The Anglo-Saxon Social Model
- Thread starter Rattigan
- Start date
No, it was just that I had different colours available to me at the time. By the time of the second map former-SA is known as Bantuland of course.
That makes them sound like they are 80s magical hackers.
Not Azania? After all, there are non-Bantu minorities in the area.
Or just keep the name as "South Africa"?
The point of the change is that it's portrayed by the nationalist party in power as the people of the nation throwing off the final vestiges of the colonial/white/Boer yoke and regaining their 'independence' alongside the other nations of the continent. By my understanding, the vast majority of black South Africans are Bantu peoples of one kind or another (although, of course, correct me if I'm wrong) and the current ruling party doesn't draw much, if any, support from the non-Bantu people and so doesn't really bother with them.
As for Azania, my understanding as that that never reached that far south.
Fair enough. The 2011 census puts Black Africans at 79.2% of the population. I believe that the vast majority of them would be speakers of one Bantu language or another. Given that the majority of the Zulu live outside South Africa ITTL, the largest ethnic group would be the Xhosa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa#Demographics
http://www.statssa.gov.za/census/census_2011/census_products/Census_2011_Census_in_brief.pdf
Having nationalists exclude ethnic minorities is hardly unusual, after all.
Whilst the term Azania originally applied to parts of the east African coast, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC for short), and some other groups, had proposed renaming the country Azania.
However, ITTL, I can see it never becoming re-popularised as a Pan-Africanist thing.
The General Election of 2018
The Way of the Weird: The Return of Multi-Party Politics
Since the fracture of the Liberals in December 2015, the main psephological development for Labour had been to find parliamentary management somewhat easier. Sarah Teather’s 46 Progressive MP’s became effectively an annex to the Labour caucus, regularly voting with the government on most measures and only picking fights on hot button issues (notably non-Commonwealth immigration) on which Labour found themselves united and could force through on the backs of their majority anyway. Meanwhile, the Libertarians and the Liberals seemed mostly interested in blasting chunks out of one another. The Conservatives were also concerned about the Libertarian threat: not only did they eventually grow to outmatch the number of Conservative MPs (62 to 57) but they also took on a number of socially and culturally libertarian positions that the Conservatives had traditionally thought to be their territory.
The viciousness of the opposition parties’ assaults on one another was probably made worse by the bleak polling outlook for all of them: Cooper’s government was riding high in the polls and didn’t look like giving up that position at any stage. At one point the leader of Sinn Fein, Michael D. Higgins, was spotted having lunch with Ed Balls, the Chancellor and Cooper’s husband, and was asked by a journalist what the contents of their discussion was. Higgins replied: “we were just discussing administrative parliamentary matters, considering that Sinn Feinn are going to be the main opposition after the next election.”
Higgins was, of course, joking but his comments revealed much about the buoyant mood in the four nationalist parties, which foresaw in the Liberal split the possibility for a breakthrough. Even in Cornwall, where Mebyon Kernow had basically functioned as a slightly kooky branch office of the Liberals for many years, there was renewed hope of serious political gains.
The results were brutal for the Liberals: to follow up from the 108 MPs they lost to the Libertarians and Progressives in December 2015 and January 2016, they lost another 58 MPs to crash to their lowest ebb since the topsy turvy politics of the 1920s and 1930s. Labour helped themselves to another 24 seats, stressing the success of Cooper’s governing record and hammering the Liberals, Progressives and Libertarians for their ill-discipline. The Conservatives gathered together another 5 seats to return to the highest level they had obtained under Letwin a decade previously. But, with results elsewhere, this would be of little comfort to them.
As well as being a traditional general election, 2018 was also a battle for the soul of British politics, over whether its spirit was progressive or reactionary. And the answer to that question turned out to land firmly in favour of the former, with the Progressive Party picking up 23 seats to ensconce itself as the third party. They appealed to people of a basically left wing perspective but who didn’t trust Labour’s more statist instincts. The academic David Runciman defined their appeal as to “the kind of people who like the memory of Lloyd George, didn’t vote for Thatcher in 1981 and prefer Steel over Beckett.” For a period during the campaign there were serious suggestions that they might knock out the Liberals into second.
The Libertarians lost 10 seats from their pre-election number, something that could plausibly be called a failure even if 52 seats for a newly-founded party was generally seen as positive. They did particularly well in areas which had formerly had a large number of Liberal activists who defected on-mass in December 2015. But, despite their successes in surviving, the results, and where they were based, suggested that there was now a hard cap on their electoral success.
The Liberals remained the second largest party in the Commons (and by some distance too) but it certainly didn’t feel like that. Varadkar stepped down the morning after the election, precipitating a leadership election that was resolved at the annual conference in October. The contest was dominated by discussions of what the Liberals were for. On the one hand, they could portray themselves as the party which could successfully straddle Britain’s libertarian and progressive traditions but that raised the question: if one was of progressive inclinations, why be in a party with a libertarian wing, or vice versa? The eventual victory of Heidi Allen as leader did not promise an easy answer to those questions.
Since the fracture of the Liberals in December 2015, the main psephological development for Labour had been to find parliamentary management somewhat easier. Sarah Teather’s 46 Progressive MP’s became effectively an annex to the Labour caucus, regularly voting with the government on most measures and only picking fights on hot button issues (notably non-Commonwealth immigration) on which Labour found themselves united and could force through on the backs of their majority anyway. Meanwhile, the Libertarians and the Liberals seemed mostly interested in blasting chunks out of one another. The Conservatives were also concerned about the Libertarian threat: not only did they eventually grow to outmatch the number of Conservative MPs (62 to 57) but they also took on a number of socially and culturally libertarian positions that the Conservatives had traditionally thought to be their territory.
The viciousness of the opposition parties’ assaults on one another was probably made worse by the bleak polling outlook for all of them: Cooper’s government was riding high in the polls and didn’t look like giving up that position at any stage. At one point the leader of Sinn Fein, Michael D. Higgins, was spotted having lunch with Ed Balls, the Chancellor and Cooper’s husband, and was asked by a journalist what the contents of their discussion was. Higgins replied: “we were just discussing administrative parliamentary matters, considering that Sinn Feinn are going to be the main opposition after the next election.”
Higgins was, of course, joking but his comments revealed much about the buoyant mood in the four nationalist parties, which foresaw in the Liberal split the possibility for a breakthrough. Even in Cornwall, where Mebyon Kernow had basically functioned as a slightly kooky branch office of the Liberals for many years, there was renewed hope of serious political gains.
The results were brutal for the Liberals: to follow up from the 108 MPs they lost to the Libertarians and Progressives in December 2015 and January 2016, they lost another 58 MPs to crash to their lowest ebb since the topsy turvy politics of the 1920s and 1930s. Labour helped themselves to another 24 seats, stressing the success of Cooper’s governing record and hammering the Liberals, Progressives and Libertarians for their ill-discipline. The Conservatives gathered together another 5 seats to return to the highest level they had obtained under Letwin a decade previously. But, with results elsewhere, this would be of little comfort to them.
As well as being a traditional general election, 2018 was also a battle for the soul of British politics, over whether its spirit was progressive or reactionary. And the answer to that question turned out to land firmly in favour of the former, with the Progressive Party picking up 23 seats to ensconce itself as the third party. They appealed to people of a basically left wing perspective but who didn’t trust Labour’s more statist instincts. The academic David Runciman defined their appeal as to “the kind of people who like the memory of Lloyd George, didn’t vote for Thatcher in 1981 and prefer Steel over Beckett.” For a period during the campaign there were serious suggestions that they might knock out the Liberals into second.
The Libertarians lost 10 seats from their pre-election number, something that could plausibly be called a failure even if 52 seats for a newly-founded party was generally seen as positive. They did particularly well in areas which had formerly had a large number of Liberal activists who defected on-mass in December 2015. But, despite their successes in surviving, the results, and where they were based, suggested that there was now a hard cap on their electoral success.
The Liberals remained the second largest party in the Commons (and by some distance too) but it certainly didn’t feel like that. Varadkar stepped down the morning after the election, precipitating a leadership election that was resolved at the annual conference in October. The contest was dominated by discussions of what the Liberals were for. On the one hand, they could portray themselves as the party which could successfully straddle Britain’s libertarian and progressive traditions but that raised the question: if one was of progressive inclinations, why be in a party with a libertarian wing, or vice versa? The eventual victory of Heidi Allen as leader did not promise an easy answer to those questions.
So how is the International Community and the United Nations handling all the new African states? Is anyone providing loans or development assistance?
By the 21st century the British Liberals are often viewed as a bit of an embarrassing uncle by much of the Commonwealth's other centre-right parties. In the first place, they kind of suck electorally (albeit that they've often had some rotten luck with economic conditions outside of their control). And, secondly, there was more than a bit of a centrist to centre-left strain in the Liberals that meant they were never always comfortable in centre-right groupings. Instead, the senior party on that end of the spectrum is probably the Pakistani Liberals, who are not only solidly centre-right (in the sense of sticking to fiscal conservatism albeit in the generally more progressive political culture of TTL) but also much more electorally successful.
The World Bank has leapt into the breach and is providing loans and development assistance. A lot of this is pure power politics rather than high-mindedness, of course, with the permanent Security Council members considering it vital that the governments that signed the Damascus Accords be propped up. Of course, the SWF is jumping in where it can (notably in the case of Azawad) but the other permanent members have tried to use the World Bank as a way of not 'giving' the continent to the Commonwealth (again). In addition, the major regional powers in the north and east of the continent (Egypt and Ethiopia) have used the end of the war and the Accords to gain a great deal of influence in central and west Africa and there's growing concern about the possibility of the continent being divided into competing power blocks.
In the constituencies they benefitted from a general split between the Libs, Libertarians and themselves, as well as a certain splitting of the vote caused by the nationalists' revival. Also a certain amount of disillusionment with Labour (at the margins of course, Labour still increased their representation) in the lists.
Second Chinese Civil War (2022-2023)
In Search of a Modern China: The Second Chinese Civil War
The CNS Zongren docked to receive the Democratic Socialist leadership, April 2022
Since the foundation of the Fourth Republic in 1953, Chinese politics had been dominated by the Progress and Development Party and the Democratic Socialists. Progress and Development had traditionally been thought of as a soft nationalist party of the centre-right but with a strong emphasis on economic protectionism and supporting local businesses, which critics charged soon became little more than a fetish for nationalisation and a corruption nexus between the managers of these nationalised industries and government figures. The Democratic Socialists, on the other hand, belied the general description of them being on the centre-left by being very open to influxes of foreign credit and business to bring in jobs and capital to use for Chinese purposes. In this sense Chinese politics did not map neatly onto the centre-left and centre-right contests seen elsewhere in the world, with the Democratic Socialists being considerably less statist and the Progress and Development being notably more so than their brother parties in other countries.
This approach, typified by the presence of Finance Minister-turned-Premier-turned-Finance Minister-turned-Premier-again Deng Xiaoping at the top of government over the two decades of Democratic Socialist dominance of the Yuan between 1973-93, certainly had many successes. As we have seen, in 1997, China overtook the United States to become the second largest economy in the world, a position they had held since then. Similarly, few visitors could walk around cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai or the capital Nanjing without seeing enormous wealth and confidence in its well-educated citizens. But, go 100 miles inland from those cities, and the picture could look quite different. Indeed, outside of certain points in southern and eastern China, the majority of the country remained extremely poor and underdeveloped. Furthermore, critics charged that, while Commonwealth banks and Brazilian factories (among others) had opened up branches in China since the 1970s, it had done so at the expense of crowding out native Chinese industries (and, in particular, non-Han industries). Of particular note was the fact that much of China’s nuclear industry used technology rented from the SWF and its railways system was built almost entirely by Commonwealth companies and Commonwealth managers. Combined with concerns about just how much of its issued bonds were owned by SWF proxies, many worried that this gave the Commonwealth a potentially vice-like grip over China if needs be.
While the first past the post structure of the Yuan allowed the Democratic Socialists to gain majorities off the back of strong urban support, their popularity in the wider country was a bit more shakey and the Progress and Development Party had consistently won presidential elections since the 1970s, with most presidents serving two terms before the other party won two terms for themselves. For the 2005 election, the party nominated Zhou Yongkang, a man with close ties to the business community. He successfully won two terms in office (2005-2013) but frequently came into conflict with the Democratic Socialists in the Yuan (which they controlled 2003-08) over questions of tax cuts and other assorted legislation. What followed was a period of rapid party polarisation, with the 13 years after 2008 seeing 10 years where one party controlled the Yuan and the other the Presidential Palace, resulting in legislative paralysis.
While an older generation of Chinese were relaxed about the government not being able to do things, given the experience with the Kuoumintang, that was less true of the younger generations born several decades after the foundation of the Fourth Republic. Following three years of unified Democratic Socialist control, China returned to divided government in March 2021, with the election of Wu Yajun to the presidency. Wu was widely disliked within the Democratic Socialists for a number of reasons, not least of which was her extensive business career and reasonably well-known (if unprovable) corruption. (Some also suggested her gender played a significant role.)
In the first year of her tempestuous presidency, Wu was engaged in a near-constant media war with Liu Yunshan, the Democratic Socialist Premier. He point-blank refused to table her legislative agenda for a vote and she, in turn, vetoed a record number of bills passed by the Yuan in her first year in office. Going into the 2022 Yuan elections, Wu campaigned hard on the promise of using any majority Progress and Development won to force through constitutional changes that would provide for more unified government. However, heavily gerrymandered urban districts allowed for the Democratic Socialists to retain a small majority. But Wu and the rest of the Progress and Development Party had not been idle.
In April 2022, Wu vetoed the budget approved by the Yuan, with Wu demanding a new budget be approved with vast increases in military expenditure which she knew would be impossible for the Democratic Socialists to agree to. She was supported by General Zhang Shengmin, the Chief of the General Staff, who argued that the Democratic Socialists were playing politics with Chinese national security. In response, two days later the Yuan passed a bill removing Zhang from office and replacing him with Admiral Pan Chin-lung, who was known for his (relatively) liberal leanings. The majority of the Chinese Navy sided with the Democratic Socialists in the Yuan who, the day after Wu (predictably) vetoed Zhang’s dismissal, issued the Proclamation of Dismissal, declaring that Wu should be removed as President and the constitution amended to create less divided government. (Ironically, these were fundamentally the same reforms that Wu had championed only months previously but few were in the mood to note that.) Following the declaration, the Democratic Socialist leadership in the Yuan boarded the CNS Zongren (the navy’s flagship, ironically named after the former Progress and Development President) and demanded the loyalty of the remainder of the armed forces.
With the majority of the army remaining loyal to the President, China descended into a low-level civil war with most of the fighting taking place along the coastal areas but neither side being able to gain a decisive upper hand. International opinion would be scandalised, however, in November 2022 when Wu’s men rounded up the Democratic Socialist members of the Yuan who had not managed to escape with the leadership on the Zongren (and who had since been under in a relatively luxurious house arrest) and publicly executed them without trial in the Central Stadium. A week later, a naval detachment sailed up the Yangtze to the army base at Yangzhou. A series of coordinated air strikes and bombardments caused serious damage to the army infrastructure, resulting in over 2,000 casualties and effectively opening up the river to Wu’s government in Nanjing.
Despite the navy suffering their own casualties (including damage to the Zongren that rendered her inoperable for the rest of the conflict), they managed to march on Nanjing and occupy it on 12 December 2022. Wu and her allies fled to the Brazilian legation. Over the next three months, negotiations took place between the two sides with the Brazilian government acting as intermediaries. On 18 March 2023, the new constitution of the Fifth Republic was promulgated, providing for unified federal executive and legislative government along the American model (albeit with an electoral college involved that most people judged gave an advantage to the Democratic Socialists). The following day, Wu committed suicide, on the grounds that she would not receive a fair trial, but an amnesty was otherwise issued to all of her allies and the presidential and legislative elections on 30 June were certified by UN observers as free and fair.
The CNS Zongren docked to receive the Democratic Socialist leadership, April 2022
Since the foundation of the Fourth Republic in 1953, Chinese politics had been dominated by the Progress and Development Party and the Democratic Socialists. Progress and Development had traditionally been thought of as a soft nationalist party of the centre-right but with a strong emphasis on economic protectionism and supporting local businesses, which critics charged soon became little more than a fetish for nationalisation and a corruption nexus between the managers of these nationalised industries and government figures. The Democratic Socialists, on the other hand, belied the general description of them being on the centre-left by being very open to influxes of foreign credit and business to bring in jobs and capital to use for Chinese purposes. In this sense Chinese politics did not map neatly onto the centre-left and centre-right contests seen elsewhere in the world, with the Democratic Socialists being considerably less statist and the Progress and Development being notably more so than their brother parties in other countries.
This approach, typified by the presence of Finance Minister-turned-Premier-turned-Finance Minister-turned-Premier-again Deng Xiaoping at the top of government over the two decades of Democratic Socialist dominance of the Yuan between 1973-93, certainly had many successes. As we have seen, in 1997, China overtook the United States to become the second largest economy in the world, a position they had held since then. Similarly, few visitors could walk around cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai or the capital Nanjing without seeing enormous wealth and confidence in its well-educated citizens. But, go 100 miles inland from those cities, and the picture could look quite different. Indeed, outside of certain points in southern and eastern China, the majority of the country remained extremely poor and underdeveloped. Furthermore, critics charged that, while Commonwealth banks and Brazilian factories (among others) had opened up branches in China since the 1970s, it had done so at the expense of crowding out native Chinese industries (and, in particular, non-Han industries). Of particular note was the fact that much of China’s nuclear industry used technology rented from the SWF and its railways system was built almost entirely by Commonwealth companies and Commonwealth managers. Combined with concerns about just how much of its issued bonds were owned by SWF proxies, many worried that this gave the Commonwealth a potentially vice-like grip over China if needs be.
While the first past the post structure of the Yuan allowed the Democratic Socialists to gain majorities off the back of strong urban support, their popularity in the wider country was a bit more shakey and the Progress and Development Party had consistently won presidential elections since the 1970s, with most presidents serving two terms before the other party won two terms for themselves. For the 2005 election, the party nominated Zhou Yongkang, a man with close ties to the business community. He successfully won two terms in office (2005-2013) but frequently came into conflict with the Democratic Socialists in the Yuan (which they controlled 2003-08) over questions of tax cuts and other assorted legislation. What followed was a period of rapid party polarisation, with the 13 years after 2008 seeing 10 years where one party controlled the Yuan and the other the Presidential Palace, resulting in legislative paralysis.
While an older generation of Chinese were relaxed about the government not being able to do things, given the experience with the Kuoumintang, that was less true of the younger generations born several decades after the foundation of the Fourth Republic. Following three years of unified Democratic Socialist control, China returned to divided government in March 2021, with the election of Wu Yajun to the presidency. Wu was widely disliked within the Democratic Socialists for a number of reasons, not least of which was her extensive business career and reasonably well-known (if unprovable) corruption. (Some also suggested her gender played a significant role.)
In the first year of her tempestuous presidency, Wu was engaged in a near-constant media war with Liu Yunshan, the Democratic Socialist Premier. He point-blank refused to table her legislative agenda for a vote and she, in turn, vetoed a record number of bills passed by the Yuan in her first year in office. Going into the 2022 Yuan elections, Wu campaigned hard on the promise of using any majority Progress and Development won to force through constitutional changes that would provide for more unified government. However, heavily gerrymandered urban districts allowed for the Democratic Socialists to retain a small majority. But Wu and the rest of the Progress and Development Party had not been idle.
In April 2022, Wu vetoed the budget approved by the Yuan, with Wu demanding a new budget be approved with vast increases in military expenditure which she knew would be impossible for the Democratic Socialists to agree to. She was supported by General Zhang Shengmin, the Chief of the General Staff, who argued that the Democratic Socialists were playing politics with Chinese national security. In response, two days later the Yuan passed a bill removing Zhang from office and replacing him with Admiral Pan Chin-lung, who was known for his (relatively) liberal leanings. The majority of the Chinese Navy sided with the Democratic Socialists in the Yuan who, the day after Wu (predictably) vetoed Zhang’s dismissal, issued the Proclamation of Dismissal, declaring that Wu should be removed as President and the constitution amended to create less divided government. (Ironically, these were fundamentally the same reforms that Wu had championed only months previously but few were in the mood to note that.) Following the declaration, the Democratic Socialist leadership in the Yuan boarded the CNS Zongren (the navy’s flagship, ironically named after the former Progress and Development President) and demanded the loyalty of the remainder of the armed forces.
With the majority of the army remaining loyal to the President, China descended into a low-level civil war with most of the fighting taking place along the coastal areas but neither side being able to gain a decisive upper hand. International opinion would be scandalised, however, in November 2022 when Wu’s men rounded up the Democratic Socialist members of the Yuan who had not managed to escape with the leadership on the Zongren (and who had since been under in a relatively luxurious house arrest) and publicly executed them without trial in the Central Stadium. A week later, a naval detachment sailed up the Yangtze to the army base at Yangzhou. A series of coordinated air strikes and bombardments caused serious damage to the army infrastructure, resulting in over 2,000 casualties and effectively opening up the river to Wu’s government in Nanjing.
Despite the navy suffering their own casualties (including damage to the Zongren that rendered her inoperable for the rest of the conflict), they managed to march on Nanjing and occupy it on 12 December 2022. Wu and her allies fled to the Brazilian legation. Over the next three months, negotiations took place between the two sides with the Brazilian government acting as intermediaries. On 18 March 2023, the new constitution of the Fifth Republic was promulgated, providing for unified federal executive and legislative government along the American model (albeit with an electoral college involved that most people judged gave an advantage to the Democratic Socialists). The following day, Wu committed suicide, on the grounds that she would not receive a fair trial, but an amnesty was otherwise issued to all of her allies and the presidential and legislative elections on 30 June were certified by UN observers as free and fair.
At Commonwealth level, they were definitely the 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' monkey and adopted an official position of neutrality. Different member states, obviously, had their own attitude. The Hong Kong government is generally more favourable towards the Democratic Socialists because they're the party less likely to make bellicose noises about the possibility of changing Hong Kong's status (not that that's common in Progress and Development but it's definitely there on the party's fringes - think something like the number of MPs in the Tory party actually publicly committed to leaving the EU in c.2010 OTL). But there wasn't any direct member state involvement, although maybe the picture might seem different if you looked too closely at how certain Hong Kong financiers and industrialists spent their money in China during those years. A particular flashpoint came in November 2022, when the Zongren looked like she might dock in Hong Kong for repairs. Lee Cheuk-yan (leader of the Democratic Labour party and prime minister since 2018) ordered that she not be allowed to dock and the opposition Democratic and Liberal parties attempted to use that as a wedge issue in the upcoming Christmas elections. In the end, Democratic Labour lost their majority (albeit they remained in power in coalition with the Democrats) but the Zongren didn't dock there and limped to Hainan instead.