The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
- Thread starter Augenis
- Start date
China had some minor chemical weapon projects back during the Great European War era, but they have been abandoned for humanitarian reasons.
indeed. In OTL, China is the most prolific user of cloud seeding, too.
Could be. Mobile warfare doctrines are still common across the planet, as you can see.
Did India made a terrible mistake? You can't do rapid maneuvers in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Now they will have a taste of OTL Vietnam.
It's not like the Chinese are any better as the Chinese military's basic doctrine is focused around quick victory through combined arms.
India's goal was the get China to the table, dealing with insurgents can be dealt with after that. Of course now that the lines appear to have stalled out and China is clearly not backing down those insurgents could prove to be a real throttle on India's supply lines.
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Don't worry. The Middle Kingdom will endure this latest Indian aggression.
Not exactly germane to the TL, but why do both Latvia and Lithuania/Litva have L, T, and V in their names?
Simplification, I think. OTL Lithuanian orthography is heavy based on Czech, both Czechs and Lithuanians had national revival during 19th Century, something, that is not needed ITTL. Lithuanian orthography in this TL should have more German/Polish flavour, no carons, more digraphs etc.
As far as I know, it's more or less a coincidence. The name Latvia originates from the Latgalian tribe and was first coined in the 19th century, when Latvian nationalism popped up. The origin of the name Lithuania (from Lietuva) is still unclear and there are a number of theories on it, but the most popular is that it was once the name of a small pagan land around the river Neris which later became the core of the Lithuanian state.
Lithuanian language uses Cyrillic in TTL.
Ooops! I took wrong impression from all that names written with modern Lithuanian orthography.
I write it in modern Lithuanian for simplification. Here is an example of TTL Lithuanian orthography from earlier in the thread
The Dutch Disease
The Dutch Disease: Europe’s New Protectionists (1916-1955)
The flag of the Netherlands Free State. The red and black are, like the three white crosses, inherited from the traditional symbols of Amsterdam. The orange and blue represent the other provinces of the Netherlands.
The flag of the Netherlands Free State. The red and black are, like the three white crosses, inherited from the traditional symbols of Amsterdam. The orange and blue represent the other provinces of the Netherlands.
“I love the Swedes,” Stadtholder Martijn Dijkgraaf cheerily reported to a nationwide audience over a Sengupta broadcast in 1929. “Everything about them, from their cakes to their cars, absolutely fantastic. But what really galls me about them is how they call themselves a ‘mutilated victor’ of the Years of Disaster.” Here, his tone turned dark. “Do you want to know of mutilation, Stockholm? Look upon my country, which is so cruelly divided by the Goths’ artificial line.”
This was an angry message, to be sure— but anger defined the 1920s for the Netherlands. This small country, born in 1515 after the chaos of the Burgundian Wars, initially bent its knee to the Plantagenet kings who “liberated” it from Austria and liberated its inhabitants, rich and poor, of their wealth and livelihoods. From this inauspicious beginning, this nation of burghers and peasants clawed its way to greatness as its former suzerain fell to pieces. A little over fifty years after its creation, the Dutch founded Nieuw Amsterdam on Vespucia’s eastern coast. Fifty years after that, the Netherlands changed the course of the Twenty Years’ War with their naval superiority in the North Sea, which prevented the Catholic English from landing troops on the continent. The treaty which ended the war in 1630 was signed in Amsterdam, and it granted the Netherlands control of Gelre and Friesland. By 1650, the Dutch had claimed and settled North Vespucia’s eastern coast, and contested the Portuguese domination of the Old World’s marine trade. By the end of the 17th century, the Dutch Empire straddled the world, from Taiwan and Macao in the east to the upper Tjukagoa [1] in the West. The 18th century, however, gleefully smashed it to bits. The major countries of the world doubled down on mercantilism and shut Dutch products out of their markets. China expelled the Dutch from Macao. New Netherland became the Vespucian Free State, and was relieved of all of its economic obligations to the metropole at the price of a few political concessions. As the Germans rose up in the name of their Republic and challenged France’s domination of their disunited states, the Netherlands remained marginalized, threatened, and—worse still—utterly broke. The improvements of the 1800s, including industrialization, did bring some improvements to Dutch prosperity and prestige, but the international climate of the time led inexorably toward the Great European War, which are still known in the Netherlands as the Rampjaren (“Years of Disaster”). By 1916, the low-lying Dutch lands had been flattened further by German, French, and English boots. The Paris Conference awarded most of the Dutch empire in Africa to Spain. The Vespucian Free State, which was theoretically bound to follow Amsterdam’s lead on matters of foreign policy, simply looked on. To top it off, the “Frisian State” set up by the German occupiers extended well beyond the boundaries of Friesland, covering three eastern provinces (Groningen, Drenthe, and Overijssel) whose inhabitants traditionally spoke varieties of Low Saxon. When Germania annexed their sham state, they took almost 25% of the Netherlands’ land area with them.
The 1920s may have been an Era of “Good Feelings” for the great powers of Europe. The hopeful spirit of the age was even shared by some of the continent’s smaller peoples. The Frisians and Saxons had long been derided by the coastal and riverine Dutch-speakers, but the Kingdom of Germania won over its new subjects by extending political autonomy to Friesland and following up on the defunct North German state’s recognition of Low Saxon as an unofficial but protected dialect of German. Few good feelings, however, graced the Netherlands. The postwar government turned to domestic reconstruction and the reimposition of order, but found that the country no longer trusted it to enrich and protect them. The louder voices of the Netherlands demanded change, and power fell to those who could promise it.
A line of unemployed people in Arnhem. France, the traditional ally and protector of the Dutch, faced its own troubles and could offer little help to the Dutch government.
To this day, the assassination of Stadtholder Dirk Tellegen on April 12, 1924 remains a mystery. Tellegen, as the somewhat inept leader of the Democratic Unitarians in the Netherlands, was a man with many enemies in the deep-red and deep-blue [2] wings. His killer, having done the deed, appeared to have dissolved to dust alongside his smoking gun and swirled away in the North Sea currents. What is known, however, is that the death of Tellegen set a dangerous series of events into motion. A loose coalition of Unitarian parties mobilized hundreds of marchers in the streets of Amsterdam over the following week, but the initial purpose of “calling upon the government to deliver justice” was quickly replaced by broader calls for political reform and economic equality. The States-General [3], spurred out of its typical gridlock by the Unitarian show of force, not only confirmed the succession of Grand Pensionary [4] Jorik Scholten to the post of Stadtholder but also granted Scholten emergency powers, which included the power to legislate by decree and to confirm one’s own appointments. The resulting reshuffle of the Privy Council [5] promoted a certain General Martijn Dijkgraaf to the post of Commissioner for Justice. In a Sengupta broadcast delivered on the very same day, Dijkgraaf promised to begin investigating Tellegen’s death “immediately, and with all available resources.” Over the following weeks, however, the media could not help but note that significant portions of the Justice Commission’s resources were diverted to persecuting labor unions and minor Unitarian parties which had participated in the April Demonstrations.
Meanwhile, the Dutch military seethed. Although the upper crust tended to be drawn almost exclusively from the wealthy urbanites of Amsterdam and Utrecht, the middle and lower-ranking officers and soldiers tended to be a more diverse mix. Many had been recruited or conscripted before or during the Great European War, ensuring that the only war they knew had also been the most destructive war in their nation’s history. Most of the conscripts went home as soon as the the ink on the Paris treaties was dry, but some stayed on because they had no job opportunities at home, or because “home” as they knew it had been erased from the map by the war. Accordingly, the lower and middle strata of the armed forces were a mix of ideologies. The Protectionists, raised in the conservative climate of rural Dutch Reformism or urban religious revival movements, tended to not mind the Scholten administration’s policies. The Unitarians, however, ran out of patience by July.
Many a counterfactual has been written about the July Days of 1924. What if the blue-wing coup succeeded, and delivered Colonel Henk Rijkaard to power? During the coup, Rijkaard’s putschists rode through Amsterdam on horseback and in automobiles, distributing thousands of pamphlets within the space of hours. Each one declared that the intent of the “popular revolution” was to “restore constitutionality and protect the ancient rights and obligations of the States-General.” Analysis of Rijkaard’s letters to fellow plotters support the “Sidabras hypothesis,” which states that the July Days were meant to end the state of emergency by any means necessary and ensure that the Netherlands were democratic by August. His communications with the civilian Unitarian parties, however, paint a different story. Rijkaard promised these parties’ leaders massive amounts of seats in the restored States-General in exchange for their cooperation and support for his coup. Such support, however, was not able to save Rijkaard’s hide. The majority of the military and civil police rallied to the lawful government, which Scholten’s administration could still claim to be. Within three days, Henk Rijkaard had been tracked down to a slum outside Haarlem and arrested. Declaring the need for “iron determination and lightning speed against the Unitarian traitors,” Stadtholder Scholten demanded and received the adjournment of the States-General. Martijn Dijkgraaf was promoted to the post of Grand Pensionary as a reward for his effective command of the loyalist troops during the July Days. After the end of Scholten’s term of office in 1925, the Stadtholder announced that he would not run for another. Since the States-General remained adjourned and the state of emergency was still in effect, the position of Stadtholder passed automatically to the Grand Pensionary.
In his inaugural speech, Dijkgraaf promised “not a simple shuffling-around of old faces and names, but a new state that will guide our return to the strength, unity, and morality of our forebears.” The political system that he established in the Netherlands has since been termed the Nieuwe Staat(“New State”).
Martijn Dijkgraaf, Stadtholder of the Netherlands (1925-1951)
Hindsight removes all blindfolds, and we can now infer that Tellegen’s killer was probably a member of Dijkgraaf’s clique. Dijkgraaf’s actions as the Commissioner for Justice seem to have been an exercise in bear-baiting— by insulting and persecuting the blue-wing, he hoped that they would do something drastic. The Unitarian coup may not have been expected by Dijkgraaf, but he certainly took advantage of the opportunity to win the support of the public. Jorik Scholten, who served in the Army for thirty years before entering politics, appears to have been a creature of the military’s red wing all along.
Even if the Dutch public of the time knew this, it’s hard to say how much they would have cared. The Unitarians were an easy target to pick on, because the majority of Dutchmen afforded them little to no sympathy. The urban population of the Netherlands reached a high water mark of just under 50% during the Dutch “Golden Age” in the 1600s, but slid down during the period of economic stagnation that followed. The industrialization of the 1800s, immigration from the countryside, and general improvement of living standards helped raise the urban population, and the German annexation of a quarter of the Netherlands’ land area took tens of thousands of rural inhabitants out of Amsterdam’s purview. However, this proportional decrease in the rural population was offset by the Dutch loss of Groningen. All told, by 1920 almost 60% of the nation’s people were boeren, or farmers. The strict and pious austerity of Melanchthon and Flammant had been toned down to a more simple commitment to frugality and hard work, but proper Dutch Reformism still ruled the villages and small towns. The urban areas were somewhat less Protectionist and more cosmopolitan in their outlook, but here too the influence of tradition was apparent. Churches, aflame with the spirit of religious revival, eagerly competed with secular or anti-religious political parties for adherents. Rural migrants to the cities kept their faith, and their attitude toward it affected that of the intelligentsia. From the late 1800s, the Meijerist Movement (named for their chief ideologue, Hugo Meijer) insisted that Dutch Reformism was a coherent, consistent way of life that effectively granted meaning to human life. As if to drive the point home, the Great European War violently shook the belief of even the most progressive urbanites in the beneficial properties of modernity. The election of the Democratic Unitarian Dirk Tellegen as Stadtholder had required all of the Dutch blue wing’s political capital, and his lackluster performance in office only encouraged the country’s shift toward Protectionism. The Goedendag Party, founded in 1919, took its name from the Dutch for “good day” and also from the goedendag, a metal-headed club with a spear point which was heavily used by 14th-century Flemish militias. Its philosophy vehemently challenged progressive principles and the Republican ideology on which they rested. Secularism was a mistake, the Party manifesto claimed, because it left behind a moral and ideological vacuum that various strains of idiocy eagerly filled. Democracy was a mistake, because it made the state— the instrument of Dutch unity and strength— into a hectic zoo of discordant demagoguery. The elitism of the upper classes, meanwhile, was misguided— the simple lifestyle and strong family values of the countryside offered the Dutch a future which the rampant and selfish individualism of free capitalism and the sick parody of human fraternity offered by the Unitarians could not. A party of this nature would be quite invisible in the prewar era, but by the time of Tellegen’s assassination Goedendag had a chapter in every province of the Netherlands. Over the course of Dijkgraaf’s reign, the party would effectively become the civilian wing of the military-led government.
Despite being born from such a milieu, the Nieuwe Staat was not completely reactionary. One of the new government’s first actions was to make a survey of the existing means of production, and require that their owners submit reports on how much raw material and investment they required to continue their work. Armed with this information, the government set out repairing the shattered links of trade with the rest of the world. The Commission for Domestic Development bought factories which had closed or which were on the verge of closing, and sold them to more efficient companies at low rates. From 1928 onward, a massive campaign of public works worked toward full electrification of the countryside and improved irrigation and drainage networks. The funding for all this was initially quite scarce, but the discovery of natural gas in 1930 near Haarlem kicked off an economic renaissance. Natural gas was demanded across the industrialized world for cooking, heating, and electrical power production. The worldwide depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s destroyed investor confidence in many things but, as Dijkgraaf reminded listeners on his Sengupta broadcasts, “the day that Dutch natural gas stops being a safe bet is the day that the world goes back to cooking over an open fire.” With the windfall from exploiting gas fields across the country and in the shallow seas near the coast, the Netherlands was finally able to import enough cheap raw materials to satisfy the demands of the manufacturing sector. The Sengupta, meanwhile, spread throughout the Netherlands, and by 1935 almost everyone in the Netherlands lived within walking distance of one. The government-owned channel Voice of the Netherlands (Stem van Nederland, SvN) featured weekly “fireside chats” with Dijkgraaf himself, who discussed government policy, world news, and answered questions which viewers sent to him earlier in the week by mail. Other programming on SvN included sermons by pro-government pastors of the Dutch Reformist Church, live readings of old Dutch poems and short stories, and press releases from the Goedendag Party. This keen understanding of the opportunities afforded by the media was essentially unprecedented among 20th-century governments.
Such modernization, however, would not affect the Netherlands’ authoritarian politics for some time. The new constitution promulgated in 1927 clarified the government of the Netherlands Free State as an authoritarian hierarchy firmly committed to centralization. Its power would not be absolute—villages and towns below 10,000 inhabitants would, for example, be permitted to retain their elected municipal councils. However, the administration of settlements with more than 10,000 inhabitants, of the provinces, of the police forces, and of the courts would be placed under officials trained and appointed by the national government. The Stadtholder stood at the apex of this structure, advised by a new body called the Council for Peace and Development (Raad voor vrede en ontwikkeling, RVO) which consisted of all the old members of the Privy Council and several “Special Advisors” drawn from the military and law enforcement agencies. The States-General was permitted to reconvene in 1928 after a nationwide election, but every step was taken to ensure that a coalition of red-wing parties led by Goedendag won the majority of seats. There was initially some paranoia among Dutch women that the government would, in its religious zeal, ban women from working outside the home. This fear proved to be unfounded, but certain policies— including a system of grants for families upon the birth of their first child, and aid for women who became nurses and teachers but not for women who became professionals and entrepreneurs— made the Nieuwe Staat’s stance on the role of women in society quite clear.
Germania, as expected, did not recognize the new regime— but given that the Dutch had never recognized the creation or the annexation of the Frisian State, this latest insult did not make Dutch-German relations much worse than they already were. France was more pragmatic— it had strong economic and political links with the Netherlands, and the region of Wallonia in particular depended on the Dutch ports in Flanders. In the end, French loans paid for the construction of the first Dutch natural gas pipelines and reservoirs. Over the course of the 1930s, the Netherlands reduced its dependence on France by signing trade deals with just about every state in Europe that had poor relations with the Baltic-Adriatic Coalition, and were therefore less likely to import fossil fuels from Germania (which uncovered extensive natural gas deposits of its own near the formerly Dutch city of Groningen). Particularly close partners of Amsterdam included Sweden and Lithuania, who paid for its natural gas with shiploads of timber, copper, and iron. However, no partnership proved quite so fruitful as that between the Netherlands and Portugal, the two colonial overlords of southern Africa.
The colonial flag of Dutch Zambezia, the last “maritime province” of the Netherlands.
To call the Dutch administration in Zambezia “extractive” would grossly understate its commitment to squeezing value from every grain of African sand. The sprawling colony might have been a fine pearl in Portugal’s necklace had the Dutch not conquered it during the 1600s in their wars for naval supremacy against Portugal. Since then, the local administration, seated in the colonial capital of Gerritsstad [6], had outlasted the Dutch presence in China, the Dutch colonies on the Zanzibar Coast, and the Dutch interest in its own beschavingsmissie (civilizing mission). After the 1900s, the Dutch were not as interested in civilization or conversion as they were in economic development. After a 1910 civil war in the Kingdom of Mutapa broke the power of the royal government and left its capital atop Mount Fura in ruins, the Dutch announced the full annexation of Mutapa and the imposition of taxes (to be paid in cattle and gold) on the former kingdom’s population. The establishment of the Nieuwe Staat only exacerbated this tendency, as Amsterdam began encouraging Dutchmen from the regions devastated in the Great European War to begin new lives in Zambezia. From 1930 to 1940, the colonial administration sold herds of cattle, which it had amassed by levying in-kind taxes on the Mutapans, to new settlers who brought their families with them. Charter companies, upon receiving permission from Gerritsstad and investment from Amsterdam, began to slice through the coastal forests, leaving roads and rails in their wake. The Dutch development of Zambezia was mostly haphazard, but Dijkgraaf did set certain targets for development. Zambezia was to supply the raw materials which the Netherlands’ European territories lacked— and to do this, it needed to produce more than just gold and cattle. Iron and coal mines sprung up along the lower Zambezi from 1928, while explorations of natural gas and oil fields began in the late 1930s. One lucky charter company found copper in dizzying abundance west of Lake Njassa [7], on the border with the Southern Unclaimed Zone. Rice and cotton plantations fed and clothed the Netherlands, which gleefully forgot its prior commitment to abolishing forced labor in Africa as it drafted African workers through a process of indentured servitude. By 1940, Gerritsstad was a fine city of 500,000 people, around half of which were Zuidtrekkers ("Travelers to the South"), or white Zambezians. The natives attempted violent resistance— a Muslim-led revolt of the northern Makua people almost evicted the Dutch from northern Zambezia in 1932, and revolts continued to erupt after the original rebellion’s suppression in 1935. After 1940, leadership of the native population shifted to clubs and parties of educated Africans in the cities of Gerritsstad and Jansen [8], who looked to the democratic government of the Vespucian Free State as a model for an autonomous Zambezian regional government within the greater Dutch state. The Nieuwe Staat mostly tolerated such movements, but the Oostmoer [9] chapter of the “Society for African Advancement” was forcibly shut down within days after its participation in a deadly riot in the city market over food prices. The remaining chapters of the Society wondered how the Dutch had tracked down the Oostmoer leadership with such dizzying speed. The answer was quite clear— not all of the Zuidtrekkers had migrated south in order to plow a field.
To the casual observer, the offices on 1500 Voorpret Avenue were simply the Zambezian headquarters of De Heraut ("The Herald"), a respected newspaper that leaned slightly toward the red-wing. A member of the Dutch National Security Service (Nationale veiligheidsdienst, NVD) would know that De Heraut was actually a front for the NVD’s own operations in Zambezia. The health of any authoritarian regime depended on the effectiveness of its police, and one would be hard pressed to find a police force more effective than that which hid behind the facade of De Heraut. Working under assumed identities as reporters or photographers, this mercenary force of Zuidtrekkers and collaborationist Africans developed capabilities in assassination, subversion, interception, infiltration, and counterinsurgency. The lack of any major independent revolts after the Makua Revolt of the 1930s, and the timid political quietism of the 1940s political clubs, can be attributed to the effectiveness of De Heraut. During joint training exercises, the Europe-based units of the NVD and De Heraut’s operatives taught each other the skills which they’d picked up while dealing with anti-government activists on both continents. The NVD also collaborated fruitfully with the Portuguese, helping them deal with the bands of rebels who fought the prazo owners in the Cabo do Destino.
In the short term, the effectiveness of the NVD kept the domestic scene in Europe and Africa quiet. In the long term, the organizations resilient enough to survive its onslaughts did so, and eventually grew bold enough to take the fight to their oppressors.
Central and Southeastern Europe after the War of the Danube.
Even if the Germans’ involvement in the War of the Danube prevented them from doing anything about the Netherlands, Vienna’s disappointment with the Nieuwe Staat influenced the Centralist Party’s unyielding determination to create stable democratic republics in post-Danubian Europe and Anatolia. However, these new states offered plenty of new disappointments of their own. The 1950 accession of Karel Luxemburg as King Karoly I of Hungary inspired the unstable provisional government of Wallachia-Moldavia to restore their own monarchy two years later, under a descendant of the Gediminids. Ion Voicu retired in 1955, but the de-facto autocracy he established continued on under his handpicked successor Nicolae Neacsu. The grumbling of non-Wallachian Roma, who felt that Voicu only favored members of his own tribe for high office, was duly ignored. In Serbia, botched attempts at land reform by the provisional government left a large portion of the country’s arable land in the hands of former rebel commanders, many of whom had a religious bent. The politics of the country accordingly came under the strong influence of the newly-restored Serbian Orthodox Church, whose leaders returned from exile and came out of hiding to find a population in need of their guidance and a government that accepted many of their suggestions.
The course which Bosnia took was particularly shocking. Albania, Europe’s other majority-Muslim state, remained firmly committed to Republicanism. At times, domestic and foreign observers derisively remarked that it had become a client state of the militarily and economically more powerful Greek Republic to its south. Bosnia’s politics, however, were dominated not by foreigners but by the ayans, a class of Ottoman-era landowners who retained their estates under Visegradian rule, lost them violently during the War of the Danube, and were brought back to their lands with the support of the Germans, who hoped that the presence of a literate native elite accustomed to statecraft and stewardship would benefit the nation. This assumption wasn’t exactly wrong. The Bosnian government was one of the more efficient in the post-Danubian Balkans. The diplomatic service, staffed with the Arabic-literate imams who had survived the war, was able to coordinate with Egyptian representatives, who landed in Sarajevo with offers of economic and humanitarian aid. Sultan Sa’id II of Egypt, armed with revenue from the newly-renovated Suez Canal and seeking to raise his profile in the Mediterranean world, declared Egypt’s commitment to helping the Muslims of Bosnia and Albania rebuild their lands, mosques, and schools. The Bosnian ayans, however, were interested in more than simple cooperation. Their power depended on customary privilege, and in order to maintain it they needed a ruler who would understand such things. In 1952, the Bosnian provisional government requested that Sultan Sa’id send an Egyptian prince to Bosnia. The Egyptians sent Mustafa, the son of Sa’id’s youngest brother, to Sarajevo shortly after a national plebiscite in 1954 confirmed that the Bosnian public sought the return of Ottoman rule, albeit in a very unexpected form. Although the Christian minority of the state mostly abstained from the vote, 73% of the electorate approved the enthronement of Mustafa as the first Sultan of Bosnia. Germania hesitated to recognize this change at first, but Croatia, showing no such compunctions, sent its own Democrat to Sultan Mustafa’s enthronement. The government in Zagreb had inherited the capital, treasury, and much of the civil service of the Visegradian kingdom of Slavonia, and looked to build up good relations with (and influence over) the former constituents of that defunct entity wherever possible.
Sultan Mustafa I of Bosnia shakes hands with Democrat Davor Šuker of Croatia. Soon after this picture was taken, the governments in Zagreb and Sarajevo ratified a deal that would allow the landlocked Bosnians to import and export products from the ports of Split and Dubrovnik.
Observers derisively referred to the hard Protectionist turn that Eastern Europe had taken as the “Dutch disease,” but such remarks proved insightful. The changes that the countries in the East underwent were indeed similar to establishment of the Nieuwe Staat. The national publics of the East, some of whom had not even imagined themselves as being of one nationality or another until very recently, had undergone great trauma and become highly suspicious of change. They responded by turning to tradition and custom, which made the truly unavoidable changes easier to digest.
In this climate, Dijkgraaf’s death in 1951 was something of a relief for Germania’s strategists. The RVO chose General Ronald Verhagen, who had served honorably as the governor of Zambezia until his resignation and return to Amsterdam in 1949, to serve out the remainder of Dijkgraaf’s fifth (and last) six-year term. Verhagen’s formal election as Stadtholder by the States-General in 1955 confirmed his status as the Nieuwe Staat’s new face. The change in leadership preserved a trend of growing rapprochement with Germania that had surfaced during the last decade of Dijkgraaf’s tenure. Verhagen did not, of course, petition to join the German-led European Defense Commission immediately— such a move would be a betrayal of Dutch national sentiment, which still regarded the establishment and annexation of the Frisian State as illegitimate. Likewise, the Germans were lukewarm about forging links with a rogue dictatorship. But as the Asian powers drew closer to war, Germania and the Netherlands finally came to terms. If the upcoming war in Asia drew Europe in, the continent’s militarily stronger powers needed to be prepared. Vienna did not love the Dutch, but, in the worst case scenario, they would bring some interesting skills to the table. The NVD's International Bureau was one of the most modern and effective foreign intelligence agencies in Europe, and it had, with the local authorities' collaboration, infiltrated and liquidated blue-wing organizations in a long list of Protectionist or anti-Unitarian states (the Vespucian Free State, New France, East Turkey, Arabia, and Britannian Sudan all figure prominently in this list of clients). It was known that the Commonwealth had hired many European adherents of Unitarian ideology in order to take advantage of their skills, so any Dutch spies sent to Indian-occupied territories would have a plausible alibi.
The European Defense Commission billed itself as a military alliance first and an economic union second, but the organization had a clear political dimension since its inception. The EDC’s framers intended for it to be a bulwark of the post-Danubian democratic-republican consensus, to which Sternberg's Centralists had so stoutly committed themselves. Europe’s diverse lands were, to be sure, quite grateful to Germania’s defense of the continent during the grueling War of the Danube, and the new German-drawn borders of Eastern Europe’s borders would, for the most part, endure the coming decades. However, Germania’s smugly-drafted blueprint for postwar Europe’s political order offered more promise than performance in the long term. The “Vienna Circle” of reliably pro-German countries counted members from Poland to Greece to Spain, but even some of Europe’s most unstable countries were willing and able to chart a more independent path.
[1] Ohio River.
[2] If red and blue are this TL’s left and right, then I think “deep” ought to take the place of “far” as an indicator of radicalism.
[3] Like a Parliament, the States-General is tasked with legislating. Its members are directly elected by popular vote, and they elect the Stadtholder from among themselves. Before the Great European War, there were calls for replacing this system of indirect popular sovereignty and having the Stadtholder be elected directly by the people, but the postwar Netherlands has other concerns.
[4] This office is basically the equivalent of a Vice President in other countries (or as TTL would call it, a Deputy Democrat) when it comes to succession order. In terms of power, though, the Grand Pensionary is more like a Minister of the Interior.
[5] A sort of cabinet, whose members advise the Stadtholder and serve as intermediaries between the Stadtholder and the various executive departments.
[6] OTL: Beira. I think I placed the colonial capital at Quelimane in a prior guest post, but it’s definitely Beira now.
[7] Lake Malawi.
[8] Nampula.
[9] Quelimane.
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Bosnia's relationship with its Ottoman legacy isn't just one of love and nostalgia. Bosnia hasn't existed as a sovereign nation for 700 years-- and even then, the medieval Bosnian kingdom was majority-Christian. There's a real hunger for uniquely Bosnian and uniquely modern national symbols, and TTL Bosnia has decided to take them from the one epoch of TTL Bosnian history-- that of Ottoman rule, from the 1400s to 1914-- in which the forces of prosperity, good government, and cultural flourishing generally triumphed over brutal chaos over a sustained span of centuries.
And while I'd certainly find a Gediminid restoration in Lithuania interesting, the continued OTL existence of the Spanish Bourbons has not yet led the French to reconsider their republicanism
Well, you forgot to mention the loss of New Zealand to China in the GEW, but nice update overall.
Question. Are there many OTL royal dynasties which retained regnal titles for as long as the House of Gediminas did in TTL? The first ruler of that dynasty was Gediminas starting in 1316, and 650 years later, you can still trace a direct male line from him to a real monarch. (albeit one of Wallachia-Moldavia, not Lithuania )
Of course, TTL has many contenders for extremely long dynasties, too. Habsburgs have had titles since the 11th century and they are the current dynasty in Germania. House of Luxemburg started in 1308 and is still kicking, too. House of Plantagenet is also still around... and even the House of Osman, though, again, not in their original country.
)Of course, TTL has many contenders for extremely long dynasties, too. Habsburgs have had titles since the 11th century and they are the current dynasty in Germania. House of Luxemburg started in 1308 and is still kicking, too. House of Plantagenet is also still around... and even the House of Osman, though, again, not in their original country.
I wonder how New Zealand is faring right now? How do the locals view Chinese rule?