The More Things Change...

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The 21st century is a time of detente. The long nuclear standoff between the League of Nations and the Prague Pact shows signs of ending amicably, and it seems more possible that certain injustices that survived in the cracks of the long, cold, war may finally be remedied. Of course there are those who would call these injustices righteousness, and gather arms in anticipation of the world's attention being turned their way...

Key:

Major Powers:

Red: Prague Pact
Maroon: Socialist states allied with the Prague Pact
Light Purple: League of Nations
Dark Purple: League of Nations allies
Green: Republic of China
Yellow: United States
Orange: Reactionary Bloc

Nations of North America:
1 Pacifica
2 California
3 Texas Freezone
4 ASR (American Socialist Republic)
5 CSA (Confederate States of America)
6 Great Alaska
7 Quebec
8 The Endless Nation
9 Deseret
10 United States
11 Miami

Updates describing individual areas in more detail to follow

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And we start our global tour with:

California

California is a country of many names: Playground of the World, Golden State, SoCal, New Sodom, Land of Sin, and more. No matter the type of entertainment, California does it biggest and best (at least according to the Californians). What's beyond dispute is that this sunny stretch of North America is the capitol of the world's movie, pornography, television, music, gambling, and drug industries. Some may call it crass and bemoan it's influence on more traditional culture, but practically everyone watches, listens to, or imbibes something coming out of California. Tourists from around the world flock to see in person the golden land usually only glimpsed on their TV sets, and to take advantage of the friendly climate and beautiful beaches. Locals accept these pilgrims as their due, come to worship before the altar of global pop culture.

Of course there are disadvantages to having major industries based on things that would be felonies in many of your neighbors. Corruption is rife in California, and while claims that the country is run by organized crime are overblown, it's mainly because what would be considered criminal organizations elsewhere are simply upstanding members of the business community in California. Deseret in particular has warrants out for the arrest of a number of Californian CEO's, accused of dealing with smugglers who haul, pot, porn, alcohol, coffee, and various other prohibited items across the border. Even countries with less restrictive governments than the Mormons generally don't appreciate the eagerness with which California exports products banned elsewhere, though the exact products they worry about vary substantially from place to place.

California generally keeps out of global politics. None of their neighbors are much interested in conquest, and while they're firmly on the capitalist side of that global divide, they're content to let the League of Nations handle that particular fight. Locals are making too much money to have a revolution, and besides detente means more customers. California's closest 'ally,' if it can be called that, is the Texas Freezone, which is perhaps the only place on Earth more libertine than California, and much appreciated for it's ability to make California look like an ordinary nation. To the extent that the Freezone has a diplomatic presence abroad, it is through representatives of it's major interests working out of Californian embassies.

The one real diplomatic objective California does have is a fairly recent and very specific one: copyright protection. The content producers that so dominate California's economy always disapproved of the bootleg copies of their work circulating around the planet, but with the rise of the internet piracy has become an existential threat in the eyes of California legislators. It's bad enough when people in the rest of North America or the League download copies on the sly, but the real worry is the tendency in the socialist world to just make a copy of foreign intellectual property and post it on a government library site, hitting two birds with one stone by improving their people's quality of life while sticking it to those smarmy capitalists. Not being a global power in any area but culture California can't bring much direct pressure to bear, and of course countries that have stomached California pushing it's wares on them whether they want them or not have little interest in doing them any favors, but promises of favorable trade deals and even crack-downs on smugglers are starting to make headway.
 
I think the Southern United States would be divided off with pretty much the borders of the Confederate States of America.
 
Reactionary Bloc

To discuss the so called 'Reactionary Bloc' as being a single-entity, or even as a logical group to put countries in, has always been a bit absurd. The exact countries contained in the bloc is somewhat up for dispute, as is the level of coordination between even those countries firmly within the bloc. However, there is a sense in which the reactionaries are united: they are remnants of an older and rather different world order, who have no interest in adapting themselves the mores of more 'modern' nations. While the term 'reactionary bloc' is most commonly used as a propaganda tool by Soviet and League politicians, it is true that the various powers of the bloc have worked together on a number of occasions in order to preserve their existence in an increasingly hostile world – most famously in the 1960's with the bloc's coordinated nuclear program. Since then levels of cooperation and trust have waxed and waned between the bloc's members, but as relations thaw between the League of Nations and the Prague Pact many in the reactionary nations feel that they must draw together again if they're to survive the disapproval of a more united international community.
 
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.
 
Is "Endless Nation" a poetic name for a nation (as in, "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom") or is it a beautiful name for "wasteland"?
 
Is "Endless Nation" a poetic name for a nation (as in, "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom") or is it a beautiful name for "wasteland"?

I'm going to guess based on it's location that it is a Native American state so probably poetic in naming. Will also probably consist of a few cities but have a largely nomadic population resembling Mongolia? I must admit I am enjoying this TL. Alternate American states are always an interesting read.
 
The Endless Nation

The 1860's was the cradle and graveyard of North American nations. As the American Civil War (Second American Revolution) raged on and on in the east, forces in the west began to stir. The US Army was busy fighting a two front war, the Mormons in Deseret were rising up, and west coast was torn apart in a civil war of it's own. The few remaining independent Native American tribes saw that this time of chaos and disruption was their only chance to free themselves from the white man, and they took action. In a remote corner of the continent tribes living on territory that others claimed belonged to the United States or Canada, but that they knew had been theirs since time immemorial, rose up and declared their independence. In these sparsely populated lands it was relatively easy to drive out the few white settlers who wouldn't accept native rule, and to accept refugees from native populations all over the continent. Riders went out, telling any natives that they could find to abandon their reservations or supposedly guaranteed treaty lands, and follow them back to an endless nation of their brothers where they could hold their heads high. Tribes from every corner of North America made the journey, and while they may not have spoken the same language or had the same traditions, they were united by their experience of oppression and genocide, and their determination to stand firm in this last refuge.

By the time the war ended in 1869, the face of the continent was dramatically changed. The United States had lost the South and West, though it did have some compensation in it's conquest of much of Canada, after that nation had been foolish enough to follow it's colonial masters into a war supporting Southern independence. With all the losses, and the exhaustion of an 8 year long war, the US no longer had the stomach for yet another war just to conquer some stretch of distant badlands filled with a hostile foreign population. With their freedom assured, the peoples of the Endless Nation, as they styled themselves, set about forming a society out of the shattered remnants of a hundred nations.

The truly remarkable thing about the Endless Nation is it's genuine rejection of cultural modernity and homogenization. While the rest of the world has grown ever closer together in a Europeanized materialistic and individualistic model of civilization, the people of the Endless Nation have turned resolutely the other way, hewing to an utterly different social model. The central unit of society is not the individual, but the tribe. Each tribe of perhaps a hundred members belong to a larger tribe of tribes, which is in turn contained within a larger nation, which is one nation of several in the Endless Nation. Each tribe chooses a leader from among it's members, and those leaders come together to choose the chiefs of the larger tribes. Thus there is a clear chain of connection from the lowest tribesman to the highest authority in the land, through a chain of chief representatives in ever larger tribes. Government or arbitration of disputes is not conducted by some set standard of bureaucratic process, but by the lowest level of tribal authority able to contain all parts of an issue. For most matters a low level tribal chief, with the democratic ascent of his small tribe, is all that is necessary. For disputes among members of different tribes, they simply appeal up to the first chief to represent both nations. This breeds a more human and compassionate brand of justice, though one that seems arbitrary and unevenly carried out compared to the other nations of North America.

Of course there are those who fall through the cracks of such a system. Immigrants from elsewhere, people who have had a falling out with their tribal leadership, or simply those who feel stifled by living under traditional law, form a somewhat separate society outside of the tribal system. These people are largely left alone so long as they don't interfere with tribal matters, but they have no political power and few rights compared to those safely ensconced within a tribe. Still, many come, living in that vast arc of people from the Texas Freezone up through the Endless Nation to Alaska where borders matter little and anyone with a strong back can find a job working in some extraction industry for a decent wage to compensate for appalling safety conditions. In the Endless Nation such things are balanced with an unwillingness to despoil the land, but this is often overwhelmed by a tribe's willingness to rent out a bit of land for mining and have the money to buy imports from the outside world.

The Endless Nation is considered to be a poor country, and in most ways they are, but their stubborn adherence to a more traditional way of life at least avoids most of the truly awful instances of social collapse seen in parts of the third world where tribal systems fall away with nothing to replace them. There is a steady stream of emigrants leaving the nation to seek their fortunes elsewhere, but they are more than compensated for westerners arriving to seek enlightenment in a simpler form of life, and often bringing with them all their worldly wealth to give up for the use of their tribe (critics on both sides of the border deride this as buying ones way into a distorted idealized vision of primitive life). The Endless Nation exists orthogonal to the grand debates about capitalism and communism that rage across the world. In a sense they are more reactionary than any power of the Reactionary Bloc, but neither side exactly appreciates that comparison. The Endless Nation just desires to keep existing as apart from the rest of the world as they can. While some tribes now have TVs in their teepees and cell phones in their headsets, it's still possible to ride out into the plains and see nothing of modernity, and believe for a moment that this is the one true nation, cut loose from time and ordinary concerns – Endless.
 
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