Moon’s Lunacies: The Inner Moon’s AH Repository

[TheInnerMoon]

For about two months now, I've been posting various alternate history vignettes and outlines over on the Sea Lion Press forums. Since most of that's been in the members-only section, I thought I'd start crossposting it here, also as a means of soliciting more feedback.

I'll start out by laying out some of the main 'drafts' I've been working on, some of which go back many years:

1. Imagination Takes Power is probably the oldest of my drafts that I would still like to finish some day; some of the docs date back to 2016. The main premise is an alternate and more successful may '68, coming at the tail end of a longer decade-plus of divergences. The initial PoD will likely be the Warsaw Pact compromising with the Hungarian reformers in '56, which will help Western European communism keep more of its prestige. At the same time, it's not as if the New Left has no reasons to set itself apart from the old party-union bureaucracies. Much of the TL I've built out so far has surprisingly little to do with these dynamics, though, since I started with the pop cultural portion spinning out into the 1970s. I have a curious amount of notes on the alternate career of one George Lucas, for instance. But since I've literally been teaching the history of this period to university students, I think I would have a far better grasp of the political background now than I did back when Obama was still in office.
2. Shanghaied! consists of a series of vignettes and DBWIs branching out from an earlier and more successful Shanghai Commune during the Northern Expedition. Enflaming the United Front between KMT and CCP, this will start the breakdown of the former in a way that lets Wang Jingwei and his "Left" associates come out on top, at the cost of cutting the fight against the northern warlords short. The overall result is a North-South China divide which lasts into an alternate WW2. Speaking of, the tumult in China ends up playing an important role in Soviet party politics, being the exact kind of ammunition the United Opposition needs for its last ditch fight against Stalin. Combined with a bunch of divergences elsewhere, the eventual WW2 analogue sees both Chinas team up with a socialist France and the USSR to fight Germany (led by Schleicher), Japan, and possibly Britain. The Chinese throw out Japan and even free Korea, but not before the Soviets are couped by an opportunistic Tukhachevsky. The 'present day' of the TL thus leaves the Socialist Republic of (South) China as the new center of the Comintern, a nation of exiles confronting a mostly hostile world.
3. Freedom From Fear might be the scenario I'm most interested in at the moment, since it allows me to make some important points about 20th century historiography and political economy. The basic premise is that the US becomes the sort of place that Henry Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt wanted it to be, where a condominium with the USSR is more than just an idle dream of the New Deal's foreign policy architects. This kind of scenario would be best served by a minimum of divergences, just to prove that it was more possible than we might think, although I have half a mind to throw in some fun WW2 changes for its own sake. That's all TBD, although I do have some idea of what this world looks like by the 1980s, when I want its main story to be set.
4. Risen From Ruins started out as me projecting the history of a country like East Germany onto the US, but it has shifted considerably from there. At present, it's mostly about a late WW1 putting the US on a very different historical trajectory, with a hard right turn throughout the 30s and 40s turning it into the 'evil empire' of the world. Helped along by a considerable internal insurgency, the US eventually goes socialist, joining its more anarchist Mexican and Chinese comrades as part of a new International. There's various formats that could help me tell this story, it's something I'm still working out.
5. Corporatist World (real title pending) is a scenario I've created relatively recently, and mostly exists to make another point about 20th century political, namely the general consensus by mid-century on a dirigist/social democratic/corporatist mode of production. The focus is once again on China, consisting here of a federal system led by the 'Three Chens': Chen Duxiu, Chen Gongbo, and Chen Jiongming. The Federation of China is a proud member of the Second International, which is still very much alive and kicking by the late 20th century, since the main divergence is all about avoiding WW1 and keeping certain pre-war institutions and tendencies alive. Along these lines, the US will also keep some of its William Jennings Bryan focus on compassionate isolationism, with the anti-colonial movements of the world seeing the US and Japan as their main benefactors. Opposing the two camps of Social Democracy (Germany+China) and Developmentalist Anti-Imperialism (Japan+USA) are Russia and Britain, the Old Empires that just won't let go. The drama culminates in a nuclear conflict in the 1980s, with China being one of the un-nuked powers tasked with putting the world back together.
6. War of the Workers is all about vindicating the original "Left Communists" of 1917-1918, the kind of guys who wanted to start a prototypical People's War against Germany instead of signing Brest-Litovsk. While admittedly a daredevil strategy, they had some clout among the very top of the bolshevik leadership, and could have won out if the immediate post-October politicking had played out differently. Hell, discontent with the peace was what eventually led the Left SRs to try their abortive uprising in mid-1918, so this isn't just a bit of bolshevik drama. At its most ambitious, I see this kinda conflict prolonging WW1 and turning the inter-imperialist into a proper socialist revolutionary war across Europe, but that's the long-term ambition of a very nitty-gritty writing project.
7. Finally, I should probably mention the two works of actual alternate/future history I've already been developing in full. These would be The End of History, about left-wing US activism in the 1990s, and Xenopoiesis, about a world where all the accelerationist imaginations of the 21st century crashed into one another.

Naturally, if you have any questions about these scenarios, I'd be more than happy to answer them. And when the vignettes and drafts I post here relate to them directly, I'll also be sure to mention that.

 

[TheInnerMoon]

First up, a cryptofascist complains about the Rooseveltian deep state:

"Upon his selection as vice president in 1940, Cordell Hull was regarded as a safe pair of hands by the Democratic establishment, certainly compared to the 'Eleanorian' alternative that was Henry Wallace. Even so, the problems started early. Hull was unable to avoid the promotion of his former deputy Sumner Welles to Secretary of Commerce, turning their mutual enmity into a Cabinet matter. Wallace received his own promotion to the Commerce Department, forming a distinct clique of far-left progressives together with Ickes, Perkins, and the ever-present Hopkins."

"The presence of the "Eleanor Clique" turned from a nuisance to a problem in the latter stages of the war, when it became evident to White House regulars that Roosevelt was not long for this world. While the president's loss of vigor was largely owed to his preexisting health problems, the stressed of the executive office had done his condition no favors. If it had been the so-called "Curse of Tippecanoe", then at least it would have subsided with Roosevelt's death. Unfortunately, the curse had seemingly put a target on Hull's back as well, as if to rebel against the unnatural character of Roosevelt's third term."

"The instability was hardly confined to Washington. If so, then Hull could have relied upon the estimable Churchill in building the new international order. Even the predictable autocracy of Stalin could have given him a sense of stability. But the Old Bulldog had been subverted by Labour, and Koba's disappearance was yet to be resolved. Perhaps De Gaulle could have helped the US turn away from the looming disaster, but this was foreclosed by the inexplicable contempt that Hull felt towards the great general."

"And so the evil had been done. The "New Deal for the World" had sacrificed the West's security for the sake of Nations United. Before long, the country of Germany would be no more, its industries packed up and shipped eastwards. These machines would form the engine of a bureaucratic capitalism, with the new system of international trade allowing Russian manufactures to flood the vulnerable markets of Western Europe. Through this insidious scheme of political economy, agents like Laurenti Beria and Harry Dexter White proved themselves the true disciples of Marx."

"The political conventions of the new world system were arguably even worse, at least in the short term. The promise of political autonomy to Russia's new satellites were unconvincing, who had already seen what such plebiscites had been worth in the Baltics. The UN security council was a farce as well, including obvious Soviet puppets like Nehru's India and Sun Fo's China. It did not matter that they would both come around to the Western in time, for that itself would be a sign of America's own compromise with communism."

"Hull himself would not last long in his position, forced to resign under the tyrannical provisions of the twenty-second amendment. However ill he might have been, to remove a sitting president for the sake of an unelected deputy (the choice of Douglas having been forced upon Hill by the Eleanorites) was just another sign of the nation's democratic decline."

"Mainstream historiography would portray Hull's abortive tenure as a latter-day Andrew Johnson, an internal saboteur holding back the course of history. While Johnson's reputation is one I would seek to revise myself, I believe a more potent comparison would be Woodrow Wilson, another internationalist visionary who saw his crusade for Peace and against Communism cut short by internal subversion."

- Excerpts from "War of the Roosevelts: How Socialism Conquered America" by James J. Martin. New York: Devin-Adair (1973)

 

[TheInnerMoon]

"At the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, a new economic world order was forged, with dozens of nations pledging to peg their currencies to the Almighty Dollar, which itself would be convertible to gold at 35 dollars an ounce. Twenty-five years later, this pillar of postwar stability would be naught but rubble, with only a handful of countries even interested in renewing the agreement, and the dollar's gold convertibility being suspended altogether. Thus arises an important question: what happened?

If the opinion makers and power brokers of the anglosphere are to be believed, then this massive crisis in the global economic order happened through no fault of their own. It was a geopolitical fluke, you see, if not the result of Soviet perfidy. Ironically, many of their European counterparts would agree with that assessment, at least the latter part. From about the death of Stalin onwards, the Soviets managed to play their hand expertly, pulling neighboring powers into their sphere without the heavy hand of their tsarist ancestors. This took some getting used to; for East Germany, it had only been a few years since 'the Party had chosen to dissolve the People', as Brecht put it. Those People must have been awfully surprised when Malenkov let them reunify peacefully with the rest of Germany, especially when this left the SED to fend for itself. Still, the now unassailable SPD proved grateful, and this model of 'Germanization' would be repeated in Korea, Vietnam, and Iran. These maneuvers were a close-run thing, to be sure, as each of these countries would enter a prolonged period of strife before reconciliation proved viable. But as the first dominoes fell without much trouble, and the Soviets proved a tolerable hegemon, the others were all the likelier to follow.

We might as well end our analysis here. The expansion of Soviet influence was not some great accident of history, but rather the result of a careful threading of the needle. Like the satirical metaphor of the "Soviet Onion", each layer around the USSR's core territories was treated differently, with economic incorporation spreading more readily than direct political interference, which was mostly reserved for emerging revolutionary powers. While this approach would inevitably face some domestic blowback, the new clique gathered around Malenkov managed to ward off most complaints through their symbolic obsequience to Stalinism, as well as the obvious dividends which resulted from their new course. "Peace through Production" was the order of the day. The New New Soviet Man would be a consummate consumer, enjoying the fruits of their labor in a way that no other world citizen could. Before long, this strategy would be known by many other names: Red Plenty, Luxury Communism, Wandel Durch Handel. Some would decry it as a 'socialist prosperity gospel', or else a dangerous diversion onto the Capitalist Road. But however discontented the left wing of the Soviet camp got, they were not the ones in charge, and the ones who were were more than satisfied with the new regime of peace, stability, and kickbacks.

At the same time, things were not going so well for the United States. To those who lament the loss of America's global influence, this is just the other side of the coin of betrayal. Soviet subversion combined with domestic betrayal to produce the abortion of American Empire. The most frequent scapegoats of this reading of events are the 'peacenik presidents' Kefauver and Scranton, who are also said to have caused a great deal of instability at home with their 'race chaos' activism. Between the two of them, they especially hate Scranton, who was vaulted into office through a 'corrupt bargain' in the 1964 contingent election, short-circuiting the dixiecrats' own efforts. Of course, if this nigh-conspiratorial interpretation were to be in any way consistent, it should be acknowledged that Eisenhower was in fact the first to get entangled in the causes of American decline. Beyond his tentative steps towards civil rights, there was the financial fallout of the Suez War, which led to a severe break between the US and the dying Anglo-French empires. In this sense, there is something to be said for the consistency of rabid Bircherism, which at least has the decency to condemn Old Ike as well.

Really though, there is no reason to see even the America of 1968 as fatally compromised by the realigning world-system. The various accommodations with the USSR kept the newly neutral nations open for business, which meant that America could still make a buck off them. Sure, Willy Brandt's Germany was tying itself ever closer to Soviet commodity flows, but that was to be expected given their geographical proximity. In regions like Africa or South-East Asia, there had to be plenty of room for the both of them.

History, or rather George Wallace, had other plans. If there was any kind of electoral subversion in US politics at this time, it was surely the way that the Dixiecrats came in from the cold to take over the post-Kefauver Democratic Party. Their ascendancy came as an indirect result of the unkept promise of minority equality, for as questions of segregation and voting rights remained unresolved, ever greater portions of white America were starting to see the 'racial rabble-rousers' as the real problem. Among the firebrands of the South, it was George Wallace who knew how to play to these crowds the best, veiling their shared monstrousness by appealing to the importance of 'tradition' or 'law and order'. This new style of 'infrasound politics' became the core of his Northern Strategy, building the coalition that—combined with Republican apathy and left-wing infighting—would propel him to the presidency in 1968. From there, things would get worse.

As with the other presidents of the 1960s, Wallace's success was not matched downballot, keeping him from pursuing any sort of decisive action. Since much of his program was based around a retreat of federal power in favor of the states, this wasn't too bad. Where it really stung was in the realm of foreign policy. Responding to the controversy of detente, Congress had come to reserve more power for itself when it came to the nation's international dealings. Ironically, much of this effort had been led by the old Dixiecrats, who now found that Wallace's own foreign policy slate was hampered by liberal Republicans and the emerging Social Democrats. His grand plan, of opening new lines of trade with the far-right nations of Iberia, Latin America, and France, was easily scuppered on humanitarian grounds. With the only viable alternative being a deeper engagement with the 'Germanized' countries—the ones he had called Soviet proxies—the American sphere of influence was forced to remain in its decayed state.

At this point, any further recapitulation of American decline would be all too indulgent. With the ascent of Wallace, America had put itself in zugzwang, where no possible move would pull it out of its death spiral. Barring a few incidents, the history of the 'Sordid Seventies' became inevitable at this point. Among foreign onlookers, there is yet some hope that the country will resolve its own troubles in a revolutionary fashion, either rejoining the international order or breathing new life into it through another major realignment. The popularity of Chinese-inflected socialism among American leftist movements could offer a preview of such changes. At present, though, we can predict little but hardship for the nation that was once poised to take over the world."

Excerpt from "Access Denied: The Waning of American World Power" by Fred Halliday. Published in The Reasoner, London, april 1981.

So this vignette is from an entirely different concept of mine, Tail Wags Dog, where the lack of a Sino-Soviet split eventually sees China overtake its 'big brother'. There are some clear similarities with my other TLs, like the USSR pursuing a less hardline approach to foreign politics, or my focus on global political economy in general. But that's just my house style, I suppose.

 

[TheInnerMoon]

And now, a potential point of divergence for Freedom From Fear:

Common men could change the world. They did it all the time. Georg Elser knew this.

But you couldn't do it all at once. Even that bastard Hitler had once been just a painter and a corporal. It had taken him time, time and a stupid amount of luck to get to be the fuhrer. One of his first grabs for power had been here in Munich, and his cronies had made a spectacle out of that for the past few years. To Georg, this was a welcome bit of predictability. They were here now, and—if the war which everyone was anticipating could wait a little longer—they would be back here next year. He would have time to plan.

Taking down the fuhrer was no easy task; if it were, Georg was sure someone would have done it already. He was no marksman, but he would have access to explosive materials through his job. Some kind of bomb seemed apt. Last night, he had tried to attend the customary speeches at the Bürgerbräukeller, where much of the nazi leadership would have been present. By the time he got in, almost everyone was already gone. But at least he had gotten a good look at the place, and if their security remained as bad as it had been, he would get his chance.

Georg wasn't sure why he's hung around for the parade. Nothing about it would help him. Maybe he just wanted to get a look at the bastard, the object of his hatred, who had eluded him yesterday. The fuhrer would look into the crowd, not knowing his killer was among them. Here he came now.

Before Georg could get a good look at his future target, a shot rang out from the direction of the reviewing stand. As the crowd tore itself apart in panic, and Georg was almost dragged along with it, he caught a glimpse of the spot where Hitler had just been. All he saw was a clutch of fearful stormtroopers, with a prone and bloody figure on the ground between them.

As it turned, the common man was more capable than Georg had thought.

 

[TheInnerMoon]

And here's my rough reasoning for why I would diverge Freedom From Fear's world with Maurice Bavaud's successful assassination of Hitler on 9 November 1938:

• Originally, I thought I would keep my divergences as small as possible. If the point is to prove the US and USSR could have been buddy buddy instead of engaging in a Cold War, why not reveal that with as few changes as possible? One fun idea I hit upon was to switch the death dates of Stalin and FDR; with the former, you get rid of someone who was a bit too protective of his new sphere of influence to fully engage in the new world order, and with the latter, you preserve someone who's forged the American state in his image and is ready to go all-in on a Second Bill of Rights.
• While this seems like a fine conceit, what really started bothering me was the situation I wanted to establish in Europe and China. In the case of the former, I thought it would be fun to have the old empires of France and Britain form an opposing bloc to the Soviet-Americans, even if they would be far weaker by comparison. The main narrative here would be more 'controversial' end to WW2, where something like a wehrmacht coup (more on that in a bit) ends up inviting the WAllies in, with the various collaborator states turning coat as well. This would basically enshrine clean wehrmacht as conventional European historiography, and treat much of the nazi project as an anti-communist necessity. In China, meanwhile, I was angling for a settlement between the KMT and CPC, basically a formalization of the Second United Front. Knowing full well how tentative that 'united' front really was, I really had to find a way to get Chiang Kai Shek out of the way at the very least, since I judge him to be even less pragmatic than Mao in this matter.
• So here I was, looking for a drastically different end to WW2 to set up this new balance of powers, when I hit upon Operation Long Jump and all it implied. I was going to combine it with the Cairo Conference (maybe setting the whole thing in Baghdad) and take out the leaders of the Four Policemen all at once. Of course, somebody recently started a Long Jump scenario on the other place, and as they pointed out, that'd probably only make the WAllies even more determined to crush Germany. Interesting, but not what I'm looking for.
• So that brings me to my present musings, with Hitler being taken out before the war can even get going. This does a couple of things. First, the nazi power struggle will delay the war outright, though I think it would settle into an uneasy Goering-Himmler duumvirate before long. Historiographically, this will allow Germany to appear janus-faced, with all the bad stuff blamed on SS perfidy and Goering praised as the true heir to Hitler. In the short term, it will allow for elections in France and Britain, a 'peaceful' resolution of the Danzig crisis, and an incoming Franco-British-Soviet alliance (with Poland rebounding into the German sphere). By the time the war proper gets going, let's say 1940-1941, Germany's strategy is surprisingly similar to WW1, playing defensive in the East long enough to knock out the West, this time with Italy and maybe Spain helping out from the start. I'm not sure if France would still be beating as handily, or if I'm straining plausibility here. What helps the Germans is that Japan has no non-aggression pact with the Soviets, and might strike Siberia outright. Though this would also hugely overstretch them if the WAllies pact extends into East Asian matters, I'll have to figure that out.
• Anyway, the point is to ultimately pivot to a situation which strengthens US-Soviet cooperation (maybe through more cooperation in the Pacific?) combines with a Europe weary and anti-communist enough to parlay with the equally exhausted wehrmacht circa 1945. The details obviously have to be settled eventually, but since Freedom From Fear itself is all about the post-war situation, a lot of this can yet be in flux.

 

[TheInnerMoon]

Corporatist World: A list of elements I want to incorporate (pun intended)

• Bryanite Democracy as a populist/farmer-labor extension of Jeffersonianism
• Board of Land Management (OTL's BLM but more democratized)
• The US National Guard as a potent post-apocalyptic civic army
• Hyphenated Americans, and a less homogeneous American identity in general
• Party paramilitaries
• Social Credit and other 'populist technocrats'
• Russian Cosmism
• Chinese federalism
• The Second International
• A World Court
• Esperanto as a lingua franca
• A Catholic integralist bloc, perhaps producing a split in the Roman church
• A studiously pluralistic Austria-Hungary
• Villa-Zapata duumvirate in Mexico
• Ottoman Empire holds on too, specific fate TBD
• Later decolonization, perhaps through a flurry of plebiscites
• No world wars in general until The Big One

 

[TheInnerMoon]

"War, the great equalizer. And none more equal than the Second World War. Ernest Mandel's recent article on the topic leads me to meditate on my own priors. Editor's privilege, let's call it.

As British Marxists, we make for the strangest of nationalists. Barring the legacy of the Levellers and Chartists, there is little to recommend about the political history of our august island nation. Not until "the War", that is. Our twisted reverence for the conflict was noticed early on by Bertolt Brecht, and it led him to produce The Crucible, still my favourite piece of his. Its minimal scope—a conflict over Home Guard property requisitions in a small Midlands town—communicates a covert criticism of 'civil defence socialism' as anything but. In taking over the trades hall instead of the manor house, the unspoken conventions of British class society were as alive under Dalton as they had been under Chamberlain. That the Fabians who designed the postwar order through such documents as Cole Report were themselves of a middle or upper class character need hardly be reiterated. And so, if the biases of this new regime were hardly proletarian, what is there to recommend about it?

What this line of reasoning ignores—and I risk valorizing our own nostalgia here—is that genuine pressures from below made all the difference. The Popular Front could only get in on the backs of mass discontent with Chamberlain's National Government, and even that took three years of grueling attrition. Once in charge, the influence of 'junior members' like Common Wealth and the CPGB (both still independent parties) was far greater than their meager parliamentary number suggested. Buoyed by wildcat strikers and desperate trekkers, the demand for any kind of worker power was keenly felt in Westminster. In translating this energy into a new social model, a vital role was played by the so-called 'Bevin Boys', British conscript workers whose experience with worker self-management in the Urals proved infectious back home. The enthusiasm got so bad at one point that an official complaint was lodged with Litvinov, the Soviet foreign secretary, to stop propagandising among guest workers. That this movement might be entirely organic was not even considered, especially since there was little awareness of how unorthodox these developments had been in the USSR itself.

At the front, too, similar forces were felt. The destruction of the BEF in the French Rout had done much to tear the professional core out of the armed forces, ironically preparing the war for a more French style citizens' army. The increased reliance on colonial troops in Africa and the Middle East compelled a more conciliatory towards the empire, represented by the promises of such documents as the Cripps-Dutt report. Finally, fraternisation with insurgents in Iberia and Soviet troops on the Caucasus front also produced many young radicals, though in the latter case the influence was again more bidirectional than authorities assumed.

With all of these developments, the stage was set for Britain's further socialisation during the Global Armistice. That the armies had halted out of exhaustion rather than a sense of victory was paramount, for as an Iron Curtain fell across Poland and the Pyrenees, there were many on both sides of this divide who wanted to resume the conflict posthaste. Any hint of 'managerial waste' would be strictly opposed by the militant masses, who treated the emerging welfare state as a matter of social security rather than personal comfort. Their anti-capitalist instincts were bolstered by the evident apathy of Taft's America towards the fight against fascism, with even Tory MPs cursing the usury of US financial interests, and their perfidious attempts to pull the white dominions out of Britain's orbit. There was also time to look eastwards now, where the Japanese conquest of China, Indonesia, and Indochina suggested an imminent threat to the nation's own Asian possessions. Decolonisation became a preemptive necessity, and the developmentalist cadres of the new Soviet-British bloc were set on turning this need into a virtue. Only a common wealth could defeat the plutocrats and bureaucrats of Germany, Japan, and America, and so a commonwealth they would build.

Brecht's suspicions were never wrong. There has always been a bourgeois element to British socialism, even now. But the will to defeat fascism has been no less genuine, and as long as robber kings still control the fading glory of the continent, there will be that demand for final victory, at home and abroad. As Marxists, it is our duty to broaden the scope of that battle, to understand the autocracy of Capital itself, and the resulting need for full proletarian control. The Popular Front may well prove insufficient in effecting this total transformation. Here at the Socialist Review, we take such self critique seriously. If a break must be made, we will be the first to announce it."

— "At Home in the War" by Perry Anderson, Socialist Review, London, march 1978

Inspired by this list and this TL on the Union of Britain.

 

[TheInnerMoon]

I've been thinking more about Corporatist world as part of an esoteric project I'm working on; here are the results so far.

• First off, the major power blocs in the world number between two and four (it's vague on purpose)
  • There's the old imperialists of Britain and Russia, whose internal politics veer between liberal paternalism and out-and-out assimilationism. Their flavor of corporatism is all about creating free economic zones on their periphery for the sake of labor aristocrats at home. At its worst, parts of India and Siberia come to resemble OTL Manchuria.
  • The integralists are a touch better, insofar as they are culturally pluralistic and less colonial in their dealings. This is because many of them are former colonies in Latin America, or are the kind of Iberian colonial where you claim to be not like those other girls. Lusotropicalism and all that. Their main downside is that you are not allowed to be anything but the worst kind of Catholic if you're a christian, and other religions had better watch themselves. Austria-Hungary is the ideological leader of this bloc, since integralism is just about the only thing keeping it together.
  • The nations of the Second Internationale are a collective regime of peace and love—at least on the outside. Without a world war to split its left and right factions, social democracy is still trying to balance Revolution and Reform as good old Kautsky advised. Its founding myth is the German Revolution which toppled Wilhelm II around the twenties, although the SFIO insists that the Paris Commune should be their real genesis. Franco-German harmony is its European foundation, and looks constantly poised to become a full federation on the Chinese model. Speaking of, China is the socialist success story of the 20th century, embracing the more revolutionary anti-colonial side of the 2Int formula together with Mexico and Iran.
  • Speaking of anti-imperialism and all that, the new great powers of Japan and the United States want YOU to join their coalition of free peoples. Mostly because they need more regions to invest in. Together with the on-the-ground expertise of the 2Int, they bankroll rebellions and developmental schemes everywhere, though mostly in Africa and South-East Asia. Their politics run from 'liberal corporatism' (when everything is a zaibatsu) to the New Deal on steroids. Social democrats are often a junior partner in this, although the catholic parts of the US are a solid voting block too.
• This balance of power roughly holds throughout the twentieth century, with the steady drumbeat of decolonization providing the fodder for various proxy conflicts. Much of the competition is about soft power too, including a 'Race for the Heavens' which starts in the 1930s. As a result of the heavily dirigiste nature of this world's economies, monumental and capital-intense developments like spaceflight or atomics generally do better, although the lack of a major world conflict creates a lot of path dependency with regard to infrastructure in the developed world. That's part of why all sides are so eager to fight over the underdeveloped periphery, and why China has done so well.
• When the War finally comes, it is suitably apocalyptic (ie nukes galore). The main onset is that big revolt in the Raj which every side was dreading and/or working towards. Though the Second Internationale forbids the non-tactical use of atomics, they are informally shielded by the arsenals of Japan and America. When this alliance starts to become more formal, the integralists follow suit through a deal with the empires, and the war is on. Did I mention the year is 1984?
• The bombs drop, and everybody dies. Well, not everyone, but the devastation of the major powers is pretty much absolute. The Second Internationale benefits from being less of a target, but that also means they now have hundreds of millions of refugees to take care of. Any survivor with family connections or a university degree is quickly snapped up by the rising economies of Africa and Latin America. The military remnants of Japan and the US Pacific Fleet regroup in China, from where they start finishing fights in South and South-East Asia and generally putting the region back together.
• By 2025, the mass die-offs from nuclear winter, opportunistic diseases, and general immiseration are mostly taken care of. The old world's treasures have been shipped south, and the World Court in Istanbul is steadily expanding into a World Concert. In a few decades, when the shoe is fully on the other foot, Europe will be divvied up between integralist missions, Ottoman venture capital, and Chinese guild concessions. The irony is not lost on anyone. Space is another story, one I will get to in time. Safe to say that the various colonies in orbit and on Luna survived, somehow, and now need to bargain with the new power-that-be for resources and landing rights.