Thank you all for the kind words!
Arrogance and the desire to quickly defeat the Japanese forces by surprise and force a peace. An utter disregard for their will to fight, etc. Honshu provided the quickest route to doing that and by invading via Hokkaido, the Russians would only have alerted the Allies who may have invaded on their own or worse, sided with the Japanese against the Russians. Therefore, a quick campaign to the heart. Obviously didn't work out.
Way earlier in the TL the US gained a huge amount of land from Spain. This led to not many calls to expand north so Canada was essentially ignored. And ignored by me as well. Sad for old Canada.
Ah this will be a disappointing answer but much like with Canada, I don't know enough about Persia to be doing anything too crazy with it. Essentially, it is neutral everywhere (much like OTL) and allied with Britain. It did not have the nerve to stand up to Russia but remains a secular, modernizing force. Expect more Persia to show up in the coming months.
There is a canal actually; I mentioned it briefly years ago. I wrote: "Plans for a canal to link the Mediterranean to the Red Sea were put into action in 1850 and the Canal Majestueux à Est was completed in 1852, thereby extending French influence to new places."
It was neutral this past war but was part of the Continental Alliance during the First Great War. It did not wish to get tangled up (literally - the Amazon is fierce) fighting the crazies in Quito and Peru.
I can't say I am a big fan of nuclear weapons so I've written them out of history in the next update below. See if you can spot the small reference.
Anyway, here is another UPDATE!
The major Allied countries that had defeated Japan – the United States, the Confederate States, France, Britain and China – found the need for a post-war conference to determine a common policy to avoid another devastating conflict. Russia was also invited, not by virtue of its defeat of Japan but by its virtue of a major world power. The conference began in Shanghai, a city that still bore the pockmarked scars of Japanese bombardments. The International Convention (IC), or Shanghai Convention, was the first time the major world leaders were in attendance in any manner. It was indeed the first truly international conference and was heavily based on the Pan-American Congresses spearheaded by American president Stephen Devereux beginning in 1920. All the major leaders were present including their prime ministers, foreign ministers and dozens of lesser officials. This included the neutral countries who were not banned from such a convention simply by opting to not partake in a devastating conflict.
Among the presidents, kings, and ministers of the International Convention were American President Everett A. Glenn (Republican vice president to President Kirkwood who opted not to run for re-election in 1940 due to declining health), American Secretary of State John W. McCormick, Confederate President Peter J. Bates (the Whig replacement to Whig predecessor Ernest Marland), Gran Colombian President Jose Ortega-Raiz, Brazilian Emperor Juan Francisco I, Argentinean Empress Carlota I, Mexican Emperor Hector II, the presidents of Central America, Paraguay and post-Zavtra Quito and Peru, Emperor Napoleon IV, King George VI of Britain, the Prime Ministers of all British Dominions including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, the East Indies, East Africa, Central Africa and the Sandwich Islands, German Emperor Jerome II, Polish King Augustus V, Austro-Hungarian-Bohemian Emperor Franz Karl II, Swedish King Gustav VI, Swedish Chancellor Sven Lund, Russian Czar Michael III, Russian First Minister to the Crown Anton Morchenko, Chinese Emperor Guangxu, and dignitaries from essentially every nation on the planet.
The individual dynamics among the International Convention’s participants were of course interesting. The icy reception between Morchenko and Napoleon IV was expected and a microcosm of the ill will between the two countries. The blatant aggression between the old French Emperor and his distant relative, Alexander I of Greece was obvious and uncomfortable (stemming from the Greek alliance with Russia in the Valentine’s Day Betrayal). The most distant dignitary was Chinese Emperor Guangxu whose exotic dress drew stares and whose constant coiterie in the great meeting hall was only forgivable because of his host status. The outspoken and passionate guest was not a combatant but Emperor Franz Karl II of Austria-Hungary-Bohemia who spoke at length, justifying his country’s neutrality, berating his neighbors for their damages and pleading with them to adopt a policy of non-alliance. Much attention was given to Morchenko but in public he was quiet and almost charming, deferring to the Russian czar who spoke at length advocating world peace and a “balance of prosperity.”
Franz Karl II of Austria-Hungary-Bohemia in an earlier portrait. These sort of mustaches are still popular in this TL because I am partial to them.
The convention lasted for ten days. The world media reported every word, every movement and the convention was a gossip-making machine. Most dignitaries would not speak to the media and many reports were based on speculation and assumption. However, within the hall of the International Convention, the hundred men and women discussed at length the future of the world in a truly remarkable event of humanity. The entire convention was presided over by a lowly Chinese government official whose confidence in the face of the most illustrious meeting in the world drew respect from all the leaders. Everyone who wish to speak was given the chance and every world leader took the opportunity to address his or her peers. In some cases, their speeches were philandering to higher moral ideals like Peace and Justice while the most forthright included a country’s true interests. The larger and more powerful the nation, the less likely the speaker would talk about their specific interests. Franz Karl II drew special attention with his long, passionate speeches. A fly on the wall could catch the French Emperor roll his eyes at his Austrian counterpart’s oration on “severing special alliances,” while he would nod vigorously when Franz Karl spoke of “everlasting peace, ensuring a safe earth for a thousand years.” The fly on the wall may see Anton Morchenko’s eyes light up when he briefly spoke of “a brotherhood of nations, with malevolence toward none” and Empress Carlota’s voice quiver as she pleaded from the heart to “forever end the terrible suffering for our offspring’s’ sake.
The International Convention from September 1st through September 11th is not usually hailed a success because of the later events of the twentieth century. But in the immediate post-war age of the Second Great War in forty years, it brought the nation’s leaders together in a bond of humanity and brought hope to a world tired of war and sick of death. In the grief of the post-war period, agreement was easy. By unanimous vote, the world leaders first declared war to be “never used unless in the most extreme of situations and only then with limited force,” war to be “condemnable by all other international parties even if bound by alliance,” the end of secret alliances, “to build trust and friendship among the world’s nations,” “to foster an international growth and understanding,” “to solve internal conflicts peaceably and without outside interference,” and most importantly “cease research and development of new, powerful weapons capable of mass destruction.”
Many world leaders voted on the later agreement without full knowledge of what it meant. The American President Glenn introduced the measure after rumors of a French program studying the composition of an atom and how to harness its power to create a devastating, new weapon. The program was known to the French Emperor but he had little idea of its capability; coming of age when armored cars and biplanes were the cutting edge of military technology. He soon ordered the program’s termination and in the spirit of international solidarity (and desire to cut seemingly superfluous military research budgets!), similar Russian, British and American programs were terminated forever and buried deep into the history of science textbooks.
The bold but vague agreements became the basis of the Declaration of the International Convention. Every world leader present signed it and very soon the leaders of the minor nations not present expressed their support of it. The nickname “The Peace Doctrine” quickly came about and daring statements of the Peace Decade and Peace Century inevitably followed. The Peace Movement blossomed after the International Convention and enjoyed wide-spread support among the majority of the world’s inhabitants. The Peace Movement was a political as well as cultural movement in the first truly international exchange of ideas and culture among the world’s nations. In the years immediately following the war, artists and musicians were among the first to make amends and the 1940s became the forefront of the internationalism art movement. Politicians were also motivated by the Peace Movement and the 1940s and 1950s saw great strides toward consensus, agreement and problem-solving in international and domestic affairs. Big business was also favorable to the Peace Movement because it only meant a shift from war production to consumer production. Despite the damages of the war, the world economy boomed, consumerism took rise, cities were rebuilt under an architectural style known as International Peace and a general feeling of goodness overtook most of the world. In effect, it was an “Era of Good Feelings” and the generations that lived through the war looked forward to the new, prosperous future.
It is important to note broad international trends that had been in the making for decades prior to the Second Great War. The First Great War was the result of radical nationalism, itself stemming from the somewhat oppressive French-dominated European atmosphere of the nineteenth century. A backlash against the perceived French nationalism gave rise to, for example, the nationalist policies of the British King Charles IV, Russian Czar Michael II and Ottoman Sultan Abd-ul-Mejid III. Their aggressive foreign policies directly caused the First Great War. The subsequent triumph of the Allies meant a continuation of moderation and consensual multi-nationalism, as opposed to the British version of nonconsensual, oppressive foreign imperialism that, for example, aimed to strangle colonies of its natural resources with no political power given to native populations and stressed the superiority of the British and particularly English people over all others.
While Napoleonic France was by no means a total democracy, it was hardly a nationalism-quenching force in Europe. Long a bastion for moderates, Imperial France limited the power of the clerics to the church, equally persecuted remnants of the ancien regime and republican radicals, and took enthusiastic charge of state administration including the education of millions of children. Throughout the nineteenth century, the increasing liberal policies of Napoleon II and then Napoleon III fostered a sort of Pan-European identity. Within the borders of the French Empire itself were multiple languages including French, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene, Croatian and more local languages such as Romani, Basque and outposts of Yiddish. French remained the official national language but in various provincialities and municipalities, the government permitted and even encouraged the local language. Further, the French Empire was intertwined, first dynastically, and then fully by politics, policy and even culture with its allies in Spain, Portugal, Southern Lusitania, Naples, Westphalia then Germany, Denmark, Poland and Greece until Greek policies shifted in the late 1930s. Favorable domestic policies advocated first by France and then its European allies gave way to a positive labor environment for the people while international expansion and trade fostered business growth. Further, the meritocratic system put in place by Napoleon I ensured that leaders in all fields – business, military, academia, government – were from all the empire’s nationalities and religion. It was not uncommon for the Imperial Senate or Imperial Cabinet to possess a larger proportion of Jews, Germans or Italians than in the actual empire. The opportunity to rise to the highest levels in society was favorable to keeping domestic peace and placating nationalistic sentiments. In short, the French Empire was not nationalist toward a particular nationality nor did it favor the superiority of one people over another. Rather it fostered a new identity for Europeans, focused on many Enlightenment ideals such as the rule of law and reason. It was never short of nationalism in the patriotic sense and festive, enthusiastic national celebrations and commemorations attested to that. The defeat of the borderline racist, vehemently radical nationalism in the First Great War further legitimized the French model of governance.
In essence, beginning in the period after the First Great War, other empires embraced the French model of nationalism and therefore multi-culturalism, multi-nationalism and multi-linguism, as a successful alternative to the “one nation, one people” nationalism that had sparked the First Great War. Other countries soon joined France as true multinational empires. The first truly multi-national empire, Austria, was ruled by a conservative, reactionary series of rulers following the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. It was a nation held together only by a dynastic figure and its complement parts threatened to tear apart if Balkan regional nationalism ever escalated. It was only with great reluctance that Franz Joseph I created Austria-Hungary in 1890. However, the Emperor Rudolf’s creation of the Triple Monarchy in 1918 was a much less reluctant, if not enthusiastic endeavor. The Triple Monarchy embarked on a national overhaul to blend its unifying identity as more than simply the Hapsburg monarch. Great Britain’s massive and ultimately successful Dominion system of governing its overseas empire (and France’s adoption of a similar program) offered yet another alternative of a multi-national empire under a single monarchy. By the early 1930s, much of the world was under the control of some sort of multi-national state or its ally: France and its allies in Europe, Britain and its huge overseas empire directly tied to London, Austria-Hungary-Bohemia, even the United States and China with its multitude of nationalities under a single leadership. The successful growth and expansion of these multi-national countries was a remarkable development especially considering the alternative, nationalist vision of the world advocated by the defeated powers in the First Great War.
A famous 1909 book by Flemish author Jan Heemskerk entitled “The World of Tomorrow,” imagines what the world would look like in the year 2000 if the Coalition had won the First Great War. The book was a hit with the public as well as intellectuals in history and government, citing it as an accurate representation of speculative sciences. Indeed, in the 1910s “Speculative Sciences” (“alternative history” in the Americas) became a notable field with some intellectuals who speculated on what may have been based on existing fact, although the studies came to end in the 1920s and 1930s in the preference of more concrete evidence. Heemskerk envisioned a world of intense nationalism and portrays Europe broken into a hundred smaller countries much of it based on lingual lines. Calling this vision the “Triumph of Nationalism,” Heemskerk’s book included a map of Europe including independent countries such as Brittany, Basque Country, Catalonia, multiple German and Italian states, the Balkan Peninsula broken into dozens of smaller fragments and even “my own dear hometown, Brussels, was the scene of bloody battles between those wanting to join the Dutch nation and those wanting to join the Walloons.” The various states constantly warred with each other over the smallest trifling; a border dispute, an insult to one nationality, a complex system of ever-changing alliances. Ironically, his vision of the world also saw the British Isles divided into numerous independent states including Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England, despite the British originally being the harbingers of the nationalist movement. His dystopic vision is credited toward rising public awareness toward the dangers of extreme nationalism.
The Second Great War was the last hurrah of the nationalist movement. Abandoned by a multi-national Britain and a neutral Triple Monarchy, the movement found natural allies in the radical policies of Japan, the vengeful Prussians and the ultra-conservative policies of the Zavtra ideology. The utter defeats of Japan and Prussia in the war left only a handful of exceptions to the multi-national norm that embraced the world. These exceptions remained Zavtra Russia, Zavtra Sweden and the Confederate States of America. There were very strong pronouncements of peace at the International Convention in 1941 with the observing that all the countries of the world were the same. But there remained this major difference between multi-national, tolerant, open states and the oppressive, Orthodox, Russian-centric Zavtra Russia and its ally in Sweden. The Confederate States was a unique system, separate from Russia but still not quite a multi-national country.
An alternative theory came about in the 1960s, about the existence of large multi-national empires in Europe (mainly France, Britain and Austria). As Napoleon I marched through Europe, multi-nationalism was the only path toward success because sooner or later the conquered nations would rise up if given the opportunity. Their opposition to his march advanced his short-term aims but their long-term nationalistic identity. Thus, the central force in Europe, Napoleon, had to create a multicultural atmosphere, fostering tolerance and acceptance of cultural differences or else the empire (and his power) would collapse. As the British and Austrians followed Napoleon’s footsteps a century later, they only did this in order to save their monarchies in the ultimate act of selfishness. This theory was called the “Save the Monarchies Theory,” and naturally came to prominence in American intellectual circles.
Grand Prince Paul II said:
Arrogance and the desire to quickly defeat the Japanese forces by surprise and force a peace. An utter disregard for their will to fight, etc. Honshu provided the quickest route to doing that and by invading via Hokkaido, the Russians would only have alerted the Allies who may have invaded on their own or worse, sided with the Japanese against the Russians. Therefore, a quick campaign to the heart. Obviously didn't work out.
Kenichiro Harada said:
Way earlier in the TL the US gained a huge amount of land from Spain. This led to not many calls to expand north so Canada was essentially ignored. And ignored by me as well. Sad for old Canada.
Imrightyourwrong said:
Ah this will be a disappointing answer but much like with Canada, I don't know enough about Persia to be doing anything too crazy with it. Essentially, it is neutral everywhere (much like OTL) and allied with Britain. It did not have the nerve to stand up to Russia but remains a secular, modernizing force. Expect more Persia to show up in the coming months.
Imrightyourwrong said:
There is a canal actually; I mentioned it briefly years ago. I wrote: "Plans for a canal to link the Mediterranean to the Red Sea were put into action in 1850 and the Canal Majestueux à Est was completed in 1852, thereby extending French influence to new places."
Imrightyourwrong said:
It was neutral this past war but was part of the Continental Alliance during the First Great War. It did not wish to get tangled up (literally - the Amazon is fierce) fighting the crazies in Quito and Peru.
Yorel said:
I can't say I am a big fan of nuclear weapons so I've written them out of history in the next update below. See if you can spot the small reference.
Anyway, here is another UPDATE!
Immediate Post-War Situation (1941-1943)
Beginnings of the Peace Doctrine and Movement
No level of superlative is needed to describe the extent of damage the Second Great War caused to the world. It was a truly global war, from the farthest reaches of the Pacific to the mists of the high Andes to the traditional battlefields of Europe. There were few unscathed people of the war and even the few truly neutral nations – Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Persia, among others – were touched by the damage of their neighbors. The surrender of Japan on August 6th marked the end of violent combat but the violence did not end that day. The former combatants of the world were generally displeased with the outcome of the war and the multilateral world perched precariously at the end of one war and the beginning of an uneasy peace.Beginnings of the Peace Doctrine and Movement
The major Allied countries that had defeated Japan – the United States, the Confederate States, France, Britain and China – found the need for a post-war conference to determine a common policy to avoid another devastating conflict. Russia was also invited, not by virtue of its defeat of Japan but by its virtue of a major world power. The conference began in Shanghai, a city that still bore the pockmarked scars of Japanese bombardments. The International Convention (IC), or Shanghai Convention, was the first time the major world leaders were in attendance in any manner. It was indeed the first truly international conference and was heavily based on the Pan-American Congresses spearheaded by American president Stephen Devereux beginning in 1920. All the major leaders were present including their prime ministers, foreign ministers and dozens of lesser officials. This included the neutral countries who were not banned from such a convention simply by opting to not partake in a devastating conflict.
Among the presidents, kings, and ministers of the International Convention were American President Everett A. Glenn (Republican vice president to President Kirkwood who opted not to run for re-election in 1940 due to declining health), American Secretary of State John W. McCormick, Confederate President Peter J. Bates (the Whig replacement to Whig predecessor Ernest Marland), Gran Colombian President Jose Ortega-Raiz, Brazilian Emperor Juan Francisco I, Argentinean Empress Carlota I, Mexican Emperor Hector II, the presidents of Central America, Paraguay and post-Zavtra Quito and Peru, Emperor Napoleon IV, King George VI of Britain, the Prime Ministers of all British Dominions including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, the East Indies, East Africa, Central Africa and the Sandwich Islands, German Emperor Jerome II, Polish King Augustus V, Austro-Hungarian-Bohemian Emperor Franz Karl II, Swedish King Gustav VI, Swedish Chancellor Sven Lund, Russian Czar Michael III, Russian First Minister to the Crown Anton Morchenko, Chinese Emperor Guangxu, and dignitaries from essentially every nation on the planet.
The individual dynamics among the International Convention’s participants were of course interesting. The icy reception between Morchenko and Napoleon IV was expected and a microcosm of the ill will between the two countries. The blatant aggression between the old French Emperor and his distant relative, Alexander I of Greece was obvious and uncomfortable (stemming from the Greek alliance with Russia in the Valentine’s Day Betrayal). The most distant dignitary was Chinese Emperor Guangxu whose exotic dress drew stares and whose constant coiterie in the great meeting hall was only forgivable because of his host status. The outspoken and passionate guest was not a combatant but Emperor Franz Karl II of Austria-Hungary-Bohemia who spoke at length, justifying his country’s neutrality, berating his neighbors for their damages and pleading with them to adopt a policy of non-alliance. Much attention was given to Morchenko but in public he was quiet and almost charming, deferring to the Russian czar who spoke at length advocating world peace and a “balance of prosperity.”
Franz Karl II of Austria-Hungary-Bohemia in an earlier portrait. These sort of mustaches are still popular in this TL because I am partial to them.
The convention lasted for ten days. The world media reported every word, every movement and the convention was a gossip-making machine. Most dignitaries would not speak to the media and many reports were based on speculation and assumption. However, within the hall of the International Convention, the hundred men and women discussed at length the future of the world in a truly remarkable event of humanity. The entire convention was presided over by a lowly Chinese government official whose confidence in the face of the most illustrious meeting in the world drew respect from all the leaders. Everyone who wish to speak was given the chance and every world leader took the opportunity to address his or her peers. In some cases, their speeches were philandering to higher moral ideals like Peace and Justice while the most forthright included a country’s true interests. The larger and more powerful the nation, the less likely the speaker would talk about their specific interests. Franz Karl II drew special attention with his long, passionate speeches. A fly on the wall could catch the French Emperor roll his eyes at his Austrian counterpart’s oration on “severing special alliances,” while he would nod vigorously when Franz Karl spoke of “everlasting peace, ensuring a safe earth for a thousand years.” The fly on the wall may see Anton Morchenko’s eyes light up when he briefly spoke of “a brotherhood of nations, with malevolence toward none” and Empress Carlota’s voice quiver as she pleaded from the heart to “forever end the terrible suffering for our offspring’s’ sake.
The International Convention from September 1st through September 11th is not usually hailed a success because of the later events of the twentieth century. But in the immediate post-war age of the Second Great War in forty years, it brought the nation’s leaders together in a bond of humanity and brought hope to a world tired of war and sick of death. In the grief of the post-war period, agreement was easy. By unanimous vote, the world leaders first declared war to be “never used unless in the most extreme of situations and only then with limited force,” war to be “condemnable by all other international parties even if bound by alliance,” the end of secret alliances, “to build trust and friendship among the world’s nations,” “to foster an international growth and understanding,” “to solve internal conflicts peaceably and without outside interference,” and most importantly “cease research and development of new, powerful weapons capable of mass destruction.”
Many world leaders voted on the later agreement without full knowledge of what it meant. The American President Glenn introduced the measure after rumors of a French program studying the composition of an atom and how to harness its power to create a devastating, new weapon. The program was known to the French Emperor but he had little idea of its capability; coming of age when armored cars and biplanes were the cutting edge of military technology. He soon ordered the program’s termination and in the spirit of international solidarity (and desire to cut seemingly superfluous military research budgets!), similar Russian, British and American programs were terminated forever and buried deep into the history of science textbooks.
The bold but vague agreements became the basis of the Declaration of the International Convention. Every world leader present signed it and very soon the leaders of the minor nations not present expressed their support of it. The nickname “The Peace Doctrine” quickly came about and daring statements of the Peace Decade and Peace Century inevitably followed. The Peace Movement blossomed after the International Convention and enjoyed wide-spread support among the majority of the world’s inhabitants. The Peace Movement was a political as well as cultural movement in the first truly international exchange of ideas and culture among the world’s nations. In the years immediately following the war, artists and musicians were among the first to make amends and the 1940s became the forefront of the internationalism art movement. Politicians were also motivated by the Peace Movement and the 1940s and 1950s saw great strides toward consensus, agreement and problem-solving in international and domestic affairs. Big business was also favorable to the Peace Movement because it only meant a shift from war production to consumer production. Despite the damages of the war, the world economy boomed, consumerism took rise, cities were rebuilt under an architectural style known as International Peace and a general feeling of goodness overtook most of the world. In effect, it was an “Era of Good Feelings” and the generations that lived through the war looked forward to the new, prosperous future.
Broad International Trends: Politics and the Role of Nationalism
It is important to note broad international trends that had been in the making for decades prior to the Second Great War. The First Great War was the result of radical nationalism, itself stemming from the somewhat oppressive French-dominated European atmosphere of the nineteenth century. A backlash against the perceived French nationalism gave rise to, for example, the nationalist policies of the British King Charles IV, Russian Czar Michael II and Ottoman Sultan Abd-ul-Mejid III. Their aggressive foreign policies directly caused the First Great War. The subsequent triumph of the Allies meant a continuation of moderation and consensual multi-nationalism, as opposed to the British version of nonconsensual, oppressive foreign imperialism that, for example, aimed to strangle colonies of its natural resources with no political power given to native populations and stressed the superiority of the British and particularly English people over all others.
While Napoleonic France was by no means a total democracy, it was hardly a nationalism-quenching force in Europe. Long a bastion for moderates, Imperial France limited the power of the clerics to the church, equally persecuted remnants of the ancien regime and republican radicals, and took enthusiastic charge of state administration including the education of millions of children. Throughout the nineteenth century, the increasing liberal policies of Napoleon II and then Napoleon III fostered a sort of Pan-European identity. Within the borders of the French Empire itself were multiple languages including French, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene, Croatian and more local languages such as Romani, Basque and outposts of Yiddish. French remained the official national language but in various provincialities and municipalities, the government permitted and even encouraged the local language. Further, the French Empire was intertwined, first dynastically, and then fully by politics, policy and even culture with its allies in Spain, Portugal, Southern Lusitania, Naples, Westphalia then Germany, Denmark, Poland and Greece until Greek policies shifted in the late 1930s. Favorable domestic policies advocated first by France and then its European allies gave way to a positive labor environment for the people while international expansion and trade fostered business growth. Further, the meritocratic system put in place by Napoleon I ensured that leaders in all fields – business, military, academia, government – were from all the empire’s nationalities and religion. It was not uncommon for the Imperial Senate or Imperial Cabinet to possess a larger proportion of Jews, Germans or Italians than in the actual empire. The opportunity to rise to the highest levels in society was favorable to keeping domestic peace and placating nationalistic sentiments. In short, the French Empire was not nationalist toward a particular nationality nor did it favor the superiority of one people over another. Rather it fostered a new identity for Europeans, focused on many Enlightenment ideals such as the rule of law and reason. It was never short of nationalism in the patriotic sense and festive, enthusiastic national celebrations and commemorations attested to that. The defeat of the borderline racist, vehemently radical nationalism in the First Great War further legitimized the French model of governance.
In essence, beginning in the period after the First Great War, other empires embraced the French model of nationalism and therefore multi-culturalism, multi-nationalism and multi-linguism, as a successful alternative to the “one nation, one people” nationalism that had sparked the First Great War. Other countries soon joined France as true multinational empires. The first truly multi-national empire, Austria, was ruled by a conservative, reactionary series of rulers following the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. It was a nation held together only by a dynastic figure and its complement parts threatened to tear apart if Balkan regional nationalism ever escalated. It was only with great reluctance that Franz Joseph I created Austria-Hungary in 1890. However, the Emperor Rudolf’s creation of the Triple Monarchy in 1918 was a much less reluctant, if not enthusiastic endeavor. The Triple Monarchy embarked on a national overhaul to blend its unifying identity as more than simply the Hapsburg monarch. Great Britain’s massive and ultimately successful Dominion system of governing its overseas empire (and France’s adoption of a similar program) offered yet another alternative of a multi-national empire under a single monarchy. By the early 1930s, much of the world was under the control of some sort of multi-national state or its ally: France and its allies in Europe, Britain and its huge overseas empire directly tied to London, Austria-Hungary-Bohemia, even the United States and China with its multitude of nationalities under a single leadership. The successful growth and expansion of these multi-national countries was a remarkable development especially considering the alternative, nationalist vision of the world advocated by the defeated powers in the First Great War.
A famous 1909 book by Flemish author Jan Heemskerk entitled “The World of Tomorrow,” imagines what the world would look like in the year 2000 if the Coalition had won the First Great War. The book was a hit with the public as well as intellectuals in history and government, citing it as an accurate representation of speculative sciences. Indeed, in the 1910s “Speculative Sciences” (“alternative history” in the Americas) became a notable field with some intellectuals who speculated on what may have been based on existing fact, although the studies came to end in the 1920s and 1930s in the preference of more concrete evidence. Heemskerk envisioned a world of intense nationalism and portrays Europe broken into a hundred smaller countries much of it based on lingual lines. Calling this vision the “Triumph of Nationalism,” Heemskerk’s book included a map of Europe including independent countries such as Brittany, Basque Country, Catalonia, multiple German and Italian states, the Balkan Peninsula broken into dozens of smaller fragments and even “my own dear hometown, Brussels, was the scene of bloody battles between those wanting to join the Dutch nation and those wanting to join the Walloons.” The various states constantly warred with each other over the smallest trifling; a border dispute, an insult to one nationality, a complex system of ever-changing alliances. Ironically, his vision of the world also saw the British Isles divided into numerous independent states including Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England, despite the British originally being the harbingers of the nationalist movement. His dystopic vision is credited toward rising public awareness toward the dangers of extreme nationalism.
The Second Great War was the last hurrah of the nationalist movement. Abandoned by a multi-national Britain and a neutral Triple Monarchy, the movement found natural allies in the radical policies of Japan, the vengeful Prussians and the ultra-conservative policies of the Zavtra ideology. The utter defeats of Japan and Prussia in the war left only a handful of exceptions to the multi-national norm that embraced the world. These exceptions remained Zavtra Russia, Zavtra Sweden and the Confederate States of America. There were very strong pronouncements of peace at the International Convention in 1941 with the observing that all the countries of the world were the same. But there remained this major difference between multi-national, tolerant, open states and the oppressive, Orthodox, Russian-centric Zavtra Russia and its ally in Sweden. The Confederate States was a unique system, separate from Russia but still not quite a multi-national country.
An alternative theory came about in the 1960s, about the existence of large multi-national empires in Europe (mainly France, Britain and Austria). As Napoleon I marched through Europe, multi-nationalism was the only path toward success because sooner or later the conquered nations would rise up if given the opportunity. Their opposition to his march advanced his short-term aims but their long-term nationalistic identity. Thus, the central force in Europe, Napoleon, had to create a multicultural atmosphere, fostering tolerance and acceptance of cultural differences or else the empire (and his power) would collapse. As the British and Austrians followed Napoleon’s footsteps a century later, they only did this in order to save their monarchies in the ultimate act of selfishness. This theory was called the “Save the Monarchies Theory,” and naturally came to prominence in American intellectual circles.
