The Anglo-Saxon Social Model
- Thread starter Rattigan
- Start date
Deleted member 94708
None of this is particularly likely. The modern City Hall wasn't built until the turn of the 20th century. Likewise, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and associated parks and squares are the product of an early 20th century revitalization plan. No one would even think to use the old City Hall as a capitol, they'd want something purpose built, and the area that is the Parkway today was just ordinary city blocks.
There are 3 main possibilities that they might have done in the 1860's if they moved the capital...
1. Create a Federal District encompassing all of Philadelphia County. At the time, D.C. not having voting rights wasn't the big thing that it has become since. It's entirely possible that no one would lend it a second thought. Not likely, though, as removing 500,000 people from Pennsylvania would vastly reduce the state's clout in Congress.
2. Repurpose about half of Fairmount Park to serve as a federal district. The timing is perfect; replacing the heart of the city with a massive park was proposed in the 1850's and implemented in 1867 IOTL. By the early 1860's the boundaries of the park had been mostly set, and the area that was proposed for the park east of the Schuylkill was just about the same area that the National Mall had in 1850, just shy of 350 acres. That would be sufficient to build a Capitol Building at the site of OTL's Art Museum, leave considerable space for future monuments, and build a presidential residence. That residence could be built on the site of Boathouse Row, or by renovating and extending Lemon Hill Mansion or Mount Pleasant Mansion. Either would be suitable, though the latter is probably easier to expand as necessary.
3. A combination of the above; create a federal district encompassing the land between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers from Montgomery Avenue in the north to Spring Garden Street in the south; basically, all the land that is "behind" the strip described in 2. above. That area has a population of around 130,000 in 1865, so it's within shouting distance of D.C.'s 80,000.
I expect that 2 is probably the most likely, because it creates something similar to D.C.'s key public spaces IOTL and is unlikely to ruffle many feathers. It won't reduce PA's power in Congress or change the party balance in the state at all, it is very similar to an already-existing plan, it brings federal jobs, patronage, and funding (just starting to be a thing in 1865) to the city, and it means that the expense of buying this land and beautifying it is on the Feds, not the city and state. Landowners who sell their land for the park IOTL would instead sell it for the capitol, buy something nearby, and rent it to the Federal bureaucracy that makes the move up. I expect that the initial "Federal Park District" would look like the red area below, and they'd eventually give it the blue and purple areas as well. That would give it some room to grow.
Deleted member 94708
Great work. As I mentioned before, I'm not really all that familiar with the geography of Philadelphia so I'll leave it up to those on this TL who are more familiar with it to decide
Deleted member 94708
I haven't quite puzzled out how turning over most of Fairmount Park would impact the development of the city's parks department. Obviously a lot of any capitol district would be parkland, so that's not a huge change, but building a national cemetery in the NW part of Fairmount would take away a huge amount of rewilded area and leisure space. There would probably be a push not to give away much more after the last bit gets given to the Feds in 1926 to build the Lincoln Memorial on a prominent overlook.
At some point, since West Philadelphia was built later and was nicer than North and South Philadelphia for most of the period in question, I think the city might raze the OTL Brewerytown and Strawberry Mansion neighborhoods, which were industrial slums, and use them for sports fields, reservoirs, etc. Those are, IOTL, exactly where the Lincoln Memorial is ITTL (non-canon). Meanwhile, the triangle I've left alone on the West side of the park would probably contain most of the athletic fields that are, IOTL, under TTL's National Memorial Cemetery.
Thanks! I live there, have my whole life, right on the edge of Fairmount Park. I am open to being told I'm wrong but I think this is the most likely outcome given what the city looked like between 1860 and 1930.
Black January, 2008
The Suicide of Postwar Europe, Part Three: More Money Than God
In January 2008 international finance and currency markets were thrown into chaos when a series of apparently unconnected entities began vast and quick sell-offs of French government bonds. £629,000,000,000 worth of bonds were dumped in that month, resulting in an immediate spike in French borrowing costs and a tidy profit for the entities that had begun the sell-off. This was accompanied by a smaller move to dump Soviet bonds. Ahead of their third-quarterly all-parties meeting in June 2008, the board of the SWF confirmed that several subsidiary entities had engaged in a targeted “slimming down” of their total portfolio of foreign government bonds and currency.
Even before it was known who was behind the dumping, the sudden shorting of the Franc caused immediate problems for the Sixth Republic, which was not only having to deal with its vast military commitments in Yugoslavia but which had also managed to hold down domestic discontent through a mixture of an expensive internal security apparatus and extremely low levels of taxation. Combined with a general economic slow-down caused by the ongoing crisis in Yugoslavia, the French economy tipped into recession in the first and second quarters of 2008. With borrowing costs rising, the government was forced to turn to the World Bank as its main supplier of credit but the board, chaired by the American Timothy Geithner, was unwilling to extend loans unless they came with stringent conditions attached. This, in turn, only made matters worse if France sought further credit on international markets.
In October 2008, matters were exacerbated by, firstly, a series of seemingly-coordinated denial of service attacks that crippled the French banking system and, secondly, the discovery of a malicious computer worm inside the French military SCADA systems that is believed to have caused substantial damage to the communication and coordination of the armed forces and internal security service. The hand of the Commonwealth behind this was suspected, of course, but never proven. In a joint meeting of the French cabinet, senior generals and financial regulators, Le Pen ordered the carpet bombing of London in retaliation for the SWF’s actions. However, Chief of Staff Jean-Louis Georgelin refused to obey the order and instead ordered Le Pen’s immediate arrest. With Le Pen’s daughter Marine siding against her father, he was removed and she proclaimed president in his stead the same day. (Georgelin’s role in this has come under scrutiny in the years since, with unreconstructed National Front hardliners throwing conspiratorial glances at his previous associations with more moderate Republican figures.)
Marine Le Pen’s first action as president was forced on her: ordering the Bank of France to impose a partial deposit freeze. While this was necessary to prevent the flight of hard currency, this unfortunately meant that France was now no longer meeting its obligations under its World Bank loan, and Geithner took great pleasure in putting the pressure on. At the end of October, in a climate of severe political and social unrest, France defaulted on its World Bank obligations, followed by a general default on its debt and the formal abandonment of the convertibility of the Franc two weeks later.
The ensuing economic and political crisis was arguably worse than the ill-fated period of the Fifth Republic only a decade previously. By the end of 2008, the economy had contracted by 20% since 2003. Since the Monuments Bombing in June 2005, French output had fallen by more than 15%, the Franc had lost three-quarters of its value and unemployment exceeded 25%. Income poverty had grown to 55% of the population at the time of the default. This was simply not a sustainable level in a democracy (even though the Sixth Republic could only very generally be described as democratic) and widespread social unrest erupted across the country. The riots soon escalated to include property destruction, often directed at banks. Confrontations between the police and rioters were common, with Marine Le Pen claiming that they were all wreckers paid by British and Jewish interests (which wasn’t totally untrue, in fact, as the British government had provided sanctuary for French dissidents since 1996 and the Five Eyes Agency began to arrange for their return to France in the winter of 2008/09). A particularly violent incident occurred in the Place de la Republique on 20 and 21 January 2009, in which 39 people (including 6 children) were killed by police and 227 injured.
The following day, 22 January 2009, an estimated 40,000 people, calling themselves ‘La France Insoumise’ and led by the dissident politician Jean-Luc Melenchon, marched on the Élysée Palace. At the sight of the mob, the guards surrendered without firing a shot and, when the mob entered the palace, they found that it had been abandoned by the government. Le Pen and her circle emerged three days later in Petrograd but by that point things were too late. Melenchon propagated a new constitution on 23 January and the following day his skeleton government received a delegation of Commonwealth diplomats. In response, the internal security and police forces effectively went on strike in order to drown the new government in civil unrest.
However, they had miscalculated. Whatever conservative support might have existed for the overthrow of socialism in 1995 and 1996 had now withered under the harsh conditions imposed by the Sixth Republic. The business community were repulsed by Le Pen’s rhetorical attacks on ethnic minorities, not to mention the support he gave to the semi-regular pogroms organised by ‘off-duty’ policemen. Many fled to the Department of the Maghreb, which - with the safety of the Mediterranean between it and mainland France - had become something of a haven for certain tolerated dissidents. The small-town ‘France profonde’ which had been so crucial in bringing Le Pen to power now also abandoned him due to a combination of economic chaos and a disastrous foreign policy that had done the exact opposite of fulfilling Le Pen’s promise to restore French international prestige. Instead of collapsing into chaos, French public life became dominated by peaceful sit-ins around the country, which grew from simple protest movements to become informal communities in public spaces. Critics of the new French regime were furious when the press revealed that two members of the Commonwealth delegation were Sir Crispin Odey and Sir Mark Carney, the chairman and deputy chairman, respectively, of the SWF. In short order, the SWF had arranged for a fresh line of credit to be extended to the new French government, the fund having made a significant profit on its shorting of the French sovereign debt only a year previously.
A referendum on 2 February returned a 96.4% vote in favour of the new constitution (critics noted that this was almost exactly the same percentage as Napoleon III had won in 1852) and the Seventh French Republic was declared the following day. With all assembly members from the Sixth Republic proscribed from election, the Seventh Republic was an immediate and radical repudiation of the majority of France’s economics and politics since 1945. Among its most notable moves was Melenchon’s order to immediately withdraw French troops, weapons and money from Yugoslavia, calling for peace talks. Oskar Lafontaine also returned to government as the Foreign Minister and immediately set out to fix where he had failed in 1996: declaring the French Union at an end and urging democratic elections in the other members. Unlike in 1996, on this occasion the other members of the French Union chose not to intervene militarily, perhaps put off by the sight of senior Commonwealth diplomats standing on the steps of the Élysée shaking hands with the new regime.
The political response in the Soviet Union was scarcely as dramatic but was by no means less important. The lower level of financialisation of the Soviet economy meant that the economic problems caused by the shorting of its bonds did not create as serious an issue for the country. However, borrowing costs did rise and this put pressure on its ability to keep up its military commitments in Yugoslavia. In March 2009, Gennady Yanayev was gently eased out of his position as Premier (he spent the remaining year of his life as Chairman of the Soviet Tourist Board) and was replaced by Vladimir Putin. Putin used his room to maneuver to agree an armistice with NATO which came into force on 1 June 2009.
Following the armistice, secret negotiations were held in Stockholm, hosted by the Nordic Union and chaired by the UN. This was followed by a public peace conference the following month in Kirkuk. This resulted in the United Nations Agreement on the Former Yugoslavia (commonly known as the “Kirkuk Accords”), which appeared in November 2009. A lengthy and complicated document, the main point of the Accords was to effectively abolish Yugoslavia as a country, order the withdrawal of all foreign troops from its territory and place it under the governance of a UN board (made up of a representative of every permanent member of the Security Council and 15 members selected from the other members of the General Assembly) which would manage the territory in advance of a series of referendums to determine its future direction.
The whole Yugoslav War was a sorry affair: conceived in the tragic murder of innocents by terrorists, it had turned into a bloodbath where, by the end of it, few people were left sure of what they were fighting for. What could be said for NATO was that, under the Kirkuk Accords, it did secure the extradition of the Yugoslavian masterminds of the Monuments Bombings (along with Lyndon LaRouche, who was implicated as an influence in the attacks but who would later be acquitted at trial). When the extradited individuals were later put on trial for murder in a Philadelphia courtroom, many praised it as a victory for the decency and the process of American justice. But over 16,000 American soldiers, sailors and pilots had died in the killing fields of Yugoslavia, as well as nearly 3,000 from other NATO countries. Was that a fair trade? It seemed at least debatable.
Similarly, the white supremacist neoliberal regime in France had wandered decisively into its own suicide, killing over 4,000 of its sons and giving birth to an explicitly socialist regime that repudiated everything it stood for. In the Soviet Union, things hadn’t gone as badly as it had for France, and many (including Putin) could congratulate themselves on finessing a reasonably elegant exit from Yugoslavia, considering where they had been in the middle of 2008. But few could deny that it was another embarrassing bloody nose for the regime. Even the governing classes of Brazil and China, who attracted praise for their skilful diplomatic containment of the war, were now looking closely at their bond spreads to try and gauge precisely how much was owned by the Commonwealth or the SWF.
And it was the Commonwealth and the SWF that were about the only entities who came out of this fiasco well, with their true power now laid bare for the world to see. A Nordic academic paper, published in 2010, suggested that the SWF now owned 10% of all issued shares in the world. This was probably an exaggeration but, after all, who would know?
In January 2008 international finance and currency markets were thrown into chaos when a series of apparently unconnected entities began vast and quick sell-offs of French government bonds. £629,000,000,000 worth of bonds were dumped in that month, resulting in an immediate spike in French borrowing costs and a tidy profit for the entities that had begun the sell-off. This was accompanied by a smaller move to dump Soviet bonds. Ahead of their third-quarterly all-parties meeting in June 2008, the board of the SWF confirmed that several subsidiary entities had engaged in a targeted “slimming down” of their total portfolio of foreign government bonds and currency.
Even before it was known who was behind the dumping, the sudden shorting of the Franc caused immediate problems for the Sixth Republic, which was not only having to deal with its vast military commitments in Yugoslavia but which had also managed to hold down domestic discontent through a mixture of an expensive internal security apparatus and extremely low levels of taxation. Combined with a general economic slow-down caused by the ongoing crisis in Yugoslavia, the French economy tipped into recession in the first and second quarters of 2008. With borrowing costs rising, the government was forced to turn to the World Bank as its main supplier of credit but the board, chaired by the American Timothy Geithner, was unwilling to extend loans unless they came with stringent conditions attached. This, in turn, only made matters worse if France sought further credit on international markets.
In October 2008, matters were exacerbated by, firstly, a series of seemingly-coordinated denial of service attacks that crippled the French banking system and, secondly, the discovery of a malicious computer worm inside the French military SCADA systems that is believed to have caused substantial damage to the communication and coordination of the armed forces and internal security service. The hand of the Commonwealth behind this was suspected, of course, but never proven. In a joint meeting of the French cabinet, senior generals and financial regulators, Le Pen ordered the carpet bombing of London in retaliation for the SWF’s actions. However, Chief of Staff Jean-Louis Georgelin refused to obey the order and instead ordered Le Pen’s immediate arrest. With Le Pen’s daughter Marine siding against her father, he was removed and she proclaimed president in his stead the same day. (Georgelin’s role in this has come under scrutiny in the years since, with unreconstructed National Front hardliners throwing conspiratorial glances at his previous associations with more moderate Republican figures.)
Marine Le Pen’s first action as president was forced on her: ordering the Bank of France to impose a partial deposit freeze. While this was necessary to prevent the flight of hard currency, this unfortunately meant that France was now no longer meeting its obligations under its World Bank loan, and Geithner took great pleasure in putting the pressure on. At the end of October, in a climate of severe political and social unrest, France defaulted on its World Bank obligations, followed by a general default on its debt and the formal abandonment of the convertibility of the Franc two weeks later.
The ensuing economic and political crisis was arguably worse than the ill-fated period of the Fifth Republic only a decade previously. By the end of 2008, the economy had contracted by 20% since 2003. Since the Monuments Bombing in June 2005, French output had fallen by more than 15%, the Franc had lost three-quarters of its value and unemployment exceeded 25%. Income poverty had grown to 55% of the population at the time of the default. This was simply not a sustainable level in a democracy (even though the Sixth Republic could only very generally be described as democratic) and widespread social unrest erupted across the country. The riots soon escalated to include property destruction, often directed at banks. Confrontations between the police and rioters were common, with Marine Le Pen claiming that they were all wreckers paid by British and Jewish interests (which wasn’t totally untrue, in fact, as the British government had provided sanctuary for French dissidents since 1996 and the Five Eyes Agency began to arrange for their return to France in the winter of 2008/09). A particularly violent incident occurred in the Place de la Republique on 20 and 21 January 2009, in which 39 people (including 6 children) were killed by police and 227 injured.
The following day, 22 January 2009, an estimated 40,000 people, calling themselves ‘La France Insoumise’ and led by the dissident politician Jean-Luc Melenchon, marched on the Élysée Palace. At the sight of the mob, the guards surrendered without firing a shot and, when the mob entered the palace, they found that it had been abandoned by the government. Le Pen and her circle emerged three days later in Petrograd but by that point things were too late. Melenchon propagated a new constitution on 23 January and the following day his skeleton government received a delegation of Commonwealth diplomats. In response, the internal security and police forces effectively went on strike in order to drown the new government in civil unrest.
However, they had miscalculated. Whatever conservative support might have existed for the overthrow of socialism in 1995 and 1996 had now withered under the harsh conditions imposed by the Sixth Republic. The business community were repulsed by Le Pen’s rhetorical attacks on ethnic minorities, not to mention the support he gave to the semi-regular pogroms organised by ‘off-duty’ policemen. Many fled to the Department of the Maghreb, which - with the safety of the Mediterranean between it and mainland France - had become something of a haven for certain tolerated dissidents. The small-town ‘France profonde’ which had been so crucial in bringing Le Pen to power now also abandoned him due to a combination of economic chaos and a disastrous foreign policy that had done the exact opposite of fulfilling Le Pen’s promise to restore French international prestige. Instead of collapsing into chaos, French public life became dominated by peaceful sit-ins around the country, which grew from simple protest movements to become informal communities in public spaces. Critics of the new French regime were furious when the press revealed that two members of the Commonwealth delegation were Sir Crispin Odey and Sir Mark Carney, the chairman and deputy chairman, respectively, of the SWF. In short order, the SWF had arranged for a fresh line of credit to be extended to the new French government, the fund having made a significant profit on its shorting of the French sovereign debt only a year previously.
A referendum on 2 February returned a 96.4% vote in favour of the new constitution (critics noted that this was almost exactly the same percentage as Napoleon III had won in 1852) and the Seventh French Republic was declared the following day. With all assembly members from the Sixth Republic proscribed from election, the Seventh Republic was an immediate and radical repudiation of the majority of France’s economics and politics since 1945. Among its most notable moves was Melenchon’s order to immediately withdraw French troops, weapons and money from Yugoslavia, calling for peace talks. Oskar Lafontaine also returned to government as the Foreign Minister and immediately set out to fix where he had failed in 1996: declaring the French Union at an end and urging democratic elections in the other members. Unlike in 1996, on this occasion the other members of the French Union chose not to intervene militarily, perhaps put off by the sight of senior Commonwealth diplomats standing on the steps of the Élysée shaking hands with the new regime.
The political response in the Soviet Union was scarcely as dramatic but was by no means less important. The lower level of financialisation of the Soviet economy meant that the economic problems caused by the shorting of its bonds did not create as serious an issue for the country. However, borrowing costs did rise and this put pressure on its ability to keep up its military commitments in Yugoslavia. In March 2009, Gennady Yanayev was gently eased out of his position as Premier (he spent the remaining year of his life as Chairman of the Soviet Tourist Board) and was replaced by Vladimir Putin. Putin used his room to maneuver to agree an armistice with NATO which came into force on 1 June 2009.
Following the armistice, secret negotiations were held in Stockholm, hosted by the Nordic Union and chaired by the UN. This was followed by a public peace conference the following month in Kirkuk. This resulted in the United Nations Agreement on the Former Yugoslavia (commonly known as the “Kirkuk Accords”), which appeared in November 2009. A lengthy and complicated document, the main point of the Accords was to effectively abolish Yugoslavia as a country, order the withdrawal of all foreign troops from its territory and place it under the governance of a UN board (made up of a representative of every permanent member of the Security Council and 15 members selected from the other members of the General Assembly) which would manage the territory in advance of a series of referendums to determine its future direction.
The whole Yugoslav War was a sorry affair: conceived in the tragic murder of innocents by terrorists, it had turned into a bloodbath where, by the end of it, few people were left sure of what they were fighting for. What could be said for NATO was that, under the Kirkuk Accords, it did secure the extradition of the Yugoslavian masterminds of the Monuments Bombings (along with Lyndon LaRouche, who was implicated as an influence in the attacks but who would later be acquitted at trial). When the extradited individuals were later put on trial for murder in a Philadelphia courtroom, many praised it as a victory for the decency and the process of American justice. But over 16,000 American soldiers, sailors and pilots had died in the killing fields of Yugoslavia, as well as nearly 3,000 from other NATO countries. Was that a fair trade? It seemed at least debatable.
Similarly, the white supremacist neoliberal regime in France had wandered decisively into its own suicide, killing over 4,000 of its sons and giving birth to an explicitly socialist regime that repudiated everything it stood for. In the Soviet Union, things hadn’t gone as badly as it had for France, and many (including Putin) could congratulate themselves on finessing a reasonably elegant exit from Yugoslavia, considering where they had been in the middle of 2008. But few could deny that it was another embarrassing bloody nose for the regime. Even the governing classes of Brazil and China, who attracted praise for their skilful diplomatic containment of the war, were now looking closely at their bond spreads to try and gauge precisely how much was owned by the Commonwealth or the SWF.
And it was the Commonwealth and the SWF that were about the only entities who came out of this fiasco well, with their true power now laid bare for the world to see. A Nordic academic paper, published in 2010, suggested that the SWF now owned 10% of all issued shares in the world. This was probably an exaggeration but, after all, who would know?
You can never have too many French republics 
Let's hope things go better for the 7th. I think there's room for it. This world doesn't go crazy when it hears socialism so it will probably be allowed to develop a bit more freely. And of course with the USSR working with the Le Pen dictatorship, it is unlikely to be their model for socialism.
Let's hope things go better for the 7th. I think there's room for it. This world doesn't go crazy when it hears socialism so it will probably be allowed to develop a bit more freely. And of course with the USSR working with the Le Pen dictatorship, it is unlikely to be their model for socialism.
No. The Commonwealth withdrew from NATO in 1966. They did provide diplomatic support in the UN as well as general logistics support, where needed, and intelligence sharing (up to a point, of course).
How the UK government exercise oversight over SWF?
Talk about fighting with money. This give the word Golden Cavalry of St George a whole new level of meaning.
Talk about fighting with money. This give the word Golden Cavalry of St George a whole new level of meaning.
...uh-oh.Infobox on the First Yugoslavian War said:
I imagine that, in the minds of dissidents against the world's political/economic order, the Commonwealth did not come out of this one smelling like roses. What the SWF did to the French economy mirrors the incident that first made George Soros notorious in OTL: his shorting of the Bank of England in 1992. And while the UK soon recovered (though it took the Conservative Party a generation to climb out of the wilderness), the SWF broke the Sixth Republic's back, using its financial power to destroy two right-wing nationalist regimes and replace one with a socialist government and the other with a UN Trust Territory.
Imagine if, in the coming US Presidential election, a consortium of international bankers working in league with the Chinese engineered a financial crash in order to take down Trump, leading to him losing the election in a landslide to Elizabeth Warren. And elements of the American bureaucracy, including Trump's own son-in-law Jared Kushner, worked to undermine him at every turn. And all of this happened out in the open, with the culprits admitting to it, facing no repercussions, and either getting plum jobs in the Warren administration or making off like bandits.
Because that Infowars/Breitbart fever dream is more or less what the Commonwealth and the SWF did to France. Picture a mix of Soros, '80s Japan, and the present-day PRC, and you have the language that every nationalist pundit and demagogue out there is gonna use to describe the Commonwealth. They'll be accusing their nations' leaders of being in hock to London, selling out their nations for thirty pieces of silver while the Commonwealth uses the SWF to impose its New World Order. You already brought up Brazil and China as countries that are taking a very close look at their balance sheets after Black January; I can see both turning to nationalism and anti-Commonwealth sentiment in the coming years in response. In France itself, there are probably a lot of right-wingers who, having seen the Commonwealth destroy the government they supported, are probably stewing in disaffection and radicalism. In the US, the legacy of the Monuments Bombings discrediting the far-right means that it won't be too pronounced, at least not at first, but if a left-wing nationalist, one committed to America's legacy of liberty, diversity, and the melting pot who also sees the Commonwealth as the devil itself, manages to get traction...
(The Commonwealth's right wing, by contrast, is probably smiling at this display of just how powerful it still is. They beat the French and gave the Soviet commies a black eye? Beautiful.)
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The SWF is managed by two committees. The first one is the Management Committee, made up of the chairman, deputy chairman and seven members proposed for renewable three-year terms by the prime minister's Economic Advisory Council. In practice, the seven members are promoted from within the SWF in consultation with the chairman and deputy chairman.
Alongside the Management Committee is the Oversight Committee, a more explicitly political body. It is made up of the British Chancellor, two Vice-Chairmen (both appointed by the Chancellor at will) and one representative from each Commonwealth member state (appointed by that member state to renewable six-year terms). The Oversight Committee conducts hearings every time a new chairman, deputy chairman or member of the Management Committee is proposed and they vote on whether to recommend them to the role. Although the vote doesn't have to be heeded and the power of appointment remains, ultimately, with the British government, in practice someone who wasn't approved by the Oversight Committee isn't going to find their way onto the Management Committee.
Additionally, the chairman and deputy chairman attend every prime ministers' conference and have a close relationship with Commonwealth leaders to make sure that Commonwealth and SWF strategies remain broadly aligned.
I'd meant to change the previous update so that it was only the French who were 'volunteers'. Thanks for picking me up on that.
no bother its just when I calculated the death count as a percentage it came out as something like 30% of deployed troops, I know the soviets are obviously into repression but that would have been noted, it was also higher than the soviet afghan war so it came across as a bit much. I know the soviets are supposed to be similar to OTL Chinese communists but I'm wondering how much of a difference there is for example I don't think you could get away with say the social credit thing or too much ethnic oppression just because there is so much ethic diversity compared to china. I like the sort of the soviet communist nationalist route you've taken,it suits ITL government - it helps paves over ethnic divides, the communist nature prob welfare stuff like free maternity, housing etc to keep people happy honestly I expect the soviet government to go down an automating UBI system in order to keep people happy. How close am I?.
Britball to Franceball: "Sorry to hear about that trouble you are in. We would like to help but well we are busy in Yugoslavia and all." *Sips Tea*
Just to be clear about the figures given for the size of the armies that I gave in the info box, that represents the largest complete deployment at one time rather than being the total number of troops that a given country deployed in total. I think, given that, the casualty figures should be a little less horrific, although I take your point.
As for the Soviet Union, your suspicions are very close. I had actually thought that something like the social credit system would have been instituted by now, especially considering how the Soviet Union had its own internet equivalent from the beginning.
I’ll still be using OTL figures as characters rather than inventing new ones. I’ll be bringing the TL to a close in 2030, which is when a particular event will occur which (I think at least) brings it to a nice thematic conclusion.