The age of six powers

With a POD on or after 1900, have the earth have six major powers, being...

-The United States of America
-The British Empire
-The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
-The Empire of the Rising Sun
-An Alliance of Germany, France and Italy (NOT A THIRD RIECH)
-Brazil

And one without a nuclear war whiping out the earth, bonus points for accelerated space development.

Zor
 
That's rough...

First of all, in 1900:

France and Germany are adversarial.
Brazil is far behind the rest of these potential powers
USA is far ahead of the others.
Russia (and not Soviet Union) is agarian and backward. With no WW1, the Soviet Union would not exist.


Off the top of my head, having a crisis in Portugal--and the Royal Family moving to Brazil, essentially reuniting Portugal and Brazil, might be a start. But even with Portugal and various minor colonies added, Brazil is going to be a massive underdog compared to the other countries.

French-German alliance is going to require a massive external threat. The logical source of this threat would be the United Kingdom (at least before the Soviet Union is ever born), perhaps the UK suddenly gets a wacked out government?

Japan, meanwhile, simply continues its long term ambitions of expanding its territory--defeating Czarist Russia in a war, and then over the next half century annexing and colonizing China.

I guess the French/German/Italian alliance is opposed by a UK/Austria-Hungary/Ottoman Empire/Russian alliance. In the resultant WW1 that happens, Austria Hungary is partitioned, the Ottoman Empire collapses and an aspiring power, Greece, wins a great victory against the Young Turks. Greece grabs the Bosporous.

Now, the Soviet Union emerges from a hard left political alliance that overthrows a defeated Russian State--and this time, Russia marches South instead of West. The rump Ottoman State, now stripped of its Aegean Coastline and "Constantinople", is one more victory to the Soviet Union; Afghanistan, Sinkiang and Mongolia are all annexed as Soviet Socialist Republics.

In the 1930s, Republicians overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic. With Portuguese help, Emillio Mola reinstates the Monarchy in alliance with Portugal-Brazil. Spain will warmly support Portugal as an equal ally for this critical assistance.

The United States, having decided to give up on the Phillipines, slumbers for half a century, while its economic machine gears to levels that Europe would never believe. But without a war on its hands, the United States is truly a sleeping giant.

So, at 1950, you have:

UK (Badboy; some kind of Third Generation Imperialist)
German/French/Italian/Ukrainian/Romanian Alliance (Democratic)
Japan (Now ruling the Phillipines, China, Korea, and portions of the Soviet Far East from the war with Czarist Russia)
Brazil-Portugal, allied with Spain. (Still the lightweight of the group)
USA (Stronger Economy then OTL, but hasn't fought a war for 50 years)
Soviet Union (Expansionist as well as Industrialist. Soviet Union ITTL probably sees a world war as a chance to annex the Middle East, Iran, and India to its county. Its interesting, but ITTL, the Soviet Union has odd SSRs in its midst: Turkish SSR, Afghan SSR, Mongolian SSR, and Xinjiang SSR.

Does this suffice? I'm pretty sure that a world war is coming...
 
Sounds like a scenario for playing Civilization III Complete: the only wrinkle is the German/French/Italian congolmeration, where you'd have to pick one as the basis (I'd go with the Germans since that civ's traits are militaristic and scientific) and use city names that at least give nods to the other subcultures involved.
 
With a POD on or after 1900, have the earth have six major powers, being...

-The United States of America
-The British Empire
-The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
-The Empire of the Rising Sun
-An Alliance of Germany, France and Italy (NOT A THIRD RIECH)
-Brazil

And one without a nuclear war whiping out the earth, bonus points for accelerated space development.

Zor


I dunno: this seems to require multiple PODs - the US is nearly a given, the Japanese need hold onto no more than their pre-1930's conquests to be a heavyweight, and _given_ a Soviet Union, a French-Italian-German (and Polish, Romanian, etc...) anti-Soviet alliance isn't very unlikely.

OTOH, the Soviet Union required a really thorough collapse of Russian society and if it's anything like OTL, it's economics are going to get it in big trouble: what POD is going to give it a working economy (or a totalitarianism so absolute, that like N. Korea OTL it is able to keep going _despite_ the problems) while solving the even more daunting problems we have with the other two?

As far as I know, nobody really knows for sure _why_ South America declined economically relative to the US and W. Europe OTL - although there are a lot of theories - so it's very hard come up with a POD for that in the first place. And as for the British Empire, I am doubtful there _are_ any PODs after 1900 that keep it as a power in 2008, short of a "rest of the world goes eeevil" scenario in which India, S. Africa, etc. "stay close to nurse, for fear of something worse." To even get a federalized "white" empire, you probably need to have a pre-1900 POD: and as for India and such - well, you probably have to derail the whole "biological racism" train of thinking in the 19th century. The people you have been treating with sniffy condescention if not outright contempt for generations aren't going to immediately march with you hand-in-hand into the Glorious Future just because you have given (been forced to give) them their independence.

Single POD? The Rosicrucians have allied with the Templars to push human development forward, I guess. :eek:

Bruce
 
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