CSA
The Confederate States of America was born in the 1860's when they seized their independence in what they call the Second American Revolution and their neighbors call the Southern Rebellion. However, the Confederates have fallen far since that moment of glorious victory, hanging onto just a coastal fringe of the continental empire they once commanded. The Confederacy is something of a pariah state, even among their Reactionary Bloc allies, due to the 'peculiar institution' that first prompted them to seek independence: slavery is alive and well in the CSA.
Even at the CSA's founding slavery was an anachronism, but by the early 20th it had become an absurdity. Nations that had once bought the CSA's exports and tacitly supported an institution they would never accept at home found it increasingly difficult to justify trading with slavers. As sanctions and condemnations mounted, in 1900 many believed that abolition might be just around the corner. While stopping short of actual abolition, a number of laws concerning proper treatment of slaves and the right of the small free black population were passed. While the old planter class was thoroughly resistant to change it seemed for a moment that a coalition of liberal intellectuals and working class whites might be able to overturn the old ways and bring about a brighter future. Perhaps they might have, but what progress they could produce was simply too slow, and by 1908 the prospects of peaceful change were dashed forever.
In the latter half of the 19th century Marxist ideals had grown increasingly popular in North America. Abraham Lincoln, the disgraced ex-President who lost the South, became a staunch advocate for socialism, wandering the country promoting a uniquely American brand of democratic socialism. While these ideals may have been interesting to people in the USA, it was in the CSA where they truly caught fire. Marxist texts, and Lincoln's simplified and Americanized versions, circulated from hand to hand among the dispossessed in the South. Nowhere was the conflict between workers and owners more stark than in a land where many workers WERE owned. Slaves of course desired their freedom, but even more significantly poor whites wanted a system where their wages weren't held down by competition with the enslaved population.
By the early 20th century the CSA was a powerkeg, and in 1908 a spark flared up in Mississippi. A particularly sadistic plantation owner ordered one whipping too many, and something snapped among his chattel. Soon the owner, his family, and a few overseers found themselves locked in a storage cellar, as their erstwhile property discussed what to do. At first the consensus was that they needed to get the hell out of their, splitting up and making a break for the American border. However, this plan was sufficiently impractical that when a more educated than average house slave started talking about Spartacus, Lincoln, and Dialectical Materialism, his friends listened.
By the time the Mississippi National Guard admitted that they couldn't handle the situation, a wildfire was burning that the underfunded Confederate Army couldn't stamp out. Parties of former slaves marched from plantation to plantation, adding to their ranks with each conquest. Where they might have once risen up to stomp out this largely black insurrection, the poor whites in the area largely stayed neutral – not exactly joining the revolution, but willing to let things take their course as long as it was those planter bastards who were being strung up. As news of all this spread throughout the country sympathetic riots flared in every city, and imitators rose up in state after state. By the time the dust settled the CSA had been torn in half, with the national government maintaining control of the Atlantic States, the Texas State government having held out in the west, US troops occupying Kentucky at the request of the state government there, and the communist rebels holding the center (as well as a splotch of territory in Southern Florida with a rather different ideology).
Forced to accept a humiliating peace negotiated by the US, Confederate leaders brooded in their reduced territory, and doubled down on repression. While the Third American Revolution, as it's participants sarcastically called it, had been a shock for the Confederate ruling class, it also proved essential to the survival of their system. Every plantation owner from Virginia to North Florida had relatives from the lost states staying in their houses regaling them with stories of their terrifying flight. It seemed every overblown talking point of the conservatives was correct – a moment's lapse in vigilance would allow the oppressed masses to rise up and slaughter their betters. Of course the whites who voluntarily remained in the brand new ASR would tell a somewhat different story, but who could trust those race traitors? For the next couple generations the tragic hero of every Confederate novel would be the heir to some Alabama plantation, forced to flee his home and now seeking his fortune in what remained of his homeland. The propaganda coup of a violent revolution not only improved the Confederate's resolve, but made them slightly more popular internationally. Even slaveholders can be sympathized with when their former property is spouting Marxist slogans and out for blood. This forbearance wouldn't last forever, but it was given a further boost by the outbreak of WWI, which put human rights issues on the back burner compared to the Entente's need for cheap North American raw materials. By the time the mood in the west once again turned against the CSA in the 1920's they'd had the time to dig in against future uprisings or international interventions.
For the next few decades the CSA largely sat out the great upheavals that wracked the rest of the world. Though they had some sympathy for the fascists in Europe, the CSA's leaders weren't so stupid as to go to war on behalf of allies separated by the whole of the Atlantic Ocean and the Royal Navy. Instead, they focused on maintaining domestic stability, which was challenge enough given the increasing Soviet support for the ASR. Concerns over communist expansion, of particular interest in the CSA for obvious reasons, prompted the creation of the so called 'reactionary bloc' in the 1960's which along with the CSA included Portugal, Spain, Japan, South Africa, Alaska, and Argentina. Caught between rising communist influence on one side and a League of Nation's that was for one reason or another unsympathetic to their plights, the reactionaries cooperated in a joint nuclear program, detonating their first bomb in the Alaskan wilderness in 1971. Since that breakthrough, and the proliferation of nuclear arms throughout the bloc, the CSA has added a nuclear deterrent to it's ever growing stockpile of reasons to expect their peculiar institution to last through the 21st century just as it lasted through the 20th: With blood, iron, and by the skin of it's teeth – but sticking in there nevertheless like a difficult to excise cancer.