Independent Texas as failed state

[MRig]

I'm kicking around an idea for a story set in an AH universe. The story would be set in Houston in the present day, so the AH timeline is backstory and doesn't have to be realistic, but I'd like to at least make a go of a plausible backstory.

The present day has the following characteristics:
1. North America is balkanized and Texas is an independent failed state run by a dictator.
2. The United States as such has not existed for some time (~100 years), and those dissatisfied with their countries' failures and the meddling of foreign nations seek to revive it.
3. The most powerful country in the world is a Russia-dominated Eurasian Union, which is a capitalist liberal democracy that controls much of Europe and has a NATO/Warsaw Pact type alliance with most independent European nations. Like the United States of OTL, it regularly undertakes military interventions in places like Texas.

Here's what I'm thinking:

1860s: Confederates win the War of Secession (OTL American Civil War).
1860s-90s: The northern states further balkanize along east-west lines (maybe agrarian populists vs. eastern banking interests?) now that the precedent is set for disunion.
??: Texas splits from the Confederacy and they have fought at least one bloody war between then and now, with the Eurasian Union supplying arms to both sides.

I think I'll start the Eurasian Union bit as an After 1900 thread, because I'm thinking a WWI/Russian Revolution POD, but feel free to chime in on that one as well.

Thoughts? Am I on the right track here? How would you do it?

 

[CthulhuFhtagn]

I'm not sure if the Confederates could win in the first place. And even if by some miracle they did, I thought the Civil War played a big part in tying the rest of the country together (all those railroads).

 

[packmanwiscy]

I would probably suggest a POD earlier than the Civil War for the south to win.

 

[Lalli]

Victorious South is really unlikely perhaps even possible with POD of 1861 or later. And even if CSA gains independence, it is more plausible that CSA balkanise than USA would balkanise. Independent Texas is possible but I am not sure why it would be failed state. It might be authotarian state anyway.

And victorious CSA would cause some butterflies which altered Great War greatly. And there probably not be even revolution in Russia. It is very possible that Russia developes as constitutional monarchy or even tsars can handle things well enough that revolution not happen.

 

[jkay]

Despite its sad popularity, the US giving up after the Civil War is total Space Bat land. People mostly LIKE being part of a superpower, why CSA seceded TOGETHER. Sorry.

Independent Texas can happen and easily fail, but then we'd apply, because we aren't quite THAT stupid.

A 'winning' CSA would be pretty shrunken. And then it'd shrink even more quicklyish by more stupid war and US-supported slave rebellions. So, I don't think it'd change nuch in WWI.

My idea for Russia is: probably likeliest is to keep Russia out of WW1, of only quickly in. For the war started it all. Then you'd get a reforming tsardom. I think Communism was too popular to lose the war easily without too much work.

 

[riggerrob]

WI other states did not assist Texas in its war of independence from Mexico?
WI if the Spanish Army and government still controlled substantial parts of Latin America?
By "Latin America" I mean as far north as Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona Southern California and even parts of Southern Colorado.

 

[MRig]

I'm not sure if the Confederates could win in the first place..

Victorious South is really unlikely perhaps even possible with POD of 1861 or later. And even if CSA gains independence, it is more plausible that CSA balkanise than USA would balkanise. Independent Texas is possible but I am not sure why it would be failed state. It might be authotarian state anyway.

And victorious CSA would cause some butterflies which altered Great War greatly. And there probably not be even revolution in Russia. It is very possible that Russia developes as constitutional monarchy or even tsars can handle things well enough that revolution not happen.

I would probably suggest a POD earlier than the Civil War for the south to win.

Despite its sad popularity, the US giving up after the Civil War is total Space Bat land. People mostly LIKE being part of a superpower, why CSA seceded TOGETHER. Sorry.

Independent Texas can happen and easily fail, but then we'd apply, because we aren't quite THAT stupid.

A 'winning' CSA would be pretty shrunken. And then it'd shrink even more quicklyish by more stupid war and US-supported slave rebellions. So, I don't think it'd change nuch in WWI.

I know folks here tend to have a dim view of the CSA's prospects, and the smart money is certainly on the Union. I generally don't do CSA victory timelines because A) been done and B) I'm a bit troubled by their association with a kind of wish fulfillment that Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the "corrupt and unspeakable core" of nostalgia for the historical moment in which it seemed that the Confederacy might win.

All that being said, I don't think a Union victory is a done deal. I think the Turtledove timeline has the Union give up way to easily, but a Confederacy with the recognition of Britain and France (say, after a victory at an alt-Antietam) could last until 1864 as they did OTL, and then end the war with Lincoln's replacement by a Copperhead.

What are these earlier PODs y'all are thinking of? War breaking out sooner, giving the Union less of an industrial advantage?

Harder I think is the end of the "United States" as we know it. It's a powerful idea, and people in the Union are at least as likely to cling to it than discard it. However, we have to consider the politics of a USA that has no South to contend with. The "orthodoxy" seems to be that leftist and progressive movements are stronger, but that doesn't have to translate into electoral success. Some of the uprisings in the Gilded Age were huge. Could one of them split the Union a second time? If not, is there some other way to give up the name of "United States?" I'm working back from an alternate present day where it is important to the story that the United States belongs to a lost history that some are struggling to reclaim.

My idea for Russia is: probably likeliest is to keep Russia out of WW1, of only quickly in. For the war started it all. Then you'd get a reforming tsardom. I think Communism was too popular to lose the war easily without too much work.

Okay, cool. So, WWI becomes Germany and AH against France and Britain. For this to work, Russia still needs to create a "Eurasian Union" that extends at least as far as the Warsaw Pact countries, and ideally includes Germany. So, maybe the beats play out similarly (Entente victory followed by fascist Germany followed by war with Russia), but in this case Russia is a constitutional monarchy that has "pulled a Meiji" in the interwar period, and the Eurasian Union is a kind of latter-day personal union like the UK but on a much larger scale. Is that plausible? It certainly increases Russia's relative power to avoid the horrors of WWI and industrialize anyway.

I don't think a different outcome of the ACW butterflies away World War I. The proximate cause may be different (some gunboat crisis or other, maybe) but turn-of-the-century Europe was a powder keg.

WI other states did not assist Texas in its war of independence from Mexico?
WI if the Spanish Army and government still controlled substantial parts of Latin America?
By "Latin America" I mean as far north as Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona Southern California and even parts of Southern Colorado.

I like larger Mexico timelines, and this might be one, though I generally agree with the interpretation that the proximate cause of the Civil War was the seizure of Mexican territory (the ultimate cause of course being slavery).