The U.S military didn’t bother to invade that part of Canada, and the islanders basically declared themselves Canada.
Future Map Thread
- Thread starter TheGrandVizier
- Start date
West Africans must have been somewhat competent in this world or I can't take this seriously.
A project I later abandoned, but I still have a few images like this map. Might as well post them here. This is the same project as the earlier solar system map I posted here, basically, after a tumultuous mid-21st century, the fragile geopolitical system keeping the world together since 2030 has basically fallen apart. The U.S is on the brink of civil war (for the third time), the East African Federation has fallen to sectarian infighting and has brought the rest of Africa down with it, while the Chinese Federation's ambitious nation-building efforts have failed and the once all powerful nation is becoming as irrelevant as the decadent European Union.
Here, I'll just copy what I put on Reddit:
~~~~
In the year 2075, man is still very much alive. But Earth is a dying society. A post truth society where lies are valued more than the truth. War, famine, tragedy continues to ravage the surface, humans continue their environment-destroying behaviors, and billions wait in a queue for a one-way trip to the wonders of Mars.
Indeed, politics on Earth are boring and near dystopian. Europe has long since been a reactive, decadent, society, but that attitude is spreading worldwide. In America, the democratic process slugs on, with electoral turnout abysmal and words like liberty and freedom slipping from the American zeitgeist. China and her allies in the Asian Union appear the be the only nations left with spirit and will, reminiscent of the European empires of old, but the slowly crumbling population and economy of Asia means that firebrand will is going nowhere.
As such, issues like the East African Civil War and the Indian Crisis are brought up before the powers of the world, and world leaders choose to do nothing unless it directly benefits them and their special interest groups. Socialists and communists critique this as a failure of the capitalist system, but their ideology is dead in the water too, the working classes being satiated by endless entertainment means that a communist revolution will never occur.
The dream of Earth, the willpower of humanity is dead. The only hope are the stars, and Earth's best and brightest have left or hope to leave the planet for colonial holdings in space where the dream of exploration, art, and hope are very much still alive. Earth may be dying, but the stars are the future of the human spirit anyway.
Looking for feedback here. I'm imagining a world of superstates. I started with the rough map of 1984, and then tried to make something more realistic. No, I'm not suggesting a world anything like 1984, just that it was a starting point for the map. If this were a map of a point in the arbitrarily near future, would you find these superstates more or less evenly matched, as a whole? I also wanted to keep a few key regions and countries outside the superstate structure, as regions for them to compete.
United Americas is probably the heavy hitter here, but it is the most isolated from the others (pros and cons there). The United Arab League is probably the least powerful, but is probably the most homogenous superstate, and would be an energy heavweight and can exert control over much of global shipping. The United East Asia has the strengths of China united with the First Island Chain. United South Asia has pretty ideal borders (insofar as having borders can be ideal), being largely protected by the Himalayas. The Eurasian Union has the strength of a united Europe with the gigantic buffer of Siberia.
(all just arbitrary names)
United Americas is probably the heavy hitter here, but it is the most isolated from the others (pros and cons there). The United Arab League is probably the least powerful, but is probably the most homogenous superstate, and would be an energy heavweight and can exert control over much of global shipping. The United East Asia has the strengths of China united with the First Island Chain. United South Asia has pretty ideal borders (insofar as having borders can be ideal), being largely protected by the Himalayas. The Eurasian Union has the strength of a united Europe with the gigantic buffer of Siberia.
(all just arbitrary names)
Venditg
Banned
The world after the Sino-American War
YELLOW Radioactive parts of the world
GREEN Brazil
LIGHT GREEN Latam allies of Brazil
CAMO GREEN Visegrad Pact
BEIGE Mediterranean Union
PURPLE 4 Nation Alliance
RED Canada
Pink Canadian Allies
BROWN DOTS Insurgencies, from far left to far right, from anarchist to Islamist.
WHITE Anarchy, chaos and who knows. There dwell dragons.
BLUE Russia and then the Eurasian Union
An attempt at a plausible, but interesting map. My main goals were:
The dominant form of cooperatively owned enterprise is a worker cooperative - such an organization is one where the workers collectively own and manage the enterprise according to democratic norms. In simple terms, each worker has one stock in the company, and may vote in elections for the board, for specific proposed policies, and receives appropriate dividends annually. These organizations also broadly restrict manager's wages. Some cooperatives (such as many hospitals) are owned by both consumers and workers jointly. A few are owned entirely by consumers, but these are generally strongly local, as compared to the sometimes international stretch of worker cooperatives.
Wars between ICAG countries have occurred, but are very rare - analogous in frequency to wars between democracies, or between socialist states. Only a handful have happened to date.
Distributism is the predominant economic mode due to the successes of cooperative enterprises on the small scale, which gradually expanded by means of market competition. Previously, (particularly in manufacturing,) such enterprises ran afoul of two major problems: a lack of entrenchment creating a difficult legal and economic environment for new cooperatives to form, and competition with the reserve army of labor of the second and third world. Over the course of the twenty-first century, this reserve army of labor became less and less available (a process most obvious today in the case of China), as wages in those countries rose due to the development of internal supplies of wealth. Major cooperative enterprises, such as Mondragon, maintained a kind of ideological commitment to the expansion of such enterprises, slowly coming to serve as an increasingly-available basis for the development of a distributist economy.
Numerous other explanations are given for the eventual triumph: the lack of useless and perfunctory labor in cooperative enterprises, the increased motivation of workers who are working for themselves, the reduced wages for upper management providing greater consumer spending and/or reinvestment, the greater understanding of the individual worker over the specifics of his job than pencil-pushers on the other side of the country, etc. Reams and reams of such documents, theories, and arguments have been exchanged on the subject, and of course there are still those who question even if distributism is the more successful mode of production.
Within ICAG, the four great powers are China, India, the United States, and France. Africa hosts two regional powers that have the real potential to become great powers in the future: Nigeria and the East Africa Federation, who are currently limited in reach to their immediate neighbors and not much further beyond.
In some sense, cybersocialism can be backdated to figures like Kantorovich or projects like Cybersen, but this is rather like claiming that Leninism can be backdated to Blanqui and Marx - there are key differences in structure and form owing to theoretical developments.
Given the near-abolition of the capitalist class and bourgeoisie within much of the world, cybersocialists are generally not revolutionary. They believe that they can democratically take power, and begin a rapid, but legal, process of reform, wherein - to put it in short - taxes are hiked, public projects are kickstarted, and more of the economy falls under central planning.
Despite some successes, cybersocialism is still a marginal political position. Just as one wouldn't expect a billionaire or small business owner to embrace having their property expropriated, nor too will one find the average worker-owner or consumer-owner of a cooperative happy to see his or her business bought out or replaced by state apparatus. No major power is (yet) a cybersocialist state, and they lean towards the smaller states. The most populous by far is Madagascar, with 130 million people; the other five are Chiapas, Cuba, Ecuador, Haiti, and Namibia. Namibia faced US intervention in its domestic politics due in part to its cybersocialism in the American-Namibian War (2062-2073), which eventually saw the United States withdraw entirely as the public mood soured on the war. This war's effect on the general population (combined with civil strife and shifting economics at home) lead directly to the most recent realignment of American politics, which resulted in the Republicans arriving on the scene as workerist distributists.
It is worth remembering that cybersocialism is - generally speaking - an accepted part of ICAG. Cybersocialist nations generally allow cooperatives under the same legal guidelines as in more traditional distributist states, they simply have very large chunks (80+%) of their population employed by state enterprises. Thus far, cybersocialist nations have not fallen wildly behind more traditional ICAG countries.
The People's Republic of China, whose economic ties to much of eastern and central Africa remain strong and powerful. The EAF is a major historical partner, and despite its growing independence, it is more the junior partner of a long alliance than a truly independent power, putting much of Africa in the PRC's sphere of influence. China has spent much of its time in the past century working to diplomatically and economically contain India, putting the two powers as direct rivals as the 22nd century begins, with a relationship somewhat analogous to that between the USA and China at their rougher points in the past few decades.
The United States is no longer the premier world power, but it is very definitely the number two, shortly after China. With the breakup of the European Union, and India's political and economic isolation, it had nowhere else to be. By various legal and democratic procedures, it has incorporated five new states into the Union: D.C., Puerto Rico, Pacifica (a union of the low-population American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands), Belize, and Panama. The admission of non-territorial states into the union is a relatively recent development, with the movement having begun in the 2050s as China emerged as a peer competitor, and only recently begun to bear fruit in 2083 with Belize's citizenry voting by a 12 point margin (55 to 43) to become a US state in a plebiscite; attempts have centered on Pacific, Carribean, and Central American nations, due to their small size and relatively "digestible" natures, with a combined charm campaign taking advantage of US wealth.
India has been - by intentional project - economically isolated as China has co-opted its neighbors and built a trade network that intentionally routes around much of the subcontinent. Its only close allies are Bengal and Bhutan; Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Burma all fall in the Chinese sphere of influence. Despite such trade restrictions, it has been very successful in developing its internal economy, and has good relations with the United States and the Eurozone; its force projection and diplomatic power, however, languish well behind its rivals. In 2066, under Hindu nationalists, Nepal formally joined with India to become a single united Hindu state.
The Distributist League is a major economic and political bloc, centered largely around France. It represents a new European consensus, emerging after the collapse of the European Union in the aftermath of France's own exodus in 2062 as distributism took hold and the neoliberal institutions of the EU became a strangling vice rather than a benefit to France. With only Germany left holding the reins, the EU rapidly fell apart, and France quickly picked up the pieces, becoming the center of a whole new pan-European project. It, and its areas of interest such as the Levantine Republic, Libya, and Lebanon, is often colloquially referred to as the "Eurozone," and remains a close strategic ally of the United States. Some suggest that the large number of non-distributist states in Europe is due to intentional French neglect, as both Germany and England, if allowed into the League, would be rivals for dominance.
Nigeria/ECOWAS is one of the most rapidly emerging powers, suggested sometimes to be the "China of the 22nd century," Nigeria - and ECOWAS as a whole's - economic successes and eventual shift towards distributist economics in the 2060s was a major part of ICAG's rapid successes in the latter half of the 21st century, signalling the end of Africa as a region to export labor and allowing domestic cooperatives to directly compete with capitalists in their own country, rather than with impoverished workers on the opposite side of the planet. Today, it has close ties to the United States, and relatively good relations with the Eurozone, though the close relationship between Algeria, Agadez, and Azawad does mean there is still some bad blood related to the independence of constituent zones.
The East African Federation is a country developed, in large part, with Chinese funding, and today retains that close and intimate relationship to China, who has used economic ties and power to build its strength in the region. It was initially formed of a union between South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi; in 2087, it added Kivu (formerly a part of the DRC) into its union. Some suggest it seeks a gradual expansion to cover all of the continent, though its support for Darfur and Katanga's independence, without any particular efforts at annexation, suggest otherwise.
Islamic Republic of Iran has democratized heavily over the past 86 years, to the point that the Ayatollah has little more true political power than the Queen of England does today. It also experienced major economic successes due to rapprochement with the United States and Europe, even as its oil supplies dwindled and hydrogen fuel cells and fusion power began to dominate the energy market. It retains a major position as a regional power, with extensive diplomatic ties throughout the region, including to various minority parties and the occasional insurgent group.
The Arab Federal Republic was formed in the aftermath of the Second Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave that occurred in 2068, spreading across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain. It is today nearly 40% non-Arabic, owing to the vast numbers of non-Arab groups in the petrostates prior to the revolution; they proved a major impetus for the union, as the Arab intellectuals and military leaders responsible for the revolution feared ethnic violence by the minority (or, in the case of UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, majority) population, and moved the capital to Amman, Jordan. Kuwait voluntarily joined the Arab Federal Republic in 2090, though the US today maintains its military bases there as part of the agreement.
Due to vast improvements in medical technology available to the dolphin population in the wake of their semi-integration, the total population of all bottlenose dolphin species has exploded, and is currently estimated to be approximately fifteen million, with ten million being the "common" bottlenose dolphins (The Free Dolphins), another 4.5 million being Indo-Pacific, and the remaining half million being Burrunan.
A small percentage of the dolphin population are citizens of terrestrial nations, particularly in the New World where, technically, many already were, having been born within waters claimed by those nations. They tend to not be particularly politically involved, due to various psychological and behavioral differences.
To the people who benefit from - or truly believe in - these companies, the ideology is industrialism: a vertically and horizontally integrated, disciplined workforce is more efficacious than masses of teeming cooperatives each working in sequence for their own profit. These companies are not outright malicious in their treatment of their workers, but the overall tendency is to work them hard and compensate them well, to attempt to simultaneously stimulate a competitive degree of economic growth while building up loyalty. Most, however, simply do their job because the possibility of distributism has been closed off, rendered unthinkable simply due to the inevitable economic chaos and stranglehold these companies still hold on domestic industries.
Some within (and without) suggest perhaps a shift towards outright syndicalism from this system: where most countries saw a gradual, more distributist development of their economies, with cooperatives slowly outcompeting traditional corporations, this would instead simply hack off the head of these massive enterprises and replace them with worker-elected managers. In Japan in particular, the Japanese Syndicalist Party has seized the position of second-party from the Democratic Party, now controlling 113 seats out of a 465 person parliament, to the LDP's 265. Another 34 seats are held by the Japanese Cybersocialist Party, which is closely aligned to the JSP. If the LDP's hold on power ever slips, there goes the nation…
The ideological basis of the IEU is the rebellion of the professional-managerial class - the lawyers, the managers, and at the broadest the college graduates - against the rising distributist new order. Its dominant ideology is "institutionalist": elitist, credentialist, viscerally anti-populist, and generally a development of the modern idea that the purpose of democracy is to select the "wisest" or "smartest" individuals. The PMC has lost its multicultural teeth to the simple reality that many of the most prominent, successful economies - whether entrenched or freshly-established - are distributist, with their PMC either being thoroughly brought to heel, utterly crushed, or never firmly established as a class in the first place. Farewell, cosmopolitan elite, welcome to siege mentality.
There is likely a significant relationship between this ideology and that sort of technocratic-democratic ideology of "if the government's running fine, keep on running," popular in China and Japan, where election results are more a sign of the dominant party's ability to please (or displease) the general public with its various actions. However, its development in Western countries was completely different from its form in Eastern countries. Rather than using democratic mechanisms as a "yes/no" vote and acting accordingly, the intent and function of the gradual formation of unaccountable governmental and quasi-governmental institutions, as well as work to depress the vote, etc, came from an entirely different direction, one fundamentally suspicious of democracy. The elites - educated, intelligent, conscientious - were the people capable of effectively running the country. The fact that the PMC feared the squeeze from the shift to distributism certainly didn't hurt.
The IEU is comprised of England, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Portugal.
The United States, unlike most other Anglo countries, avoided falling to institutionalism, likely due to its federal system - even if Virginia or Delaware banned or restricted cooperatives within their states, they could still form and compete in other states, the "race to the bottom" now transformed into an institution to help workers' positions, rather than hurt them.
The Creeping Threat of Genetic Fascism:
In 2082, Seneca, an English biotech corporation, introduced the "Baby Einstein" package, costing some two million of today's dollars (the total earnings of a median future household over the course of over six years). In its best form, it induced a 1-2std increase in conscientiousness, fitness, and IQ.
There are lower quality packages available for less - they cost the same to produce and apply to a fetus or embryo, but the cold logic of profit encourages wringing as much money as possible out of the population, and differential pricing schemes are fine when one has a monopoly. The first generation of Baby Einsteins is now reaching age 25 - these 18-25 year olds make up around 1M (including lower-quality packages) people within the IEU (the IEU has a combined population ~300M), and around a hundred thousand outside of it, 80% of whom are from the Six Tigers, and the remainder from ICAG nations.
It is probably one of the most understated political crises, akin to global warming or peak oil: the IEU appears set to entrench its meritocracy as a hereditary office, seen and ensured by one's genetic code, which is in turn afforded to you by your parents. Denialism of the potentially devastating long-term consequences exist both in the IEU and abroad, and various major powers have made contact with England to share the details of Seneca's Baby Einstein package. At present, it is believed that the production apparatus for the retrovirus responsible for the Baby Einstein package (and its formula) exist only in three places, all located in England. They are all quite secure.
Kasyanov, who has been President since 2072 and ruled unquestioned within his party since 2080, is a conservative technocrat, oriented towards maintaining Russian prestige on the international stage. Where his predecessors formed the state into a condition of electoral dysfunction and personal rule, then into a fairly well-defined national ideology of conservative and nationalist republicanism, he has oriented himself towards iterating upon and protecting the system his forebearers left him.
His nation's aggressive orientation on the international stage, which precedes him - Belarus was annexed in 2065 and Kazakhstan in 2067 - has left it rather diplomatically isolated. As a partial counter-strategy to this issue, he has moved to encourage the Bulgarian National Party and the Romanian National Party (both parties with similar ideological tendencies) to overthrow their respective governments, and continued the Russian policy of working to block and prevent the eastward shift of the Distributist League via use of every last bit of economic force they can bring to bear on the problem. In the view of Kasyanov, EU/NATO expansionism left Russia without any room to breathe, and the two shattering into pieces is a welcome gift Russia will not miss out on, or allow to be undone.
Note that, unlike some older expansionists, Kasyanov's Russia remains part of an interlinked European trade network - it merely seeks to ensure that Eastern Europe becomes (or remains, in some cases) more economically dependent on Russia than on France, Germany, or England. With the climate effects of global rise in temperatures, Russia - already a breadbasket - has begun to produce still more wheat to provide for hungry mouths on other continents as the global population continues to rise due to the prevalence of longevity treatments.
Economically, Russia is closest to the industrialists, with a cartelized economy, though it has the classical authoritarian indifference to the color of the cat so long as it hunts mice, and has some significant involvement of worker cooperatives in its economy.
The absolute monarchy of Eswantini and the single-party state of Zimbabwe are both supported by South Africa, purely to reduce the number of distributist states near them. The ongoing Matabeland insurgency (2087-Present) has occupied much of South Africa's military capacity for the past two decades.
The DRC lost Kivu to EAF-backed insurgents (the resultant United Republic of Kivu proceeded to vote to join the EAF two years later), and more recently Katanga in much the same way, and the military dictatorship is only clinging more tightly to its power in the aftermath. Today, the state is perhaps the most open example of biotechnological innovation and developments in cybernetics, with many technological avenues that have been eschewed by other powers now being researched, such as rapid human growth, mass genetic tampering, and more, all with the nominal purpose of ensuring national strength - currently, all that's really present is mass cyborgization, with over 4% of the population having heavy cybernetics, a "man-machine army" built up over the past decade. The military dictatorship is run by an increasingly cliquish and insular officer class, with periodic (normally nonviolent) purges of the ranks, and buy-in by the common citizen is likely near-nothing. Thus far, the DRC's military, while at least vaguely adequate against insurgents (the Kivu and Katanga insurgencies lasted over a decade each), remains untested against rival state powers.
Turkey wound up falling into authoritarianism in the 21st century, becoming in effect a conservative Islamist single party state. Its military is probably the most effective of any reactionary state, and makes up a core backbone of its governance - once the Kemalist influence on the military had been thoroughly purged, the new Islamists looked back on it and saw how valuable an appropriately ideologically-committed military could be. Once, it was closely aligned with the Arab petrostates, by sheer necessity if nothing else. With their fall, the Islamist governing party turned even more conservative and reactionary, their siege mentality intensifying. The current President has been serving since 2062, and thanks to anti-agathics, shows no signs of leaving office, even beginning to publicly play with the idea of declaring himself Caliph, though the rest of the Islamic world balks at the idea. It is currently closely aligned to Russia.
Quite recent to pass from this category is Morocco. Their Western Sahara claim was the site of the Sahrawi War (2097-2101), between the Moroccan government and a mix of insurgent Sahrawi locals and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (recognized formally in 2039 to have the easternmost parts of the territory), formally joined by the United States in 2101 and seeing the war's prompt and quick resolution in only three weeks. SADR now lays claim to the entire Western Sahara, as a consequence, and Morocco has had a new, American-instated government. Whether the resultant (distributist) Moroccan state will succeed in the long term or not, is up in the air.
On Mars, a permanent Chinese research base has a total population of 27 people, made at enormous expense for primarily prestige reasons; Russia and the United States are considering competitor programs, while Japan, France, and India have scrapped the idea completely.
The asteroid belt is the primary site of economic action off of Earth; the lack of gravity wells means that mining from asteroids is a good way to acquire raw materials if one has enough patience. The first mining operation began in 2088, and thus far all enterprises have been state-backed. The round trip takes around six months, and upwards of 200 people may be employed in this capacity (offworld) at any given time, managing enormous numbers of drones.
- A world that is organized very differently from our own, not just in direct technological manners (as in, e.g., Transhuman Space), but also in the more simple and plain methods of economic and social organization that do not rely on technology (basically from the very beginning of industrialization you could theoretically have Leninism, after all; sometimes social movements take quite a while to figure out how to make themselves practical). I hit upon distributism/market socialism for something that was possible and interesting for this.
- An international situation of genuine, mutual, ideological conflict, in a way that has largely disappeared in deference to national interest since the collapse of the Soviet Union. For this purpose, two rivals to distributism were formulated and put into play in the countries that seemed most likely (or most plausibly) to host them: institutionalism and industrialism.
- World map changes where any individual one is at least semi-plausible, and none overtly contradictory, even if all of them happening is unlikely by the odds - a more probable world map would probably have half (or less) the territorial exchanges shown on this one, but simply leaving vast swaths of the world looking exactly the same other than maybe in color didn't quite sit right with me.
Politics of the Future:
A Brief Primer: Distributism & Socialism:
We will use the term distributism to describe the dominant economic system, one where those tasks best done by private enterprise are generally performed by cooperatively owned enterprises instead of traditional corporations. Many people in this world would identify their economic system as socialist instead, or occasionally even syndicalist. As a rule of thumb, social conservatives call it distributism, social liberals call it socialism. We'll call it distributism because that's more specific and better helps distinguish it from state socialism and command economies.The dominant form of cooperatively owned enterprise is a worker cooperative - such an organization is one where the workers collectively own and manage the enterprise according to democratic norms. In simple terms, each worker has one stock in the company, and may vote in elections for the board, for specific proposed policies, and receives appropriate dividends annually. These organizations also broadly restrict manager's wages. Some cooperatives (such as many hospitals) are owned by both consumers and workers jointly. A few are owned entirely by consumers, but these are generally strongly local, as compared to the sometimes international stretch of worker cooperatives.
The International Cooperative Association for Growth
"The" international economic association, incorporating most countries in the world, it can be thought of as the modern day IMF or COMECON. It is structured and intended to encourage trade between distributist states in an international environment, to mediate international disputes between cooperatives, etc. Most countries are part of it - with distributism having shown its efficacy as a model of modern economic growth, most other nations have incorporated themselves into it, aside from two major ideological rivals and the last few totalitarian or insular holdouts to the ICAG.Wars between ICAG countries have occurred, but are very rare - analogous in frequency to wars between democracies, or between socialist states. Only a handful have happened to date.
Distributism is the predominant economic mode due to the successes of cooperative enterprises on the small scale, which gradually expanded by means of market competition. Previously, (particularly in manufacturing,) such enterprises ran afoul of two major problems: a lack of entrenchment creating a difficult legal and economic environment for new cooperatives to form, and competition with the reserve army of labor of the second and third world. Over the course of the twenty-first century, this reserve army of labor became less and less available (a process most obvious today in the case of China), as wages in those countries rose due to the development of internal supplies of wealth. Major cooperative enterprises, such as Mondragon, maintained a kind of ideological commitment to the expansion of such enterprises, slowly coming to serve as an increasingly-available basis for the development of a distributist economy.
Numerous other explanations are given for the eventual triumph: the lack of useless and perfunctory labor in cooperative enterprises, the increased motivation of workers who are working for themselves, the reduced wages for upper management providing greater consumer spending and/or reinvestment, the greater understanding of the individual worker over the specifics of his job than pencil-pushers on the other side of the country, etc. Reams and reams of such documents, theories, and arguments have been exchanged on the subject, and of course there are still those who question even if distributism is the more successful mode of production.
Within ICAG, the four great powers are China, India, the United States, and France. Africa hosts two regional powers that have the real potential to become great powers in the future: Nigeria and the East Africa Federation, who are currently limited in reach to their immediate neighbors and not much further beyond.
Cybersocialism
In most places, market economics dominate - replacing market economies wholesale normally requires a revolution, after all, while outcompeting corporations and small businesses simply requires time and a vaguely-sympathetic legal environment. Within ICAG, however, also exists the Seventh International, an international organization for so-called cybersocialist parties, interested in planned economies based on the application of modern information technologies and artificial intelligence.In some sense, cybersocialism can be backdated to figures like Kantorovich or projects like Cybersen, but this is rather like claiming that Leninism can be backdated to Blanqui and Marx - there are key differences in structure and form owing to theoretical developments.
Given the near-abolition of the capitalist class and bourgeoisie within much of the world, cybersocialists are generally not revolutionary. They believe that they can democratically take power, and begin a rapid, but legal, process of reform, wherein - to put it in short - taxes are hiked, public projects are kickstarted, and more of the economy falls under central planning.
Despite some successes, cybersocialism is still a marginal political position. Just as one wouldn't expect a billionaire or small business owner to embrace having their property expropriated, nor too will one find the average worker-owner or consumer-owner of a cooperative happy to see his or her business bought out or replaced by state apparatus. No major power is (yet) a cybersocialist state, and they lean towards the smaller states. The most populous by far is Madagascar, with 130 million people; the other five are Chiapas, Cuba, Ecuador, Haiti, and Namibia. Namibia faced US intervention in its domestic politics due in part to its cybersocialism in the American-Namibian War (2062-2073), which eventually saw the United States withdraw entirely as the public mood soured on the war. This war's effect on the general population (combined with civil strife and shifting economics at home) lead directly to the most recent realignment of American politics, which resulted in the Republicans arriving on the scene as workerist distributists.
It is worth remembering that cybersocialism is - generally speaking - an accepted part of ICAG. Cybersocialist nations generally allow cooperatives under the same legal guidelines as in more traditional distributist states, they simply have very large chunks (80+%) of their population employed by state enterprises. Thus far, cybersocialist nations have not fallen wildly behind more traditional ICAG countries.
Syndicalism
Most states adopted a distributist economic policy by a mix of free market competition and state sponsorship - more free market in the first world, more state sponsorship in the third. Some, however, were relatively late to experience this intensifying competition, and instead chose to take the preexisting corporate institutions and redistribute ownership to workers. This has resulted in much larger cooperatively-owned enterprises in countries which engaged in such strategies, where the institution arrived in a top-down fashion, rather than a bottom-up one. The People's Republic of China is by far the most prominent syndicalist country.The Powers
There are, roughly speaking, four great powers within ICAG, and several more regional and secondary powers. In order of importance, they are:The People's Republic of China, whose economic ties to much of eastern and central Africa remain strong and powerful. The EAF is a major historical partner, and despite its growing independence, it is more the junior partner of a long alliance than a truly independent power, putting much of Africa in the PRC's sphere of influence. China has spent much of its time in the past century working to diplomatically and economically contain India, putting the two powers as direct rivals as the 22nd century begins, with a relationship somewhat analogous to that between the USA and China at their rougher points in the past few decades.
The United States is no longer the premier world power, but it is very definitely the number two, shortly after China. With the breakup of the European Union, and India's political and economic isolation, it had nowhere else to be. By various legal and democratic procedures, it has incorporated five new states into the Union: D.C., Puerto Rico, Pacifica (a union of the low-population American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands), Belize, and Panama. The admission of non-territorial states into the union is a relatively recent development, with the movement having begun in the 2050s as China emerged as a peer competitor, and only recently begun to bear fruit in 2083 with Belize's citizenry voting by a 12 point margin (55 to 43) to become a US state in a plebiscite; attempts have centered on Pacific, Carribean, and Central American nations, due to their small size and relatively "digestible" natures, with a combined charm campaign taking advantage of US wealth.
India has been - by intentional project - economically isolated as China has co-opted its neighbors and built a trade network that intentionally routes around much of the subcontinent. Its only close allies are Bengal and Bhutan; Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Burma all fall in the Chinese sphere of influence. Despite such trade restrictions, it has been very successful in developing its internal economy, and has good relations with the United States and the Eurozone; its force projection and diplomatic power, however, languish well behind its rivals. In 2066, under Hindu nationalists, Nepal formally joined with India to become a single united Hindu state.
The Distributist League is a major economic and political bloc, centered largely around France. It represents a new European consensus, emerging after the collapse of the European Union in the aftermath of France's own exodus in 2062 as distributism took hold and the neoliberal institutions of the EU became a strangling vice rather than a benefit to France. With only Germany left holding the reins, the EU rapidly fell apart, and France quickly picked up the pieces, becoming the center of a whole new pan-European project. It, and its areas of interest such as the Levantine Republic, Libya, and Lebanon, is often colloquially referred to as the "Eurozone," and remains a close strategic ally of the United States. Some suggest that the large number of non-distributist states in Europe is due to intentional French neglect, as both Germany and England, if allowed into the League, would be rivals for dominance.
Nigeria/ECOWAS is one of the most rapidly emerging powers, suggested sometimes to be the "China of the 22nd century," Nigeria - and ECOWAS as a whole's - economic successes and eventual shift towards distributist economics in the 2060s was a major part of ICAG's rapid successes in the latter half of the 21st century, signalling the end of Africa as a region to export labor and allowing domestic cooperatives to directly compete with capitalists in their own country, rather than with impoverished workers on the opposite side of the planet. Today, it has close ties to the United States, and relatively good relations with the Eurozone, though the close relationship between Algeria, Agadez, and Azawad does mean there is still some bad blood related to the independence of constituent zones.
The East African Federation is a country developed, in large part, with Chinese funding, and today retains that close and intimate relationship to China, who has used economic ties and power to build its strength in the region. It was initially formed of a union between South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi; in 2087, it added Kivu (formerly a part of the DRC) into its union. Some suggest it seeks a gradual expansion to cover all of the continent, though its support for Darfur and Katanga's independence, without any particular efforts at annexation, suggest otherwise.
Islamic Republic of Iran has democratized heavily over the past 86 years, to the point that the Ayatollah has little more true political power than the Queen of England does today. It also experienced major economic successes due to rapprochement with the United States and Europe, even as its oil supplies dwindled and hydrogen fuel cells and fusion power began to dominate the energy market. It retains a major position as a regional power, with extensive diplomatic ties throughout the region, including to various minority parties and the occasional insurgent group.
The Arab Federal Republic was formed in the aftermath of the Second Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave that occurred in 2068, spreading across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain. It is today nearly 40% non-Arabic, owing to the vast numbers of non-Arab groups in the petrostates prior to the revolution; they proved a major impetus for the union, as the Arab intellectuals and military leaders responsible for the revolution feared ethnic violence by the minority (or, in the case of UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, majority) population, and moved the capital to Amman, Jordan. Kuwait voluntarily joined the Arab Federal Republic in 2090, though the US today maintains its military bases there as part of the agreement.
Indo-Pacifica, Burrunia, & Free Dolphins
Following advances in artificial intelligence and linguistics, in the 2050s, it became clear that the bottlenose dolphin population's average level of intelligence was roughly in line with that of humanity, with meaningful conversations becoming possible between the two previously-separated populations. Due to their widely-distributed population and lack of technology - making them roughly equivalent to a vast array of hunter-gatherer tribes that were once smeared across the terrestrial Earth - they have been organized, for legal purposes, into three separate polities: Indo-Pacifica, Burrunia, and the Free Dolphins, depending on subspecies. The primary legal impact is that dolphins can sue for damages caused to their traditional ranges, expect prosecution for acts of delphicide, etc, but otherwise their territory is still largely considered terra nullius.Due to vast improvements in medical technology available to the dolphin population in the wake of their semi-integration, the total population of all bottlenose dolphin species has exploded, and is currently estimated to be approximately fifteen million, with ten million being the "common" bottlenose dolphins (The Free Dolphins), another 4.5 million being Indo-Pacific, and the remaining half million being Burrunan.
A small percentage of the dolphin population are citizens of terrestrial nations, particularly in the New World where, technically, many already were, having been born within waters claimed by those nations. They tend to not be particularly politically involved, due to various psychological and behavioral differences.
The Holdouts
Industrialism & the Six Tigers:
Germany, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and Brazil - these six nations had heavily cartelized economies prior to the shift towards distributism, and unlike some other highly-cartelized economies, stayed that way. The zaibatsu, the konzerne, the chaebol, etc, all entrenched themselves deeply into the political and economic infrastructure of their respective countries, effectively making their removal nigh-impossible short of revolution. These countries all have some low-level cooperative enterprises, but the capacity to form large cooperative corporations such as Mondragon is simply not there. They are states that have resisted modernity due to the actions of their major corporations. They survive and function mostly due to the fact that to dismantle them would cause the unemployment of vast swaths of the population, sapping any political will in these countries to change.To the people who benefit from - or truly believe in - these companies, the ideology is industrialism: a vertically and horizontally integrated, disciplined workforce is more efficacious than masses of teeming cooperatives each working in sequence for their own profit. These companies are not outright malicious in their treatment of their workers, but the overall tendency is to work them hard and compensate them well, to attempt to simultaneously stimulate a competitive degree of economic growth while building up loyalty. Most, however, simply do their job because the possibility of distributism has been closed off, rendered unthinkable simply due to the inevitable economic chaos and stranglehold these companies still hold on domestic industries.
Some within (and without) suggest perhaps a shift towards outright syndicalism from this system: where most countries saw a gradual, more distributist development of their economies, with cooperatives slowly outcompeting traditional corporations, this would instead simply hack off the head of these massive enterprises and replace them with worker-elected managers. In Japan in particular, the Japanese Syndicalist Party has seized the position of second-party from the Democratic Party, now controlling 113 seats out of a 465 person parliament, to the LDP's 265. Another 34 seats are held by the Japanese Cybersocialist Party, which is closely aligned to the JSP. If the LDP's hold on power ever slips, there goes the nation…
Institutionalism & the International Economic Union:
Unlike the Six Tigers, where there is little underpinning ideological impetus, the IEU is a collection of nations which are absolutely united by an ideological project, and believe themselves to at least have the potential to become a peer and ideological competitor to ICAG. If one was to ask for a historical comparison, perhaps they would suggest the early industrialization in Britain, which set the stage for it to become the number one world power.The ideological basis of the IEU is the rebellion of the professional-managerial class - the lawyers, the managers, and at the broadest the college graduates - against the rising distributist new order. Its dominant ideology is "institutionalist": elitist, credentialist, viscerally anti-populist, and generally a development of the modern idea that the purpose of democracy is to select the "wisest" or "smartest" individuals. The PMC has lost its multicultural teeth to the simple reality that many of the most prominent, successful economies - whether entrenched or freshly-established - are distributist, with their PMC either being thoroughly brought to heel, utterly crushed, or never firmly established as a class in the first place. Farewell, cosmopolitan elite, welcome to siege mentality.
There is likely a significant relationship between this ideology and that sort of technocratic-democratic ideology of "if the government's running fine, keep on running," popular in China and Japan, where election results are more a sign of the dominant party's ability to please (or displease) the general public with its various actions. However, its development in Western countries was completely different from its form in Eastern countries. Rather than using democratic mechanisms as a "yes/no" vote and acting accordingly, the intent and function of the gradual formation of unaccountable governmental and quasi-governmental institutions, as well as work to depress the vote, etc, came from an entirely different direction, one fundamentally suspicious of democracy. The elites - educated, intelligent, conscientious - were the people capable of effectively running the country. The fact that the PMC feared the squeeze from the shift to distributism certainly didn't hurt.
The IEU is comprised of England, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Portugal.
The United States, unlike most other Anglo countries, avoided falling to institutionalism, likely due to its federal system - even if Virginia or Delaware banned or restricted cooperatives within their states, they could still form and compete in other states, the "race to the bottom" now transformed into an institution to help workers' positions, rather than hurt them.
The Creeping Threat of Genetic Fascism:
In 2082, Seneca, an English biotech corporation, introduced the "Baby Einstein" package, costing some two million of today's dollars (the total earnings of a median future household over the course of over six years). In its best form, it induced a 1-2std increase in conscientiousness, fitness, and IQ.
There are lower quality packages available for less - they cost the same to produce and apply to a fetus or embryo, but the cold logic of profit encourages wringing as much money as possible out of the population, and differential pricing schemes are fine when one has a monopoly. The first generation of Baby Einsteins is now reaching age 25 - these 18-25 year olds make up around 1M (including lower-quality packages) people within the IEU (the IEU has a combined population ~300M), and around a hundred thousand outside of it, 80% of whom are from the Six Tigers, and the remainder from ICAG nations.
It is probably one of the most understated political crises, akin to global warming or peak oil: the IEU appears set to entrench its meritocracy as a hereditary office, seen and ensured by one's genetic code, which is in turn afforded to you by your parents. Denialism of the potentially devastating long-term consequences exist both in the IEU and abroad, and various major powers have made contact with England to share the details of Seneca's Baby Einstein package. At present, it is believed that the production apparatus for the retrovirus responsible for the Baby Einstein package (and its formula) exist only in three places, all located in England. They are all quite secure.
Russia
Russia is an authoritarian, expansionist state, ruled by Sergei Kasyanov, the leader of the All-Union National Party. It has taken advantage of the recent chaos following the collapse of the EU and NATO due to the European and American political crises of the 60s and 70s to expand its influence. It is a de facto single party state, with over 70% of the legislature controlled by the ruling party, and opposition mostly neutered. The "strongest" real opposition party is the All-Union Syndicalist Party, which frequently just barely manages to get across the 5% margin to get into parliament (though, in fairness, external estimates are that their actual vote counts are two or three times higher than the ones the government gives).Kasyanov, who has been President since 2072 and ruled unquestioned within his party since 2080, is a conservative technocrat, oriented towards maintaining Russian prestige on the international stage. Where his predecessors formed the state into a condition of electoral dysfunction and personal rule, then into a fairly well-defined national ideology of conservative and nationalist republicanism, he has oriented himself towards iterating upon and protecting the system his forebearers left him.
His nation's aggressive orientation on the international stage, which precedes him - Belarus was annexed in 2065 and Kazakhstan in 2067 - has left it rather diplomatically isolated. As a partial counter-strategy to this issue, he has moved to encourage the Bulgarian National Party and the Romanian National Party (both parties with similar ideological tendencies) to overthrow their respective governments, and continued the Russian policy of working to block and prevent the eastward shift of the Distributist League via use of every last bit of economic force they can bring to bear on the problem. In the view of Kasyanov, EU/NATO expansionism left Russia without any room to breathe, and the two shattering into pieces is a welcome gift Russia will not miss out on, or allow to be undone.
Note that, unlike some older expansionists, Kasyanov's Russia remains part of an interlinked European trade network - it merely seeks to ensure that Eastern Europe becomes (or remains, in some cases) more economically dependent on Russia than on France, Germany, or England. With the climate effects of global rise in temperatures, Russia - already a breadbasket - has begun to produce still more wheat to provide for hungry mouths on other continents as the global population continues to rise due to the prevalence of longevity treatments.
Economically, Russia is closest to the industrialists, with a cartelized economy, though it has the classical authoritarian indifference to the color of the cat so long as it hunts mice, and has some significant involvement of worker cooperatives in its economy.
Reaction:
The DPRKs and KSAs of the 22nd century, the people who simply refuse to engage in modernity, who view it as something grotesque and ugly. Rare by now - it simply isn't easy at all to maintain such a state, and it gets less easy with each passing year, as more of your neighbors become wealthy and free while you grind your citizenry into the dust. Eswantini, the DRC, Turkey, and Zimbabwe all fall into this category at present day. It is not a coincidence that they are mostly African nations - even the emergent Nigeria and East African Federation regional powers lack the full force of soft power that an established and developed nation like India, China, Russia, the United States, etc, can bring to bear within their spheres of influence.The absolute monarchy of Eswantini and the single-party state of Zimbabwe are both supported by South Africa, purely to reduce the number of distributist states near them. The ongoing Matabeland insurgency (2087-Present) has occupied much of South Africa's military capacity for the past two decades.
The DRC lost Kivu to EAF-backed insurgents (the resultant United Republic of Kivu proceeded to vote to join the EAF two years later), and more recently Katanga in much the same way, and the military dictatorship is only clinging more tightly to its power in the aftermath. Today, the state is perhaps the most open example of biotechnological innovation and developments in cybernetics, with many technological avenues that have been eschewed by other powers now being researched, such as rapid human growth, mass genetic tampering, and more, all with the nominal purpose of ensuring national strength - currently, all that's really present is mass cyborgization, with over 4% of the population having heavy cybernetics, a "man-machine army" built up over the past decade. The military dictatorship is run by an increasingly cliquish and insular officer class, with periodic (normally nonviolent) purges of the ranks, and buy-in by the common citizen is likely near-nothing. Thus far, the DRC's military, while at least vaguely adequate against insurgents (the Kivu and Katanga insurgencies lasted over a decade each), remains untested against rival state powers.
Turkey wound up falling into authoritarianism in the 21st century, becoming in effect a conservative Islamist single party state. Its military is probably the most effective of any reactionary state, and makes up a core backbone of its governance - once the Kemalist influence on the military had been thoroughly purged, the new Islamists looked back on it and saw how valuable an appropriately ideologically-committed military could be. Once, it was closely aligned with the Arab petrostates, by sheer necessity if nothing else. With their fall, the Islamist governing party turned even more conservative and reactionary, their siege mentality intensifying. The current President has been serving since 2062, and thanks to anti-agathics, shows no signs of leaving office, even beginning to publicly play with the idea of declaring himself Caliph, though the rest of the Islamic world balks at the idea. It is currently closely aligned to Russia.
Quite recent to pass from this category is Morocco. Their Western Sahara claim was the site of the Sahrawi War (2097-2101), between the Moroccan government and a mix of insurgent Sahrawi locals and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (recognized formally in 2039 to have the easternmost parts of the territory), formally joined by the United States in 2101 and seeing the war's prompt and quick resolution in only three weeks. SADR now lays claim to the entire Western Sahara, as a consequence, and Morocco has had a new, American-instated government. Whether the resultant (distributist) Moroccan state will succeed in the long term or not, is up in the air.
Intrasolar Exploration:
There are in total six artificial habitats around Earth, with a combined population of around 5,000, each owing allegiance to a different Earth power (Russia, China, India, USA, France, & Japan), and each amounting to little more than a research base and manufactory.On Mars, a permanent Chinese research base has a total population of 27 people, made at enormous expense for primarily prestige reasons; Russia and the United States are considering competitor programs, while Japan, France, and India have scrapped the idea completely.
The asteroid belt is the primary site of economic action off of Earth; the lack of gravity wells means that mining from asteroids is a good way to acquire raw materials if one has enough patience. The first mining operation began in 2088, and thus far all enterprises have been state-backed. The round trip takes around six months, and upwards of 200 people may be employed in this capacity (offworld) at any given time, managing enormous numbers of drones.
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Had an idea about a future timeline. Centered several millennia in the future after Mars and Venus were partially terra formed. Only for some apocalyptic collapse to wipe out over 99% of the human population. Leaving the vast majority of the surviving population stranded on the incomplete worlds.
With the two biggest players in the terra forming of Mars & Venus and thus making up the majority of survivors being the USA & China. With the following while being major players in exoplanetary colonization were dwarfed by the big two.
With the two biggest players in the terra forming of Mars & Venus and thus making up the majority of survivors being the USA & China. With the following while being major players in exoplanetary colonization were dwarfed by the big two.
- India
- EU
- Brazil
- Japan
- Russia
- Brazil
- South Korea
What happens with Egypt and the Sinai? I get the breakup of Libya, but I'm not sure if the pink parts of OTL Egypt would have a high enough population to be viable states.
I would very much like an explanation of how the hell Egypt got partitioned between the UK, Turkey, and France. Or, well, most of these territorial changes. Some of them I can understand, even if I don't necessarily think they're likely (independent Quebec, Scotland, and Somaliland, united Korea, East African Federation, Chinese annexation of Taiwan, Ethiopia can into sea), but others are bizarre--I don't understand the logic behind your partition of Russia, for instance, or why Turkey would want to annex more than its entire population in Arabs and Kurds, or how on Earth you get China annexing half (but only half!) of Mongolia, almost the entire Russian Far East, and chunks of Pakistan and India, but somehow losing Tibet in the process.
For Egypt, after Ethiopia dams the Nile it effectively becomes a failed state, after a few decades the Turkish Empire tries to annex it but the UK and France don't want Turkey having full control over the Suez so they partition it, they are more protectorates than anything.
Russia becomes a lot less powerful from a loss of population, and gradually their territories either became independent or got eaten up by other countries, but they still had enough control to have access to the Bering Strait and control their capitals in Europe. Turkey is gradual. Most of them where failed states anyway so all it had to do was dam the tigris and euphrates and then wait for them to collapse, and then when the region of oil in Saudi Arabia went into chaos, so did the rest of the country, allowing Turkey to protect the significant religious cities, pleasing the Muslim population. For China I get you, half of Mongolia is unreasonable, and honestly I just wanted to see Tibet, but there's a lot of river wars in this timeline, China dams the Indian and Pakistani rivers and is gradually taking over the countries from the sides.
Thanks for your criticism.
So you have Ethiopia, Turkey, and China using dams to destroy other countries or regions for their own gain under the assumption that international arbitration fails and none of the affected countries decide to just throw a couple missiles at the dams in question? India and Pakistan have nukes and the Saudis could get them if they tried; taking territory off a nuclear power is a really, really dangerous game to play.
That being said, the map does look interesting. What happened to South Africa and Indonesia?
Crazymachines
Banned
No deep lore for this, just one way a post 2nd korean war might look like
South Korea (and Allies) casualties: 8,935,952
North Korea casualties: 11,923,534
South Korea (and Allies) casualties: 8,935,952
North Korea casualties: 11,923,534
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Green and black spots being irradiated/chemically saturated? Also, China invaded from the north to keep a buffer?
Crazymachines
Banned
I did a more fleshed out version of this on the other map thread if you're looking for more info, but yes
TheSwedishHistorian
Banned
Personally the biggest strength of China is on land, and even though they can strengthen their navy its a lot easier for nations to team up to oppose any chinese aggression at sea as has been seen with the Quads and NATO's attempt to hold back china from invading Taiwan. India if stronger on this map would also try their hardest to keep China at bay. Its one thing for China to march into Vietnam, Laos etc, and another than to takeover or puppet Phillippines and Japan.
Also if Russia joins some kind of EU, then I'm pretty sure the UK would to, or at least a United ireland and Scotland which is looking more likely by both the year and day.
Please tell me more about this world.
Slightly adjusted version of your map. More compact Arab state with Eritrea and others. UK and greenland in EU. More continental mega China. Island Confederation. Other minor changes
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