It is misleading because, as the remaining SDAP (Social Democratic Worker's Party of Germany) refounded itself as the DAP (German Worker's Party), it is listed as a "new" party "gaining" 18 seats, despite the reality being most of the voters returned to the SPD and the former SDAP went from 70s to 18.
Nobody Expects: The Spanish Revolution
- Thread starter Onerom
- Start date
Will we soon get information on what happened during the Austrian Crisis's and the Galician War? It sounds like there was some Kiev Pact infighting.
I do not know how soon because I'm quite inconstant and irregular in doing the updates, but it is up is the list of topics I'd like to touch in the near future (save for getting fed up with the period and changing towards other parts of the world and time...)
Long story short:
Second Austrian Crisis: civil war and dismemberment of the Habsburg Monarchy (ex-Austria-Hungary).
Galician War: the Austrian Crownland of Galicia and Lodomeria petitioning Poland to unite with it, Ukrainians in East Galicia setting up a rebel government and eventually Poland and Ukraine intervening in favor of their respective ethnic brethren.
Very cool, thank you for the response! And don't worry about the time it takes to make update, I am subscribed so I will see it whenever it comes out.
How can the military think that they are the good guys when they are called ''National salvation regime''
Also, great TL
Also, great TL
Well, they called themselves government, not regime
"National Salvation regime", in French "le régime de Salut National" is a historiographical term that describes the period of Gouvernement du Salut National+État français, not a contemporary designation like how Nazi Germany didn't call itself that.
Bookmark1995
Banned
The same way North Korea calls itself "democratic" despite functionally being a feudal monarchy.
Very cool to see someone developing the roles of groups like the Zollparlament that most timelines never mention.
Were there any particular factors that led to no Franco-Prussian war in 1870? Also does the Zollverein still exist today in the German Empire?
Were there any particular factors that led to no Franco-Prussian war in 1870? Also does the Zollverein still exist today in the German Empire?
Seems like it doesn’t since the wiki box ends with its end (I think)
Yes, the immediate cause as for why there's no Franco-Prussian War in 1870 is that OTL's casus belli does not exist: no revolution in Spain in 1868 meant that there's no offer for the throne to Leopold of Hogenzollern-Siegmaringen, no French protest nor the Ems Dispatch crisis.
The ulterior reason for no Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s (beyond the fact that I do not want it for creative purposes...) is that Napoleon III's foreign adventures entangle the Second French Empire and serve as the distraction for the population and source of prestige that the FPW tried to be. There's a French intervention in Mexico those years which I'll explain some day (it's not like OTL's, lets call it convenient convergence).
Technicaly, it does, but is subsumed in the federal structure of the Reich (like OTL 1871-1919 but without independent countries associated like Luxemburg ). The Reichstag has the powers of the defunct Zollparlament and the Reichsrat those of the Federal Customs Council. There was talk of Austria-Bohemia joining during the Adenauerjahre but it didn't came to fruition.
I'm just on page 1 of 12 and it might be beaten to death by now, but the troubling thing about this sort of Eurocentric explanation of 21st century Euro-colonies persisting is that it set the agency of colonized peoples at nought. Certainly OTL colonized nationalists were able to use the leverage of two Great Wars weakening European authority and power projection--but it does not follow that their independence must only be the result of European weakness. After all, colonialism was never universally popular in the metropolitan countries themselves; the considerable voting (and general class struggle) bloc of Socialists and their more radical rivals asserted the common humanity of all people, including colonial subjects, as a matter of principle for instance. This did not mean that British Labourites or counterparts on the Continent all were opposed to colonial systems root and branch, of course. But it did mean that the ruling nations were not of one mind.
It might seem reasonable to argue that with the pro-imperial factions less weakened and nations less drained and thus able on paper to muster greater force to maintain a system against the will of the colonized, OTL independence-seeking nationalists, and their metropolitan political allies such as they were (few deeply principled, many fair-weather semi-friends), would be channeled instead into liberalizing their local governance under a somewhat looser, semi-autonomous federal-imperial banner. The obvious problem with taking left wing assertions of universal rights of man and democratic equality to the limit is that colonized peoples tended to greatly outnumber the colonizers; principled democracy would turn each empire into an Asian or African republic with a European annex minority. And this flies in the face of the organization of liberal society, in which wealth greatly multiplies the importance of persons in a quite undemocratic fashion; European metropolitans are consistently far richer per capita than their subjects overseas and this means applying democracy seriously puts a bunch of people both much poorer than their erstwhile master peoples and culturally alien to them in charge of the great concentrations of global wealth. Common working class Europeans and their capitalist overlords can easily make common cause against being drained by the masses their nations collectively rule to equalize the wealth. Nor do policies have to take on socialistic extremes of leveling to create resentment; just privileging the per capita growth rates of the colonized over the colonizers will be enough to have majorities in the global north up in arms.
The alternative then is that in the name of imperial glory (and more crass but strong economic interests) the ruling powers maintain a plainly exploitive and stratified political order. It does seem entirely possible on paper anyway that a clever system of colonial administration can identify the most promising and capable native peoples and promote them invidiously to a privileged track, this select minority having a strong stake in perpetuating the overarching imperial allegiance as guarantors of their own status. In fact I believe every imperial system OTL did this to a certain extent. The danger here is manifold too of course. On one hand, such elites may, especially if given rewards in the form of respectable and important high level administration or private business opportunity, conceive themselves capable of running their colonies as independent nations and shrug off their dependence on imperial favor in favor of controlling their own movements and believing in their own personal merit as decisive. Grant even a fraction of the hand-picked "evolve" as the French called them some remnant of personal loyalty to their own historic people, and such a cooptive approach sows the seeds, if not of destruction, anyway opposition. Meanwhile it is highly unlikely imperial authorities of an alien culture will be able to either cherry pick and coopt or identify and neutralize all potential leaders of talent, and anyone with grievances will flock to explicitly anti-imperial and nationalist movements. Certainly success in raising up a coopted pro-imperial local elite assists in divide-and-rule, and nations that do tear themselves loose can be hamstrung by deep suspicion between the agents of the former colonizers and partisans of uncompromised nationalism.
The idea then that the colonized were not strong enough to toss off their foreign rulers without these being driven to the wall of failure by rival Europeans first seems first of all to neglect the motives and numbers and capability of the ruled majority in the Global South, in a quite patronizing manner. And secondly, the logic of maintaining formal rule seems deeply antagonistic to liberal-democratic norms; possibly a sufficiently ruthless European power can maintain supremacy over poorer majorities--but by means of repudiating democracy and doubling down on authoritarian and violent methods. So it seems likely, if realistic, to be associated with a dystopian sort of world where the major exponents of humanistic equality and democratic values are radicals largely out of power.
Fairly certain that everything bar some white dominions and France's colonies got their independance and in France's case that appears to be something contested by the people in the metropol and merely a result of the imperialism left over from the dictatorships of their past.
Well, it's been a year and a half now but I haven't been able to develope the TL as much as I would have wanted to initially, no worries. Keep in mind that what I explained in those first posts was a general recap of what factors led me to justify this particular creative setting, I'm certainly not saying that absent WWs this would be what happened, the world is more different than that.
It doesn´t, as you say, that's why not every colony is dependent: see the nations of Central Africa, among many others (India, South East Asia, Indonesia...). It's not only that no WWII has resulted in stronger European nations (and Japan) , what I also meant was that pre-war forms of thought remain unchallenged far longer (if at all), that no Fourteen Points of Wilson enshrining self-determination nor the UN charter have been made (for example), that ITTL a random German from 2020 has a way of understanding the world closer to a German of 1910 than to a German of OTL 2020.
The general theme of the TL is precisely that the world remains more anchored in the past except for some places (Spain and some Spanish American nations, mainly) as an intended contrast. Then again, those few places should be the focus of the TL but I have long been creatively blocked on their plots and find that people like them less than, say, articles about great powers and such.
Again, what you say is 100% true, leftist movements in particular are most sympathetic to the plight of colonized peoples in TTL as well. But the thing is, except for the UK, nations which keep colonies up untill nowadays are precisely nations which have traversed long periods as dictatorships of a right-wing flavor and more importantly, regimes which predicated that those overseas territories were an integral part of their nations (Portuguese Lusotropicalism, Italian Quartaspondaism, French delusional "civilizational mission" along a twisted right-wing bent of their republican universalism, Japanese goals in Taiwan and Korea). Meanwhile, international socialism does noot have a state as the USSR to sponsor it, which I believe is a huge handicap.
This is indeed the way that the UK took with those colonies that for some reasons (mostly, sizable European-descended populations) were not deemed susceptible to be let go, and Italy once the mentioned dictatorship phased and the question of what to do with those colonies were Italians were a majority (Libya) or an important minority (around 10%, in Tunisia) arose.
This is the case of Portugal (which i haven't yet touched in updates) and the great dilemma of France: fullfil the republican promise even if it means becoming de facto a West African republic with European territories, or retreat to a core identity at the cost of not being able to compete as a Great Power anymore. It's a great contradiction for the French right and and even a bit for the left, and it is intended.
These societies are quite more illiberal than ours, but once again you're right. In the British case, the Empire is big enough that the Dominions (they're not called that, but for the sake of simplicity) which have native majorities (Cape, Natalia, Rhodesia) do not outbalance the Home Nation Dominions and the settler Dominions, and even then each one has enough autonomy to prevent a direct massive transfer of wealth even if all the others wanted to. They cannot prevent the setting of Empire-wide minimum standards of healthcare, education etcetera, but those are more easily justifiable to metropolitan (and diaspora) voters. In the Italian case, again the metropolis outweighs the overseas territories, and in Libya there's even a Euro-descended majority.
This is Portugal's case, the European mainland has in fact become an appendix of Angola, which is the region that bears the greatest part of the economical growth. Increasing numbers of European Portugueses would want Portugal to secede from its own state because the economical and demographic center of the state has been migrating to Angola and it fuels resentment also in white Angolans (angolenhos brancos, numbered around 3.5 million out of a total population of 30 million, but 25 to 35% of them have significant native recent ancestry and would be better described as mestiços, although they identify with the European community) and native Angolans.
And this is (more or less) the French or Japanese cases. There's obviously the economic sphere of having exclusive access to the raw materials and labor of the hunderds of millions of Algerians and West Africans as well as their captive market, but there's an specific emphasis on the Imperial aspect: West Africa to France is the only way to compete with the other great powers like the UK (190 million pop.+global sphere), Germany (130 million pop.+Eastern European sphere) or Russia (320 million pop), and we are talking of a nation that suffered a great defeat which it never dealt with the appropriate way (kinda like OTL interwar Reich). Losing the Great War and 6 o 7 decades of dictatorship have led to a national trauma that doesn't allow France to properly deal with its ghosts in a healthy way, and it won't end well.
As I have commented earlier, it's not that I have treated all the situations the same i.e. every colony remains colony nor every colony achieves independence in the timeframe of OTL. There are colonies that achieved independence by the force of arms, others that did so through agreements, and colonies that up to the moment remain so because of specific motives (bot ITL and creative). It's not that I believe that no WWII means France keeps West Africa indefinately. Moreover, this France and this world diverges from OTL's much earlier than that, we are not talking of a liberal democratic republic that exists since 1870, but of an imperfect compromise regime emerged from a decades-long dictatorship.
I'm no historian, just an amateur which uses his free time to build a world that attempts to be interesting, and that includes conflict. The only part of the world that is intended as utopian (or simple better than) vs ours is Spain and some Hispanic nations (like Sonora, Colombia, Argentina or Phillippines), the rest is not perfect nor presented as such. I appreciate that you took your time to write the comment and hope I have addressed your concerns. Even if you disagree with the direction taken, I hope you at least understand better why I made the creative choices I did, which I have tried have an in-world root and not just because.
Thing is, OTL demonstrates a third way. It is not very much justified (a little bit but offset by a lot of downsides) from an idealistic-humanist perspective, but it has proven eminently practical from a cynical point of view:
1) agree in principle early on that full legal independence is on the agenda, inexorably. Note the USA adopted this position pretty early with the Philippines for instance. This was hardly the expectation of the first generation under McKinley of course--but even he, in his incredibly patronizing "Civilize and Christianize" speech, already was implying an eventual exit for Uncle Sam. "They've got to be protected, all their rights respected, until someone we like can be elected!" (Tom Lehrer, "Send the Marines!") In principle the colonies are declared to be an oopsie mistake, soon to be water under the bridge, move on.
2) moving on, manage the transition to independence by cherry picking the rivals for independent leadership to privilege those most inclined and motivated to play ball with the former imperial power and global capitalist priorities generally, as much as possible. Where the most viable leaders are most rhetorically opposed, hamstring them with built-in trouble. Then follow through with the formal independence ceremonies, with "our sons of bitches" in charge as much as possible.
3) keep intervening, with major operations if necessary, to keep the "independent" nations in line. "Until someone we like can be elected," rinse and repeat.
4) claim the imperial power has done the right thing and washed its hands of the troubles of the so magnanimously liberated peoples, and any dysfunctions that happen there now just go to show maybe it was a mistake to turn them loose--hence OTL a resurgence of such regrets and advocacy of neo-imperialism once the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and later. Never mind all those shadowy covert operations. Plausible deniability is after all "deniable;" step one is never to admit to it. And certainly never mind that most of the time it is not necessary to intervene much at all--the magic of the marketplace is at work, delivering the best of all possible worlds (when ill conceived and irrational radical extremists are foiled anyway, too bad these backward people are so irrational) and all the economics texts prove these poor folk don't deserve any better--if they did, the market would surely reward them more. Just the way the world naturally and properly turns, it isn't imperialism at all. How could it be? Look, they have their own flag flying!
Major parts of the classic imperial systems at its "belle epoque" high noon just before the Great War of OTL were not formal colonies after all; all of Latin America (with a few patches of direct colonies here and there like British Honduras or the various Guianas and of course the majority of Caribbean islands) was independent, nominally liberal republics. British intervention there was very indirect. But effective. Later the USA muscled in and took over this racket, without generally planting any flags--just in the Panama Canal Zone. I don't think this proves that classic late 19th-early 20th century overt imperialism was irrational, an argument I see made frequently nowadays, much as apologists for capitalism generally deplore slavery as not just inhumane but inherently irrational. But it wasn't, in the times and places it flourished, slavery was very very profitable and it is absurd to hold a more principled system would have been more profitable I think. Same goes for Euro-colonialism gobbling up the world with handfuls of nominally free exceptions like Ethiopia and Persia. The biggest exception being China but anyone who understands the degree of European intervention in Chinese affairs around 1900 would be hard put defending late imperial, or early republican, China as a viable independent nation-state in the modern global system. (Japan I would categorize as the single case of joining the global ruling system, as a very junior partner, on anything close to equal terms).
So by no means does paper independence equal achievement of the utopian millennium of course.
I certainly do notice that your TL broadly speaking retains a lot of conservatism across the board. And indeed I predicted--the viable way to get long term formal colonial empires in 21st century modern conditions is to have an authoritarian, reactionary society. Which for my money (if I only had any!) is dystopian of course.
I'm saying I think you can have the Sun Never Sets empires in a plausible evolution, but it is not a nice thing to wish for. Kind of like wishing slavery were still a normatively accepted and legal thing. Plenty of decent minded people kid themselves into thinking it would be nice to have the former anyway, and I am sure if we go looking on the Internet we can find plenty of latter-day slavery advocates, some of whom profess it would be really more humane and nice with suitable reforms than the sort of OTL harshness embedded in practical liberal societies, let alone more openly repressive ones.
I myself have let myself be beguiled by the musings of such mid-20th century Britons as TH White, in his Arthurian Once and Future King, putting the case for ongoing Commonwealth unity in the authoritative mouth of Merlin teaching young Arthur, that unity is a higher and better state than disunion. But the only way to square that with universal human equality would be to either weaken the Commonwealth to pretty much what it is OTL, a blanket of sentiment and diplomatic preference loosely over actually independent nations--or to as mentioned turn the British Isles into a department of an India-Africa dominated global federation. I can't tell from White's expressed vague Commonwealth unity advocacy whether he was a Tory or Labourite at the time--the Conservatives had Churchill, but Labour had Clement Attlee, who also preferred a strong Empire. Churchill at least was forthright about who should be the master of this house, right or wrong. And while I don't know Attlee or Labour in general positions on the Irish Republic, Churchill I know bitterly resented their pretensions of separation from the UK.
But meanwhile, while on paper France and Britain appear to be shorn of "la Glorie" of their respective flags waving over such large percentages of former empire--in fact neither Britain nor France has degenerated into a third rate nation OTL. Both have remained major global powers to be reckoned with, and if we impolitely turn our eyes to the more covert manipulations of former colonized regimes, it is apparent both have a quasi-imperial sphere to this day, pretty openly visible in France's case. Just as slavery if highly rational in one phase of development ceases to be so and nominally "free" labor fettered by historic and persistent institutional disadvantage becomes plainly more profitable, so too is neoliberal informal rule in favor of certain norms a quite sound foundation of ongoing national advantage to great profit, in a world of nominally free nations.
There is then no necessary price to pay of eclipse upon withdrawal from formal colonial possession. Of course if I read up on how France's ATL dilemma stands in detail, I might find specific circumstances taking indirect rule for profit maximization off the table for special reasons. As a general proposition though it is a false dilemma; OTL the enriched nations of Europe and their settler colonies including the USA have dealt themselves in at the high roller table where they remain for systematic reasons.
I believe OTL's circumstances do not apply here. Most colonial powers fought hard to keep their colonies and only relented after defeats or stalemates, and that was after two World Wars during which Wilson's Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter enshrined universal self-determination. OTL's superpowers during the Cold War, the US and the USSR, were anticolonial (even if in the US case it wasn't always wholeheartedly) and promoted anticolonial movements in accordance to their ideology and/or self-interest in weakening the old empires.
In this world we have great powers that openly mantain colonial or postcolonial situations (the UK in southern Africa and some enclaves around the world, Russia in Central Asia, Japan in Korea and Taiwan, Italy in northern Africa, Portugal although it is a secondary power...) not taking into account informal spheres of influence. From the rest of the great powers, the US has its own skeletons in the closet with the minorities within its borders, Germany holds treaty ports in China and Posen and Elsass-Lothringen in Europe, and both have neocolonial relations in their spheres in Latin America and Eastern Europe; the only explicitly open anticolonial great powers are India and China, who are challenging the status quo but whose rise has only been recent.
But this world is advancing towards being "nominally free" at a much slower pace, and so France's establishment (cynically) does not see how they are worse than say the British in Natalia or the Americans in Mississippi. What was rational given the economical circumstances of late 19th and early 20th centuries has trascended the mere economic sphere due to the legacy of a long dictatorship, whole generations of Frenchmen have been drilled the belief that the empire is an extension of the French Republic itself and moreover, that without the empire France will be outcompeted by other powers, it doesn't matter if it's true as much as a sizable proportion of the population believes it. So we have country that believes it's right holding its colonies coupled with a mostly apathic international situation. Even IOTL, it took decades for Apartheid South Africa to fall despite international scorn (not taking into account it had some covert support from the West because the movement for democracy was percieved as too "red").
Is France a "democracy"? Within the TL's situation it is considered as such, although it doesn't mean it would be by our standards, indeed a more reactionary society and an authoritarian state are required for this situation to arise in the first place. Am I advocating for it? Not at all, just trying to explore a narrative as a secondary plot of the TL.
As long as the French believe so, it isn't really a question of wether there will be a price to pay or not, but of perception. Take an OTL situation for example, the Catalan independence movement and the position of the Spanish right: Catalonia is a region where pro-Spanish rightist parties are marginal and the left hegemonic, so if they supported the secession their position in the remaining-Spain would be strenghtened. However, one of their core believes (and of their voters) is that Spain is indissoluble and that Catalonia is Spain, so they cannot support the position which would benefit them the most.
ITTL's France case, the right political establishment and their voters believe in Republican universalism in that every citizen, no matter if Parisian, Norman or Marseillese, can be an equal citizen of the Republic. However, translated to the colonies that means an Algerian or a Senegalese can and should also become equal citizens of the Republic if the values of such Republic are to be upheld, which they have problems assimilating because, in their inner self, for them only a metropolitan (read: European) can really hold a French identity and for them the French Republic should be French. So the French right has the cognitive dissonance of either they are not French and then that logic ends up meaning colonies should be independent (which they do not want because of reasons previously talked about of), or they are French and then, as you said, the Republic becomes an African one with an European appendix by sheer force of demographics if republican values of democracy and equality are to be realized. Where does this stubborness about the colonial subjects becoming eventually citizens of the Republic come from for the right, which is tradionally a position that regards individuals as fundamentally unequal and hierarchies as not only natural but desirable? Mostly from the reaction against the defeat in the Great War against Germany, the believe in revanche, which would need the contribution of the whole empire if it was to succeed against the newly united Reich (I base most of that aspect in this general's military proposals around OTL's WWI: if they are to provide military service, they are to become citizens and viceversa).
That is the dilemma, either really attempt integration at the cost of what means to them to be French, or letting them go at the (imagined, wether real or not) cost of becoming a regional power; but they don't want to do either, and its sowing discontent in an Africa that has already long surpassed the metropolis in population. What you anticipated would happen is already happening, it's just that it hasn't resolved yet (mostly because I thought it would be a good narrative for the 'modern day' to cover once the TL lore was much more fleshed out).