The months before and after the start of the twentieth century has provided a new focus on the 'long term view' of the energies of members of the Counterfactual History Society, the second millennium since Christ now in its final, hopefully uneventful, stretch. Imagining the world the Millennium Folk with find themselves in a hundred years from now has seen an upsurge in popularity by writers and mapmakers alike, though in the latter case the job of shifting through all the utopian visions, rarely little more than fronts for revanchist politicking, of this or that nation or empire fulfilling all their territorial desires is an odious if necessary one for any man hoping to editorialize a counterfactual paper.
On occasion, a submitted map for publishing is so bizarre, so illogical, and so universally offensive, that one cannot resist the desire to use it to provoke discussion.
The submitter of this map, though anonymous, is matched in his mechanical talent only by his perverse imagination and presumably his sense of humour. France reverses her losses to Prussia thirty years ago, only to then lose her empire in North Africa, this 'Algeria' having a true flourish of a name. The Kaiser is nowhere to be seen in Germany, now squashed in borders that have no historical precedent, though Germany must be admitted to be far better off than the empires of Austria and Russia. I'd call the situation in the Balkans the work of a Romanian nationalist if it were not for the excess in 'imagination' in other places in the map. 'Yugoslavia'? 'Macedonia', in a place that seems to share very little ground with the homeland of Alexander? And the less said about the remnants of the Ottomans, the better.
I readily anticipate the comments this map is sure to generate, with all its little eccentricites and unlikelihoods from Independentish Ireland to 'Belarus' to a Poland that seems to have reversed her fortunes regarding her old Prussian/Russian masters.
(OCC - Write from the perspective of an onlooker from the year 1900.)