to go wrong for the Spanish monarchy here. Nope, nothing wrong here, I swear.
Oh wait, who am I kidding? This is a TastySpam TL. Of course it'll explode and cause a mess for everyone else involved.
On another note, a random question I thought of after it came up in another TL a while ago: Is the union between Sweden and Norway still intact ITTL?
Oh wait, who am I kidding? This is a TastySpam TL. Of course it'll explode and cause a mess for everyone else involved.
On another note, a random question I thought of after it came up in another TL a while ago: Is the union between Sweden and Norway still intact ITTL?
Thanks for reminding me....that will probably be the next update...I see no way whatsoever for something to go wrong for the Spanish monarchy here. Nope, nothing wrong here, I swear.
Oh wait, who am I kidding? This is a TastySpam TL. Of course it'll explode and cause a mess for everyone else involved.
On another note, a random question I thought of after it came up in another TL a while ago: Is the union between Sweden and Norway still intact ITTL?
I wouldn't go that far. There are definitely distinctions. A lot of very anti-Semitic people, even murderous people, IRL objected to the Nazis. I actually don't think this is that far-off from his OTL belief system - and he did not exactly love Hitler.
Actually, what's going on in France right now? They're probably the largest power we haven't heard much from lately.