You have two [6] in the actual text.
So, the Soviet invasion is August Storm here as well?
So, the Soviet invasion is August Storm here as well?
Holding Out for a Hero: Gustav Stresemann Survives
- Thread starter Faeelin
- Start date
wolf_brother
Banned
What are the chances of the reds overrunning Manchuria, Korea, and staging attacks on the Home Islands?
If the Soviets 'just' take Manchuria that might be enough to force Japan out of China, and into the arms of whatever anti-Communist alliance is most attractive at the moment.
If they take Korea Japan is going to be forced into rethinking their entire colonial-military model, and is going to be desperately looking for allies.
If there are attacks on the Home Islands I imagine we might see alt-Kamikaze style attacks as the embargo and the invasion start to seriously damage the Japanese ability to wage a modern war.
If the Soviets 'just' take Manchuria that might be enough to force Japan out of China, and into the arms of whatever anti-Communist alliance is most attractive at the moment.
If they take Korea Japan is going to be forced into rethinking their entire colonial-military model, and is going to be desperately looking for allies.
If there are attacks on the Home Islands I imagine we might see alt-Kamikaze style attacks as the embargo and the invasion start to seriously damage the Japanese ability to wage a modern war.
Peacemakers
The removal of national minorities and their uniqueness from the life of a state must bring with it cultural deprivation for that state; the elimination of small peoples from the life of the European states must lead ultimately to the arrest and paralysis of European cultural life. Nationalism will silence the the astonishingly rich-sounding orchestra of Western intellectual life, breaking one instrument after another, until finally one piercing and dissonant trumpet of war shrieks through a gigantic barracks.-Paul Schiemann, 1939
The reaction of most of Europe to reports of a downed Italian plane in Southeastern Austria ranged from "Oh Christ, what have they done now?" to loathing and contempt for Italy. La Rocque, who had just brokered a European-settlement, had no desire to go to war to Italian adventurism in the ruins of a French ally. Attlee was no friend of the fascists, and Italy's failure in Spain, along with its humiliation during the Abyssinian Crisis, illustrated that their bark was worst than their bite. The most people would say is that Mussolini would have never been dumb enough to bog down in the Balkans. Still, this was one more crisis for a bruised and battered world. Fortunately, there were those who recognized that it had to stop. The removal of national minorities and their uniqueness from the life of a state must bring with it cultural deprivation for that state; the elimination of small peoples from the life of the European states must lead ultimately to the arrest and paralysis of European cultural life. Nationalism will silence the the astonishingly rich-sounding orchestra of Western intellectual life, breaking one instrument after another, until finally one piercing and dissonant trumpet of war shrieks through a gigantic barracks.-Paul Schiemann, 1939
While Yugoslavia burned and German-Polish strife threatened to set Europe ablaze, in three nations along the Baltic, unnoticed to most of Europe, another way was shown. Perhaps not being riven with delusions of grandeur and great power status, the Estonians, Latvians (and to a lesser extent Lithuanians) spent the period building up civil societies that tolerated and embraced their minority populations while undergoing economic expansion. It was here that a German from Jelgava, was born, and was first pushed towards the thoughts that led to the European Declaration of Human Rights.
Paul Schiemann was a German born in Jelgava in 1876, as the German elite in the Baltic provinces faced a threat from Russification. Schiemann completed a Doctorate at Griefswald in 1902, drawing on materials from the Foreign Office through his uncle, Theodor Schiemann (a prominent historian) had with Kaiser Wilhelm. Despite this, Schiemann returned home to the Baltic Provinces, where he hoped to work for greater autonomy for the Estonians, Latvians, and Germans.
Schiemann's initial plans were a failure, as most Baltic Peoples still associated the Germans (the Ritterschaften) with the autocratic Tsarist regime. [1] Schiemann was critical of the Tsarist-German collaboration, warning " 'So far revolution has deprived us only of material wealth. But our cultural inheritance has always been threatened most fiercely and brutishly by reaction." Such radical talk earned him the title "Red Schiemann", but despite his opposition to the Tsar's autocracy he fought for Russia in the Great War [2], spent a brief period in 1917 advocating for an independent Latvia in Berlin, and then returned home to help the German minority in Latvia make its way in a strange, new world.
Schiemann's thinking crystallized over the 1920s, and thanks in no small part to him the German position in Latvia was secured. German ministers served in the Latvian cabinet; at one point in the 1920s, Schiemann himself was considered to head a coalition government. Buoyed by such success, in 1926 Schiemann, along with other European minority leaders, hosted Europe's first Minorities Congress in Geneva.
The timing was auspicious. The Locarno Treaties had raised hopes of a European-wide peace, and Germany's entry into the League heralded a chance to use the League's minority apparatus for the German minorities of Eastern Europe. Yet the first years of the League had illustrated significant shortcomings, with the League convinced that minority rights were a privilege, not a right; and that any undue pressure or violation of sovereignty was forbidden. But how, Schumann asked, could the great nations ignore the forty million minorities across the continent?[3] As he declared in 1934, "The Minority Problem is a European Problem. No country's fate can be independent of Europe's as a whole."
What was the solution? Schiemann's own approach was liberal; one might almost call it libertarian. Culture was a private affair where the state had no more right to interfere than religion. [4] Within Latvia, this meant that each community should handle its own schooling [5], Schiemann was a proponent of European unity; but to Schiemann European unity would only come when Europe consisted of states of nations, not nation-states.
Schiemann photographed before the 1933 Minorities Congress
The early 1930s were a nadir for Schiemann, as the League failed to alleviate minority concerns in Poland or Efforts to build an international organization to monitor minority rights failed because no nations were able, or willing, to cede control of their internal affairs to an international organization. And Schumann became perturbed by Stresemann's turn to the right, and his effort to leverage the German minorities of Europe for political gain. But he never gave up, and Schiemann's writings (including some directed to the German Foreign Office) were influential in the Prague Settlement, which ceded Czechoslovak Germans substantial cultural autonomy, were in a large part modeled on his ideals, and the Latvian example.
Then came the Vilnus Crisis. Schiemann and the Minorities Congress were active in calling for a lasting solution to the European problem, and it was thanks in no small part to their efforts that Poland and Germany agreed to a Treaty pledging to respect each other's minority rights. [6] But there was still no overarching framework. That would not come until 1941, as League peacekeepers rolled into Belgrade.
Although historians would cite the League's deployment of peacekeepers as a turning point for the League of Nations, this overstates the change. The League had deployed peacekeepers in the past, notably during the 1920 plebiscites in Silesia, Allenstein, and Schleswig[7], and during the Colombian-Peruvian crisis of 1933 [8], but these had always been to monitor international disputes, reflecting the League's original focus on preserving international peace. The decision of the League Council (Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy) [9] to offer Yugoslavia's government forces to "assist in promoting internal stability" was thus a marked shift, but, under the circumstances, the only one plausible. The League peacekeeping forces consisted of approximately thirteen thousand troops, from France, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, and Holland. Notably not included were Romania, Hungary, or Bulgaria, nations whose troops, it was felt, would only exacerbate tendencies. The first League troops arrived in February of 1941. What they found shocked a continent.
Europe was familiar with conflict, and newspaper reports of atrocities in Spain and China. But there were limits, and the Gospic Massacre brought a new level of horror to readers at their breakfast tables. Before the war, Gospić was a small town with a Croat majority, and a Serb minority. When the conflict first broke out, order was (mostly) maintained; but as the Yugoslav forces advanced northward, and Serb partisans continued to harass Croat forces, the Croat government drew up a list of names. This list was provided to Pavelic's Utasha, who used it, on January 13, 1941, to round up "traitors to the Croat people." The Utashe came in the night, and forced the Serbs out of their homes at gunpoint. Cars were in short supply, so they were marched through the woods for 8 hours, and then forced to dig their own graves, shovels hammering into frozen ground. When it was over, some one hundred and fifty Serbs had been executed.
This might have been the end of it, but a reporter for the BBC was present in the town, and was able to photograph the bodies the next day. As League Peacekeepers descended upon the region, it soon became clear that the Gospić massacre was far from unique, as a few of reports that made it to the west illustrate:
"[W]e saw two Serb soldiers, one of them was standing guard and the other one was lying on the girl, with his pants off. And we saw a girl lying on the ground, on some kind of mattress. There was blood on the mattress, even she was covered with blood. She had bruises on her legs. There was even blood coming down her legs. She was in total shock. She went totally crazy.”
"There was a woman with a small baby a few months old. A Croat told the mother that the child must stop crying. When the child did not stop crying he snatched the child away and cut its throat. Then he laughed. There was an Italian soldier there who was watching. He did not react at all."
""I saw how a young boy of about ten was killed by Serbs. This happened in front of my own eyes. The mother sat on the ground and her young son sat beside her. The young boy was placed on his mother’s lap. The young boy was killed. His head was cut off. The body remained on the lap of the mother. The Serbian soldier placed the head of the young boy on his knife and showed it to everyone... I saw how a pregnant woman was slaughtered. There were Serbs who stabbed her in the stomach, cut her open and took two small children out of her stomach and then beat them to death on the ground. I saw this with my own eyes."
All told, some eleven to twenty thousand individuals died during the Yusolav Crisis, and Europe's attention was painfully focused on a part of the continent it had hitherto ignored. [10] What were they going to do with the place? You couldn't simply divide up the region along ethnic lines; the minorities were too evenly mixed by centuries of living together, and creating another five backwards states with irredentist demands and engaging in economic warfare would hardly improve the region. But the pre-existing order had (no thanks to the Italians) led to fighting far bloodier and more atrocious than anything the Continent had seen. [11]
Some proposals called for population transfers, abolishing communities to end conflict and breaking apart Yugoslavia. This would, however, only create new problems and reward the Italians for breaking up their neighbor. Would the Macedonians be an independent nation? Bulgarians? Greeks? What about the Hungarian population of Yugoslavia? Furthermore, breaking across Yugoslavia would pretty much give the Italians what they wanted. So, a breakup was off the table, at least for now.
Nor were people willing to just walk away and leave Yugoslavia to collapse again. Only the relative sanity of its neighbors prevented the crisis from escalating. Wouldn't it just occur as soon as
everyone left?
The Yugoslav left, dominated by the Communists, had its own vision for Yugoslavia's future, who had taken advantage of the vacuum to become a powerful force in Bosnia-Hergeviza and parts of Croatia, led by veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Under Josip Tito, the Yugoslav Communist Party became a darling of Europe's left by advocating a worker's federation which would protect minority rights, and earned praise for combating attempts at ethnic cleansing by both sides during the war. On more than one occasion Schumacher speculated that Germany's workers had expelled their monarch after losing a war, and that Yugoslavia could be served by the example. But the Yugoslav Communists could never triumph over the other factions, and even Schumacher had no desire to see Yugoslavia end
up radicalized through a civil war like Spain.
The only plan that could work, and would work, was a constitutional reform, placing the peoples of Yugoslavia on a clean (or at least slightly less dirty) slate. "And if it doesn't work," Schumacher quipped, "German presidents will be thanking German boys in Serbia for the important work they're doing for the next thirty years."
The Constitution for the Federated Kingdom of Yugoslavia was hammered out over the course of 1941, and was only approved, in part, because of a lack of a better alternative. Many of its features were impractical, the product of academics who thought the first constitution failed due to poor legalese, and not because Yugoslavia had failed to construct a civil society. But its key, defining features helped mitigate many of the worst excesses of the previous kingdom. Drawing upon Schiemann's influence and the Czech and Baltic examples, it promised the kingdom a new start; one that would, it was hoped, end the population transfers and regicide.
In place of the kingdom's centralized government, there were six federal provinces (or banovinas): Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo and Vojvodina, although not given their own provincial status, were given autonomyw ithin Serbia and their own representation in the national legislature. Within each province, all individuals had the right to list themselves as whatever ethnicity they pleased, and to attend primary schooling which was funded on a pro rata basis (adjusted decennially for each census). The new constitution reiterated support for freedom of assembly and speech; but unlike in the old kingdom, the communists were allowed to operate freely. [12] Finally, King Alexander, at the age of 18, assumed the throne, promising a new start for the peoples of the kingdom.
Yugoslavia's new king was supposed to promise a fresh start and a break from the Serbian chauvinism that had dominated the state
It wasn't loved; but it might be better than the piercing shrieks of war. For now, that would do.
_______________________________________
One of the other consequences to flow from the war was French support for something liberals and Pan-Europeans had long aspired: A European Charter of Human Rights. This was a revolutionary development, and deserves some discussion. There had been advocates of a united Europe since the days of Napoleon, but fairly few had given much thought to its government. Even Aristide Briand, who proposed a European Union in 1929 in response to the threat posing by economic troubles and German rearmament, focused on respect for inter-state borders, not the rights of the rights of the individual. Even the 1930s proponents of European integration spent more time extolling the opportunities that would spring from continent-wide planning, and saw no problem with Fascist Italy being a member.
To a large extent, this can be traced to Schiemann's observation that minorities faced the greatest danger in dictatorships and illiberal regimes. Belgium was a nation of two minorities, but nobody worried that Walloons would be exterminated. Switzerland, where Schiemann vacationed to cure his tuberculosis was a mélange of Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen who bought into the notion that they were all Swiss. And in Eastern Europe itself, it was in Czechloslovakia that minority rights were most respected. As a rising tide of autocracy swept across the continent, he could not help but note that minority rights seemed to be a consequence, not a predecessor, to a civil society.
But how to promote these values? The same way the League of Nations sought to abolish war: thought international pressure and making the alternative infeasible. In other words, there had to be consequences towards not respecting the rights of man; and even if a dictatorship could buy stability temporarily, Yugoslavia showed that when the regime collapsed the underlying problems were only exacerbated. By 1940, Schiemann's argument had gained weight on the left and among the continent's liberal parties.
Yet the policy would only be adopted thanks to Paul Reynaud, President of the French Republic. Horrified by tales from Spain and Yugoslavia, hoping to improve ties with Germany, and worried that France was adrift in a world dominated by the Anglo-Saxons and Russians, he pushed for a treaty of European human rights; something to show that Europe, too, stood for more than war and killings.
Considering that Europe is the birthplace of freedom of thought, and rule of law, and that the achievement of greater unity between its peoples is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;
Reaffirming their profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which they depend;
Being resolved, as the governments of European countries which are like-minded and have a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom and the rule of law, to take the first steps for the collective enforcement of certain rights....-European Declaration of Human Rights, 1943
Reaffirming their profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which they depend;
Being resolved, as the governments of European countries which are like-minded and have a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom and the rule of law, to take the first steps for the collective enforcement of certain rights....-European Declaration of Human Rights, 1943
[1] Indeed, after the Duma was dissolved on June 3, 1907, the German elite welcomed the news.
[2] His brother fought for the Kaiser, which oddly enough didn't break apart the family.
[3] As OTL showed, easily!
[4] Or healthcare.
[5] Although Schiemann supported joint post-primary schooling, to encourage intermingling.
[6] Of course, since Germany had been doing this since the 1920s, this was less of a big deal. For many in Poland this grated more than Danzig's restoration to Germany, since it as an attack on Poland's hard-won sovereignty. The German minority in Poland is pretty much gone by 1939, alas.
I can't find a place to mention it, but in OTL he and his wife hid a Jewish girl in their house during the Nazi occupation of Riga, at a time when he himself was under house arrest. But he's less cool than Rommel and Stauffenberg, who get a medal for being the nicest guys on Hitler's team.
[7] In OTL France actually deployed 11,500 troops to Silesia; the Italians deployed 2,000, and the British deployed either 11,500, or 2,000.
[8] The Peruvian-Colombian border crisis also marked the first (and in OTL only time that peackeepers wore League armbands and deployed under the League flag.
[9] I don't think Mussolini would have left the League. Italy goes along at this point because it has no choice in the matter.
[10] Still, there were bright spots. The conflict did not end entirely after the deployment of peacekeepers, and one of the more famous incidents of the peacekeeping operation as the Battle of Macek, where French and German forces ended up deployed as a buffer region. Local Croat forces, acting on reports that the French and German peacekeepers were unwilling to engage, planned to assault a vulnerable Serb position. Lieutenant Colonel Camille d'Ornano would later become the first Frenchmen to receive an Iron Cross " for continuous bravery before the enemy or excellence in commanding troops."
[11] Seen in a relative term. Nobody really remembers what went down in the Balkan Wars outside of the, err, Balkans.
[12] Anything that will glue the kingdom together, after all.
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Yugoslavia is saved on paper. Let's see if that translate to reality.
I am envisioning a European Court of Human Rights, but I'm holding off on describing in depth until after the Polish update. A lot of what early "Europe" looks like will depend on East Asia.
What's interesting is that unlike in OTL, a significant chunk of "Europe" is not a signatory, initially. We'll see if that changes.
I'm pretty agnostic, at this point. One of the things which has struck me while researching this timeline is how civil societies collapse are built. Poles and Germans are no longer the hereditary enemies they were in the 1930s, after all. And the region Balkans weren't always a chaotic mess of ethnic cleansing.
Maybe it won't work out in the end, but I don't think it's inevitably going to fail. We'll see.
It's all about economics, state supervision and freedom of speech combined. In addition to food on the table and enough jobs, one also needs security forces that keep the extremists away from one another's throats and who are at the same time not seen as an enemy by any side. This is pretty much what OTL Yugoslavia achieved.
On retrospect it's painfully clear that while a good start, it wasn't enough. What was missing was a society where even the most painful parts of the war could be openly discussed and depated on, instead of being brushed away from public. In OTL this only meant that they turned into private gossip and rumours as the speakers of uncomfortable truths were all too easily arrested for agitation of hatred and sent to the islands to enjoy the sunny climate of "Tito's Siberia." For fearmongers and extremists this was used as a proof that "we're right, and as you can see the Party doesn't want you to know it!"
It was the relative freedom of press and expression that slowly enabled the Finnish society to heal the worst wounds of the Finnish Civil War, as the defeated side could gradually begin to publicly discuss the excesses and attrocities commited by the winning side while also promoting the viewpoint of the war as a common tragedy of the whole nation.
But what does this mean for Europe in general? It remains to be seen whether any smaller dictator is forced and/or willing to play Gaddafi in TTL in order to see whether major powers are bluffing on their new ethnical creed and willingness to promote it.
Such ideas might also have huge effect on Soviet Union, if/when eventual detente begins. After all, some kind of early version of Helsinki Accords and some chances to monitor them internationally would be a huge change in the way Soviet Union can treat her citizens.
On retrospect it's painfully clear that while a good start, it wasn't enough. What was missing was a society where even the most painful parts of the war could be openly discussed and depated on, instead of being brushed away from public. In OTL this only meant that they turned into private gossip and rumours as the speakers of uncomfortable truths were all too easily arrested for agitation of hatred and sent to the islands to enjoy the sunny climate of "Tito's Siberia." For fearmongers and extremists this was used as a proof that "we're right, and as you can see the Party doesn't want you to know it!"
It was the relative freedom of press and expression that slowly enabled the Finnish society to heal the worst wounds of the Finnish Civil War, as the defeated side could gradually begin to publicly discuss the excesses and attrocities commited by the winning side while also promoting the viewpoint of the war as a common tragedy of the whole nation.
But what does this mean for Europe in general? It remains to be seen whether any smaller dictator is forced and/or willing to play Gaddafi in TTL in order to see whether major powers are bluffing on their new ethnical creed and willingness to promote it.
Such ideas might also have huge effect on Soviet Union, if/when eventual detente begins. After all, some kind of early version of Helsinki Accords and some chances to monitor them internationally would be a huge change in the way Soviet Union can treat her citizens.
One has to remember the Croats and Slovenes were not completely against a Yugoslavia. They were against this Yugoslavia that was nothing more than a Serbian Empire.
abc123
Banned
And if I can ask you- why is that? ( Why Germans and Poles aren't hereditary enemies any more? )
About Balkans, same question- why it wasn't?
About this constitution for Yugoslavia- I find it highly unplausible...
That sort of constitution was possible only in undemocratic country with single party dictatorship ( Communists ) and even then it was only on paper... There was no real authonomy for federal states. And when that changed ( democratization in 1990 and authonomy really was happening ) Yugoslavia broke apart.
Simply- you can't save Yugoslavia by keeping evreybody happy. That's surest way for breaking Yugoslavia.
What you can is- to try to keep two most important nations in Yugoslavia- Serbs and Croats more-less happy on expense of others. Maybe add Slovenians there, because it is Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and SLOVENES and because of their economic importance.
But, allmost all others must be kept down, or else you can't have Croats and Serbs happy.
And if Croats or Serbs aren't happy, Yugoslavia is in big troubles. If they BOTH aren't happy ( like in second Yugoslavia ) Yugoslavia is dead.
Like the Balkans, perhaps they just needed America to spank them?
It's actually an interesting question, and IMo the American example is very interesting to me.
Take African-Americans. 150 years ago, they were property. Actual, fungible, property. Fifty years ago, they couldn't go to the same schools as white kids in much of the US. I'm living this year in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King Junior was shot.
We've still got a lot of racial problems to overcome, but the USA has managed to avoid ethnic cleansing, no?
I don't know about that. Switzerland seems to work well enough with a federal government, no?
Switzerland is a special case, at least to a degree (As a conservative white male i do think tradition has something to do whit it, as well as whom the neighbours are). Other federal states have not do nearly as well. Belgium and Czechoslovakia springs to mind. Ethnic based issues caused problems. And both of those were better off economically, and had fewer "main" ethnic groups that Yugoslavia. I believe that a full blown hayekian decentralized federal stat might work, but the only test is a new crisis. Oh and what is von Hayek doing?
Faeelin
Probably less what the US did than what the Soviets did and threatened to do for several decades afterwards.
Germany is no longer in a position where it can realistically think about political and/or military domination of the continent so its political sights are set somewhat lower in terms of securing its stability and security. Poland is no longer between a rock and a hard place but more needs a western counter-balance to avoid overwhelming Soviet/Russian domination. [Although the Russian demographic problems and loss of the Ukraine especially moderate that somewhat]. The fact that the Germany established by the western powers is a far more palatable neighbour that previous ones is probably also a factor for the Poles.Steve
I don't see why Belgium is a failure as a state. It's still around, and if it breaks up it will be through peaceful measures where each part still remains part of the same economic unit with the same currency and freedom of movement across borders. Yugoslavia it ain't.
I would even argue Czechoslovakia's breakup was fairly "successful", in that unlike Yugoslavia it didn't result in ethnic cleansing and tens of thousands dead.
He's around, but IMO Erhard's probably more influential in Germany at the moment.
The next piece will be on jazz in Germany and Central Europe, since someone asked me to talk more about Germany. (I don't think this is what they had it mean, but really it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing).
I'm not sure Muslim Filipinos are a valid example. The US never really tried to settle or even incorporate the Philippines. America's efforts there are really just another colonial war, like the way the Hereros were treated.
This.
Plus the fact that Poles and Germans were relocated as to not share the same territory and that future border revisions aren't expected. Plus the shared experience of Soviet domination with eastern half of Germany and the fact that Germans are not proud of WWII.
Those both seem like internal changes, no?
The other example of a successful pluralistic society that comes to mind is India.
Successul doesn't mean perfect, mind.