The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
- Thread starter Augenis
- Start date
Considering the VFS' President (sorry, Democrat) got shot a while back, I wonder what succession procedures are there in the VFS if a Democrat dies in office.
Who knows. No emergency election was held after the attempt on Fredrik Koertsen's life, for the simple reason that he wasn't actually killed. So we'll never know what could have happened.
The Pacific Theater
“The advantage of geographical nearness to an enemy, or to the object of attack, is nowhere more apparent than in that form of warfare which has lately received the name of commerce-destroying, which the French call guerre de course. This operation of war, being directed against peaceful merchant vessels which are usually defenceless, calls for ships of small military force. Such ships, having little power to defend themselves, need a refuge or point of support near at hand; which will be found either in certain parts of the sea controlled by the fighting ships of their country, or in friendly harbors. The latter give the strongest support, because they are always in the same place, and the approaches to them are more familiar to the commerce-destroyer than to his enemy.”
-- A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
The spheres of influence in the Pacific. Not included in the map are Wamp’una Island [a], Rapa Nui, and the Topa Islands [0], which are all under Inca rule.
The Oceanian Revolution proved that the real cages didn’t enclose the Indian “tiger,” but the limited imaginations of the world’s statesmen. Lucknow had independently, unilaterally, and forcefully placed a massive continent under a Blue banner. Worse, Unitarianism’s new Pacific shore bordered several targets for the increasingly real threat of Indian aggression.
A Lusangese poster encouraging settlement in the Dongnanhai Islands. Such initiatives were generally very successful.
The first sign of trouble, in Lusang’s view, was that fishermen could no longer go looking for sea cucumbers without getting shot at. Since the 1700s, Lusangese and Malay fishermen had plied the waters off northern Oceania and conducted trade with the local natives to gain sea cucumbers, which the Chinese and Japanese believed to have strong and valuable medicinal powers. The Britannians allowed this trade to happen freely at first— they didn’t control northern Oceania as strongly as the north and east, and felt that abolishing the lucrative trade would turn the native Oceanians against their colonial rulers— but placed increasing restrictions on it over the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Oceanian Unitarians, however, were far more paranoid about the level of control they had over the lands they claimed, and enforced the maritime border between Oceania and Lusang quite strictly. The Lusangese government didn’t wish to start a war over this— after all, the Oceanians had restricted themselves to firing warning shots and ultimately killed no Lusangese fishermen— and restricted its own considerable merchant and fishing fleets from traveling too far south. Expecting that the Oceanians would someday attempt to expand their territory— just like every other Unitarian state that reached a certain level of stability and maturity— the Lusangese also upgraded the fortifications on their southern islands (including Aozhou [1]) and on the islands of Dongnanhai [2] in the east.
The peoples of the islands under the Emperor’s rule had possessed naval traditions for centuries, and Lusangese fishermen and had charted the waters of western Dongnanhai for almost two decades by the time the Wanzhe Emperor acceded to the throne. Wanzhe’s transformation of Lusang into a naval power did, however, bring these charted regions and unknown ones further to the east under the state’s control during the first two decades of the 1900s. The Lusangese Navy was originally responsible for governing the islands of Dongnanhai, and the headquarters of the military government was established in Koror, on the island of Zhudao [3]. Sailors stationed in smaller centers on the outlying islands reported back to Koror through periodic trips by boat. The native islanders were, to an extent, integrated into this new system— anticipating the eventual transfer of power to civilian authorities, the Navy created schools for the native population and training programs for future bureaucrats. However, the pace of demographic, economic, and social change in Dongnanhai eventually grew so fast that, by the 1930s and 1940s, the natives had become strange minorities in their own lands.
The Dongnanhai sugar industry appeared fated for failure. Lusangese investors knew little about sugar production and made bad investments in companies that folded soon after their establishment. By 1915, however, Li Siyang partnered with Gumbay Pendatun, a Muslim from Mindanao, to establish the Dongnanhai Sugar Company (東南海糖公行, Dongnanhai Tang Gonghang). Dongtang established sugar plantations quickly by importing willing and skilled tenant farmers from the Visayas and Mindanao instead of recruiting local islanders unfamiliar with sugar production or plantation monoculture. Other companies developed in Dongnanhai around particular specialities, usually to serve the needs of the increasingly numerous Lusangese settler population. After sugar, copra (dried coconut meat) was the second-most lucrative cash crop in the islands. Copra could be used as feed for livestock, or grated and boiled to extract coconut oil. Meanwhile, fishing fleets plied the waters every day, and sold their wares directly to sprawling fish markets or to the fish processing plants that were set up on the larger islands. Zhudao earned its name through enormous harvests of pearls and mother-of-pearl. The Navy handled the shipping of mail and cargo to and from Dongnanhai and the Lusangese heartland. As such industries grew, the need for improvements to port and harbor facilities did as well. These improvements, once implemented, facilitated further shipping and colonization.
By 1937, air travel had been established between most of Lusang’s major regions, with airports built on Dongnanhai’s larger islands. Development had reached international standards, with a network of elected and appointed civilian officials taking over the Navy’s efforts to promote public works, health and sanitation, agriculture, infrastructure, industry, safety, and justice. However, the natives’ opinions on these seemingly positive changes ranged from ambivalence to strong disapproval. Airplanes that landed in Koror found a thoroughly Lusangese city, in which Chinese and Tagalog were the main languages of public life. The population of Saipan, the economic and administrative center of northern Dongnanhai, was almost 90% Lusangese. Settlers and immigrants made up a significant part of Pohnpei Island’s population as well. The natives were free to participate in this system, and to be as educated and wealthy as any subject of the Emperor, but the system didn’t necessarily depend on their participation. The transformation of Dongnanhai did not depend on the assimilation of the natives— if sufficient native labor could not be found for a venture, then workers, managers, and investors could simply be imported from elsewhere. The system established itself, swelled until it filled the whole world of Dongnanhai, and then presented the natives with the choice of joining it wholeheartedly or imposing a cultural and economic exile upon themselves.
The fortification of Dongnanhai required the importation of soldiers. While the local civil and military defense forces generally regarded native customs with respect and sought not to anger them, the imported soldiers saw the natives as potential fifth columns for Oceanian invasion. The insults of the military garrisons soon gave the native chiefs and commoners alike plenty of reasons to complain to Koror.
When asked about the situation in the South Pacific in 1951, Admiral Cheng Tianyu of the Lusangese Navy replied that “it has become commonplace in Tongduo [4] to joke about how the Ocean of Great Peace was named prematurely.” A contemporary observer could easily believe that Lucknow and its allies intended to prove the Admiral right.
The flag of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
As the Britannian empire collapsed on all the Pacific’s shores, the volume of naval traffic in the Pacific decreased. Unable to gain as much funding from port taxes as it used to, the Britannian protectorate of Hawaii faced severe financial troubles. Angered by their commanders’ inability to guarantee the payment of their salaries and the Britannian Resident in Honolulu’s imposition of “Troubles Taxes” to pay for London’s efforts at recovery, a wide coalition of sailors began a mutiny in Honolulu Harbor. Though “English” sailors who identified as such were unsupportive of the mutineers’ demands, they were outnumbered by native Hawaiians, haole (locally-born whites, usually the descendants of Celts) islanders, and crewmen of mixed race. The spirit of revolt soon spread to the dockworkers and the wider city, each of whom had their own grievances against the Britannians. The Honolulu civil police force, which was not integrated into the Britannian chain of command, did nothing to prevent this fire from spreading, and even helped to detain the Resident in Honolulu. The Hawaiian Revolution of 1950 ended with a new government of Hawaiian Marines, sailors, businessmen, and traditional chiefs (who still commanded the native populace’s deep respect) in custody of Honolulu and most of the Royal Navy’s Hawaiian fleet. After receiving notes of surrender from the tiny and isolated Britannian garrisons in Oahu, the ruling coalition declared John Kana’ina— a descendant of the old Hawaiian kings who had accrued much popularity as the Chief Surgeon of Honolulu General Hospital— as King Kamehameha VI of the restored Kingdom of Hawaii. The newly-constituted Hawaiian Navy ensured that the figurehead sovereign’s writ ran to all the islands of Hawaii’s traditional territory and the new acquisitions of Midway Island and Johnston Atoll. All who were dissatisfied with the new state of affairs were allowed to repossess most of their movable property and given a one-way ticket to Jamestown, the capital of New England.
The French-trained troops of a Samoan ali’i.
The Hawaiian kingdom, eager to build good relations with local powers and avoid the financial troubles of its predecessor, scrapped the old provisions against allowing the ships of Britannia’s rivals to use the islands’ ports. The French, who has previously considered conquering those same ports for their own exclusive use, took Honolulu’s olive branch for what it was and redoubled on their undeclared war against the Oceanian republic— or, more accurately, the Turkish-led pirates operating under the Oceanian flag.
In the early months of 1949, when the Oceanian Civil War began to turn especially deadly, French scouts noted an anomalous development. The Oceanian Unitarians were still struggling to break out of eastern Oceania Major [5], and Benedict Scrooge’s forces held them off from the democratic-nationalist strongholds in the south of the great continent. Despite the stalemate on land, however, the Unitarians enjoyed uninterrupted success at sea. Britannian New Guinea, the Baronial Islands [6], and New Ireland [7] all fell to the Oceanian navy, which appeared to have a strength beyond any possessed by the remaining Oceanian fleet of the Royal Navy, which was beaten back to Wallace [8] and the Aardman Islands [9]. Sustained surveillance revealed that most of the vessels in the “Oceanian navy” were of Turkish make. Questioning of the refugees who sailed from the Oceanian-ruled islands and were rescued by French vessels confirmed the wider Unitarian movement’s involvement in the Oceanian revolution. The Reynaud Report, compiled in March 1949, detailed the almost wholesale transfer of the defunct Union’s naval units— which had defected to India as the War of the Danube wound down— to Oceanian service. Turkish submarine crews, who had become infamous as unfeeling hunters of the Visegradian refugees from Tripolitania, now applied their not-insignificant experience in a new theater. The Résident-Général in Apia, who served as the head of government and commander-in-chief in the French Pacific, ordered the establishment of French control over Fiji before the Oceanians could arrive, and the regular delivery of aid to the Britannian ships that still held out in the Aardman Islands. The Unitarians naturally objected to this foreign intrusion on “rightfully Oceanian” territory, but were under strict orders to avoid attacking any non-Britannian vessels. The Indians didn’t want their incursion into the Britannian Pacific to spiral out of hand, and in this respect they were quite similar to the French. The Britannian Royal Navy did most of the actual fighting, and the French relegated themselves to keeping the Britannians in the game through steadfast support from and cooperation with the French.
It is possible to argue that France’s intervention in the Oceanian conflict was the latest in a long series of similar ventures upon which the French empire in Oceanesia [10] had been built. Rival rulers and peoples in the islands had long waged wars with spears and war clubs (but, notably, not with bows and arrows). The arrival of European sailors, and the experience with modern weapons and warfare that they brought, intensified these struggles. Stalemates were shot to bits by white mercenaries in the employ of traditional chiefs with ambitions of paramount kingship. Sometimes, different factions of Europeans faced off against each other— British and French traders and soldiers were often equally assimilated into the fabric of Oceanesian society, but their traditional sectarianism animated many battles between warring chiefs. In the late 1800s, the French government, which sought friendly waystations on the Pacific route between New France and Indochina, used many of these conflicts as pretexts to annex or impose protectorates over local societies. Samoa was the first to fall, and from the European settlement near Apia the French ranged forward to conquer Tonga to the south and a range of islands and atolls in the north.
Despite the French establishment of strong political and economic structures over most of their Pacific possessions, Native Oceanesians constituted the majority of the population on every island. In Samoa and Tonga, the traditional ali’i chiefs still possessed the mana, or divine inspiration, which they inherited from their godly ancestors. The Samoan and Tongan kingdoms had been adversaries in the past (the Samoan king’s title of Malietoa was a reference to a great fight against Tongan invaders), and both peoples identified as separate nations. However, the militarization and taxes imposed by the French to carry on their war against the Oceanians fell equally heavily upon both. The French fleet contained crew members of Samoan and Tongan descent, and the death of these native sons at sea fostered a sense of common destiny among both peoples. In Fiji, the Bau chieftains had once ruled as kings, and still held much power during the period of Britannian rule. Their cooperation was essential for the speedy establishment of French control over Fiji, but was only gained through Apia’s granting of economic and political concessions. This strengthened the Bau position in the short term, but in time they would be viewed as self-interested collaborators by Fijian commoners unable to emulate the chiefs’ success. Profits from the whaling industry near Tonga, in which crews of natives and Europeans hunted sperm whales and humpbacks for their oil and spermaceti, had once been doled out by the French to ensure political quietism. The age of electricity, however, had decimated this industry, and nothing of similar profit-making capacity had arisen in French Oceanesia in the decades since.
Demands for outright independence were uncommon among the Oceanesians, and heavily discouraged by the French. They would, however, become more significant in in later years.
A ship of the Royal Navy’s Oceanic fleet. It is one of the last remnants of the once-extensive Britannian empire in the Pacific.
Britannia was no stranger to the Pacific. While the Dutch and the Portuguese had charted the Pacific quite extensively, assembling trade empires with the strength of gold and cannon, the Britannians had been the first to extensively chart the islands of the South Pacific. They established the first long-term colonial empire of the Pacific in the 1700s and early 1800s, at a time when the French barely even thought about conquering the Khmer kingdom with troops from New France. The war against the Unitarians was, for the more dedicated Britannian nationalists and even some of the less dedicated ones, a war to keep intact in an age of sin that which had been built by the heroic figures of a more noble time. With the fall of Bedford [11], the last holdout of the Oceanian democratic-nationalist forces, the remnants of Benedict Scrooge’s military forces commandeered the remaining warships and stolen civilian vessels at their disposal and set out for Prester’s Port [12], the chief settlement of the Aardman Islands. Bolstered further by forcefully-recruited refugees of all races from Oceania, the resultant force, which identified as the Royal Navy of the Kingdom of Britannia in all communications with outsiders, tenaciously drove the Unitarians back from the last remnants of Britannian Oceania. Admiral Nigel Griffin presided over an "navy with a state", in which the traditional resource-extraction tools of the colonial government were reconfigured to finance Griffin’s war for survival. The French offered to sell warships to Griffin, but the Admiral had grown to prefer ships on the model of the Oceanesians’ traditional canoes. These small boats— sleek, fast, and filled with 20 or 30 raiders each— had brought down many a Dutch, Portuguese, or even Britannian treasure ship through tenacity and force of numbers. When enough Unitarian ships had been raided, stolen, or sabotaged, he planned to bring out the warships and carry out traditional pitched battles against the remaining Unitarian naval forces.
Not all the islanders, though, were happy about being ruled by warlords waging a marine guerilla campaign. The forced impressment of refugees as crewmen in Griffin’s ships was especially insulting because the Britannians in Oceania, disregarding the orders of London, had long practiced a king of indentured servitude known as blackbirding. Merchants in New Guinea, the Baronials, and the Aardmans oversaw the illegal but pervasive transfer of thousands of men to Oceania Major, where they worked on farms and plantations. If they survived their ordeals, they could go home. However, the experience never truly left these men behind. Worse still, the lighter-skinned Oceanesians were never recruited for such tasks; it fell upon the darker-skinned Gorgonesians [13] to fill the Britannians’ labor quotas.
In Oceania’s and the Royal Navy’s portions of Gorgonesia, a new identity had steadily developed. Important to this development was the standardization of Gorgonesian Pidgin, a stable and remarkably uniform creole language that encapsulated the common heritage of the Gorgonesians, and their more recent shared history of violence and subjection. The Britannians had long sought to co-opt this identity: the Catholic priests of the islands first standardized the language and its Latin-based writing system as a means of translating the Bible and commentaries on Puritan theology. Admiral Griffin authorized the creation of a “Gorgonesian Battalion” near the end of 1950. Much like the Legion of Archangel Michael, however, this force strained to escape the narrow ambitions of its creators. “Onward to Honiara,” the motto of the Battalion, invoked Honiara’s name to mean something other than the economic center of the Baronial Islands. The motto invoked the geographical centrality that placed Honiara in easy reach of every island of Gorgonesia, and the Pidgin literature that its writers had produced before the Oceanian Civil War— in other words, the qualities that made it suitable as a future national capital.
The city hall of Patamarca, Tahiti’s most prominent settlement. Designed in the Vespucian Modernist style, this behemoth of concrete and glass is a potent reminder of Inca presence.
France’s dominions walled the Oceanian Unitarians off from the Sapa Inka’s islands, and so Cusco did not seriously think that the Oceanians could disrupt its control of eastern Oceanesia. The Inca had leveraged the traditional system of chiefs in Oceanesia in a manner which recalled the statecraft of Pachacuti and Tupac Yupanqui. The Tahitian chiefs were required to send their heirs to Cusco to study in Inca schools and learn Inca ways, and were sent back home upon reaching adulthood. Many, however, stayed in the service of their adoptive fatherland by serving in the Inca navy or coast guard. Co-opting the traditional power structures in Oceanesia gave the Inca enormous influence over the population as a whole, and this was especially effective in Tahiti, whose sophisticated political and religious systems were underpinned by the mana of the king— who ruled as a vassal of the Sapa Inka— and his power to impose tapu, or prohibitions on particular activities. The Incas eagerly built on this control by erecting visible reminders of their rule. The naval base on Wamp’una Island was both massive and modern. A similar structure on Niue, built by the French on land leased to them by Cusco, was nonetheless an impressive structure that demonstrated the Inca ability to dispense with the land as they saw fit.
In the event that the control was seriously challenged, the Inca retained a justified confidence in the ability of their navy to defeat the Oceanians in a one-on-one fight, and to beat a fighting retreat if the Indians chose to intervene directly.
The flag of the Unitarian Republic of Oceania.
A notable feature of Harold Stassen’s new government, ensconced in the colonial-era capital of Saint Anselm [14] since 1949, was that it billed itself as a “Unitarian Republic of Oceania,” not a “Union.” Stassen, meanwhile, abandoned the title of “Chairman” for “Democrat.” These developments indicate a shift in Revolutionary Unitarianism, a self-confident ideology that had been dealt a decimating blow by the War of the Danube. The Republican rhetoric of Stassen’s Oceania, which also cropped up in speeches and internal memoranda, can be read as an effort by authoritarians to associate themselves with the Democratic Unitarian movement, which enjoyed greater success and popularity in Europe at a lower cost in blood and resources. In the short term, however, pretensions to Republicanism had little effect on the internal administration of Oceania, which largely adopted the Indian model.
For Oceania, consolidation meant reconquering the seas as well as the land. After ejecting the last of Scrooge’s democratic nationalist forces from the city of Bedford on New Anglesey [15], Democrat Harold Stassen pledged that all of Britannia’s old Pacific territories would be painted as rightfully Oceanian on domestically-produced maps. The French conquest of Fiji initiated a period of anti-French sentiment in Oceania, which the Turkish, Indian, and Khmer advisors to the government generally encouraged. At their suggestion, Democrat Stassen proclaimed “solidarity with the oppressed peoples under French rule” in an incendiary speech on New Years’ Eve, 1950. Whether this meant only Fiji or all the Pacific Islands under French rule was purposely left unclear.
Harold Stassen, First Democrat of Oceania. He is not yet an infamous man, but who knows what the future holds?
[a] Pitcairn Island.
[0] Galapagos Islands.
[1] The name for the Lusangese parts of northwestern New Guinea. The name “New Guinea” is generally reserved for the Britannian part.
[2] The zone of the Pacific under Lusangese control; generally coterminous with the region of Micronesia. Dongnanhai (東南海) means “Southeast Sea” in Chinese.
[3] Palau. Zhudao (珠島) means “pearl island” in Chinese.
[4] Manila.
[5] The Australian continent.
[6] The Solomon Islands.
[7] New Caledonia.
[8] Nauru.
[9] Vanuatu.
[10] TTL’s term for Polynesia, but not Micronesia or Melanesia.
[11] Auckland.
[12] Port-Vila, the OTL capital of Vanuatu.
[13] “Gorgonesia” is OTL Melanesia. The name, based on the taxonomic name for a family of corals, is a reference to the nearby Coral Sea.
[14] Brisbane. Located on Australia’s eastern side and within easy reach of New Zealand and other Pacific Islands, it’s a good place to put the capital of Oceania.
[15] New Zealand’s North Island.
-- A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
The spheres of influence in the Pacific. Not included in the map are Wamp’una Island [a], Rapa Nui, and the Topa Islands [0], which are all under Inca rule.
The Pacific Theater (1948 - 1951)
The War of the Danube was waged atop the landmasses of Central and Southern Europe, but the fate of Europe’s waters was also at stake. If the Confederation of Unitarian States managed to replace Visegrad on the European stage while taking cues from the Turks behind the screen, the Unitarian Commonwealth would have secured control of the Eastern Mediterranean, the great commercial artery of the Danube, and distant outposts on the southern Baltic shore. However, the German hammer soon fell savagely upon the CUS and eventually the Union itself, making the Mediterranean a lake of democratic (or at least, not entirely absolutist) nations. India, the last remaining Blue state, appeared unlikely to mimic the aggression of Constantinople and Kyoto. The expulsion of the doomed Japanese state from the Commonwealth and the abandonment of the Unitarian government in Baghdad showed that if the likely rewards of a military adventure couldn’t justify the possible dangers and costs, Lucknow would not pursue it. After the end of the Second Turkish Civil War in the 1945 and the “Hajj of Victory” later that year, the leaders of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia considered it likely that India, now without allies to raise its chances of success in war, no longer posed a threat to the rest of the world. Proponents of this “Caged Tiger” theory believed that India, pragmatic as it was, was ultimately incapable of audacity. Its influence had been contained within the northern Indian Ocean, and could steadily be chipped away from the peripheries.
The Oceanian Revolution proved that the real cages didn’t enclose the Indian “tiger,” but the limited imaginations of the world’s statesmen. Lucknow had independently, unilaterally, and forcefully placed a massive continent under a Blue banner. Worse, Unitarianism’s new Pacific shore bordered several targets for the increasingly real threat of Indian aggression.
A Lusangese poster encouraging settlement in the Dongnanhai Islands. Such initiatives were generally very successful.
The first sign of trouble, in Lusang’s view, was that fishermen could no longer go looking for sea cucumbers without getting shot at. Since the 1700s, Lusangese and Malay fishermen had plied the waters off northern Oceania and conducted trade with the local natives to gain sea cucumbers, which the Chinese and Japanese believed to have strong and valuable medicinal powers. The Britannians allowed this trade to happen freely at first— they didn’t control northern Oceania as strongly as the north and east, and felt that abolishing the lucrative trade would turn the native Oceanians against their colonial rulers— but placed increasing restrictions on it over the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Oceanian Unitarians, however, were far more paranoid about the level of control they had over the lands they claimed, and enforced the maritime border between Oceania and Lusang quite strictly. The Lusangese government didn’t wish to start a war over this— after all, the Oceanians had restricted themselves to firing warning shots and ultimately killed no Lusangese fishermen— and restricted its own considerable merchant and fishing fleets from traveling too far south. Expecting that the Oceanians would someday attempt to expand their territory— just like every other Unitarian state that reached a certain level of stability and maturity— the Lusangese also upgraded the fortifications on their southern islands (including Aozhou [1]) and on the islands of Dongnanhai [2] in the east.
The peoples of the islands under the Emperor’s rule had possessed naval traditions for centuries, and Lusangese fishermen and had charted the waters of western Dongnanhai for almost two decades by the time the Wanzhe Emperor acceded to the throne. Wanzhe’s transformation of Lusang into a naval power did, however, bring these charted regions and unknown ones further to the east under the state’s control during the first two decades of the 1900s. The Lusangese Navy was originally responsible for governing the islands of Dongnanhai, and the headquarters of the military government was established in Koror, on the island of Zhudao [3]. Sailors stationed in smaller centers on the outlying islands reported back to Koror through periodic trips by boat. The native islanders were, to an extent, integrated into this new system— anticipating the eventual transfer of power to civilian authorities, the Navy created schools for the native population and training programs for future bureaucrats. However, the pace of demographic, economic, and social change in Dongnanhai eventually grew so fast that, by the 1930s and 1940s, the natives had become strange minorities in their own lands.
The Dongnanhai sugar industry appeared fated for failure. Lusangese investors knew little about sugar production and made bad investments in companies that folded soon after their establishment. By 1915, however, Li Siyang partnered with Gumbay Pendatun, a Muslim from Mindanao, to establish the Dongnanhai Sugar Company (東南海糖公行, Dongnanhai Tang Gonghang). Dongtang established sugar plantations quickly by importing willing and skilled tenant farmers from the Visayas and Mindanao instead of recruiting local islanders unfamiliar with sugar production or plantation monoculture. Other companies developed in Dongnanhai around particular specialities, usually to serve the needs of the increasingly numerous Lusangese settler population. After sugar, copra (dried coconut meat) was the second-most lucrative cash crop in the islands. Copra could be used as feed for livestock, or grated and boiled to extract coconut oil. Meanwhile, fishing fleets plied the waters every day, and sold their wares directly to sprawling fish markets or to the fish processing plants that were set up on the larger islands. Zhudao earned its name through enormous harvests of pearls and mother-of-pearl. The Navy handled the shipping of mail and cargo to and from Dongnanhai and the Lusangese heartland. As such industries grew, the need for improvements to port and harbor facilities did as well. These improvements, once implemented, facilitated further shipping and colonization.
By 1937, air travel had been established between most of Lusang’s major regions, with airports built on Dongnanhai’s larger islands. Development had reached international standards, with a network of elected and appointed civilian officials taking over the Navy’s efforts to promote public works, health and sanitation, agriculture, infrastructure, industry, safety, and justice. However, the natives’ opinions on these seemingly positive changes ranged from ambivalence to strong disapproval. Airplanes that landed in Koror found a thoroughly Lusangese city, in which Chinese and Tagalog were the main languages of public life. The population of Saipan, the economic and administrative center of northern Dongnanhai, was almost 90% Lusangese. Settlers and immigrants made up a significant part of Pohnpei Island’s population as well. The natives were free to participate in this system, and to be as educated and wealthy as any subject of the Emperor, but the system didn’t necessarily depend on their participation. The transformation of Dongnanhai did not depend on the assimilation of the natives— if sufficient native labor could not be found for a venture, then workers, managers, and investors could simply be imported from elsewhere. The system established itself, swelled until it filled the whole world of Dongnanhai, and then presented the natives with the choice of joining it wholeheartedly or imposing a cultural and economic exile upon themselves.
The fortification of Dongnanhai required the importation of soldiers. While the local civil and military defense forces generally regarded native customs with respect and sought not to anger them, the imported soldiers saw the natives as potential fifth columns for Oceanian invasion. The insults of the military garrisons soon gave the native chiefs and commoners alike plenty of reasons to complain to Koror.
When asked about the situation in the South Pacific in 1951, Admiral Cheng Tianyu of the Lusangese Navy replied that “it has become commonplace in Tongduo [4] to joke about how the Ocean of Great Peace was named prematurely.” A contemporary observer could easily believe that Lucknow and its allies intended to prove the Admiral right.
The flag of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
As the Britannian empire collapsed on all the Pacific’s shores, the volume of naval traffic in the Pacific decreased. Unable to gain as much funding from port taxes as it used to, the Britannian protectorate of Hawaii faced severe financial troubles. Angered by their commanders’ inability to guarantee the payment of their salaries and the Britannian Resident in Honolulu’s imposition of “Troubles Taxes” to pay for London’s efforts at recovery, a wide coalition of sailors began a mutiny in Honolulu Harbor. Though “English” sailors who identified as such were unsupportive of the mutineers’ demands, they were outnumbered by native Hawaiians, haole (locally-born whites, usually the descendants of Celts) islanders, and crewmen of mixed race. The spirit of revolt soon spread to the dockworkers and the wider city, each of whom had their own grievances against the Britannians. The Honolulu civil police force, which was not integrated into the Britannian chain of command, did nothing to prevent this fire from spreading, and even helped to detain the Resident in Honolulu. The Hawaiian Revolution of 1950 ended with a new government of Hawaiian Marines, sailors, businessmen, and traditional chiefs (who still commanded the native populace’s deep respect) in custody of Honolulu and most of the Royal Navy’s Hawaiian fleet. After receiving notes of surrender from the tiny and isolated Britannian garrisons in Oahu, the ruling coalition declared John Kana’ina— a descendant of the old Hawaiian kings who had accrued much popularity as the Chief Surgeon of Honolulu General Hospital— as King Kamehameha VI of the restored Kingdom of Hawaii. The newly-constituted Hawaiian Navy ensured that the figurehead sovereign’s writ ran to all the islands of Hawaii’s traditional territory and the new acquisitions of Midway Island and Johnston Atoll. All who were dissatisfied with the new state of affairs were allowed to repossess most of their movable property and given a one-way ticket to Jamestown, the capital of New England.
The French-trained troops of a Samoan ali’i.
The Hawaiian kingdom, eager to build good relations with local powers and avoid the financial troubles of its predecessor, scrapped the old provisions against allowing the ships of Britannia’s rivals to use the islands’ ports. The French, who has previously considered conquering those same ports for their own exclusive use, took Honolulu’s olive branch for what it was and redoubled on their undeclared war against the Oceanian republic— or, more accurately, the Turkish-led pirates operating under the Oceanian flag.
In the early months of 1949, when the Oceanian Civil War began to turn especially deadly, French scouts noted an anomalous development. The Oceanian Unitarians were still struggling to break out of eastern Oceania Major [5], and Benedict Scrooge’s forces held them off from the democratic-nationalist strongholds in the south of the great continent. Despite the stalemate on land, however, the Unitarians enjoyed uninterrupted success at sea. Britannian New Guinea, the Baronial Islands [6], and New Ireland [7] all fell to the Oceanian navy, which appeared to have a strength beyond any possessed by the remaining Oceanian fleet of the Royal Navy, which was beaten back to Wallace [8] and the Aardman Islands [9]. Sustained surveillance revealed that most of the vessels in the “Oceanian navy” were of Turkish make. Questioning of the refugees who sailed from the Oceanian-ruled islands and were rescued by French vessels confirmed the wider Unitarian movement’s involvement in the Oceanian revolution. The Reynaud Report, compiled in March 1949, detailed the almost wholesale transfer of the defunct Union’s naval units— which had defected to India as the War of the Danube wound down— to Oceanian service. Turkish submarine crews, who had become infamous as unfeeling hunters of the Visegradian refugees from Tripolitania, now applied their not-insignificant experience in a new theater. The Résident-Général in Apia, who served as the head of government and commander-in-chief in the French Pacific, ordered the establishment of French control over Fiji before the Oceanians could arrive, and the regular delivery of aid to the Britannian ships that still held out in the Aardman Islands. The Unitarians naturally objected to this foreign intrusion on “rightfully Oceanian” territory, but were under strict orders to avoid attacking any non-Britannian vessels. The Indians didn’t want their incursion into the Britannian Pacific to spiral out of hand, and in this respect they were quite similar to the French. The Britannian Royal Navy did most of the actual fighting, and the French relegated themselves to keeping the Britannians in the game through steadfast support from and cooperation with the French.
It is possible to argue that France’s intervention in the Oceanian conflict was the latest in a long series of similar ventures upon which the French empire in Oceanesia [10] had been built. Rival rulers and peoples in the islands had long waged wars with spears and war clubs (but, notably, not with bows and arrows). The arrival of European sailors, and the experience with modern weapons and warfare that they brought, intensified these struggles. Stalemates were shot to bits by white mercenaries in the employ of traditional chiefs with ambitions of paramount kingship. Sometimes, different factions of Europeans faced off against each other— British and French traders and soldiers were often equally assimilated into the fabric of Oceanesian society, but their traditional sectarianism animated many battles between warring chiefs. In the late 1800s, the French government, which sought friendly waystations on the Pacific route between New France and Indochina, used many of these conflicts as pretexts to annex or impose protectorates over local societies. Samoa was the first to fall, and from the European settlement near Apia the French ranged forward to conquer Tonga to the south and a range of islands and atolls in the north.
Despite the French establishment of strong political and economic structures over most of their Pacific possessions, Native Oceanesians constituted the majority of the population on every island. In Samoa and Tonga, the traditional ali’i chiefs still possessed the mana, or divine inspiration, which they inherited from their godly ancestors. The Samoan and Tongan kingdoms had been adversaries in the past (the Samoan king’s title of Malietoa was a reference to a great fight against Tongan invaders), and both peoples identified as separate nations. However, the militarization and taxes imposed by the French to carry on their war against the Oceanians fell equally heavily upon both. The French fleet contained crew members of Samoan and Tongan descent, and the death of these native sons at sea fostered a sense of common destiny among both peoples. In Fiji, the Bau chieftains had once ruled as kings, and still held much power during the period of Britannian rule. Their cooperation was essential for the speedy establishment of French control over Fiji, but was only gained through Apia’s granting of economic and political concessions. This strengthened the Bau position in the short term, but in time they would be viewed as self-interested collaborators by Fijian commoners unable to emulate the chiefs’ success. Profits from the whaling industry near Tonga, in which crews of natives and Europeans hunted sperm whales and humpbacks for their oil and spermaceti, had once been doled out by the French to ensure political quietism. The age of electricity, however, had decimated this industry, and nothing of similar profit-making capacity had arisen in French Oceanesia in the decades since.
Demands for outright independence were uncommon among the Oceanesians, and heavily discouraged by the French. They would, however, become more significant in in later years.
A ship of the Royal Navy’s Oceanic fleet. It is one of the last remnants of the once-extensive Britannian empire in the Pacific.
Not all the islanders, though, were happy about being ruled by warlords waging a marine guerilla campaign. The forced impressment of refugees as crewmen in Griffin’s ships was especially insulting because the Britannians in Oceania, disregarding the orders of London, had long practiced a king of indentured servitude known as blackbirding. Merchants in New Guinea, the Baronials, and the Aardmans oversaw the illegal but pervasive transfer of thousands of men to Oceania Major, where they worked on farms and plantations. If they survived their ordeals, they could go home. However, the experience never truly left these men behind. Worse still, the lighter-skinned Oceanesians were never recruited for such tasks; it fell upon the darker-skinned Gorgonesians [13] to fill the Britannians’ labor quotas.
In Oceania’s and the Royal Navy’s portions of Gorgonesia, a new identity had steadily developed. Important to this development was the standardization of Gorgonesian Pidgin, a stable and remarkably uniform creole language that encapsulated the common heritage of the Gorgonesians, and their more recent shared history of violence and subjection. The Britannians had long sought to co-opt this identity: the Catholic priests of the islands first standardized the language and its Latin-based writing system as a means of translating the Bible and commentaries on Puritan theology. Admiral Griffin authorized the creation of a “Gorgonesian Battalion” near the end of 1950. Much like the Legion of Archangel Michael, however, this force strained to escape the narrow ambitions of its creators. “Onward to Honiara,” the motto of the Battalion, invoked Honiara’s name to mean something other than the economic center of the Baronial Islands. The motto invoked the geographical centrality that placed Honiara in easy reach of every island of Gorgonesia, and the Pidgin literature that its writers had produced before the Oceanian Civil War— in other words, the qualities that made it suitable as a future national capital.
The city hall of Patamarca, Tahiti’s most prominent settlement. Designed in the Vespucian Modernist style, this behemoth of concrete and glass is a potent reminder of Inca presence.
France’s dominions walled the Oceanian Unitarians off from the Sapa Inka’s islands, and so Cusco did not seriously think that the Oceanians could disrupt its control of eastern Oceanesia. The Inca had leveraged the traditional system of chiefs in Oceanesia in a manner which recalled the statecraft of Pachacuti and Tupac Yupanqui. The Tahitian chiefs were required to send their heirs to Cusco to study in Inca schools and learn Inca ways, and were sent back home upon reaching adulthood. Many, however, stayed in the service of their adoptive fatherland by serving in the Inca navy or coast guard. Co-opting the traditional power structures in Oceanesia gave the Inca enormous influence over the population as a whole, and this was especially effective in Tahiti, whose sophisticated political and religious systems were underpinned by the mana of the king— who ruled as a vassal of the Sapa Inka— and his power to impose tapu, or prohibitions on particular activities. The Incas eagerly built on this control by erecting visible reminders of their rule. The naval base on Wamp’una Island was both massive and modern. A similar structure on Niue, built by the French on land leased to them by Cusco, was nonetheless an impressive structure that demonstrated the Inca ability to dispense with the land as they saw fit.
In the event that the control was seriously challenged, the Inca retained a justified confidence in the ability of their navy to defeat the Oceanians in a one-on-one fight, and to beat a fighting retreat if the Indians chose to intervene directly.
The flag of the Unitarian Republic of Oceania.
A notable feature of Harold Stassen’s new government, ensconced in the colonial-era capital of Saint Anselm [14] since 1949, was that it billed itself as a “Unitarian Republic of Oceania,” not a “Union.” Stassen, meanwhile, abandoned the title of “Chairman” for “Democrat.” These developments indicate a shift in Revolutionary Unitarianism, a self-confident ideology that had been dealt a decimating blow by the War of the Danube. The Republican rhetoric of Stassen’s Oceania, which also cropped up in speeches and internal memoranda, can be read as an effort by authoritarians to associate themselves with the Democratic Unitarian movement, which enjoyed greater success and popularity in Europe at a lower cost in blood and resources. In the short term, however, pretensions to Republicanism had little effect on the internal administration of Oceania, which largely adopted the Indian model.
For Oceania, consolidation meant reconquering the seas as well as the land. After ejecting the last of Scrooge’s democratic nationalist forces from the city of Bedford on New Anglesey [15], Democrat Harold Stassen pledged that all of Britannia’s old Pacific territories would be painted as rightfully Oceanian on domestically-produced maps. The French conquest of Fiji initiated a period of anti-French sentiment in Oceania, which the Turkish, Indian, and Khmer advisors to the government generally encouraged. At their suggestion, Democrat Stassen proclaimed “solidarity with the oppressed peoples under French rule” in an incendiary speech on New Years’ Eve, 1950. Whether this meant only Fiji or all the Pacific Islands under French rule was purposely left unclear.
Harold Stassen, First Democrat of Oceania. He is not yet an infamous man, but who knows what the future holds?
[0] Galapagos Islands.
[1] The name for the Lusangese parts of northwestern New Guinea. The name “New Guinea” is generally reserved for the Britannian part.
[2] The zone of the Pacific under Lusangese control; generally coterminous with the region of Micronesia. Dongnanhai (東南海) means “Southeast Sea” in Chinese.
[3] Palau. Zhudao (珠島) means “pearl island” in Chinese.
[4] Manila.
[5] The Australian continent.
[6] The Solomon Islands.
[7] New Caledonia.
[8] Nauru.
[9] Vanuatu.
[10] TTL’s term for Polynesia, but not Micronesia or Melanesia.
[11] Auckland.
[12] Port-Vila, the OTL capital of Vanuatu.
[13] “Gorgonesia” is OTL Melanesia. The name, based on the taxonomic name for a family of corals, is a reference to the nearby Coral Sea.
[14] Brisbane. Located on Australia’s eastern side and within easy reach of New Zealand and other Pacific Islands, it’s a good place to put the capital of Oceania.
[15] New Zealand’s North Island.
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Does the Oceanian propaganda machine often refer to him as "Big Brother", I may ask?
At the moment, no. The fall of the Unitarian governments in the Middle East and Japan have made out-and-out totalitarianism a bit less popular among Revolutionary Unitarians, who now find themselves appropriating Republican ideology a bit more in order to stay competitive with other ideologies. It's likely that Stassen, if he'd been a "Big Brother" from the start, might even have lost the Oceanian Civil War-- he'd be seen as a repeat of Aras and Nagai, and lose the support of anyone who paid attention to where those men led their respective countries.
Stassen, with the support of the Indians, tries to be a new kind of Unitarian leader, one who is content with the humble title of Democrat. In practice, however, his hold over the Oceanian republic resembles that of the old Chairmen over their Unions.
So, how's Arabia faring right now? Also, I wonder what's New Zealand (OTL Taiwan) like?
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Chapter 99: Highway to Hell
Sorry I'm late. This one's a bit of a short one, because, to be honest with you here, it's been a very, very long time since this TL has begun, and it's really not easy to gather all the energy I need to write new chapters. Especially with exams coming and all. Don't worry, the TL is not going to be put to a stop, oh no.
This train just can't stop.
Part 98: Highway to Hell (1951-1956)
The 35 year long dictator of Unitarian India, having deserved the honorific "Netaji", and one of the most influential historical personalities of Asian history in general, Sanjay Nijasure passed away from a stroke while in his summer home in the outskirts of the Himalayas on May 3rd, 1951, bringing an end to an era in the history of the subcontinent. Whether you were to like him or hate him, there was no denying that Nijasure played a central role in shaping the history of his nation and probably even the entire planet. It was during his reign that India truly advanced from the ranks of important, though still regional powers, to superpower status. Wielding the largest military force on the planet by personnel and ranking extremely close to both Germania and China in gross domestic product, it was truly a force to be reckoned with. The Nijasurist policy of Accelerationism, though brutal, certainly paid its dividends.
Officially and unofficially, there were a few potential successors to the Netaji - Priya Nijasure, Mamnoon Khan, Prakash Naidu, et cetera - however, there was no destabilizing conflict for the position, as one man quickly arose as the frontrunner, being Nijasure's preferred successor, and soon commanded much of the Indian Unitarian Party under his banner. And that man was Amrit Ahuya, Unitarian India's long-time attaché and minister of foreign affairs, holding this position since the early 1930s and overseeing the diplomatic entanglements in the War of the Danube and the reconsolidation for the Commonwealth as India's sphere of influence, as well as being an influential elderly member of the Party. Ahuya was a member of the shrinking, but still extremely influential old guard - party members who participated in the revolutionary events of the 1910s and held important positions within the government since - yet at the same time, was considerably more amiable to the ideas put forward by the rising young elite. This made him an acceptable choice both to the reactionary and the moderate wings of the party, and even the radical offshoots didn't think too bad of him. The 1952 Congress of the Indian Unitarian Party in Lucknow confirmed everyone's suspicions by officially voting Ahuya in as the new Chairman of the Unified Indian State - and as gratitude for the last moment endorsement, as well as to create a feeling of true successorship, the new dictator appointed the widow Priya Nijasure as his deputy.
Priya Nijasure and Amrit Ahuya on the front page of the Lucknow newspaper "The Capital's Morning", May 1952
Amrit Ahuya's appointment coincided with a sudden, unexpected surge of Indian belligerence - truly unexpected, as Ahuya, the same man who prevented India from joining the war in East Asia during the War of the Danube, was not seen by the West and China as a belligerent candidate at all. Was this his own doing or was something unknown pushing him? Nobody knew. Funding for the already engorged military and for the Aankhein continued to be increased at a rapid pace, while the economic field of domestic affairs saw the continuation of Nijasure-era Accelerationist policies. The Commonwealth, already pretty much India's backyard, was being centralized even further for the superpower's benefit - using massive economic and diplomatic influence as well as a threat of military intervention, the new Netaji ordered a reshuffle of the governments of Aceh and Burma, replacing the somewhat independent and ideologically different leadership with loyal puppets or sometimes even officials invited from India itself. In addition, using the guise of "strengthening defense cooperation and collaboration between fellow Unitarian states", India established positions of Generals Overseers in their Commonwealth allies, one in each - while officially branded as merely the heads of permanent Indian military missions in allied territory, they largely became the middleman between the supposedly "independent" Unitarian governments and Lucknow, relaying orders and commands from India to local politicians, thus basically becoming the de facto heads of state. The puppetization of the Commonwealth was a success and a yet another showing of the Indian "controlled revolution" policy, Ahuya's brainchild from back in the War of the Danube.
The increasingly belligerent and expansionist India would become an omnipresent destabilizing force in Asia, a region already shaken by the war in the East China Sea, the Second Turkish Civil War and the Oceanic Civil War. The expansion of the Indian sphere of influence followed two general directions - one to Southeast Asia and the Nusantara archipelago, seeking to obtain complete control over the region's strategic location and natural resources, and second to Central Asia, inhabited by rural, authoritarian, isolated monarchies such as Bukhara and Yarkand, as it was the path of least resistance. Central Asia could safely be called the least developed major region in Eurasia - although it has had some contacts with the modern world through China, India and the Volga, making cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara not too shabby compared to the rest of Asia, the absolute majority of the region was rural, poor and agricultural. Unitarianism had no roots here. However, the tribal, multiethnic nature of the region meant that all of the states living here were unstable in one way or another, and this instability could he exploited by the Indian government and the Aankhein.
In late 1952, an unknown assassin's bullet struck Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, which was the beginning of a collapse of the state. With no immediate heir found, the nation devolved into a chaotic mess of claimants of various types, tribal leaders seeking to distance themselves from the Emirate and other rebel groups. In this civil war, India backed the Uzbeki warlord Abdulrauf Fitrat, who, albeit somewhat reluctant, proved to be the most receptive to aligning with the Commonwealth. The civil war in Bukhara lasted for a good year, taking so long because the arid, undeveloped Central Asian land was not the best terrain for imported Indian landships - regardless, Fitrat's Indian-backed clique overcame all opposition and founded the Emirate of Turkestan, with Abdulrauf I as its first ruler. Espousing the ideology of pan-Turkic identity, Turkestan laid claims on the lands controlled by Khiva, Yarkand and other Central Asian states - and even though the Emirate only officially followed Unitarian ideas, the Indians couldn't care less, as to the Netaji and his government, Turkestan and its claims were only useful as a sockpuppet for further expansion in Central Asia.
However, Indian expansion into Central Asia would soon reach a halt with the following Turkestani-Khivan War from 1953 to 1954. Knowing that the small Emirate housed Persian independence organizations and radical Islamists such as the Jund-e Khoda, India obviously placed priority on eliminating the state - however, once the war between the two Khanates was incited, it turned into a attritional stalemate. Even with generous support from the Commonwealth, Turkestan failed to break through the lines of their opponent, a failure attributed to leftover bad blood from the Bukharan Civil War, low legitimacy of Emir Abdulrauf I, as well as the ineffectiveness and nepotism of the Turkestani military. Reactionary factions back in Lucknow were pressuring Ahuya for a direct invasion of Khiva to end the war swiftly, but the Chairman, well aware of the tense diplomatic situation in the continent, decided against it. In 1954, a peace was finally brokered between the two Emirates, restoring the borders back to status quo, and the Commonwealth advance in Central Asia ended up defanged.
Cadre from the Turkestani-Khivan War, 1953
The guess on the tense diplomatic situation was correct on Ahuya's part. This was not the same as lead up to the War of the Danube, where a general pacifist atmosphere and focus on domestic problems meant that almost everyone was unaware of the tensions mounting up - the Western countries and China had learned their lesson. The unfinished War of the Danube, the chaos of the Troubles in Britannia and the ensuing Oceanic Civil War, and finally rising Indian belligerence meant that pacifist, anti-war parties which had dominated in worldwide democracies since 1942 were now losing ground to political forces calling for a more aggressive outlook to world affairs.
In the Kingdom of Germania, the postwar domination of the Democratic Unitarian party and their associate coalition members received a challenge from Volker Braun and the rebranded Centralist Party. Now standing as a party of continuing European integration, moderate Protectionist politics and an interventionist outlook on diplomacy, the Centralists challenged Prime Minister Franz Wagner in the 1953 German parliamentary elections. Foreign issues dominated the political landscape - not just regarding Asia, but also the numerous events in Europe, from the inaction Wagner's government took in the Crimean War, to whether or not France and the Netherlands should be invited to the European Defense Commission (a number of previous French governments expressed interest, but the idea went nowhere. Netherlands declined all offers until the territorial dispute over Friesland could be resolved), as well as, of course, actions regarding Britannia, especially on what had to be done to prevent the island kingdom from exploding into civil war. The slow, overcalculated reforms taken by the Wagner government also received notable criticism, and all this with the combination of a notable red-wing lunge in the attitude of the people meant that the current government's days were counted. After the results arrived and the new Congress gathered in Vienna, the Centralists and a coalition of regional Protectionists and moderates claimed the victory. Now the new Prime Minister of Germania, Volker Braun set forward a plan of expanding German influence in Central and Eastern Europe and reconciling with China in light of Indian belligerence (the most tangible result of his administration, finished with trade agreements and defensive treaties signed in 1954-55). In similar fashion, the election of Director Roland Durand, member of the Liberaux party, in France, and Antanas Garšva's retirement after two terms of serving as Democrat of Lithuania and the subsequent election of White Shroud leader Telesforas Gelažius in Lithuania followed this trend of interventionism.
China went through an important political realignment as well, as the 1952 Chinese legislative elections coincided with the death of the Jiaqing Emperor, the ruler of the Middle Kingdom for over three decades, and the ascension of Princess Li Wei, the first Empress of China since Wu Zetian of the medieval era. With the new regnal name Chunhua, the empress appointed the leader of the once again victorious Progressive Union Party, Xiao Xuegang, as the new Chancellor of China. Much like his famous predecessor Yang Long, Xuegang was a member of the progressive wing of Chinese politics, but with the rising tensions in Southeast Asia, the party started to slowly distance itself from their Democratic Unitarian roots. This uncomfortable atmosphere is also what pressed the new Chinese government to adopt a containment policy aimed towards India - "Not one step back" (Yībù yě bùxǔ hòutuì), declaring that any attempts to challenge the independence or territorial integrity against any member of the EASA alliance (and, unofficially, also any members of the Chinese sphere of influence, which included many parts of Central Asia) will be responded to offensively without questions asked.
Not that India feared such a statement.
Volker Braun, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Germania (1953-)
Xiao Xuegang, Chancellor of the Empire of China (1952-)
The Kingdom of Ayutthaya, one of China's most loyal allies ever since the foundation of the EASA, had been a thorn in the Commonwealth's side for years. This constitutional monarchy was quite literally in between Indian-dominated Burma, the occupied Malay Peninsula, which housed the formerly French naval base of De-Foix, now renamed to Sanjay and turned into a stronghold for India's blue-water naval fleet, and Unitarian Indochina. Obviously, Chinese governments were just as well aware of Ayutthaya's strategic location, numerous politologists and diplomatic experts described this Thai state as "the key to dominating Southeast Asia", and for good reason - and as a result, the kingdom enjoyed preferential status in the EASA. To prevent a revolution born out of poverty and public resentment, similar to what happened in Burma, the Shun Dynasty generously encouraged businesses and corporations to invest in Ayutthaya, numerous monetary donations and concessions were sent to buy the loyalty of the royal family, all of which soon turned the kingdom into one of the wealthiest states in East Asia. Regardless, it all could only delay a potential clash with the Unitarian superpower next door.
Hoping to knock the Ayutthayan domino down, the geopolitical experts in the Indian government and the Aankhein turned to the Bamar minority in the kingdom. Colloquially known as Burmese and common in the western peripheries of the Kingdom, they were the predominant ethnic group in nearby Burma, and irredentist thoughts were bubbling up little by little ever since the 1920s. Indian propaganda networks and the Aankhein had been running an extensive campaign within Ayutthaya to stir up dissent in the country and potentially destabilize it since the 1940s - and while the beginning of the campaign yielded little results, thanks to successful Chinese counter-espionage and little receptivity to such messages within the Bamar population, soon a slowly growing irredentist movement led by the former factory worker Htain Lin began to form and campaign in the city of Ayutthaya and other places. What eventually saved the Indian effort, however, was a Thai overreaction to this rising irredentist movement. Fearing for Ayutthaya suffer the same fate as Bukhara, King Sanphet XII ordered a crackdown on Bamar nationalists in 1955, which, while it alleviated the tensions in the short term, only ended up martyring a number of activists and strengthening the movement - and what's even worse, India "out of nowhere" stood up in favor of the Bamar people, declaring the recent events as "a showcare of the brutality of the feudal regime in Ayutthaya" and demanding to invoke a right to self-determination.
Obviously, China and it's "not one step back" policy was having none of it, and thus the Ayutthaya Crisis rose to the spotlight. While some talks between the rival governments of China and India were initially made over resolving the conflict, it soon became clear that Amrit Ahuya and his subordinates were not looking forward to a peaceful resolution. Indian troops were being amassed in Burma, Malaya and Indochina, to which the Chinese were quick to respond in action - by strengthening their own military presence in Southeast Asia and the provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi. Article upon article was being published across the planet on Asia being only one wrong shoe step away from reigniting the War of the Danube. Or, more accurately, starting a new, even greater conflict in the middle of what appeared to be an era of peace...
This train just can't stop.
Part 98: Highway to Hell (1951-1956)
Officially and unofficially, there were a few potential successors to the Netaji - Priya Nijasure, Mamnoon Khan, Prakash Naidu, et cetera - however, there was no destabilizing conflict for the position, as one man quickly arose as the frontrunner, being Nijasure's preferred successor, and soon commanded much of the Indian Unitarian Party under his banner. And that man was Amrit Ahuya, Unitarian India's long-time attaché and minister of foreign affairs, holding this position since the early 1930s and overseeing the diplomatic entanglements in the War of the Danube and the reconsolidation for the Commonwealth as India's sphere of influence, as well as being an influential elderly member of the Party. Ahuya was a member of the shrinking, but still extremely influential old guard - party members who participated in the revolutionary events of the 1910s and held important positions within the government since - yet at the same time, was considerably more amiable to the ideas put forward by the rising young elite. This made him an acceptable choice both to the reactionary and the moderate wings of the party, and even the radical offshoots didn't think too bad of him. The 1952 Congress of the Indian Unitarian Party in Lucknow confirmed everyone's suspicions by officially voting Ahuya in as the new Chairman of the Unified Indian State - and as gratitude for the last moment endorsement, as well as to create a feeling of true successorship, the new dictator appointed the widow Priya Nijasure as his deputy.
Priya Nijasure and Amrit Ahuya on the front page of the Lucknow newspaper "The Capital's Morning", May 1952
The increasingly belligerent and expansionist India would become an omnipresent destabilizing force in Asia, a region already shaken by the war in the East China Sea, the Second Turkish Civil War and the Oceanic Civil War. The expansion of the Indian sphere of influence followed two general directions - one to Southeast Asia and the Nusantara archipelago, seeking to obtain complete control over the region's strategic location and natural resources, and second to Central Asia, inhabited by rural, authoritarian, isolated monarchies such as Bukhara and Yarkand, as it was the path of least resistance. Central Asia could safely be called the least developed major region in Eurasia - although it has had some contacts with the modern world through China, India and the Volga, making cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara not too shabby compared to the rest of Asia, the absolute majority of the region was rural, poor and agricultural. Unitarianism had no roots here. However, the tribal, multiethnic nature of the region meant that all of the states living here were unstable in one way or another, and this instability could he exploited by the Indian government and the Aankhein.
In late 1952, an unknown assassin's bullet struck Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, which was the beginning of a collapse of the state. With no immediate heir found, the nation devolved into a chaotic mess of claimants of various types, tribal leaders seeking to distance themselves from the Emirate and other rebel groups. In this civil war, India backed the Uzbeki warlord Abdulrauf Fitrat, who, albeit somewhat reluctant, proved to be the most receptive to aligning with the Commonwealth. The civil war in Bukhara lasted for a good year, taking so long because the arid, undeveloped Central Asian land was not the best terrain for imported Indian landships - regardless, Fitrat's Indian-backed clique overcame all opposition and founded the Emirate of Turkestan, with Abdulrauf I as its first ruler. Espousing the ideology of pan-Turkic identity, Turkestan laid claims on the lands controlled by Khiva, Yarkand and other Central Asian states - and even though the Emirate only officially followed Unitarian ideas, the Indians couldn't care less, as to the Netaji and his government, Turkestan and its claims were only useful as a sockpuppet for further expansion in Central Asia.
However, Indian expansion into Central Asia would soon reach a halt with the following Turkestani-Khivan War from 1953 to 1954. Knowing that the small Emirate housed Persian independence organizations and radical Islamists such as the Jund-e Khoda, India obviously placed priority on eliminating the state - however, once the war between the two Khanates was incited, it turned into a attritional stalemate. Even with generous support from the Commonwealth, Turkestan failed to break through the lines of their opponent, a failure attributed to leftover bad blood from the Bukharan Civil War, low legitimacy of Emir Abdulrauf I, as well as the ineffectiveness and nepotism of the Turkestani military. Reactionary factions back in Lucknow were pressuring Ahuya for a direct invasion of Khiva to end the war swiftly, but the Chairman, well aware of the tense diplomatic situation in the continent, decided against it. In 1954, a peace was finally brokered between the two Emirates, restoring the borders back to status quo, and the Commonwealth advance in Central Asia ended up defanged.
Cadre from the Turkestani-Khivan War, 1953
In the Kingdom of Germania, the postwar domination of the Democratic Unitarian party and their associate coalition members received a challenge from Volker Braun and the rebranded Centralist Party. Now standing as a party of continuing European integration, moderate Protectionist politics and an interventionist outlook on diplomacy, the Centralists challenged Prime Minister Franz Wagner in the 1953 German parliamentary elections. Foreign issues dominated the political landscape - not just regarding Asia, but also the numerous events in Europe, from the inaction Wagner's government took in the Crimean War, to whether or not France and the Netherlands should be invited to the European Defense Commission (a number of previous French governments expressed interest, but the idea went nowhere. Netherlands declined all offers until the territorial dispute over Friesland could be resolved), as well as, of course, actions regarding Britannia, especially on what had to be done to prevent the island kingdom from exploding into civil war. The slow, overcalculated reforms taken by the Wagner government also received notable criticism, and all this with the combination of a notable red-wing lunge in the attitude of the people meant that the current government's days were counted. After the results arrived and the new Congress gathered in Vienna, the Centralists and a coalition of regional Protectionists and moderates claimed the victory. Now the new Prime Minister of Germania, Volker Braun set forward a plan of expanding German influence in Central and Eastern Europe and reconciling with China in light of Indian belligerence (the most tangible result of his administration, finished with trade agreements and defensive treaties signed in 1954-55). In similar fashion, the election of Director Roland Durand, member of the Liberaux party, in France, and Antanas Garšva's retirement after two terms of serving as Democrat of Lithuania and the subsequent election of White Shroud leader Telesforas Gelažius in Lithuania followed this trend of interventionism.
China went through an important political realignment as well, as the 1952 Chinese legislative elections coincided with the death of the Jiaqing Emperor, the ruler of the Middle Kingdom for over three decades, and the ascension of Princess Li Wei, the first Empress of China since Wu Zetian of the medieval era. With the new regnal name Chunhua, the empress appointed the leader of the once again victorious Progressive Union Party, Xiao Xuegang, as the new Chancellor of China. Much like his famous predecessor Yang Long, Xuegang was a member of the progressive wing of Chinese politics, but with the rising tensions in Southeast Asia, the party started to slowly distance itself from their Democratic Unitarian roots. This uncomfortable atmosphere is also what pressed the new Chinese government to adopt a containment policy aimed towards India - "Not one step back" (Yībù yě bùxǔ hòutuì), declaring that any attempts to challenge the independence or territorial integrity against any member of the EASA alliance (and, unofficially, also any members of the Chinese sphere of influence, which included many parts of Central Asia) will be responded to offensively without questions asked.
Not that India feared such a statement.
Volker Braun, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Germania (1953-)
Xiao Xuegang, Chancellor of the Empire of China (1952-)
Hoping to knock the Ayutthayan domino down, the geopolitical experts in the Indian government and the Aankhein turned to the Bamar minority in the kingdom. Colloquially known as Burmese and common in the western peripheries of the Kingdom, they were the predominant ethnic group in nearby Burma, and irredentist thoughts were bubbling up little by little ever since the 1920s. Indian propaganda networks and the Aankhein had been running an extensive campaign within Ayutthaya to stir up dissent in the country and potentially destabilize it since the 1940s - and while the beginning of the campaign yielded little results, thanks to successful Chinese counter-espionage and little receptivity to such messages within the Bamar population, soon a slowly growing irredentist movement led by the former factory worker Htain Lin began to form and campaign in the city of Ayutthaya and other places. What eventually saved the Indian effort, however, was a Thai overreaction to this rising irredentist movement. Fearing for Ayutthaya suffer the same fate as Bukhara, King Sanphet XII ordered a crackdown on Bamar nationalists in 1955, which, while it alleviated the tensions in the short term, only ended up martyring a number of activists and strengthening the movement - and what's even worse, India "out of nowhere" stood up in favor of the Bamar people, declaring the recent events as "a showcare of the brutality of the feudal regime in Ayutthaya" and demanding to invoke a right to self-determination.
Obviously, China and it's "not one step back" policy was having none of it, and thus the Ayutthaya Crisis rose to the spotlight. While some talks between the rival governments of China and India were initially made over resolving the conflict, it soon became clear that Amrit Ahuya and his subordinates were not looking forward to a peaceful resolution. Indian troops were being amassed in Burma, Malaya and Indochina, to which the Chinese were quick to respond in action - by strengthening their own military presence in Southeast Asia and the provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi. Article upon article was being published across the planet on Asia being only one wrong shoe step away from reigniting the War of the Danube. Or, more accurately, starting a new, even greater conflict in the middle of what appeared to be an era of peace...
Come on. Who doesn't like a good World War?
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How is the topic of multi-multiculturalism being handled in places like Germania?
With all the rampant nationalism of the last 50 years, is it less accepted or more?
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How is the topic of multi-multiculturalism being handled in places like Germania?
With all the rampant nationalism of the last 50 years, is it less accepted or more?
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To be honest, I'd really hoped that India would just keep its head down and quietly prosper for the next 40 years... but the beautiful phrase of "Superpower India" was good for this world. Good luck, Ahuya-- you'll need it. And same goes for the reactionary clique of militarists that's engineering this madness.
this war's probably going to end in some kind of north/south partition or full-on dismemberment of india and that makes me a little sad
this war's probably going to end in some kind of north/south partition or full-on dismemberment of india and that makes me a little sad
Generally, the people across the planet are starting to realize that many of the conflicts of the past 50 years or so were caused by destructive nationalism - the Great European War and the Russo-Lithuanian War come to mind, even the War of the Danube was fanned by nationalist rebellions - and as such, there is indeed a backlash against overt nationalism in most of the world.
Of course, it depends from country to country - taking Germania as your example, it's been a little bit over 10 years since they almost single-handedly won a war which could have determined their nation's survival, so they are obviously more overtly nationalistic than some of their neighbours.
I mean, how bad can it be, right guys? Just another local conflict or something in Asia. Right guys? We have nothing to worry about!
Especially since China is right next door! Rather than across the Pacific.
A Reply to Tobruk
A Reply to Tobruk: East Africa’s Unitarianism
On March 1953, a letter informed General Mohan Kumar that his colleague would be returning to Surat from Massawa immediately. The unfortunate man had been found by a court in Harer to have been engaged in “lewd and illicit acts” with several women and at least one farm animal. The letter further stated that East Africa required no additional military assistance from India. It ended with a declaration that East Africa “would humbly prefer that the esteemed and beloved Comrade Amrit Ahuya station his soldiers— even the well-behaved ones that exist somewhere in his vast army— in places where they are needed.”
The General-Overseer in Harer had expected to face some trouble, but, as General Kumar reported to his higher-ups, “the East Africans are prideful as cats.”
The Popular Union of East Africa had long been the Commonwealth’s oddest duck. The government of Chairman Dawit Gebeyehu, headquartered in the Harar Capital District, presided over a theoretically Unitarian federation of an Ethiopian monarchy and, after 1941, a Somali sultanate with its capital in Hargeisa. The comparatively united and cohesive army that defended this state trained and fought alongside the Siddi Regiment, a force of former slaves from India. Additional members to the Federation were considered— the Nilotic peoples along the White Nile were considered a soft target, and control of their lands promised rewards— but the Peace of Jeanville, signed in 1944, snatched away Addis Ababa, which returned to its prior status as Nouvelle-Lyon. In the years since, India had loomed large. East Africa could not counter its influence by playing anyone off it, because the Union had long since collapsed. Under this stress, East Africa turned to its own strengths, refusing Indian incentives and calling Indian bluffs whenever possible. Its state ideology evolved from “Unitarianism but with monarchs” to a body of thought now known as the Harar School.
“It is possible to view the Germanian government as simply being a republic with a king on top,” Gebeyehu wrote in his 1952 Treatise of Government, “like a flower in a youth’s hair. However, the German König retains still the important duty of embodying the unity of the people and making them governable by the bourgeois-democratic government. Without the people there is no king, but the reverse is also true. The bourgeois-democratic government in Vienna exists alongside this bond of monarch and nation without disrupting it, and this is why Germania defeated France in the Great War. We owe our own titanic successes— an exemplar for all Africa!— against France to the willingness of commoner and monarch alike to set aside any differences and work together toward the great goal of human unity.” Generally, adherents of the Harar School believed in a Unitarianism that could exist alongside traditional authorities, and benefit from their (passive) involvement. Gebeyehu liked to claim that East Africa generally adopted the principle of constraining the monarch’s power in the manner of a bourgeois constitutional monarchy, but “a little differently, for our Constitution is the great path which Weber’s studies opened for humanity. In this land, we bees value our queens.”
The Unitarian Republic of Oceania might have better illustrated the tendency of authoritarian Unitarians to distance themselves from the excesses of the Union, but East Africa also took copious notes on the fall of Kubilay. In a Sengupta-broadcasted speech made after the Yenilemists’ declaration of their own Turkish state, Foreign Minister Ilyas Garuun reported that Harar was “appalled by the failure of the once-promising nation which Akarsu Kubilay, the First Comrade, devoted his life to. I think that we all find it hard to believe that Unitarianism managed to be so unpopular among so many of a country’s people. All of you who listen to my voice, be assured that we East Africans can and will do better.” Practical measures on this front included granting select small towns and villages the right to manage their own resources, and negotiate the price of those resources’ sale to the government. However, small-scale changes did not counteract the general pattern of authoritarian centralization. The authorities at the port of Berbera typically bypassed the nominal Somali sultan in Hargeisa, and reported directly to Harar on most matters of significance. Most of East Africa’s economy remained directly under the purview of the state. Meanwhile, it was often said in Gondar that a bar table with four or five drunk prefectural administrators sleeping on it contained more power than the geriatric Emperor Yaqob’s entire palace.
Privately, Lucknow had serious concerns about East Africa. The revolutions in Aceh and Burma had been carefully controlled from the start, and India’s hands only clenched tighter around Banda Aceh and Mandalay with the arrival of General-Overseers in those capitals. The war with France, however, had left East Africa poor but made it strong. While its navy and air force were still rudimentary nand largely composed of increasingly outdated Turkish surplus equipment, the state commanded the second best army in the Commonwealth— second only to India itself in both quantity and professionalism. Its industry, cut off from French competition during the war for independence and bolstered by the assistance of Indians and exiled Turks after that, had given the state and people a kind of quiet prosperity and productivity that lagged behind Western European standards but easily outcompeted any regional African society except for Egypt. Such an ally, India reasoned, would be useful. It could, with its geographical proximity to France’s remaining centers of power in Africa, serve as a bridge to the West. India also recognized that East Africa had acquired quite a bit of prestige in the eyes of its neighbors-- enough, in fact, to potentially inspire newer revolutions that could be controlled by India from the early stages.
Fragments of a larger map which, owing to the changes in West Africa, has become outdated. I’ll post the full map eventually.
In the meantime, East Africa spent its spare change on linguistic research. French was still the official federal language and a compulsory subject in the education system, but efforts were taken to ensure that the Ethiopian education system left children with a solid footing in their mother tongue (be it Amharic, Tigray, Oromo, or something else entirely). Drawing on the talents of Ethiopia’s old translator corps and visiting academics from the wider Commonwealth or from non-Unitarian countries, Harar oversaw the construction of a Latin-based alphabet for the Somali alphabet which Hargeisa promptly adopted for the educational and cultural materials it produced for the Sultanate of Somalia. Other products of this period included compilations of existing research on the Nilotic languages spoken in France’s three inland protectorates. The effect of this charm offensive was to capitalize on existing sympathy for the East African cause.
During the East African war for independence, France had grown desperate. Presented with repeated failures by the Africa Corps, the exiled French colonial administrators in Spanish Mombasa ordered the Corps to establish contact with the inland empire of Wadai. This native state, which began modernizing its administration and army on the model of Fatahist Tripolitania to the north over the late 1930s and early 1940s, was the most powerful entity in the great unclaimed zone which covered the Sahara. Gritting their teeth, the French agreed to recognize Wadai’s control over Darfur and establish the border between Wadai and French Africa along the limits of the French zone of influence. In exchange, Wadai sent its mixed-bag army of camel-riders and modern infantrymen to help the French keep order in their empire. This move was certainly successful in deterring the Unitarians from any westward advances, and instrumental to the relatively simple resolution of the war as a whole. However, the people of the White Nile, Rift Valley, and Shilluk Protectorates remembered the terror that Wadai’s riders and the victory-starved Africa Corps had brought upon them. The wantonness, arrogance, and shocking cruelty of the French and their desert allies became a seed of bitterness. The close proximity of Wadai, whose new borders now included a section of the White Nile, watered this seed. The grievances of the Nilotic peoples did not immediately lead to the development of an indigenous nationalism-- this region had never, with the exception of the Shilluk lands, been ruled by any form of governance resembling a state before the arrival of the French. Instead of mobilizing for the sake of a new nation, the small but growing political class of the inland Protectorates looked toward Harar.
The Somalis of French Africa, much like the Nubians, were rather ambivalent about East Africa. The Nubians remembered the professionalism of Egypt’s troops, which had arrived in Jeanville on behalf of their old allies in France, and generally felt that their country could, with Cairo’s help, carve out its own path in the event of wholesale French imperial collapse. The Somalis, whether living in the French colony of Mogadishu or in the inland sultanates and chiefdoms under French influence, had not been ruled by East Africa but by the Union. The brutality of the Turks left deep scars, and unlike their compatriots under East African rule the intelligentsia of Mogadishu had grown to strongly distrust anything that smelled of blue-wing ideology. Protectionism, always a hit with the folk of rural areas and the recent migrants to the cities, gained greater support among urban professionals who owed their lives and livelihoods to the return to French rule.
In Nouvelle-Lyon, memories of the war for independence were strong. The older citizens remembered when the port was busy with ships from all over the Commonwealth. There was work for all who wanted it, and that work was the work of free men, not of colonial subjects. The younger citizens born since 1944 could not remember this heady time, but nonetheless inherited a dim sense that in Addis Ababa, Africans could be Africans again, and not Frenchmen-in-training. Nouvelle-Lyon’s view of the East African federation was not solely fleshed out by legend. Much of Nouvelle-Lyon’s Somali and Amhara population had left for Berbera after the Peace of Jeanville, and maintained ties of family, clan, and— after the normalization of French-East African relations in 1953— business with the population of Nouvelle-Lyon. When faced with demonstrations for the freedom of Nouvelle-Lyon and its possible union with East Africa as a third member of the federation, the French displayed restraint. They were understandably reluctant to mint any martyrs, but did not know how long that resolve would deliver results.
***
If Nijasure was Stalin, Gebeyehu is Tito. Here’s hoping East Africa has a longer lifespan than Yugoslavia.
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