Hi there, one and all! I'm WhiteDragon25, and I'm a recent new addition to the forum, and one of my first contributions was showcasing this map I made in the Map Thread XVII:
In that same post, I also mentioned wanting to flesh out an alt-history timeline that would justify all the wacky changes I made to the world map, hence why this thread here exists - to do exactly that!
I've got a huge number of zany ideas to explain almost each and every country on the map and how they got the way they did, but what I'm having trouble with is hammering them together into a cohesive narrative that makes sense and doesn't blatantly contradict itself... that said, I also want it so you can plop down any average person (or at least, average American) into the world and not notice any difference... on the broad strokes of things...
Yeah, that's probably asking for too much, and are probably contradictory goals, but I might as well give a crack at it.
So... onto the show! I'll try a Q&A format here where you can ask about any country on the map and I'll explain the best I can what I had in mind for it; eventually it'll coalesce into something resembling coherent.
Huh, interesting place to start! Where exactly to begin with that...
I guess I'll start with Thailand:
Thailand during WWII was coerced by Japan into an alliance wherein they would be promised the return of land taken from them by French and British imperialism, and after Japan lost at the end of the war, Thailand was punished by the British for their alliance with Japan by being stripped of their territory along the Kra Isthmus and Malay Peninsula, with said territory being given to British Malaya in its place.
Japan placed both Malaysian and Dutch Borneo under a single occupation administration during the war, and that administration system carried onto Indonesia when they declared independence from the Dutch upon Japan's surrender at the end of the war. The Federation of Indonesia would later incorporate Papua New Guinea when the latter achieved independence from Australia.
When Vietnam invaded Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Thailand saw a chance to reclaim lost territory and invaded Cambodia itself as well, eventually clashing with the Vietnamese when the two sides ended up meeting in the middle; an accidental incursion by Thailand into into Laos dragged them into the conflict as well, causing Vietnam to come to their defense. Thailand quickly capitulated Laos easily upon invading and capturing Laos's capital of Vientiane, causing their weak government to collapse; despite that, though, Thailand was unable to do the same to Vietnam and the war ground into a stalemate with Thailand suing for a white peace and a partitioning of the captured territories between the two combatants. With the Khmer Rouge destroyed and Cambodia now split between Thailand and Vietnam, and Laos effectively collapsed and under Vietnamese administration, both Cambodia and Laos were incorporated into Vietnam to form a new Indochinese Union.
Also, here's some flags for each of the above-mentioned countries (all of which I made in Flag Maker 2.0):
Note: Yes, this is obviously just the flag from Kaiserreich; I just really like it.
Yes, the Gibraltar and Bosporus Straits, the Panama and Suez Canals, and the West Bank/Jerusalem are all designated as UN-administrated International Zones for free-access and peacekeeping purposes.
That would be the Danubian Federation, the result of a series of convoluted events starting with Admiral Miklós Horthy deciding to invite Otto von Hapsburg to Hungary to end the regency on the condition of Otto gain a majority of public support. Otto spends much of the 1930's touring Hungary to rehabilitate the Hapsburg family's name in the eyes of the Hungarian people.
Horthy continues his regency trying to balance Hungary's precarious position between the two great powers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. An avowed anti-communist, Horthy nonetheless dislikes and distrusts Hitler, believing that despite Germany being Hungary's only chance of revising the Treaty of Trianon, if Germany attempts to challenge the British Navy, Germany will almost certainly lose and drag Hungary down with it. Horthy therefore tries to leverage Germany's power as much to his advantage while avoiding being inextricably tied to it - and his best chance of doing so being exploiting Hitler's hatred of the Hapsburgs.
Hitler's diplomatic coups such as the Anschluss of Austria and the Munich Agreement go off as OTL (the Anschluss especially thanks to the Austrians enraged with Hungary welcoming back a Hapsburg), but Horthy avoids openly entangling himself in the partition of Czechoslovakia and earning the ire of Britain and France. When WWII rolls around and the opportunity to nab Transylvania from Romania, Horthy jumps at the chance with the assistance of the Germans, but when the time comes for Hitler demanding that Hungary assist in the invasion of the Soviet Union, Horthy tries his best to decline without enraging the Fuhrer... this doesn't work out as well as Horthy hoped, as Hitler takes it as the last straw and has Hungary occupied and orders for Otto von Hapsburg to be executed. However, Otto escapes thanks to his good-will tours earning the loyalty of the Hungarian populace and makes it to the USA, where he lobbies for support for Hungarian - and Austrian - independence from Nazi tyranny.
When the war ends with Germany's defeat, Horthy and Otto manage to gain Winston Churchill's support for a "Danubian Federation" during negotiations to partition Germany among the victorious Allies (despite Stalin's objections): eastern Austria is ceded to Hungary while Tyrol is split between Italy and West Germany, while Slovakia is split between Poland and Hungary, and Hungary retains some of the land gained from Romania as a result of the First & Second Vienna Awards. Stalin is not happy about this arrangement, however, and demands that Otto's claim to the Hungarian throne be revoked and that a communist government be installed in (now Austria-)Hungary. After extensive (and very ugly) negotiations, an unorthodox compromise is reached: the newly-reformed Austria-Hungary will have a communist government placed into power, but Otto von Habsburg retains his throne in a strictly-ceremonial position, while Horthy is expelled from the country altogether; additionally, the country will be entirely demilitarized, being forbidden to have a standing army, in exchange for neither Western nor Soviet military forces being allowed into the country (with SFR Yugoslavia under Josef Broz Tito being a neutral observer to enforce compliance).
Absolutely no-one is happy about the final agreement, but in the end, the Danubian People's Federation of Austria-Hungary was born. So from a landlocked kingdom-without-a-king led by an admiral, to a communist state with a Hapsburg king and no military (and still no navy). Bizarre doesn't even begin to cover it.
Here's the flags for the Danubian Federation, both during its time as a Communist state, and after:
I honestly can't decide which is better; feel free to tell me which you prefer.
Huh... haven't really thought of the language issue that deeply... I guess it'd be a Creole/mixed blending of the two languages.
As for how Hispaniola got unified: a unification war was fought between Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the 1930's, and Haiti won.
And yes, the Caribbean Federation is a loose federation of all the Caribbean islands excluding Cuba and Hispaniola, having its roots in the Caribbean Community; Puerto Rico became its nominal leader after a referendum to finally gain independence from the United States was successful.
I'll start with the Gran Colombian Socialist Republic (and Centroamerica):
After the Republicans were defeated by the Nationalists under Franco in the Spanish Civil War, many Spanish anarchists and other leftist elements flee Spain altogether and migrate to Latin America, primarily Colombia and its neighbors, and the Central American nations. Merging together with the local socialist factions there, the Colombian revolutionary movement starts developing a Bolivarian revivalist ideology centered around reuniting Gran Colombia into a socialist republic. With extensive contacts between its fellow revolutionary groups in Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama, the foundation is laid for an impending multinational revolution.
When Hitler orders the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941: believing the time is right to ignite the revolution, the Pan-Bolivarian socialist movement triggers its revolts all across Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama; simultaneously, Central American revolutionaries begin their own revolts against the US-installed banana-republics the peoples of Central America so detested. The chaos of the entire situation forces American intervention to protect the vitally-important Panama Canal - still under American control - but the intervention is short-lived when in December of 1941, the Japanese Empire attacks Pearl Harbor and brings the USA into the wider Second World War. The socialist revolutions in Latin America have to be ignored for the time-being while America has to deal with the Axis Powers in Europe and the Pacific; as a result, the Gran-Colombian and Centroamerican Socialist Republics are formed after the success of the revolutions.
As for Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay:
Paraguay, seeing the success of the revolutions up north, decides to go for roundthree and starts shit with Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. This predictably ends badly for them, as Paraguay is curbstomped by the three defending nations, resulting in Paraguay being erased off the map once and for all, Bolivia taking back the Chaco region, with the rest split between Argentina and Brazil. Bolivia also managed nab a small slice of Peru during the chaos of the Gran Colombian Revolution, netting them coastal access finally (Bolivia's coastal aspirations will soon get expanded upon later on when it manages to obtain Chilean territory as well, under the excuse of "protecting" Chile from socialist infiltration by becoming a "buffer").
The Pan-Bolivarian revolutions and the third Paraguayan war cause a massive amount of unrest in Brazil, with the Estado Novo regime under President Getúlio Dornelles Vargas having to crack down on both a regurgent PC-SBIC (the Brazilian Communist party) and AIB (the Brazilian Integralist party), complicated further by António de Oliveira Salazar's arrival after his flight from Spanish-conquered Portugal (which is a separate story to tell altogether), resulting in a four-way power struggle between the Communists, Integralists, Vargas, and Salazar.
Argentina then decides join in on the fun, and exploits the confusion in Brazil to invade Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul, which Brazil could do nothing about thanks to the political chaos preventing them from mobilizing a full military response; Argentina renames itself the Republic of La Plata in pride of the accomplishment, and is hated by Brazil ever since.
Eventually the four-way power struggle collapses as Vargas is overthrown and Salazar is killed, and both the AIB and the PC-SBIC tear into each other so much as to weaken them enough for a fifth faction of democratic revolutionaries to fill the power vacuum left by Vargas's death, restoring order and bringing and end to the Estado Novo, forming the Second Brazilian Republic in its place.
As I mentioned before, the Bosporus Straits are an International Zone under UN administration.
As for how: Greece got out of WWI with a better deal than OTL, with them being handed the European side of the Bosporus at Versailles, at the expense of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The Straits and Istanbul itself however would fall under a League of Nations mandate to in an effort to prevent Greece, Turkey, and the Soviets from bickering over it. A later compromise would result in a new/expanded city being constructed on the Turkish side of the Bosporus, with that city being named Istanbul while the European side is renamed Constantinople, forming the Twin Cities of Constantinople-Istanbul. Both the cities and the Straits would transfer over to the new United Nations when the LoN was dissolved and replaced with the UN.
Finland gave Sweden its "arm" to gain most of Norway's Finnmark? I understand that the Finns and Swedes might well be OK with the deal, but why would the Norwegians accept anything of the sort?
Just to gain an access to the sea Finland would only need Kirkenes and (some of) the Sør-Varanger municipality. Maybe the Norwegians might be ready exhange the Finnish "arm" to that area only. Still a longshot, IMO, would probably require some additional compensation.
Sorry, I don't have a blank version of it; if it helps, here's the original version of the map that I used as a base for mine (the one I used is an older one, from before the Waking the Tiger expansion; here's the latest version of the same map).
Finland gave Sweden its "arm" to gain most of Norway's Finnmark? I understand that the Finns and Swedes might well be OK with the deal, but why would the Norwegians accept anything of the sort?
Just to gain an access to the sea Finland would only need Kirkenes and (some of) the Sør-Varanger municipality. Maybe the Norwegians might be ready exhange the Finnish "arm" to that area only. Still a longshot, IMO, would probably require some additional compensation.
...To use Finland as ablative armor against the Soviets.
Honestly, I just didn't like the way the "arm" looked relative to Sweden and Finland's border (I didn't like Finland's northwestern panhandle either). Of course, aesthetics isn't really a realistic answer, so that's why this thread exists, to figure out a justification for all the border changes.
...complicated further by António de Oliveira Salazar's arrival after his flight from Spanish-conquered Portugal (which is a separate story to tell altogether)...
The Iberian peninsula comes out of the war united thanks to a series of comical misunderstandings: Meeting at Hendaye between Hitler and Franco in 1940 goes about as well as it did in OTL (not very), but slight changes in the wording in the dialogue results in British Intelligence (having somehow managed to bug the meeting) becoming worried about the prospect of Nationalist Spain entering the war on the Axis side and threatening Gibraltar. These concerns brought to the attention of Churchill and Parliament, Churchill hits upon the idea to invoke Britain's 1373 alliance treaty with Portugal in case of hostile Spanish activity towards Gibraltar. Portugal's dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, though already implicitly supporting the Allies, was reluctant to fully commit to the Allied cause, and so only gave a vague reassurance that he would honor the alliance in the case of its dire necessity. After his own spies report back to him with this information, however, Franco becomes worried that the British might've been able to convince Salazar to assist in an invasion of Spain; Franco therefore mobilizes his forces around Gibraltar and the Portuguese border to defend in case of British attack. This, of course, convinces Salazar that Franco might be planning to invade him, and so mobilizes his forces to the Spanish border while also calling in the British for the worst-case scenario.
Of course, this back-and-forth of escalation-telephone eventually triggers both sides' alliance agreements, Franco throwing in his lot with Hitler and invading Gibraltar and Portugal, and Salazar and Churchill both invoking the 1373 Alliance and subsequently causing Portugal to join the Allies and invade Spain. Needless to say, it became a rather confusing mess. Nationalist Spain manages to conquer Portugal, with Salazar fleeing to Brazil, but Franco ends up being defeated and captured by the British in the end anyways thanks to Free French forces assisting from Algeria; the entire miscommunication isn't cleared up until after the war. The mess is only further complicated when the CNT-FAI reemerge from hiding underground upon Franco's capture and take control of the country for the remainder of the war... this results in a rather awkward peace conference when the British, Franco, and the CNT-FAI leadership meet to resolve the question of who is the legitimate ruler of Iberia (Salazar doesn't get a say in matters, having abandoned Portugal firstly, and secondly having ended up embroiled in Brazil's own confusing power struggles, which would come to be the cause of his own unfortunate demise).
Here are the flags of the CNT-FAI led Iberian Federation:
(Initial flag design for united Iberia under the CNT-FAI at end of WW2)
(Second design after the CNT-FAI joined the Fourth International to piss off Stalin)
(Third design with Four-Intern/Hammer-&-Sickle logo removed after Stalin's death in 1953)
(Final design during the late Cold War-era)
And here's the flag of the post-Cold War Iberian Union:
The various states you see in West Africa are the Senegambia Confederation, Greater Liberia, the Mali Federation, and the Ashanti Kingdom; here are the flags:
To bump this thread some more, I thought I might try giving a basic explanation for the Soviet Union's survival:
First off, Soviet Red Army commander Mikhail Frunze survives his illness in 1925, and later becomes a key member of the Bolshevik Central Committee as the Stalin-Trotsky power struggle begins; Frunze is ultimately forced to side with Stalin in the end, but manages to avoid burning his bridges with Trotsky, who is expelled from the Communist Party and exiled from the USSR. Trotsky, for his part, instead of moving first to Turkey, emigrates directly to France, before moving south to Barcelona in Spain, and then finally to Mexico during the Spanish Republican exodus after the end of the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War progresses slightly differently, with Frunze managing to convince Stalin to send him as a volunteer force to Catalonia to support the CNT-FAI, arguing that having them indebted to the USSR after the war would give the Soviet Union a non-capitalist trading partner to work with. Stalin allows it, on the condition that Frunze brings along a NKVD attachment as well so Stalin can bring the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in line with Moscow as an alternative to the CNT-FAI if the latter is defeated; in truth, Stalin's real goal behind deploying the NKVD is so he can rid himself of his long-time rival: Trotsky.
Frunze's volunteer forces work well together with the CNT-FAI and the Republican Popular Front, holding back the Nationalist forces for a time, before the NKVD's behind-the-scenes scheming rears its ugly head - an assassination attempt is made on Trotsky as he is assisting the CNT-FAI in Barcelona in organizing and training the anarchist militias, and while the attempt fails, it causes a rupture between the anarchists and the communists, forcing Frunze to withdraw his volunteer forces as the Popular Front collapses into infighting. The NKVD is also withdrawn by Frunze to prevent them from making the situation any worse - incidentally also preventing them from carrying out Stalin's purging orders - which leaves the Spanish leftist factions (though now splintered against each other) to retain their organizational cohesion, allowing them to go underground when the Republican faction is finally crushed by the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco, laying the groundwork for a future revolt.
Trotsky, for his part, flees to Mexico, and along with him come many of the leftist elements of the Spanish Republicans as they flee to Latin America. Those very same leftist elements would later become the basis for the Gran Colombian Revolutions, with its members owing their revolutionary strategy to Trotsky's work during his time alongside them in the CNT-FAI... as well as their virulent anti-Stalin sentiment, given the fiasco that was Stalin's assassination attempt on Trotsky in Barcelona, and later Stalin's more successful assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940, the year before the Gran Colombian Revolutions.
Frunze would return home to the Soviet Union just in time to get caught up in the Great Purge, as Stalin begins to rip into the Red Army's officer corps to snuff out any potential threat to his position; Frunze would become one of his biggest targets after the debacle in Spain. This inadvertently ends up saving Nikolai Bukharin, as Frunze's popularity takes up a lot more of the heat that would've hit Bukharin, and Stalin merely throws Bukharin into the Gulag rather than outright executing him. Bukharin survives the Purge and his stint in the Gulag, laying low and keeping his mouth shut for the remainder of Stalin's reign until the latter's death in 1953.
Upon Stalin's death in 1953, the ensuing power struggle in the Politburo would eventually settle into a troika between Nikita Khrushchev (as General Secretary of the Communist Party), Georgy Zhukov (as Minister of Defense and Marshall of the Soviet Union), and Nikolai Bukharin (as Premier of the Soviet Union). Khrushchev and Bukharin's leadership as General Secretary and Premier, respectively, lead to a period of economic reform and stabilization that would continue to have an effect on the Soviet Union long after Bukharin's death at the age of 75 in 1964 and Khrushchev's ousting as General Secretary that same year.
The late-1970's and early 1980's would see another major shakeup in the Soviet Union's economy as a result of events on the other side of the world:
The 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, President of Chile, ends in failure, as the Presidential Palace successfully repels the military coup forces with the support of the Gran Colombian Socialist Republic, whom President Allende had been building friendly relations with since his election in 1970. In addition to the coup's ringleader General Pinochet being killed in the attempt to arrest him for treason, the Chilean and Colombian governments also discover indirect evidence of the CIA's involvement in the coup affair; the entire incident becomes an embarrassment to the US government, which has been extremely hostile to the left-leaning Chilean government for the last 3 years and American-Chilean relations simply amounted to the former attempting to sabotage the latter's economy. The public outcry and international embarrassment forces the USA to back off on interfering in South American politics, and to gain a begrudging respect for the Gran Colombian Socialist Republic, which it also has been hostile to ever since its birth in 1940's.
The survival of the Allende government also allowed Project Cybersyn to continue development, reaching the end of the advanced prototype phase and preparing for a limited field-trial by the end of Allende's first term in 1974. The first field test proved to be a moderate but promising success, playing a large part in Allende's reelection which paved the way for further development; the Gran Colombian Socialist Republic picked up interest in the project by mid-1975 and wished to explore its potential for its own economic management, a request that Allende granted and by the beginning of 1976 the two countries began cooperating on the project as a joint venture.
The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had its own similar program in 1962 named OGAS, which was the brainchild of pioneer cyberneticist Victor Glushkov, but the project died in 1970 when it was denied further funding, as it was seen as a threat to the Communist Party's central control over the economy. However, the surprising success of Project Cybersyn in Chile and Gran Colombia reignited interest in OGAS in the Politburo, which now saw the computer network experiment as vital for the Soviet Union to stay competitive with its South American rival, which it has been in a strained relationship with ever since Leon Trotsky's assassination in 1940 (the year before Gran Colombia's founding revolution). The USSR attempted to approach the GCSR with an olive-branch and a cordial request to join and share in the Cybersyn program, but the GCSR coolly rebuffed them and refused to exchange the technology. The Soviet Union had to resort to industrial espionage and reaching out to their Cuban ally (which had much better relations with Gran Colombia than the Soviets did directly), and the Cubans eventually managed to convince the Colombians to share the technology with them - which the Cubans in turn shared with their Soviet seniors.
The Soviet Union was still extremely behind in their computer networking sciences compared to both the Chilean-Colombian Cybersyn program and the USA's ARPANET program, but that didn't stop US intelligence services from ringing alarm bells at the Soviets catching up with the United States; after persistent pestering from the intelligence community, the US Department of Defense accelerated development of the ARPANET program and lobbied Congress for more funding for the research effort. By 1985, the three cybernetics experiments - Cybersyn, OGAS, and ARPANET - were all virtually (no pun intended) in a breakneck competition with each other; the effects of the 1973 Mansfield Amendment on DARPA however still persisted, which the inadvertent 'brain drain' that came as a result of it being credited with boosting development of the fledgling personal computer industry of the 1970's & 1980's.
The Politburo's heavy investment into the OGAS program inadvertently ends up saving the Soviet Union from collapse, revitalizing its economy and keeping it chugging long enough to outlast Mikhail Gorbachev's disastrous tenure as leader of the USSR throughout the late-1980's and early-1990's. Gorbachev is replaced by Gennady Zyugenov in 1991 after the former is nearly assassinated during a coup attempt that same year, and Gorbachev's downfall effectively signaled the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, as Zyugenov served as little more than a conservative seat-warmer throughout the 1990's, holding together the Soviet Union as it withdrew into isolation as the Warsaw Pact collapses and the USSR goes into a lukewarm economic malaise. Aside from some minor structural reforms (such as the formation of the Baltic SFSR from the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian SSRs, and the Transcaucasian SFSR from the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijan SSRs), the Soviet Union remained uninvolved in international affairs until the advent of KGB director Vladimir Putin as President of the USSR in 2000.
And now for the flags of the Soviet Union (a detailed breakdown on the designs you can find here):
The Ethiopian Empire - aka Abyssinia - managed to acquire Italy's Eritrean and Somalian colonies in the peace treaty negotiations after Italy was defeated in the Second World War; they would later buy Djibouti and Somaliland from the French and British during the post-war decolonization period. The communist Derg coup d'etat against Emperor Selassie would fail to kill him, and their People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia would barely last a month of civil war before they were crushed and Selassie is returned to power and order is restored. The kingdom would continue on to evolve into a modern constitutional monarchy with parliamentary democracy, and would be one of the most developed countries in Africa.
