The End of History: The World After Syndicalism (1994-2019)

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The 50th Anniversary celebrations of the foundation of the Combined Syndicates of America had shown the world a carefully-curated image of the inevitable Syndicalist future: culminating in the 1987 May Day parade in Chicago, observers had been presented with a picture of a confident and successful society capable of projecting power across the globe.

Seven years later, it was no longer possible to argue in good faith that Syndicalism represented any sort of world-spanning force. With the reformist President Traficant trying desperately to hold together the CSA's successor state and Syndicalism confined to a handful of Latin American, African and Middle Eastern backwaters, it seemed clear to all reasonable people that Mankind's ideological era was drawing to a close: the technocratic "managed democracy" practised in Europe since the Third Weltkrieg was the inevitable endpoint of human development.

Reasonable people were about to find out quite how untrue this was.

The World in 1994

 

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[Boneheaded_Bookkeeper]

So fall so good and the nice art helps a lot. I especially like the textbook page above!

So we got a Red!America undergoing a collapse Soviet Union style but with a Kaiserreich twist? Sounds like a good source of political intrigue and general mayhem to me.

But I still have plenty of questions:

Just how large was(is) the Internationale in this TL? Was it only confined to the New World and the Middle East or did it ever get a foothold on Asia or Africa? How the hell did the Entente regain Britain and France? Does the Kaiserreich still exist?

 

[XTrapnel]

So fall so good and the nice art helps a lot. I especially like the textbook page above!

So we got a Red!America undergoing a collapse Soviet Union style but with a Kaiserreich twist? Sounds like a good source of political intrigue and general mayhem to me.

But I still have plenty of questions:

Just how large was(is) the Internationale in this TL? Was it only confined to the New World and the Middle East or did it ever get a foothold on Asia or Africa? How the hell did the Entente regain Britain and France? Does the Kaiserreich still exist?

(Very broad) outline of events prior to the collapse of the CSA:

• The Third Internationale and the Russian Empire divide Germany between them in the Second Weltkrieg (1939-1942), while Canada manages to liberate Britain: eventually, a peace is signed between Entente and the Commune of France. The CSA is in no state to assist the Internationale beyond sending multiple divisions of "volunteers" and "technical experts" to France.
• In the 1950s, doctrinal differences between the CSA leadership and the rest of the Third Internationale lead to the CSA establishing a Fourth Internationale, confining its attentions to spreading Syndicalism in the Americas and in Africa.
• In the late 1950s, the Commune of France and the Russian sphere go to war: the Entente subsequently declare war on the Internationale. Although the Commune almost gets to Moscow, and is able to establish temporary puppet states in Central Europe, it is ultimately defeated by the combined Entente and Eurasian Pact.
• The subsequent peace conference sees the Eurasian Pact's control over Eastern and Central Europe and much of Germany recognised, although Entente-aligned buffer states are carved out in the Rhineland and Bavaria.
• A lengthy depression, political instability and an increasingly unpopular military intervention in Central America to prop up the Centroamerican Worker's Federation throughout the 1970s and 1980s leads to increasing popular discontent in the CSA.

 

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If you want to know about World Syndicalism in the 21st Century, this crudely-mimeographed and hopelessly optimistic publication can be picked up in all good alternative bookshops:

 

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Another crudely-mimeographed publication by the Wildcat Press, attempting to capitalise on an early-2000s wavelet of "Syndistalgia":

 

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And a far slicker (if far more hysterical) overview of the Traficant Presidency by the same publishing house:

 

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Points of interest

• Due to William Aalto's close involvement with the leadership of the fledgling CSA, a significant number of Syndicalist immigrants from Finland were welcomed and settled in what used to be Michigan's Upper Peninsula: Finnish is still the predominant language spoken there;
• Successful lobbying by the UAW in the aftermath of the War of Liberation meant that most employment in heavy industry in the Great Lakes and Midwest Communes was closed to workers outside those Communes: along with no requirement (as in OTL) for workers in a rapidly expanding arms industry in the 1940s, this meant that the second wave of the Second Great Migration never occurred. Consequently, African-Americans (the preferred ethnocultural term among black Americans in TTL is "Negro") are much more heavily concentrated in the Deep South, particularly in the counties forming the Autonomous State of New Afrika. In addition, the generally much lower levels of immigration in TTL and the secession of the Pacific States and New England mean that black Americans comprise roughly 20% of of the population of the FAS, as opposed to 12% in OTL's 1995. However, despite this, as of the collapse of the CSA, only two black Governors had ever been appointed outside the New Afrikan and Gullah Autonomous States: Doug Wilder in the Mid-Atlantic Commune and Coleman Young in the Great Lakes Commune;
• The creation of separate ethnoculturally-based Autonomous States for the Gullah peoples in former South Carolina and for the (broadly Scots-Irish) "Appalachian" peoples in West Virginia and its environs in the late 1930s[1] has led to a significant proportion of Americans in those regions identifying as Gullah rather than Negro and as Appalachian rather than American respectively;
• No bracero program and a much higher rate of unionisation among sharecroppers and farmworkers in East Texas meant that many fewer agricultural jobs were available for Mexicans and Central Americans in the CSA, most of whom immigrated to the Pacific States instead.

[1] Not quite as crazy as it sounds: in OTL, there was at least one Maoist group in the 1960s who argued that Appalachians constituted an identifiable oppressed group within the USA and planned to establish a homeland for them once the Americans had been collectively converted to the tenets of Maoism.

 

[Boneheaded_Bookkeeper]

Such a different world compared to OTL. This America is definitely not the same nation that we're familiar with. I'm guessing that, while a definite great power, it's no where near the economic powerhouse it is in OTL.

I got really confused when Appalachian counted as its own ethnic group before you gave your explanation underneath the image lol.

How are things over with the PSA? Was the hypothetical president Disney a generally good executive leader? How large scale is immigration and their connection to the Japanese Empire and their Co-Prosperity Sphere?

I'm guessing that Britain is the big winner of this scenario. Did they also claim Alaska and Hawaii after the CSA won? How many Americans immigrated to Canada or the PSA to escape Syndicalist tyranny? Are their any major pro-federal groups left in New England or are the former Americans there mostly content to be citizens of the British Commonwealth?

Speaking of feds, what happened to good ol' MacArthur? Did he and the other american loyalists pull a Chiang and turn Cuba into their Taiwan? If so, how is it there right now? Is there a similar situation like with China where the two Americas both claim to be the only legitimate America and most nations are forced to formally recognize only the CSA while trading freely with American Cuba?

 

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How are things over with the PSA? Was the hypothetical president Disney a generally good executive leader? How large scale is immigration and their connection to the Japanese Empire and their Co-Prosperity Sphere?

Generally, reasonably similar to OTL: although Disney never quite ended up as President, Richard Nixon, Pat and Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson all did at one point or another. Immigration's really primarily confined to short-term migrant labour being used by large scale agricultural producers in fairly nasty working conditions virtually unchanged from those of the 1930s - given that the PSA was next to a very large Syndicalist power, TTL's equivalent of Cesar Chavez almost certainly ended up in a ditch with a bullet in the back of his head.

Although the PSA was fairly closely aligned to the Entente throughout the 1940s and 1950s (even sending supporting troops for the Third Weltkrieg), Japan's rise as a significant industrial power in the 1980s has shifted the PSA's focus towards the Co-Prosperity Sphere: much like OTL's Australia with China, there's a genuine tension in present day Pacific States politics between the country's historical ties to Britain and Canada and its increasing financial links to Japan, with the faultlines not being clearly left-right. More on that later.

I'm guessing that Britain is the big winner of this scenario. Did they also claim Alaska and Hawaii after the CSA won? How many Americans immigrated to Canada or the PSA to escape Syndicalist tyranny? Are their any major pro-federal groups left in New England or are the former Americans there mostly content to be citizens of the British Commonwealth?

Regarding winners, the world's significantly more multi-polar than OTL: the countries punching significantly above their weight in TTL are Russia, Japan and Britain.

The PSA held onto Hawaii, while Canada occupied Alaska almost immediately and "purchased" it from the PSA in the 1950s. The largest wave of immigration to Canada and the PSA occurred immediately after the Second American Civil War, at a time when it was effectively impossible for the CSA to police the borders properly: from the early 1940s until almost the end of the CSA, it was virtually impossible to get an exit visa from the country. Eighty years of independence have basically killed any lingering identification with a greater American state on the part of the New Englanders, but they certainly haven't avoided involvement with the Federation of American States: as of 1994, some New England citizens will shortly become very rich indeed purchasing privatised industries and utilities from the FAS.

Speaking of feds, what happened to good ol' MacArthur? Did he and the other american loyalists pull a Chiang and turn Cuba into their Taiwan? If so, how is it there right now? Is there a similar situation like with China where the two Americas both claim to be the only legitimate America and most nations are forced to formally recognize only the CSA while trading freely with American Cuba?

Dead in the Battle for Denver, I'm afraid. A rump government was set up on Cuba briefly, but fizzled out due to lack of interest and support sometime in the 1940s.

 

[traveller76]

So what happened to India?

 

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1999's bestselling work of non-fiction in the Commonwealth of Canada:

 

[Boneheaded_Bookkeeper]

Damn Japan has it good in this timeline when it comes to territory and economic acquisitions lol. I'm guessing they're really busy making the Sphere look presentable from the outside while hiding a absolute pit of brutal business handling and zaibatsu arm pulling away from prying eyes. Japan would need to be ruthless to have any kind of control over Burma as an example.

 

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So what happened to India?

Divided between the Dominion of India (and its semi-autonomous dependencies, the Kingdoms of Hyderabad and Travancore and the Republics of Madras and Ceylon) and the Japanese puppet state Azad Hind:

 

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The campaign map for a Real-Time Tactics video game, set in an alternate universe where the CSA launches an invasion of the Pacific States, having built up troops on the Idaho border under the cover of military exercises in the summer of 1987.

The player fills the role of the overall commander of PSA forces in the Pacific Northwest, and is tasked with preventing CSA forces crossing the Rockies and reaching the highways to Seattle and Portland before Entente forces can be brought to bear and a ceasefire can be negotiated: initially reliant on a handful of doomed National Guard troops and civilian reservists augmented with the air cavalry and light armoured regiments based in Camp Merriam, increasingly powerful mechanised and heavy armour regiments (both PSA and Canadian) can be deployed as the campaign progresses.

 

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[Deleted member 82792]

What's Japan and China like?

 

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[Boneheaded_Bookkeeper]

Wow, Britain must have really messed up in India to get such a broad threat rating over so large an area.

And what the heck happened in the American Great Plains? Are warlords running it?