Great Changes In The World (1st Retrospective)
Great Changes In The World
When Ran looked back on the past two decades he was amazed at the changes that had occurred. He had grown to maturity in the late 1980s, then had his heyday, as he liked to see it now, attending university, not at Gloria Regis or even London or Paris, but in the English Midlands city of Aston. There he had completed his degree in Dynamic Economics, and from a mixture of inertia and because he really did enjoy studying gone on to complete a Masters and a Doctorate, both in aspects of the same subject.
By the time that he had eventually wrenched himself away from academia in the mid 1990s he was a self-acknowledged expert in Market Forces and Global Positioning. His friends had said why did he not wait for someone else to acknowledge this also, but Ran was a man on the make, on the move and he could not see his own limitations. It was as if benig liberated from Aston had launched him full into flight, brought on a whirlwind of creativity and a slew of articles to leading journals that had quickly earned him a regular post in a leading Gloria Regis newspaper.
Ran had rarely been in person to the Imperial Capital before, and its pace of life was a surprise to him. He had never beforehand viewed Aston as sleepy, but he began to understand in retrospect the protests of his friends who had moved on after their initial graduation and had become amazed at his remaining in what they had come to see as a provincial English city. After barely a month in Gloria Regis, Ran was surprised to find himself sharing this view, and looking back already on his university days as a time of some kind of innocence. Later he would romanticise the time so that it now sat in his memory as it did now, a time of personal glories unsullied by the crude competitive world of journalism that came to devour him.
He quickly learnt that it was one thing to go into a job as a bright young thing, a new hope of the management, but quite another to live up to it. Articles he had penned weekly in the luxury of his apartment became the minimum expectation on a daily basis, and he found he was soon spending twelve hours or more in the office. At first this had a glamour, an insane glory all of its own. In the wider world it was a time of amazing change, and reporting on these changes gave him a vicarious involvement that he came to associate his own role as reporter with that not just of explaining the news, but in some sense maknig the news. As wires came in from Berlin, Rome, San Francisco, or York (the American one), he felt the buzz and the heat of being at the forefront of developing events.
And how they had developed ! Now, having at last quit the world of journalism and moved to Victoria Regis to pursue a new career in more academic circles, he could look back on the changes in the political make-up of the world and finally catch his breath. The professorship at the Western Saharan city's sole university was a sign in itself of where the winds of change were blowing, within the Three Realms at least. Victoria Regis (VR to the GR of the Imperial Capital to those crude enough to abbreviate such things) was a city on the up. Heradquarters of the Army of Africa, the Imperial Guard's African Corps, and increasingly the seat of sufficient organs of the ViceRoyalty of North-West Africa that there were calls in the Imperial Senate to transfer the capital there, Victoria Regis had seen a boom time. Doubling in population in the last decade, and with its industry and economy run through the auspices of the Revolving Laws of military procurement, it was a city that would never wane, not unless by some miracle the wars in Western and Central Africa ever came to an end.
But Three Realms Africa was just one aspect of the Global Revolution, capitalised in the way that journalists like to do these things. Write down the ten most significant changes of the last twenty years - that was one he liked to dump on his new students, wet behind the ears sons and daughters of settler families, some of them third generation with strong Moroccan roots. Then he would take their list and with casual cruelty ask about another dozen or so events that were of equal long-term importance, wondering why they had not the wit to have included those. Occasionally he would succeed in his hidden aim, some bright spark would challenge him on the randomness of such lists, ask how he could have left off any of his personal top ten, regardless of the merits of the additional ones his tutor was proposing. On days when he got such a student, Ran would earn his bonus from the Imperial Guard and recommend him for fast-streaming into their subsidised programme. Most the time, though, his only reward was the shame and humiliation of his students, especially the young women, who had come up thinking themselves so worldly and knowledgable and were now seen to be naiive and potential failures from the first week there.
Aside from personal gratification, the exercise provided Ran with a useful platform for his writing, something which in these more leisurely surroundings he was finding his way back into enjoying. No deadlines, or at least not what he thought of as deadlines - having to complete an article by early Summer was a different proposition from having to get it on the Editor's desk by five o'clock sharp. Oh yes ! He was beginning to look deeper too. That was how he had got the post in Gloria Regis in the first place, but the pressures of work and the excitement at being caught up in the reporting of great events had subdued that side of him, had led him to think in terms that he now saw were more journalise than academic. At last he could sit back and analyse events such as the evolution of the German Empire or the virtual independence of the Russian American Dominions and see more than just the personalities and the forces on the surface.
Ah, the German Empire would be one for future historians, that was for sure ! Even more so than Victor Louis' Empire of America or the Burgundian Moonbase and Mars Programmes. The German Empire had somehow insinuated itself on top of existing political institutions. It had been revolutionary in its evolution, and evolution was quite likely the only real word to describe it. Somehow the Italian Empire, growing at the same time and in the same manner had always seemed but a shadow to the German experience. And what an experience it had been !
From the Pan-Germanic Assistance Organisation had come an over-arcing unity of the German states, brought together in their desperate need to deal with the twin economic and political crises. Separate from the Pan-Germanic League but in many ways sharing the same leadership, the PGAO had come to have the real power in Brandeburg-Silesia, Saxony and the Western German kingdoms. Brunswick, which had never allowed the PGL a foothold on its territory had managed to stay aloof, and Bavaria which had tried to follow a similar track had seen popular revolution force the king into acceding to the union. It had been but a short step from this to a political framework; a federal republic of kingdoms, there was something to confuse the historians !
The election of a President and the Pan-Germanic Diet at Kassel, for want of a better location, had proved to be momentous in retrospect, but at the time was pregnant with uncertainty. Nobody could guess at Burgundy's reaction, whilst Brunswick's hostility was a given. But Burgundy remained focused on extra-terrestrial matters, whilst Brunswick was dealing with the fallout of multiple Danish crises and was unable to properly focus its attentions East and South. Many would decry this, but as the Guelphs would later say, destiny can coming sneaking upon one like a thief in the night.
The threat of popular revolution kept the monarchs and their courts in thrall. Ran well remembered the scenes from Stuttgart when Wurttemberg's knig, with Swiss support, had attempted to overthrow the rule of the PGAO government and rule independently in an economic alliance with Zurich. The lynching of the First Minister and the narrow escape for the royal party had quickly convinced the local assembly to back Kassel and demand the abdication of the king. The son had proven weaker than the father, more realistic the Pan-Germanists would say, and had led his kingdom back fully into the arms of the PGAO. Soon, Kassel was being spoken of as the Federal Capital, and the sense that the days of the German kingdoms was over began to leach into the newspapers. History was never that simple.
There are always two forces, whatever their composition and alignment, there are always two forces. That was something that Ran had expounded in his doctoral thesis back in Aston and it was something that in retrospect he, like most other analysts, had forgotten when reporting the news from the German states. He should not have been surprised by what happened, but he had lost sight of his maxim and had, sad to say now that he had time to reflect on these things, been swept along by events. Stuttgart appeared to mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, and perhaps it did, but what was written in the new chapter was not at all that which so-called experts were so confidently predicting.
On that reflection that history to a T, what happened next was never what one would have expected though in retrospect it all seems so simple and obvious. The PGAO having flexed its muscles and won for itself the primacy within the German states, began to differ amongst itself in how to rule the federal empire, and most especially in how far to go to merge the kindgoms into an overall unity. Breaking down into factions, at first within the Pan-Germanic Diet, but later on the streets, the PAO government began to lose the legitimacy that it had seemed to grab unto itself after Stuttgart. Street battles from Berlin to Munich, Kassel to Leipzig showed how flimsy this new political unity was. Everybody still proclaimed the same slogans, but nobody agreed any longer on what they meant.
And 'Enter Brunswick' as the newspaper headline had proclaimed, albeit not one of his own making, but a memorable one none the less. It was impossible for Brunswick to remain permanently aloof from the dynamic changes on its doorstep, but with the PGL having long been banned within the kingdom, and the PGAO never having had a foothold there, the backwash from events on the streets in its neighbouring states found expression within the Brunswicker Parliament, but not in the fashion that the Pan-Germanic Diet at Kassel would have liked. Brunswicker Pan-Germanists began to speak of the chaos within the federal empire, of the lack of central control, the need for a strong and responsible government, and all the same kind of words that were being spoken "from Stuttgart to Strelitz" (as the popular song went) but what they meant was something completely different.
The Brunswicker Parliament was speaking not to the people, assuming that such an amorphous mass existed in any sort of unity to demand that noun, but to the king. Oskar Friedrich was perhaps not the most imposing of men, his constant battle to control his weight ever evident upon his frame, but he was possessed of two attributes far more important that personal looks - he was dynamic, once roused to action, and he was highly intelligent. His tutors, back in his halcyon days at Wolfenbuttel, had often said he was too intelligent, too quick to pull apart a problem and look for what lay underneath when often it ran only surface-deep, but it would stand him in good stead now. He accepted his parliament's petition to appear before them and hear in detail what they proposed within a closed session, and he embraced it. And, Ran remembered with a sheen of embarassment, everybody in journalism read it wrong.
He had written an in-depth article that hit the streets an hour before the news from Brunswick did. For an hour he was a god in his analysis, thereafter he was a fool and a charlatan and it was a struggle ever after to reclaim his reputation. He was far from the only one fooled, but nobody else had revealed it in quite such a dramatic fashion, proclaiming their ignorance to the world in a full-page front-page article a mere sixty minutes before the truth came out. No doubt it was something that was still talked about in the bars of Gloria Regis, and Ran thanked his stars he was well away from there now. No, it had not been his greatest day. One could certainly say that for it !
Perhaps no one could have predicted what was to come. Oskar Friedrich 'accepted' the Imperial Crown from a mixture of his own parliament and desperate delegates from other royal courts who had come in secret to the closed session at Brunswick. Faced with the apparent choice between chaos and subjection to republican rule from Kassel, the kings of Brandenburg-Silesia, Saxony and The Palatinate had struck outside of the arena. They had listened to the humming in the wind, and they had sent their best men to Brunswick. Kaiser Oskar Friedrich would now have to make what he had taken on a reality.
It would have defeated many a lesser man, perhaps even many a greater man, but Oskar Friedrich approached it with clarity of vision and sureness of purpose. There was of course conflict, but in most kingdoms there was already conflict, fighting in the streets and in the ghettoes, and all that really happened was that the slogans changed, and the allegiances changed. For those tired of fighting for a bunch of self-serving bureaucrats at Kassel, the sudden emergence of an Imperial option was a God-send, and was seized with both hands. Over night the royalist parties found their support more than doubled as popular forces cleaved to the new approach. Enter Brunswick, indeed.
Of course the PGAO had fought back, and in the end force of arms had had to be used against Kassel, and against Wurttemberg, where again the king was forced to abdicate, this time to see himself replaced by his exiled father returned in incongruous glory from his sojourn in Zurich. And Bavaria had never been happy with its inclusion within the PGAO-run federal empire; now finding itself called upon to subordinate itself to Brunswick, of all places, it refused. Ran winced once again as he remembered the office talk on the day that the news of the Bavarian king's speech from Munich had reached Gloria Regis. Oskar Friedrich would stumble on this, he might even fall from his pinacle, a victim of hubris. Bavaria was a strong and independent-minded kingdom, its resistance would ripple back across the other German states and undo everything that the new Kaiser had achieved.
Or perhaps not. Somehow the journalists forgot to factor the army into the equation. Somehow they forgot that the new Imperial Army had already seen action in Kassel and in Stuttgart, and had grown from its Brunswicker nucleus to include significant forces from Saxony and Brandeburg-Silesia. Indeed, the force that crossed the border from Franconia into Bavaria was more Saxon than it was Brunswicker, and perhaps that was the key, ancient rivalries between those two Germanic states coming to the fore and keeping the raw but eager troops focused on the objective. Munich fell, the king abdicated and his successor bowed down before Oskar Friedrich, both literally and metaphorically, and accepted him as Emperor.
In retrospect it was all so obvious, which just begged the question of why nobody, not anybody, had seen it coming before the event. But that was History, with a capital H as Ran liked to think of it...
Best Regards
Grey Wolf
19-09-07 00:20
