Hello again Scholar, yes in my AH (if ever I rewrite it) there are going to be undoubtedly many wars, when are there not? - But (I hope) no world wars. This AH is intended to be the old European balance-of-power real politik applied to all the world. It is possible that the decolonization of southern Africa (in my AH) can be dragged out several decades.
But doing so reveals the impotence of the communists. And that makes the reunification of China by the Republican Chinese inevitable. On the other hand, if Red China gets involved, big time, in decolonialization efforts in southern Africa it feeds the communism/anti-communism hysteria and that serves to keep China separate. However, this destabilizes the European powers. I need to decide which way to go.
The problem, of course, with applying European balance-of-power politics to the whole world is, as you correctly point out, the problem of expansion. Post-Napoleonic balance-of-power politics managed to work fairly well (for a while) thanks to the facts of colonialism. The European powers expanded elsewhere. It was the great power that couldn't successfully expand elsewhere, Germany, that kicked over the apple cart. I have essentially allowed southern Africa to remain under colonial rule in order to maintain, I hope, the stability of my world-system as a whole.
Hello Atlantic Friend, thanks for chiming in. In creating and dividing my various states and alliances as I did I tried to take into account not only geopolitical factors but also anthropological factors. The latter includes language and family type. For kinship, I followed Emmanuel Todd's "The Explanstion of Ideology". There he argued that France was divided between several types of kinship families. I used that, plus the geopolitical fact of troops on the ground, to end WWII with the divisions that I did.
And so I end up with a fascist Vichy France allied to Germany and a Fourth Republic 'free' France ultimately dependent on the will of non-continental powers, mainly GB and Quebec, to defend her. Divided France consists of two very antagonistic ideological blocs, which follow the division between Petain and De Gaulle.
Of course, in a different AH in which one has the Soviets advance through Germany into France one could again plausibly divide France between communists and a 'free France' using the same combination of geopolitical facts and family types. The problem of course is always that these divided states have a common language and a shared national history. In order to keep France apart one must rely upon the different regimes keeping the ideological temperature high. And I do so assume this will be the case.
Again, I thank everyone for their comments upon my little thought experiment,
Joe