India and SPAAAAAAAACE! Not to mention Britain and SPAAAAAAAAACE!
Are the Chinese starting to be interested in space? What about the Japanese?
To some extent, by the 60s and certainly by the 70s, a space program will be one of the ways to prove you've got the economic and technical clout to be a great power - it won't be as much of a race as IOTL, but space will still be highly symbolic. That means the Chinese and Japanese, and the Ottomans for that matter,
are starting to be interested, although some will go farther than others.
And TTL has it's Warsaw Genuflection with the British King in India, which is nice
.
That is a remarkably blunt political speech for a British monarch to make in 1961, especially ITTL. Not that most Britons won't agree with their king - but no doubt it would cause a considerable political stir.
Good update- interesting to see the bluntness with which King George speaks. Curiously, that indicates that he's both going to be quite a popular King in some areas but also risks damaging the monarchy itself. There's going to be a lot of Britons who agree with every word he says that are nevertheless furious that he made such a political speech- even liberal advisors will try to rein him in.
The reason he felt able to get away with the speech was that he already
was a popular king - he's been king for 40 years at this point, and he's widely seen as the one who saved the monarchy after the Imperials' fall. All the same, it will come as a surprise, because George has a reputation for
not being overtly political, and as you say, even liberals will accuse him of overstepping his bounds. And they'll do so with some justice: it's the kind of speech a prime minister should make, not a king.
What only a few people will realize is that, as far as George is concerned, the speech was personal rather than political. The Siege of India was done in his father's name, and his father visited India personally to encourage the troops during the war, so George feels that there's unfinished family business there, and doing what he can to reset the British-Indian relationship is his way to make amends. In a way, he's been saving up capital for this speech for a long time - he's usually more the kind to make jokes about stowing away on spaceships, but he hoped that if he was deadly serious this one time, the very shock of that would get the politicians to follow his lead.
He's actually right about that, and he'll have plenty of defenders, but it
will lead to debate about the role of the monarchy, including whether there should be one.
I dislike how many monarchies are still around.
I love how many monarchies are still around.
I like having these kinds of monarchs around--kings like this George, queen-princess-nagusinas or whatever the best title of Anastasia would be, an Empress like Marianne.
The reason they are good monarchs is because democracy is strong in their lands.
All states are going to have something they center themselves around. Better that they center themselves around a man or woman with strictly limited personal power than around ethnicity, religion or ideology, because the person at least can be told they're wrong when they demand something horrible.
If it's any consolation, people are having the same conversation in TTL - there are those who view monarchy as an anchor in an age when the concept of sovereignty and nationhood is changing, and others who say that a president or constitution works just fine and that there's no reason to maintain an expensive figurehead. And among those who favor, or are willing to tolerate, the institution of monarchy, there's plenty of disagreement about its proper role.
The next few updates will have something for all persuasions: republics emerging all over West Africa (and, by the 1960s, parts of eastern Europe), but also the British monarchy as a more central institution in the Commonwealth.
On a more pleasant note, it was cool to see hints of a future religious-inflected enviromentalism show up in West Africa. The fanboy in me wants a Franco-Brazilian construction company with AIDU consultants to be fuming while it tries to figure out how to dislodge Greens and Christian Stewards staging a unity sit-in... maybe with Nicaraguan envoys try to sap French support through the AACM and Gabon?</fanboy>
Things like that can and will happen, but there will also be conflict within the environmentalist movement - the secular environmentalists won't always see eye to eye with the religious ones, and the broadly left-wing environmentalists (both secular and religious) will clash with the more conservative ones. There's a reason the Greens and the Stewards will be separate parties, and while the combination will be a powerful one in many cases, in others it will allow their opponents to divide and conquer. The environment will still be a contentious issue in TTL's present; in fact, with a more developed world (albeit one which is farther along the demographic shift), it may be even more so.
Last idle thought, promise: if Turkestan's influence hasn't pulled it off, hopefully AIDU will introduce Afghanistan to West African/Ottoman reformism?
It's already been introduced, and at this point Afghanistan is closely aligned to India and Turkestan, although Persia is also influential and it still wants to keep some distance from the AIDU.
We now concur that the most likely Arabic form is not "al-Umam al-'Uthmaniyya al-muttahida" but "al-Umam al-'Uthmaniyya al muttafiqa", based on old Ottoman Turkish renditions of the name of the United Stated that Essam found. "Al-muttafiqa" (my vocalization) should mean "that are in accord/agreement/covenant" and I feel that it is better suited to the situation described.
It's also suited to the message that the union's founders are trying to send - consider it canonized.
I have to tell you that I haven't updated the
latest posts on the wiki for quite some time now. I'll probably need to get to that soon.
If I haven't thanked you for that lately, let me do so again.
