Ghosts of Fashoda - a TL without an Entente Cordiale

Hi everyone, sorry for the extroardinarily long wait. Exams/thesis related delays are to blame, and the fact that my inspiration always seems to dry up after WW II.

Chapter IX: Cold War, 1945-2013.

The most costly and largest war ever fought – costing 35 million lives and spanning Africa, Asia, the Middle East and all of the world’s oceans – which had ended in nuclear fire, was over. Thanks to the aftermath, a status quo that tremendously differed from the pre-war one, the struggle was and still is compared to the Titanomachy of Greek mythology. That mythological struggle had left a dramatically different cosmological order with the Olympians defeating their Titan ancestors like this real war had left a very different world order with the German Empire ascending and taking the role of the British Empire. The German Empire had definitively asserted itself as the hegemonic power of Europe while the Ottomans had reasserted their influence over the Middle East, kicking out Russia and Great Britain. Japan and China, in the meantime, had proved examples to Asian nationalists that European powers were far from invincible while the latter of the two had regained its primacy as the leading Asian power. The United States, in the meantime, except for lack of nuclear weapons, was the world’s strongest country. Germany, lastly, also had the monopoly on nuclear weapons, at least in 1945.

A rather shocked world was once again at peace and, since Germany was considered the victor, it decided where the peace conference would take place: the NewPalace in Potsdam, a grand baroque Hohenzollern residence from the eighteenth century, was chosen. Politicians and diplomats from all over the world travelled to Germany to dictate or receive terms in a conference presided over by conservative-nationalist Chancellor Carl Goerdeler and the aging Emperor Wilhelm II. Once again a famous picture was made of the victorious leaders: Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, Ottoman Sultan Ahmed IV, Emperor Hirohito, the Xinxing Emperor, the heads of state of the smaller Alliance states, and their various Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers and diplomats were photographed on the steps of the NewPalace. The picture symbolized the victory of the Alliance, though in the United States it was interpreted as a symbol of imperialist, reactionary arrogance. This was strengthened because the war had generated a crusading mentality in which America was the defender of freedom and a shining beacon of democracy, liberty, tolerance and modernity.

The German government first turned to deal with Britain, perceived as the aggressor, knowing its nuclear monopoly allowed them to dictate terms. In Africa, the British colonial empire was largely carved up by the victorious powers: Germany annexed, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and the northern quarter of Bechuanaland while Italy annexed Sudan and British Somaliland. Lastly, Egypt was lost to the Ottoman Empire which also annexed Yemen, Oman and the TrucialStates while re-establishing full sovereignty over Kuwait. The British colonial empire was thus reduced to Kenya, Uganda, Southern Rhodesia, Bechuanaland and South Africa as well as Britain’s Asian possessions, in particular the crown jewel of the empire: India, to the relief of terrified pro-Empire politicians who rightfully believed all might be lost, was left to Great Britain as a consolation price. Besides these territorial losses, the Royal Navy was also not allowed to have a tonnage more than half of the Imperial German Navy’s and had to grant the German navy right of passage through the English Channel.

Russia was up for punishment next. Poland, once a buffer state itself, demanded a buffer state of its own against possible future Russian aggression, as unlikely as that seemed. As a result, the Republic of Belarus was established with its capital in Minsk while Ukraine also gained independence from Russia at long last as a buffer state to both Romania and Poland. Romania, in the meantime, annexed Bessarabia and Transnistria from Russia while Iran annexed Azerbaijan, lost more than a century before, while Georgia and Armenia gained independence under Ottoman auspices. In the east, China undid the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and re-established the border as established by the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, expanding Qian China by 600.000 kilometres which compensated the persisting loss of Formosa to Japan more than enough. Japan, in the meantime, annexed Northern Sakhalin, thereby controlling the entire island of which they had controlled the south since 1905. As it concerned the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, the United States managed to largely enforce a status quo ante bellum peace (minus Sakhalin of course) much to the dismay of Tokyo and Beijing (this, however, would later prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for Washington DC thanks to the rise of independence movements sponsored by both Japan and China). This was so because of the fact that the US was not intimidated by nuclear threats considering German inability to deliver atomic bombs across the Atlantic Ocean in the short term, the existence of an American nuclear project, Japan being on the ropes, and China despite its power not being able to have a significant impact in the Pacific due to absence of a Chinese blue water navy.

As it concerned mainland Asia, China had Britain and Russia put down in writing that they recognised Chinese sovereignty over Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. China could enforce its desires much more easily on the mainland thanks to its gargantuan army, and did succeed in prying French Indochina from France by simply refusing to have its armies there budge and no one being able to do anything about it. It was partitioned: Japan annexed Vietnam while China, preferring indirect influence via tributary relations, established pro-Chinese governments in Laos and Cambodia. In the Middle East, Iran became sovereign without foreign influences and the shares of the Imperial Iranian Oil Company (formerly Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) reapportioned with Iran owning 50% of shares and Italy and Germany each owning 25%. Iranian state revenue increased tremendously as a result, allowing President Reza Khan to fund an ambitious state guided crash modernization and industrialization program.

Germany was now the paramount power of the world besides the United States of America, but Germany would not be enjoying all aspects of that for very long, such as its colonial empire. The overjoyed Emperor Wilhelm II would not live to see that day, which applied to most of his colleague monarchs as well. The German Emperor died of heart failure in 1948 at the ripe old age of 89 after a reign that had spanned from 1888 to 1948, sixty years. He died a happy man due to the knowledge that Germany had attained its place under the sun and had cast aside the British Empire and other would-be rivals. His reactionary son, who found himself in a democratic political system and who was therefore severely out of place, succeeded him as Wilhelm III. Because he’d been in the line of succession for 66 years and because he died after only three years of rule in 1951, he is often known as the “eternal crown prince”. His second son Louis Ferdinand, his oldest son having been banned from succession for his morganatic marriage, succeeded him as Emperor Louis I of the Germans. King Victor Emmanuel III had already died in 1947 at age 78 and had been succeeded by his son Umberto II. Ahmed IV managed to outlast his colleagues and lived to age 70, dying in 1954. Tsar Michael II got cancer in 1949 and died in 1950 before what would have been his 72nd birthday (this cancer is attributed to him being in St. Petersburg when the fallout of the nearby atomic bombing of Kronstad drifted over the city). Michael II had engaged in a morganatic marriage, meaning his son was not the heir to the Russian throne, and was instead succeeded by Grand Duke Vladimir as Tsar Vladimir I. He was the Tsar’s first cousin once removed, Michael’s grandfather Alexander II being his great-grandfather. Thusly, all of Europe’s nineteenth century monarchs were dead by the early 1950s and were succeeded by long-lived twentieth century monarchs that would dominate their time as their ancestors had dominated their own. For these reasons, certain historians like to refer to the entire 1789-1945 period as the “Long Nineteenth Century”.

The period from 1945 is referred to as the Cold War, which is the period of intense sustained political and military tension between the German, Italian, and Ottoman dominated bloc of Europe, Africa (in 1945 at least, but later not so much) and the Middle East, the “free world” led by the United States and its “junior partners” Great Britain and Russia, and a rising Sino-Japanese third power bloc that was increasingly being dominated by Imperial Qian China. Ideologically, the divide was as follows: the US represented itself as a liberal democracy fighting against imperialist oppression and reactionary monarchism; Germany and its allies largely represented the anti-American struggle as one against a degenerate and immoral modern Sodom and Gomorra; China and Japan shared the anti-colonial notions of the US, but out of pan-Asian nationalist ideals rather than liberal, democratic ones. The main conflict was between the German and American blocs, with China and Japan only interfering if Asia was concerned.

Asia became an area of concern practically immediately due to Asian independence movements starting to resist colonial rule. While Britain had promised India independence for aiding in the war effort (a very significant contribution since India was the British Empire’s largest producer of steel and had a population of half a billion people) this had not been extended to any other colonies. While British India, splitting into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, became independent in 1947, the rest of Britain’s Asian colonies had no such luck. The populations of Burma, Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei and Britain’s various Pacific possessions had not been promised independence, regardless of whether they had resisted Japan and China or had collaborated with them. Besides that, there were also other European colonized peoples inspired by the example of Asians defeating Europeans: Indonesians, East Timorese and Filipinos (those who rejected dominion status in which the US continued to control foreign affairs, defence and fiscal policy). China and Japan started to generously fund Asian independence movements and to provide them with weapons and training, causing tensions between Europe and the Sino-Japanese bloc.

The US and Britain also didn’t respond positively because they didn’t want China and Japan to dominate the region. The difference between the two was that the US government didn’t mind independence if that condition was met, while the British government did. Beijing and Tokyo, however, were not willing to meet the United States in the middle; rather, China expanded the Xinxing Doctrine to the western Pacific, wanting to evict Western influence from there as well as from mainland and South-eastern Asia.

In the light of these considerations, the United States government was unwilling to grant full independence to the Philippines after 1945, fearing Japanese influence. The stubborn refusal to reconsider quickly turned away the more radical nationalist elements, but soon after also alienated moderate pro-independence elements that had previously been pro-American. As demands for full independence were met with US proposals for compromise, stepping stones that would lengthen the path toward independence and maintain a higher degree of American influence than many Filipinos considered desirable, armed resistance picked up. In 1950, the Second Moro Rebellion erupted (the first one lasted from 1899 to 1913) that engulfed much of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago where the Moro people, Muslim Filipinos, lived. In that year, the Moro National Revolutionary Front (MNRF) was founded and started a guerrilla and partisan conflict against the United States Army and Philippine government forces. The socialist inspired movement soon experienced internal dissent with devout Muslim members breaking away and forming the Moro Islamic Liberation Army (MILA). In the meantime, an outright Marxist-inspired People’s Army was also founded on Mindanao and expanded its operations across the rest of the Philippines. It fought to bring about communist revolution, committing acts of assassination, sabotage, kidnapping, extortion and bank robbery against “capitalist targets” like banks and wealthy American and Filipino businessmen, landowners and political figures. The People’s Army also fought a guerrilla war in the countryside, putting up tenant farmers against landowners, while inciting strikes in the major cities. Smaller movements based on the separate islands wanted their own island to become independent, such as for example the Second Republic of Negros proclaimed in 1953. None of the organisations proved appealing enough. The MNRF was ethnically based and the MILA was based on religion, resulting in crimes against those weren’t Moros, those who weren’t Muslims, or both. Meanwhile, the People’s Army was decidedly opposed by the more libertarian proponents of Filipino independence.

Anti-colonial uprisings took place across Asia. The Dutch East Indies rose up against their Dutch rulers while Burma, Malaya, Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei rose up against British rule. The US, while being no friend of colonialism or of pro-German states, would rather have the weak Dutch and America’s British allies in control than have China and Japan spread their influence. The supposed defender of freedom therefore supported British and Dutch colonial rule while fighting anti-American resistance in the Philippines. In 1955, this led to the formation of the Philippine National Army and the proclamation of the Second Philippine Republic. The PNA managed to gather the various independence movements under one umbrella and one military command and commenced a national uprising. Qian China and the Empire of Japan sent weaponry, trainers and funding which led to large amounts of friction.

That friction led to the threat of nuclear war when China developed its own atomic bomb in 1960 together with Japan, to which the United States responded by stationing nuclear missiles and nuclear armed heavy jet powered bombers on Guam, Wake and Kamchatka that could hit major Chinese and Japanese cities with little effort. Japan responded by stationing nuclear missiles on its Pacific islands and on Sakhalin, enabling Japan to easily decimate the West Coast and Alaska. Besides that, nuclear powered submarines started to prowl the oceans from the late 1950s onward, resulting in deadly dances between submarines from opposite camps that several times almost led to war. A very specific incident occurred near the northern most islands of the Kuril Islands, Paramushir when a Japanese patrol vessel fired upon an American patrol vessel the Japanese captain believed to be violating Japanese territorial waters. As surprising as it was that this had never happened before, it turned into a major diplomatic crisis: firstly, Japan manifested the intention to put the captured Americans on trial for alleged acts of war; secondly, the US and Japan couldn’t agree on the exact demarcation of their territorial waters between Kamchatka and Paramushir. In the end Beijing pressured Tokyo to give in to US demands, deeming the issue too trivial to risk a war over, which revealed how the balance in the Sino-Japanese relation had shifted decidedly toward China.

In the end it was also China that was triumphant with the United States calling it quits in the Philippines in 1967 and Britain and the Netherlands having withdrawn from their colonies earlier. By fighting so long, the US got what they had tried to prevent: a pro-Chinese and pro-Japanese Philippine government. Generally, most Asian countries gravitated toward China after independence and ended up satellite states, though the aging Xinxing Emperor understood quite well how to keep them happy and pro-Chinese. He died in 1970 and left a Chinese great power with an atomic arsenal and the beginnings of a blue water navy, China launching its first super aircraft carrier in the year of his death and already possessing nuclear submarines.

Africa was another theatre of the Cold War. The United States government actively supported African nationalist independence movements, thereby earning the ire of most European powers. The African theatre of the Cold War was a very messy one, much more so even than the Asian conflict zone. From the early 1950s onward, Germany and Italy saw themselves faced by colonial rebellions and resorted to outright criminal tactics such as terror bombing, chemical weapons, random reprisal executions of civilians and concentration camps. In those concentration camps, all those associated in any way with the rebels were locked up in terrible conditions: insufficient housing in which a dozen prisoners was crammed into a room ten by ten metres in size where they had to sleep on the floor, a 1300 calorie per day diet, insufficient and dirty drinking water, and forced labour. In return, African nationalist rebels had no qualms in taking whites hostage and killing or mutilating them if their demands weren’t met or raping captured white women or those black women who were mistresses of their white masters (in the latter case, the women were more often than not executed by beheading if the trauma of multiple rapes didn’t already or if the dishonour of rape didn’t bring them to commit suicide).

The wars proved increasingly hopeless for the colonial rulers and by the late 1960s and early 1970s, by which time the Germans and Italians started leaving, except where it concerned Libya because the Italians had managed to demographically overwhelm the indigenous populace after oil had been discovered in 1950 (resulting in low level conflict even until today). The Germans, however, left a going away present in the shapes of racist white minority regimes installed by them in Northern Rhodesia and along the Niger and Chari rivers in Ubangi-Shari, Nigeria, Niger and Mali. Besides that, many of the states left behind after European departure were multiethnic, causing them to descend into civil war with Europe maintaining influence through supporting those who were in favour of them. The last of the white minority regimes to fall was Ubangi-Shari, mainly because its isolated position made it difficult for US help to get there while Germany could supply it via Italian Libya. That, at times, genocidal regime didn’t fall until 1987, by which time Germany had withdrawn its support for over fifteen years, not wanting to be connected with the crimes there anymore, in part due to strong anti-colonial sentiment in the younger generation of Germans. As a result of these conflicts, Africa ended up in the American sphere of influence over a span of four decades.

By the 1990s, Europe was seeing another generation die out. Emperor Louis I died in 1994 at age 86. His two oldest sons had renounced their rights to the throne in order to engage in a morganatic marriage and, because his third son had already died, he was succeeded by his grandson George Friedrich who became Emperor George I at age 18. By then Tsar Vladimir I had also died and was succeeded by Grand Duke Nicholas, a descendant of Tsar Nicholas I, because Vladimir had died without a son. He was crowned Tsar Nicholas III at a time that he was already 70 years old. Two who had deceased earlier were Umberto II who had died in 1983, leaving his son as King Victor Emmanuel IV, and Edward VIII, who was succeeded by his son King George VI. Thereby, another new generation was ready to lead Europe into the 21st century, a century of détente as relations between the great powers had begun to improve from the 1980s. After centuries, it seemed Europe was willing to accept it wasn’t the sole power holder in the world. Because of this, the 21st century might prove to be a more peaceful one, one dominated by the United States of America and China.
 

katchen

Banned
I find it a bit hard to believe that the US would walk away from the Philippines if it hung onto them until 1967. Cement ties by granting the Philippines statehood (or three states, Luzon, Mindanao and Visayan) would be more likely if by then, racism in the United States was going by the boards.
 
Statehood is useless if the people living in those areas don't want your language, religion and your very presence in their country :D
 
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