AHC: balkanized world

Your challenge, should you take it, is to completely wipe out any political entity that is larger than a petty kingdom. Make the entire world, from Japan through China, India and Germany to Iberia, and from Scandinavia, the Middle East to Ethiopia and then to South Africa, and in the Americas also, completely balkanized into small principalities, petty kingdoms, feuding warlords, city-states, independent local communes, and marauding tribal bands. Thousands of polities, the largest ones consisting of only around a million citizens.

There is no POD limit, and you can do whatever you like with it so long as the entire world will be divided into these small entities.
 
The most obvious way would be nuclear war followed by nuclear winter

Yep. I don't see much realistic ways for balkanized world. Nuclear war, global nature disaster (explosion of Yellowstone Caldera) or then pandemic which kills much people and all states collapses.
 
So long as someone has the tactical ability and equipment to do so, there wills always be those who conquer and those to are conquered. Ultimately in the game of warring nations and their commanders there is a last (wo)man standing who can unite the factions under an empire and combine economies with resources. Even if the conqueror does not last the idea of a more efficient system with enlarged trade possibilities will make for eventually larger and larger nations forming until nation-states or continent-states form.
 
At least to some extent. As OTL shows, there are limitations on this - but usually by other nation states.
 
Maybe:

1) 1983 nuclear war with full EMP use, no one holds back and 90% of all weapons are deployed
2) Bioweapons unleashed by both sides rampage out of control with a dozen new diseases with high mortality rates noted
3) Internacine warfare among surviving states over food and fuel
4) Nuclear winter results in massively reduced harvests in those areas where such things can still be done, communications are vastly reduced
5) World population reduced to 30-50 million with technology at mid-1800 levels at best with a few exceptions. Nations turn in on each other as capital cities seem to get preferential treatment and distant regions (Western Australia, California, Texas, etc) secede, internal divisions destroy much of what is left
6) No large nation states are left, at best a few regional alliances are in place but no one state exceeds 750,000 people (Tamil-Nadu)
7) A new Dark Age ensues that lasts over 500 years, population will not reach 500 million until 2515 as plagues become difficult to manage and anytime technology asserts itself people are instinctively afraid with massive backlash
 

Orsino

Banned
I would suggest that global disaster is not a necessary prerequisite for a balkanised world. The more optimistic direction from which you could reach this outcome is that of a supranational organisation ensuring peace, trade and international cooperation/coordination. A more integrated EU type organisation would make large nation-states unnecessary resulting in new countries emerging as cultural/community identity becomes increasingly the only important criteria. I'd argue we're seeing something like this with Scotland and Catalonia, Scotland is closer now to independence than it ever has been because in some ways independence matters less now than it ever has. By which I mean Scotland doesn't need to worry about things like whether it will be less able to defend itself as a smaller nation, because as an EU nation with that degree of integration and free movement such concerns, and borders themselves, becomes less relevant.

I see a situation where the world is divided into a thousand small entities co-existing more or less peacefully as part of an EU-like UN. Of course whether that is really many nations or many parts of a single nation would be debatable.
 
Look at the EU. The security of the large semistate union means that scots and catalan nationalists no longer feel the need of the uk or spain for protection.

A global UN with teeth might, MIGHT lead to this eventually. Although probably not.
 
Look at the EU. The security of the large semistate union means that scots and catalan nationalists no longer feel the need of the uk or spain for protection.

A global UN with teeth might, MIGHT lead to this eventually. Although probably not.
I like this idea...
(even if it might not necessarily reach the desired effect)
 
If the new world was colonized by something like the ancient greeks you could see hundreds of new city states.
 
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