Map Thread VII

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Ok, so they must have just taken those places? :confused:

Yes, they joined the union during the late 1990s, so until the next census comes to pass, the new states have only 1 representative and 2 senators, hence 3 EVs. After the next census, the numbers will be properly realigned; if memory serves, Ontario will have around 10 EV's, Kanto will have in the 40's, California in the 30's, England will have 57, and so on (out of a national total of 1258 EV's).
 
The War to end all wars...
A War to endure for a century...

A Great War that's still being fought today. From 1914 to 2014 possibly.

Can someone say, what a messed up idea that the Great War never ending.

"what a messed up idea that the Great War never ending" :D

Seriously, ASB: military tech advanced substantially 1914-1918, it's not going to change much in 25X times as long? Positional warfare just isn't going to stay positional. Now, if we had some sort of stalemated WWI that led directly into some sort of "cold war" situation, you might talk of WWI lasting till today...

Bruce
 
Inspired by Alan Dean Foster's "Polonaise"... ( http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=fostpolona )

In this world, the world’s strongest power is the elective monarchy known as the Polish Imperial Union, which avoided that whole Liberum Veto thing, held onto its 16th century territories and also managed to pick up Hungary. It is more populous than the same area OTL, having missed out on Stalin and Hitler and attracting immigrants world-wide.

Theoretically, it is an absolute monarchy, but the power of the king is limited by custom, a powerful judicial system, and the people’s right of legal assassination if he (or she: no women have been elected yet, but there’s no legal barrier to it happening) does not step down at the end of a fixed five-year term.

It is a rich and peaceable state, having avoided wars of aggression for over two and a third centuries (there was that German thing, but the Germans did attack Bohemia-Moravia first). Much of Europe and the remnants of the Turkish state are joined with it in an economic union and political-military alliance (the Germans joining after a wee bit of gunpoint political reform)

Poland’s principal rival is the United States of Columbia, a US-equivalent, which has little remaining gratitude for Poland playing the part of OTL France in its independence struggle. Although it has a population some 75% larger than the Imperial Republic, it’s GNP is only about a third again as large: Poland is more technologically innovative and a world leader in half a dozen branches of technology. (For one thing, all those ambitious modernizing Jews which moved to the US OTL here found opportunities in Warsaw and Cracow and Budapest instead…).

The USC has a multi-party political system more turbulent than our US, and is as least as enthusiastic about moral crusades as the US OTL (and never having dropped conscription, has rather more troops to play around with). Corporations are larger and more closely tied in with the government than OTL: the USC is not fascist, but does have a “corporatist” air about it. To the north are the three successor states to British “Canada”, which are careful not to raise waves with their southern neighbor.

The rivalry, although it had been brewing for a while, crystallized in the era 1979-1997, when a major “Star Wars” space weapons race came into existence as a result of the Poles putting an orbital missile-launch platform to “deter nuclear war” (which worked about as well as you would expect). The “near miss” of ’97 brought a climb down and arms cuts, but the USC and the IPU continue to compete for market share and international influence. There remains something of a “US block” (the US, the Russian Federation, the Chinese, Oceania…) and a “Polish Block” (the Poles and their economic union partners, the Japanese, various Latin American nations…), although no formal NATO/Warsaw Pact organizations.

Aside from the Big Two, also counted as major powers are the Japanese Empire, still formidable after withdrawing from their turbulent Korean territories (being opened to the outside world a bit earlier than OTL, they managed to pick up some odd bits of territory in the last important colonial territorial squabble as allies of the British), and the Indian Federation, mostly former British territory as OTL, a vigorous parliamentary republic which is rapidly catching up to the USC and Poland in sheer size of economy if not standard of living. Both have their problems, the Japanese struggling with the problem of the large “guest worker” population which increasingly takes up the slack of a now demographically stagnant nation (the Japanese aren’t as xenophobic as those of OTL, but they’re still not enthusiasts about Cultural Diversity) while India saw an alarming revival of the Kali cult during the more apocalyptic phases of the nuclear arms race, which a return to more or less business-as-usual has not persuaded to disband.

Important powers of the second rank include the Latin Alliance of the constitutional monarchies of Spain and France, which is conservative, neutral and deeply annoyed by world-threatening Polish-US feuding. Various branches of the British royal family (in this world still Stuarts, butterflies having led the family to make their peace with Protestantism) rule Ireland, Britain, Central Canada and the Arctic Territories, and the mighty Pacific kingdom of Oceania. Then there is the Russian Federation: viciously nationalistic, deeply phobic re Poles, backwards and barely a first-world state, the Russians don’t even like the Chinese and the “decadent” Americans which are their nominal allies. Then there is the “Shemitic [1] Union”, a union of Arab provinces that broke away from the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s civil war with some Russian and British help, extending from Cyrenica to the Persian Gulf, rich in oil but hamstrung by a corrupt one-party government comparable to the Mexican PRI in the 1930s. China has had two civil wars in the last century, and is currently run by a military Junta (they disapprove of the word “warlord”): it is poorer than India.

The Italian "scientific republic" is something along the lines of a technocracy in OTL terminology, (yes, it does have a Science President) and is the world’s only shareholder state: it has a number of imitators around the world, usually with rather less democracy than Italy's already somewhat limited form, and the Italians wash their hands entirely of the "radical-scientific" regimes.

Latin America fought a longer and bloodier war of independence against Spain, there being no Napoleonic invasion of Iberia to shake things up. Perhaps as a legacy of the struggle, nationalism is even more fiery and xenophobic than OTL, and the powerful Alliance of the Andes, headed by Nova Granada forms a close block against USC or European meddling. They are fairly cordial in their relations with Poland, which has never gone in for overseas colonies.

Africa has been decolonized roughly as long as in our world, and sans the cold war struggle and less whacky economics, is a bit better off (more advanced tech has helped as well): there are even a couple economic “Tigers”, the Federation of Zanj (formerly British East Africa), relatively as wealthy as OTL Thailand, and Zululand, large and mineral-rich (there was no Boer-trek in this world).

Technology is more advanced than OTL. The first man on the Moon (Polish) got there in 1951, the first on Mars (Columbian) in 1965. Manned space stations are plentiful. Holographic 3-d TV has been used since the 1970s, and the first demonstration fusion power came online in 2000. There is a world wide web more developed than our own, near-orbital rocket passenger planes, gene therapy cures for a variety of cancers, and the New Freedom tower in Miami (roughly OTL Chicago) is 3,504 feet high.

Economic theory is less divided by political rancor than OTL: a functioning welfare state and government intervention to stimulate the government are widely accepted in all the major powers, the success of the “Polish Model” serving as a formidable argument against pure Lassiez-Faire economics, although there are some perhaps excessively meddlesome governments, the Italians and the Chinese being cases in point.

On the downside, bellicose right-wing nationalism and *fascistic political leanings are more main-stream than OTL, without the warning example of a Hitler (the Germans, having pulled off a peace of exhaustion in their 1900s one-front war with France and Italy, were gearing up for a second try under more radical leadership in the 1920s, but were squashed flat by the Poles in six months of bloody fighting).

Global warming, with the major powers on the same page and working hard to change over to solar, nuclear and now fusion, is less of a concern than OTL: what remains a concern is something our world has almost forgotten, the threat of global nuclear war. Nuclear arsenals are held by Poland, the USC, Nova Granada, Mexico, France, Italy, China, Japan, India, the Shemitic Union, the Russians, the British, Oceania, and the Turks (just a few): other nations have the capacity or are suspected of hiding a few “emergency” bombs. There has already been small-scale use of nuclear weapons in the Iranian-Shemitic Union conflict and the second Chinese Civil War. The Polish “threaten them with destruction” method of preventing nuclear war having been counterproductive, efforts to greatly reduce or even ban nuclear weapons through negotiation continue…

[1] Descendants of Shem: the equivalence of "Semite" and "Jew" is largely unknown in this world

Bruce
 
And here's the fershelugginer map.

Bruce

PolishImperial.png
 
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Bruce, is that a Japanese Madagascar? How exactly did that come about :confused:

By the way, love the African "Tigers" :p. Wouldn't lions make more sense? :p

I take it Poland is something akin to OTL's Austria-Hungary when it comes to colonialism then?
 
Something different. An idea I was thinking of going into but am now dropping- Japan gets a bit expansionistic early.
With alt-shinkansens.

nih2on.png
 
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