Possible Superpowers of the 20th century

Its already a Regional Power and has the population and economic potential to be a Great Power but the Sunni/Shia divide means I doubt it could become a Superpower unless it gobbled up Afghan or Pakistan, which is ASB.
 
People talking about Brazil having population are being silly - Brazil had a smaller population than the UK until 1949. Brazils current numbers are very much a late part of the century, and thus there isn't time to parley that population into economic superpowerdom until well into the 21st (Brazil is only managing regional hegemon now).

You'd need much earlier changes and for technology and the global economy to go differently from 1850 to make Brazil a superpower within the 20th century.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Its already a Regional Power and has the population and economic potential to be a Great Power but the Sunni/Shia divide means I doubt it could become a Superpower unless it gobbled up Afghan or Pakistan, which is ASB.
Eh. There's not too much of a Sunni/Shia divide in Iran. There are some Sunnis (mostly Arabs) in the western provinces, Kurds are as well unless I miss my guess, as are Baluchis. And it wasn't even really like the religious divides were all that significant prior to the Revolution. Hell, even after the creation of Israel there was still a thriving (and largely unmolested) Jewish community in Iran.

I should have clarified that I mean pre-Revolutionary Iran. The Shah probably could have stayed in power if he had spread the oil wealth amongst his people rather than basically hording it all for himself and spending it on either military technology, SAVAK, or frivolous (and almost suicidally conspicuous) consumption. Rolling back the omnipresence of SAVAK probably wouldn't hurt, either.
 

Ice-Titan

Banned
I believe the Russian Empire would have been the supreme state of the 20th century if not for communism. A capitalists/Imperialists Russia could have brought much of Eurasia under its spear through economic means alone. 400,000,000 - 600,000,000 subjects + 22,000,000+ km of territory + the resources of that territory + capitalism = massive superpower ; that makes other comparators look small. Russia in OTL was quite a large power and that was with communism holding back and killing Russia’s potential; if she was allowed to reach her true potential? Brazil, Germany, United States even China and India look small in comparison.
 
but Germany winning WW2 is ASB, much better for them to win WW1 or avoid it all together.

Judging by the number of timelines done, the consensus is that it isn't ASB for Germany to win WW2:rolleyes:

That has more to do with people's unhealthy fascination with the Reich than it has to do with the actual plausibility of the situation.

I'd say China had a shot at superpower status by the _late_ 20th century: it's heading that way, if the environment holds out, by the 2030s, and China OTL did "lose" a couple decades with the warlord era and the Japanese invasion, and plausibly a couple more due to Mao's idiocies during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.

Basically, I'm in agreement with Xavier, although I'd give somewhat better odds to Japan: aside from holding onto Korea and Taiwan (and the challenge does not require it to be just as strong as the US), it could also project a lot of influence if it avoids the imperial bug of OTL and becomes something of a leader to modernizing non-European states.

India might get a head start on industrialization before the 1940s, say if the Germans win *WWI and Britain tries to stregnthen its empire to hold off the continental colossus.

Typo, I fail to see why the British empire surviving is any less ASB than Japan holding onto Korea and Taiwan...

Bruce
 

Typo

Banned
China doesn't have a shot at superpower status within the 20th century, because the warlord era was almost inevitable given the legeay of the late-Qing era, Japanese invasion was admittedly another matter.

Without Communism, modernization goes slower, because the Confucian elements which was broken during that era would have been a huge stumbling block otherwise.

Japan can be a great power, not a superpower, because absorbing China is pretty much impossible.

Typo, I fail to see why the British empire surviving is any less ASB than Japan holding onto Korea and Taiwan...
It's not, it's just that even with Korea and Taiwan Japan is still not a superpower
 
China doesn't have a shot at superpower status within the 20th century, because the warlord era was almost inevitable given the legeay of the late-Qing era, Japanese invasion was admittedly another matter.

Without Communism, modernization goes slower, because the Confucian elements which was broken during that era would have been a huge stumbling block otherwise.

You mean like in the backwards nations of Taiwan and South Korea? :rolleyes:
Please avoid that sort of sound-bite national characterization, or I'll have to sic Hendryk on you.

It's not, it's just that even with Korea and Taiwan Japan is still not a superpower

Close enough for government work. The USSR managed with only about 40% US GNP, tops. OTL Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan have better than 50%, and as a unified economic region that probably would be higher - and that's not counting the possibility of a higher population...

Bruce
 

Typo

Banned
You mean like in the backwards nations of Taiwan and South Korea? :rolleyes:
Please avoid that sort of sound-bite national characterization, or I'll have to sic Hendryk on you.
Which are both tiny compare to the size of China, and had substantial western pressure/aid to get them to modernize?

I'm not being critical of Confucianism in particular, but -any- institutionalized tradition, whether it be Islamic, Confucian, or whatever, has a tendency of producing fatal anti-modernization elements. And large countries are always hard to industrialize.

Close enough for government work. The USSR managed with only about 40% US GNP, tops. OTL Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan have better than 50%, and as a unified economic region that probably would be higher - and that's not counting the possibility of a higher population...
Why would OTL economical miracles happen with the Japanese zaibatsu in charge?
 
One I've mulled over once or twice is an Anglo-French union based on a food-for-coal deal, based in their respective WW1 experiences. Such a deal, if strong practical measures were put in place to work in wartime, could aleviate their respective weaknesses. Between the two homelands there is enough resources for self-sufficiency and the only easily interdicted part would be the short Channel crossing.
 
A wanked to the max France + Belgium + Luxemburg + the Rhineland + ASB assimilated Algeria, Tunesia is an unlikely contender for superpowerdom that I could kinda sorta see happening with an alternate WW1 and some squinting and handwaving. But still that's at the lowest end of what I can see work as a superpower populationwise. Even ASB Germany with low population losses in WW1, friendly France and/or Russia, no WW2, Austria plus Lebensraum out the wazoo - magically disappearing/assimilating Poles or Lithuanians or whatever - won't really reach 150 million pop before the birthrates tank in the sixties. They won't get nor want the immigration to go beyond that. The US today are kinda reaching the end of the superpower tether economically with twice that population and one of the highest GDP/head on the planet.

edit: of course being a superpower becomes cheaper the worse everyone else is off, so maybe if something terrible happens to the other contenders it might work a bit better.
 
I agree that you need a 100million plus in the home territory to qualify, but a France that doesn't lose a generation in WW1 and has somewhat better demographics, plus Belgium and Luxembourg could be 90 million. Chuck in 5 million pied noirs and 5 million Frenchified Algerians and you have 100 million loyal, core subjects. While that probably isn't enough to qualify on its own if you have such a country leading a Western Mediterranean Union of Spain and Portugal with significant control, both formal and informal, over Francophone Africa and you could be just crawling over the line.
 
Yeah, absolutely correct, lower population losses for France are important were kinda subsumed in the "alternate WW1". I don't think that dominating your neighbors makes you more than a regional power though, even if you absolutely dominate a union you'd still have to make concessions to your vassals national pride and interests, making the Union the hypothetical superpower in this scenario and not the lead nation, France.

Slightly off topic, the tendency to assume that peoples just are just raring to blob together into a coherent new whole is a not that infrequent alternate history fallacy I think.
 
I believe the Russian Empire would have been the supreme state of the 20th century if not for communism. A capitalists/Imperialists Russia could have brought much of Eurasia under its spear through economic means alone. 400,000,000 - 600,000,000 subjects + 22,000,000+ km of territory + the resources of that territory + capitalism = massive superpower ; that makes other comparators look small. Russia in OTL was quite a large power and that was with communism holding back and killing Russia’s potential; if she was allowed to reach her true potential? Brazil, Germany, United States even China and India look small in comparison.

No, I do not think so. Russia had massive emigration in the later 1800s. For a country to truly industrialise, you need capital in other hands than the state or the landowners. When the landed elite controls the capital and holds most of the political power, industrialisation does not happen. See Spain, Brazil, southern USA, eastern Germany compared to western Germany pre-ww1, Hungary compared to Bohemia-Moravia pre-ww1 etc.

Russia won't magically industrialise if there's no ww1. Sure, there will spring up a small light industry based on the (limited) market around it and the government will create some heavy industry by expensive investments in military industry and infrastructure (guns, battleships and railroads), but the massive rise in trade and production that happens in an industrial revolution will not happen in Russia barring the landed aristocracy being forced from power, something which will not happen easily. In other countries it took a revolution or a civil war for this to happen.
 
I'd think England becoming a super power is pretty damn ASBish.

I believe he means the United Kingdom.

I'm not sure about other places, but their's a tendency in the U.S. to use the name/term 'England' when referring to the U.K. as a whole.
 
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I said "British Imperial Federation".

P.S.
Why Germany can become a "superpower" and a
"Hausburg Central-European federation" not?
 
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