Foreign Relations of an Independent Confederacy?

If Successful, the Confederacy would have been...

  • Isolationist

    Votes: 24 9.4%
  • An International Pariah Due to Slavery

    Votes: 126 49.2%
  • Aligned with the United Kingdom

    Votes: 40 15.6%
  • Aligned with France

    Votes: 38 14.8%
  • Aligned with the United States

    Votes: 9 3.5%
  • Something else altogether (please explain)

    Votes: 19 7.4%

  • Total voters
    256

Anaxagoras

Banned
Assuming that the Confederacy had obtained its independence, what would its foreign relations have been like? Would it have been intentionally isolationist, or perhaps and international pariah because of slavery? Would it have been aligned with Britain, or France, or even the United States?

Discuss please.
 
Its not really in a position to be a valuable ally to England or France (neither of which will want to be tethered to it), and its certainly not going to be allied with the US any time soon.

Not so much an international pariah necessarily as a pygmy that isn't even a useful puppet.
 
Banana republic. 'Aligned' is too strong a word, and implies an alliance of sorts. In reality an independent CSA would be craptastic clusterfuck which would fall under America, British, and French influence, as well as its own internal issues (Texan separatism, border states, black uprisings, etc).
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Its not really in a position to be a valuable ally to England or France (neither of which will want to be tethered to it), and its certainly not going to be allied with the US any time soon.

A French alliance with the Confederacy might he beneficial to France if it decides it wants to try to maintain control of Mexico. IOTL, it only gave up when the war ended and United States troops showed up in force on the Rio Grande River.
 
A French alliance with the Confederacy might he beneficial to France if it decides it wants to try to maintain control of Mexico. IOTL, it only gave up when the war ended and United States troops showed up in force on the Rio Grande River.

Is the Confederacy really going to be able to make any difference to such a struggle?

To put it another way, if France can't face that kind of war at an acceptable price OTL, how is the Confederacy making France enough stronger to matter?

The US might not be able to send troops to the Rio Grande, but it can do the equivalent with warships, for instance.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Is the Confederacy really going to be able to make any difference to such a struggle?

To put it another way, if France can't face that kind of war at an acceptable price OTL, how is the Confederacy making France enough stronger to matter?

The US might not be able to send troops to the Rio Grande, but it can do the equivalent with warships, for instance.

Hard to say. Obviously, the Confederacy would benefit from such an alliance by gaining the support of a powerful European state, which would provide a necessary export market for Confederate produce and serve as a deterrent against any revanchist policy by the United States.

What do the French gain? Diplomatically, having a neighbor happy with your presence is much better than having one threatening war over it. The Confederates can obviously provide logistical support, thus allowing the French army to be supplied without having supply lines going all the way back across the Atlantic.

As for the United States using naval power to try and block the French from Mexico, I just don't see it. Having just lost a war and suffered a couple hundred thousand deaths, I don't see the Northern public willing to risk war with a powerful country for a purpose which most Northerners would consider not worth bothering about.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
The Confederacy will be make a difference by merely being there. After losing a nasty civil war that sees 1/3 of the country torn away, will the Union be in any state to challenge the French? The last thing the populace is likely to want is another conflict, especially with a Great Power, over Mexico. Will the Union have any troops to spare for any Mexican adventurism now that it has to garrison an immensely long border with a hostile power that has just come fresh from a win against them?
 

Parrots88

Banned
I imagined them being the counterparts to OTL South Africa.First they supported the Nazies (like many Boers did,but the Confederacy is an independent state and not a British protectorate) and after being isolated (if not completly annexed by the US ) they will be a pariah state in alliance with Taiwan,Israel and maybe a few others (If South Africa would still choose to adopt the apartheid policy).
 
Well apparently Napoleon the third wanted to recognize the confederacy but didn't because he could no secure the support of Britain. So overall I would say that France is their most promising ally.
 
I can see as a problem child for both the French and the English. It will all depend weather or not slavery is phased out or not. If it continues beyond 1880 it moves into international pharia.
 
Hard to say. Obviously, the Confederacy would benefit from such an alliance by gaining the support of a powerful European state, which would provide a necessary export market for Confederate produce and serve as a deterrent against any revanchist policy by the United States.

What do the French gain? Diplomatically, having a neighbor happy with your presence is much better than having one threatening war over it. The Confederates can obviously provide logistical support, thus allowing the French army to be supplied without having supply lines going all the way back across the Atlantic.

What kind of logistical support can the Confederacy provide, really? Especially in Texas of all places.

As for the United States using naval power to try and block the French from Mexico, I just don't see it. Having just lost a war and suffered a couple hundred thousand deaths, I don't see the Northern public willing to risk war with a powerful country for a purpose which most Northerners would consider not worth bothering about.
Well, what kind of scenario are we assuming the Confederacy gains its independence in? And will the US really be comfortable with having France in the Western Hemisphere like this?

The Confederacy will be make a difference by merely being there. After losing a nasty civil war that sees 1/3 of the country torn away, will the Union be in any state to challenge the French? The last thing the populace is likely to want is another conflict, especially with a Great Power, over Mexico. Will the Union have any troops to spare for any Mexican adventurism now that it has to garrison an immensely long border with a hostile power that has just come fresh from a win against them?

An immensely long border that is more problematic to the southern power than the northern power. The US doesn't need to station a man on every foot of frontier, just hold any areas the Confederacy can actually threaten.

And economically the US's prosperity wasn't hurt by the ACW (as in, the regions that stayed in the Union weren't at all exhausted economically by the war).

And sending troops to tell France to go 'way is hardly adventurism.
 
The Confederacy cannot afford to be isolationist. The country relied too heavily on international trade to even pretend that it was above it all. Agriculture is a huge export business, and the Confederacy's going to need a lot of imports just to maintain its current industries.

On the whole I suspect an independent Confederacy would want to align itself with Britain-- that's where many cotton solicitors and Raphael Semmes went, after all-- but may not find Britain nearly as receptive.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
What kind of logistical support can the Confederacy provide, really? Especially in Texas of all places.

The livestock and grain of Texas would support feeding the French army, and New Orleans is obviously an ideal logistical base for a military expedition to Mexico.
 
The livestock and grain of Texas would support feeding the French army, and New Orleans is obviously an ideal logistical base for a military expedition to Mexico.

The problem though is the issue of moving that livestock and grain.

New Orleans might be ideal, true. But the transportation part of logistics doesn't sound very fun.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
The Confederacy cannot afford to be isolationist. The country relied too heavily on international trade to even pretend that it was above it all. Agriculture is a huge export business, and the Confederacy's going to need a lot of imports just to maintain its current industries.

I'm speaking diplomatically, not economically. In the economic sphere, I would expect the Confederacy to be strongly supportive of free trade. Judging by their pre-war positions, a lot of people who would likely have been influential in the post-war Confederacy might like the idea of free trade without any political alliances. But there also might be those who would want an alliance with a Great Power as a deterrent against any future aggression by the United States.

On the whole I suspect an independent Confederacy would want to align itself with Britain-- that's where many cotton solicitors and Raphael Semmes went, after all-- but may not find Britain nearly as receptive.

But perhaps France would be. As already pointed out, due to their presence in Mexico, the French have more to gain from an alliance with the Confederacy than do the British.
 
The problem though is the issue of moving that livestock and grain.

New Orleans might be ideal, true. But the transportation part of logistics doesn't sound very fun.
The ports should be fine, but the Texan rail system of the 1860s was laughably poor.

It depends on exactly when the Confederates win the War of Seccession, but pretty much any victory from 1862 onwards is going to guarantee that at least part of their rail system is going to be totally screwed. Tennesse and Mississippi are going to be the most fouled-up, but even lines in Florida and Georgia might be seriously damaged-- the Federal blockade meant that the Confederates had to cannibalize a lot of their own track to create new rails for more important track elsewhere that was damaged by raiders or just weakened by age and use.

So any victorious Confederacy is not going to have a good transportation network for the French or anybody else to rely on.
 
The ports should be fine, but the Texan rail system of the 1860s was laughably poor.

This (underlined.) Its too small and what did exist was too insignificant.

It depends on exactly when the Confederates win the War of Seccession, but pretty much any victory from 1862 onwards is going to guarantee that at least part of their rail system is going to be totally screwed. Tennesse and Mississippi are going to be the most fouled-up, but even lines in Florida and Georgia might be seriously damaged-- the Federal blockade meant that the Confederates had to cannibalize a lot of their own track to create new rails for more important track elsewhere that was damaged by raiders or just weakened by age and use.

So any victorious Confederacy is not going to have a good transportation network for the French or anybody else to rely on.

Yeah. Virginia isn't exactly ideal either - mostly worn out rather than destroyed, but damaged enough to need much repair, and that's the best area in the Confederacy in this regard (looking at it in terms of how much good it would do intact).
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
The ports should be fine, but the Texan rail system of the 1860s was laughably poor.

It depends on exactly when the Confederates win the War of Seccession, but pretty much any victory from 1862 onwards is going to guarantee that at least part of their rail system is going to be totally screwed. Tennesse and Mississippi are going to be the most fouled-up, but even lines in Florida and Georgia might be seriously damaged-- the Federal blockade meant that the Confederates had to cannibalize a lot of their own track to create new rails for more important track elsewhere that was damaged by raiders or just weakened by age and use.

So any victorious Confederacy is not going to have a good transportation network for the French or anybody else to rely on.

Obviously, there would be no thought of running supplies by railroad to the Rio Grande, since no such transport network existed. Clearly, whatever supplies the Confederacy would provide would be sent by ship from Galveston or New Orleans to the ports on the eastern coast of Mexico.

In the longer run, though, the wrecked rail system of the Confederacy seems like a good opportunity for foreign capital investment, especially considered that the Confederate Constitution prohibited the central government from undertaking internal improvement projects. I can see the French undertaking rail construction projects in the Confederacy very similar to those which they undertook in Russia IOTL.
 
From my little knowledge, I've come to expect a Confederacy that ultimately is allied with the US, Britain, and France.

It won't do well to be Isolationist, and I don't think it wanted to be. It would most want to trade, and it would expect to trade with France and Britain mostly. I never have bought this idea about huge revanchist ideals by the US against the Confederacy if it won. I rather think things will simply cool down after a decade or two, after a new generation is around who grew up with the new status quo. That being said, the US would be a good trading partner for the South, so it'd want to remain on good terms.

As to being a pariah, I severely doubt it. Brazil wasn't a Pariah, and I don't see why the Confederacy would be.
 
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