Part #206: Nation Shall Speak Boasts Unto Nation
“Yes, don’t forget to set up that auto-redirect to her on my quist calls and Motexts. Oh, and make sure Mrs Armitage at number 27 on Addington Road has her number. Tell her that her new Burgess simply
loves stories about cats and she should call her every night. That’ll teach that quean Smith a lesson for those leaflets calling my brother-in-law ‘a Jew with a tattow’...”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
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From: “The Stories Behind Today’s Global Institutions” edited by Paula Hastings (2009)—
The first WorldFest in 1859 was the brainchild of two men: Christian III Augustus, King of High Saxony, and Max von Abick, Deputy Foreign Minister of the German Federal Empire. Abick, originally from the former Brandenburg, had risen through the ranks of the Saxon civil service and had come a long way from the days when he had been a junior member of the negotiation team following the Popular Wars and the formation of the Bundesliga. Now that organisation had been succeeded by the Federal Empire, he was one of several figures instrumental in building a new civil service and state apparatus for the combined entity rather than being overly reliant on the individual kingdoms. Abick believed passionately in the idea of a united Germany and desired that its institutions should further that goal rather than working against them. In this he found an unexpected ally in the man who was, until that fateful year of 1859, the Crown Prince of High Saxony. As a consequence of the new Imperial constitution, however, his father Augustus II Frederick of Saxony (now middle-aged and rather overtaken by events) became Emperor Augustus I of Germany and gave up his royal throne in favour of his son. Dresden became the German capital owing to Augustus’ wishes—famously the only thing in the German constitution in which he got his way—and Christian decided to move the High Saxon royal seat of power and Diet to Leipzig, a move not without controversy. It was in this time, as the nature and powers of the new Bundesdiet in Dresden were argued over and new palaces were being built in Lepizig, as the Constitution was being signed, that Abick had the idea for the WorldFest—or, as the first one was officially known, the Grand National Exhibition of Germany.
It was clear to everyone that the unification of Germany was something feared by her neighbours. As Pascal Schmidt had long warned, the crowned heads of Europe were accustomed to Germany being a battlefield for their games, not a united rival that could overpower them. Abick and Christian both knew that, at least in the short run, Germany was too divided by arguments over exactly what form its unification should take to be a threat to anyone. The country needed to reassure Europe of their intentions without actually displaying such weakness. France in particular would be a deadly opponent: it was only a mutual alignment against Belgium that had prevented French intervention in the Unification War (or so it was thought) and the French had intervened diplomatically in the German conquest of Jutland, something still hugely controversial and doubtless the source of much of the international paranoia.
Abick’s idea, refined and promoted by Christian, was to hold a great international festival in Dresden, boasting to the world of Germany’s prowess but framed in a peaceful way rather than militaristic marches and displays of new weaponry. “Culture is a weapon,” Abick said, words that would take on a very different meaning in Germany a generation later. Emperor Augustus was sceptical, but the event went ahead and was held in September 1859. Everyone who was anyone in Europe was invited, and many of them turned up to see what all the fuss was about. Abick and Christian had spared no expense, turning the former parliamentary palace into the centre of the celebration and setting up open-air events amid charming autumnal gardens. There were great musicians playing some of the most famous and beloved pieces of composers from across Germany (some of whom were present in person), artists and writers displaying their latest works, engineers showing off steam carriages and railway engines in an optimistic and fraternal manner that almost made one miss the spots where guns had clearly been hastily removed. Steerables criss-crossed the air, trailing display flags and banners celebrating the formation of the Federal Empire and wishing for peace in Europe and the world. Brand new Lectel communication was shown off, the controversy of its Carolinian origin attracting crowds. That particular event set back Lectel uptake in Europe for years, for the demonstration was overtaken by an apparent unearthly event—the Lectel apparatus continued to work after being unplugged, emitted an electric shock that injured its operator, and produced a lengthy message of gibberish. For decades afterwards (and still to this day in some places) a controversy has raged between phantasmists who insist it was a message from the dead and beyonders who retort that it was a message from extratellurians [extraterrestrials]. Of course, a few decades after the event it was proved that it was nothing more than a huge solar storm with consequences for oeculight [electromagnetic radiation] across the world, also reflected in particularly intense aurorae seen farther south than usual.[1] But finding an answer has never stopped people asking the question, and still to this day both groups grimly wait by now long-outdated telegraph apparatus, carefully designed to resemble the Dresden set, waiting for the next message from above (in either sense of the word). In the short term, however, it put off many Europeans from investing in Lectel for another few years.
The Grand Exhibition had a number of goals: show that Germany was united and had a common culture, show that that culture was admirable, and show that it was also powerful enough not to mess with. Just as well that all we want is peace, yes?
Diplomats came, including a few crowned heads in person or their relatives, from across the world, even the UPSA and ENA sending representatives. Upper-class visitors came out of their own curiosity, and some bourgeosie as well: there were also events provided magnaminiously to the poor of Dresden, which must have been a great comfort for those who had had their houses confiscated and demolished to build some of the pavilions. It was said that Dresden’s street cleaners were finding bits of ragged green-white-blue bunting clogging the sewers for over a decade afterwards, so much had hastily been made in commandeered mills. Given the short preparation time, the National Exhibition was a great success, and from it the foreign visitors took an important lesson: ‘we have to have one too’.
It was the French who rose to the challenge first with the Paris Exhibition only a few months later in 1860. Existing works were hastily incorporated into the celebration. Isambard Brunel’s
Le Colosse was revived from a state of having run out of money and fallen into decay. A pre-planned refurbishment of the old Lisieux-era Optel tower,
L’Aiguelle on the Île de la Cité, was repurposed into the centrepiece of the Exhibition. When the churchbells rang to signify the event open, scaffolding and covers were blasted away by carefully placed gunpowder charges and rockets (injuring a few people in the crowd) and electride lamps [limelights] were shone on the tower’s new look. It had been strengthened and made taller by improved construction techniques, but what drew the eye was the replacement of the crude if striking Lisieux Utilitarian design with a Neo-Gothic one. It looked like the world’s tallest cathedral tower, reflecting the Notre Dame cathedral that had once stood on its site. The New Needle (as the English press called it) immediately sparked a fashion for Neo-Gothic architecture across a world that had previously seen it as a vulgar minority view beside the Classical Revival and Orientalist orthodoxy, both of which were now looking rather dated. Of course the irony was that the Needle was refurbished even as Optel was on the way out (despite the Dresden Lectel fiasco) and even in France, with its nationalistic loyalty to Optel, the tower was little used for its original purpose a decade after its refubishment.
To the surprise of many, the next country to jump on the bandwagon was Great Britain. In 1861 the country had just voted in a new Moderate government under Oliver Cross, defeating the Regressives after only one term of the scandal-plagued Joseph Knatchbull as President. Cross was determined to carve out a new niche for his country following the decay and internal conflict of the last few decades, and famously proclaimed, borrowing the language of the railway, ‘Stop the world, England wants to get on!’ His imprecise terminology was not atypical of the day, but in the end turned out to be unintentionally prophetic, for there was a part of Great Britain that increasingly wanted to get
off. Nonetheless, the public purse—bulging slightly more following the first round of the Privatisation of Bengal the year before—was expended on trying to top even the great powers of Germany and France with a national exhibition of Britain’s own. Officially called the Global Festival of London, this would be the first to be given the WorldFest name when the German papers smugly noted that their country’s idea was becoming a regular event and referred to it generically as ‘Die Weltfest’. Even jaded observers admitted that the British had outdone themselves. Marylebone Park,[2] having fallen into decay after having had browncoats and then squatters with burned-out homes camped on it for years, was re-landscaped and sculptured and new gardens were created anew, fully-grown trees and plants transported from elsewhere and arranged according to the most recent theories in both art and science. A descendant of Joseph Priestley, one of the many working in the Priestley Aereated Water Company in the UPSA, visited and commented (in Spanish) on how his ancestor would be pleased to see his theories of the Aerial Economy being observed in the land of his birth.
That Meridian was one of of many foreign visitors, for the numbers increased with each WorldFest. There were too particularly memorable parts of the British event (retrospectively called WorldFest 1861). One was the demonstration of a new experimental submarine boat[3] surfacing without warning in the Thames and made up to look like a whale, with Jonah emerging from the hatch to surprised cheers from the banks. The other was the centrepiece of the WorldFest, a deliberate attempt to top the New Needle. Rather than building up, the British built in a circle, the architect Andrew Mayberry Harborough producing a huge dome of glass and steel, an architectural style that had never been seen before but would go on to be hugely influential just as the New Needle had been. Officially called the Dome of Exploration (and including examples of exotic plants, animals and art discovered by British and American explorers from around the world), it was invariably referred to in general conversation as the Crystal Dome. Some foreign visitors complained they kept getting lost in its circuitous interior and there is certainly no truth to the rumour that they were only shown the way out by a vindictive guard if they completed whatever fiendish challenges his mind could produce that day. Nonetheless the Dome was considered a great success, and stood in Marylebone Park (through many refurbishments) until it was sadly destroyed by fire in the Third Glorious Revolution. A replica has now been constructed, but in Islington Park instead.
With the New World sending visitors to all three WorldFests so far, it could only be a matter of time before its powers juped on the bandwagon. The ENA was first to the punch, letting the mother country take the lead (something increasingly rare these days) and copying and learning much from the British. The Exhibition of America, AKA WorldFest 1862, was held in New York City and celebrated the ENA as a land of opportunity for (the right sort of) immigrants: those new interior Confederations weren’t going to fill themselves. The Americans showed off the new redevelopments of New York City, having rebuilt after the damage of the Manhattan Massacre with wider boulevards and grander houses (though, as in Saxony, that was small comfort for those whose small houses in smaller streets had been demolished in the course of the redevelopment). As was by now traditional, the Americans produced A Big Thing as the centrepiece for their festival, and the government purchased Bedloe’s Island in Upper New York Bay from its private owners for the purchase. Unveiled on the final day of the celebration (having been hastily worked on right up to the deadline) was the Temple to Civilisation, a great Neo-Classical pillar’d structure (already looking a bit out of date) topped with a great statue of Lady Septentria, the personification of the ENA equivalent to Britannia. She reached out with a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other, a snake wrapped around her neck and body like a sash. Around her feet were the key dates in the Empire’s history: 1497, when John Cabot had sailed for England to North America for the first time; 1607, the establishment of the Jamestown Colony; 1751, when Frederick I had proclaimed the Empire; 1788, when it had received a Constitution and Parliament; 1828, when the Proclamation of Independence separated the Empire from Great Britain altogether; and now, the controversial numbers shining in the setting sun, 1857 – the year of the Constitutional Convention that had changed America forever.
Unsurprisingly the ENA’s southern rival was not far behind, and in 1863 Buenos Aires played host to the fifth WorldFest. The Meridians received less turnout from Europe than the Americans had, doubtless partly because it involved a longer distance to travel and the journey was still somewhat treacherous even in the 1860s, but the fact was seized upon by many as proof that the UPSA had become a pariah state after backing Carolina in the Great American War. The impression was only intensified by events in the festival itself. The Meridians were using their event mainly to celebrate and promote the Hermandad family of nations, with pavilions in Buenos Aires created (ostensibly, in some cases) by the governments of Hermandad nations such as the Guayana Republic, the Pernambucano Republic and the Kingdom of Brazil. (Cisplatina and Rio Grande had finally been annexed in 1855 as a desperate failed electoral ploy by the departing Adamantine Party, and so were only represented within the main Meridian complex of marquees). However, the Hermandad also included Carolina, and it had its own pavilion exhorting the Kingdom’s valuable exports such as cotton, tobacco, cotton, peanuts, cotton, rice and cotton. Unfortunately for the Meridians, a scandal broke out due to the Carolinians having secretly brought slaves along to set up their pavilion, who of course by Meridian law became free men as soon as they touched Meridian soil. The discovery of the slaves plunged the government into a diplomatic incident where to hand them back to the Carolinians would invite the ridicule and hatred of not only the world but many of their own voters. The slaves went free, the Carolinians protested vociferously, matters escalated and 1864 brought the Ultima Coup and the Intervention. The UPSA would not hold another WorldFest for almost ten years.
By this point it was becoming increasingly clear that the WorldFest phenomenon was escalating out of all control. Ireland and Belgium both held a festival at the same time in 1864, and both were financial flops—them being smaller countries would not have helped, but forcing visitors to choose one or the other reduced the whole thing to a farce. As a consequence, the International World Festivals Committee was created in 1865, chaired by the now retired Max von Abick. Although its subject matter might seem frivolous, this was unquestionably the most muscular international organisation created since the India Board and the ICPA. The WorldFests were huge events, effectively having become a competitive substitute for warfare with fewer casualties (though, as the New Needle’s unveiling had proved, fewer did not mean none). It is unclear what Pablo Sanchez made of them, frustratingly for some scholars.
After the furore over the Ireland-Belgium clash had died down, the first WorldFest managed under the new rules was Russia’s in 1868. The Russians were keen to draw a line under the embarrassment of the then-recent Algerine Crisis and present a new image to the world. Tsar Theodore threw a bone to St Petersburg after years of Moscow getting preferential treatment thanks to the Slavicist ideology, and for once St Petersburg was again allowed to be the ‘gateway to Europe’ that Peter the Great had desired. Slavicism certainly played a part in the 1868 WorldFest, with celebrations of Russian-language literature and traditional Russian art and architecture, but unusually new operas and plays were allowed to be written and performed in German and French as well as Russian. The Russians did not entirely keep to the ‘peaceful’ playbook as part of the festival involved the unveiling of their first armourclad, the cruiser
Nadezhda. However, they did decorate her with lights and use the rocket launchers to fire the firework rather than the killing-people variety, so that was all right. The centrepiece to the Russian event, however, was not the armourclad but the extensive railway demonstrations, in particular an exhibition devoted to the Trans-Siberian Railway that had been under construction for some years already. The WorldFest drew global attention to this, and when it was completed three years later in 1871, commentators everywhere were already discussing how it would change the Far East forever. The Russians had thoughtfully invited the latter to start with, with invitations sent to both Chinas, Siam and Corea. In the end only the Coreans and the Feng Chinese sent anyone, but their representatives came away extremely thoughtful. Partly it was concern over the Russians potentially having the ability to deploy more power in the East, but partly it was a realisation that the trouble with Neo-Confucian policies is that one can’t show off to powers that should rightfully be one’s vassals if they aren’t allowed to come and look at your wonders...
The Committee system stabilised the WorldFests on a biennial schedule and soon the ‘WorldFest’ nickname became the official one, accompanied by the year according to the format we know today (though originally only the last two digits were shown—it would be an optimist indeed at the time to suggest that the WorldFests would continue to the twenty-first century and the third millennium!) The next WorldFest of note after Russia was that of California in 1880, in which the republic showed off its new constitutional arrangements, its Cytherean trailblazing (with Emilia Mendoza openly acknowledged as the founding leader if not nominal president for the first time) and the chaotic architectural splendour of its cities, filled with representatives of every nation and linked by glittering Lectel cables. The event was successful enough in changing public views of California—and demonstrated how far people were willing to come to see a WorldFest, particularly given more bourgeoisie now had the means to travel—that it was promptly copied by the government of the nascent Philippine Republic in 1882, with somewhat less success given the islands’ isolation from Europe. This was the first WorldFest to be held in Asia, but was swiftly followed by Feng China’s Hanjing event in 1890 and its rival Siam jumping on the bandwagon in 1892. This would, of course, be the penultimate WorldFest before the Pandoric War put them on hold—but, as with the Global Games (which they may have helped inspire), nothing had ever stopped the WorldFests for long. In this day and age in which nations shouting their distinctive virtues to the high heavens is celebrated as a virtue in itself, the appetite for this remarkable institution is forever keen.
[1] This was the so-called Carrington Event, which in OTL had more dramatic effects just because electric telegraphy was invented earlier and there were many more sets around to go haywire.
[2] OTL Regent’s Park, more or less.
[3] Not an ‘ironshark’ as that term is carefully applied onto to military submersible craft.
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