1892-1893 in the German Republic
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
1892-1893 in the German Republic
Coalition Manifesto
- Contribute more assets toward strengthening the capabilities of our allied and aligned states and organizations. Contributions should be assessed based on what we can provide, and on what the allied entity is in need of.
- Support continued economic and military development in Italy. (Combined)
- Make a dedicated effort to strengthen relations with the United States, with the ultimate goal of guaranteeing their support in any future war with the Entente. Capitalize on existing relationships and political sympathies, as well as the Entente's attacks on our respective Republics.
- Implement a fast-track teacher's program to address immediate manpower concerns in tandem with a national teacher's college program. Emphasize the preservation of participants' and recipients' cultures and dialects, alongside ensuring social equality in the program.
- Continue funding the military infrastructure and fortification program. In this stage emphasis should be on expanding and fortifying logistical nodes and axes of movement supporting first-line positions.
- Continue the expansion of the national railways, with a focus on electrifying its systems and further expanding the internal supply lines of the Republic.
- Expand the labor voucher program based on the scientific committee's report.
- Utilize the Sub-Commission for Information to organize and support revolutionary efforts in Poland.
- Pass various measures to support the modernization of yeoman farms, providing easy and affordable access to mechanization and improved fertilizers.
Opposition Referenda
- Build up secondary railroad branches and local depots to service rural areas, both for passengers and to support connection of extractive industries to the towns processing their production.
- Encourage mergers among German co-ops to allow for better economies of scale & make them capable of competing with large capitalist corporations. (enacted in part)
- Contribute more assets toward strengthening the capabilities of our allied and aligned states and organizations. Contributions should be assessed based on what we can provide, and on what the allied entity is in need of.
- Support continued economic and military development in Italy. (Combined)
- Make a dedicated effort to strengthen relations with the United States, with the ultimate goal of guaranteeing their support in any future war with the Entente. Capitalize on existing relationships and political sympathies, as well as the Entente's attacks on our respective Republics.
- Implement a fast-track teacher's program to address immediate manpower concerns in tandem with a national teacher's college program. Emphasize the preservation of participants' and recipients' cultures and dialects, alongside ensuring social equality in the program.
- Continue funding the military infrastructure and fortification program. In this stage emphasis should be on expanding and fortifying logistical nodes and axes of movement supporting first-line positions.
- Continue the expansion of the national railways, with a focus on electrifying its systems and further expanding the internal supply lines of the Republic.
- Expand the labor voucher program based on the scientific committee's report.
- Utilize the Sub-Commission for Information to organize and support revolutionary efforts in Poland.
- Pass various measures to support the modernization of yeoman farms, providing easy and affordable access to mechanization and improved fertilizers.
Opposition Referenda
- Build up secondary railroad branches and local depots to service rural areas, both for passengers and to support connection of extractive industries to the towns processing their production.
- Encourage mergers among German co-ops to allow for better economies of scale & make them capable of competing with large capitalist corporations. (enacted in part)
Having settled comfortably into their new party system, the German people continue to turn out for elections in numbers which would be remarkable in other countries, even republics like America, but are more or less par for the course in the Second Republic. The elections themselves are much more boisterous than usual, however, owing to a pair of changes made by the outgoing Assembly.
The first is the implementation of the 1890 census, which updates the official figure on voting citizens in the Republic from the 1880 number. In the decade since the founding of the Second Republic, nearly 15 million new voters have been added to the rolls, increasing by half the previous number and therefore increasing the number of delegates to represent them.
The second reform is an amendment to the Constitution of 1880, made to both improve voter representation and, perhaps more importantly, increase the number of working delegates. This second point is vital, as it provides the rapidly expanding government with more commissioners, sub-commissioners, deputy commissioners, trade envoys, special representatives, and numerous other elected officials. The Planning Commission, a mammoth entity unforeseen in 1880, consumes by itself a substantial number of these new delegates and shows no sign of its appetite abating.
Consequently, where once Germany had about 936 delegates at any one time - one for every 30,000 citizens - it now has 2165, with one delegate for every 20,000 voters, making it double the size of the next-largest legislative body. A formidable number, to be sure, but entirely necessary given the sheer scale of the elected working positions within the Second Republic.
The principal topic of debate in the electoral contest of 1891 is the increasingly intertwined role of German diplomacy and commerce, as steam-powered ships and overseas trade bridge previously unthinkable divides to connect the Republic to places as far away as Argentina, Iran, and Japan. For the Social Democrats, the growth of German international commerce is an opportunity to secure the Republic more firmly in global markets and project stability and reliability to foreign powers, especially its creditors in Britain. For the Communists and Radicals, it's an opportunity to strengthen existing ties with Alliance partners and build up additional fronts in the inevitable war against monarchism and reaction. For the increasingly international-minded Cooperativists, it's an opportunity to grow German influence among oppressed and colonized peoples, especially in enemy countries or those countries which may become enemies in future.
Ultimately, it is the Red-Gold argument in favor of strengthening ties with extant partners which wins the day and therefore the election, though Radical support has once again waned in typical fashion to make it a very junior partner in the new term's alliance. The Cooperativists' localist focus once again sees them excluded from government, as they seek to gradually establish parallel regional and cultural organizations that might, in the eyes of some hardcore centralists, erode the national government's power. Likewise, despite the growth in the Social Democrats' representation in the Assembly, they lack the power to force their way into the coalition, and therefore enter opposition instead.
Rather than engage in coalition politics, then, the Cooperativists and Social Democrats put their policies to the public for approval. The Cooperativists set forth a comprehensive scheme to expand railway construction beyond the main arteries to secondary and rural areas, both for freight and passenger service. The Social Democrats, for their part, have a legislative reform that targets the complex and sometimes contradictory laws surrounding cooperative reorganizations and mergers. Both of these proposals are broadly popular and pass as referenda in late 1892 during the midterm elections, which is when most referenda and by-elections are scheduled, local officials are elected, and Election Day is thereby maintained as a reliable yearly holiday.
The result for the former referendum is a shifting of priorities on national infrastructure, as rail electrification is kept to the cities and major industrial areas rather than the general push envisioned by the Communists, in order to accommodate more traditional rail-building projects in the countryside and to less-prioritized industrial areas. Despite the reprioritization, both programs move forward productively, and rail service proliferates explosively across the Republic.
The latter referendum comes into effect and heralds a wave of consolidation; many cooperatives that had previously wished to combine their efforts, whether horizontally or vertically, now benefit from legislation cutting through a thicket of outdated regulations dating back to the First Republic. Despite the rapid pace at which cooperatives amalgamate, assiduous attention is paid to workers' democratic rights, and overall productivity rises as new and efficient practices are put into place and larger-scale production realized.
Additional industrial aid shipments are dispatched to both Spain and Italy, including working models and assembly machines for the bolt-action Gewehr 1888, which both republics have adopted as their standard-issue rifle (albeit with regional modifications, as usual). Even as their industry cooperativizes and private industrial ownership is either crowded out or directly expropriated, their militaries begin to more closely conform to the German Landwehr model, with darker uniforms, steel helmets, and an abundance of engineering equipment, supported by increasingly robust rail networks. Such innovations are duplicated to a lesser extent in the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and the South American republics, all of whom have reason to be wary of European liberal and reactionary forces.
Chief Representative Schaefer pays a visit to the United States in 1893, ostensibly to attend the World's Fair, but in actuality to conduct an intense round of talks with American representatives in Chicago, including President Ames. The talks are productive, given both nations' general animus toward the European imperial powers, and include agreements to swap military delegations, expand trade ties, and promote German-American cooperation in areas of mutual interest, especially East Asia. While nothing like an alliance or even a military understanding, the subsequent treaties do much to rekindle the two nations' somewhat dormant ties of affection, which date back to the American Civil War almost thirty years earlier.
Efforts to resolve the ongoing shortage of teachers in the Republic are something of a mixed bag. While the fast-track program intended to get teachers-in-training out educating pupils is reasonably successful at addressing the numerical shortage, many of them are insufficiently prepared for the role and have to do a great deal of learning on the job, to the moderate detriment of their students. Nevertheless, in tandem with the expansion of teachers' colleges, the Commission for Education reports that the shortage should be resolved within the next few years.
The major benefit from the fast-track program is not the high quality of its junior teachers but rather their composition. Student populations with strong minority presence, whether cultural or linguistic, are matched with teachers who share those qualities, and who are fully prepared to nourish their individual identities alongside their learning about the German language and republican citizenship. Consequently, reading and writing attainment skyrockets, and the Red-Gold government announces that it has achieved complete national literacy for the first time in German history.
In a clever bit of financial maneuvering, the Budget Commission and the Infrastructure Commission collaborate on a program to shift some of the Republic's enormous military budget over to strategically-valuable railway improvements, namely the electrification of major arteries leading from arsenals and depots to the borders. This comes alongside a wave of improvements and further fortification of those front-line border posts, particularly in the East, which the Imperial League responds to with (less efficient) efforts in the same vein. Described privately as the "Electric Road to Moscow," this program will see a vast improvement to future mobilization and supply efforts, should a foreign war just happen to arise.
Confronted with a certain degree of skepticism over the validity of labor vouchers, the German government decides to take a different tack. Rather than converting the adult population piecemeal to the idea and shake loose entrenched ideas, they begin augmenting and then slowly replacing student allowance payments with labor vouchers instead of paper marks, first in the cities and then extending outward into the countryside. Children are much more adaptable (and devious) than their adult counterparts, and readily take to the new system, proudly exploiting various minor loopholes which are then swiftly closed, further improving the efficiency of the program.
The Sub-Commission for Information's first major task, as assigned to it by High Commissioner Strauss, is the establishment of intelligence networks and revolutionary support pipelines in Poland. Here it meets a surprising amount of resistance, not from the Russian secret police, but from the Poles themselves. Following the First Republic's failure to come to the January Uprising's aid in 1868, the Polish resistance movement has been more or less completely suppressed. In its place is "organic work," a pacifist project aimed at improving the Poles' lot in life through industry, self-improvement, and the accumulation of capital. Many educated upper- and middle-class Poles are resistant to even the concept of another armed rebellion, given Germany's checkered past and the general perceived futility of resisting the Russian army.
Fortunately, even that which is dead can never be said to truly have died, and the periodic outrages of the Russians in the countryside, ranging from Cossack pogroms to extortionate levies to Russification programs, has left plenty of fertile ground amidst the lower classes, especially those who have not profited from organic work. Connections are made with rural villages and caches of arms are stashed beneath manure piles and compost heaps, in preparation for future efforts.
In response to the growing amalgamation of rural cooperatives, Radical delegates push for and receive a special program targeted at lifting up yeoman farms, particularly in the field of mechanization and chemical fertilizers. These technological innovations allow fewer people to do far more work, thereby increasing the productivity of the single family by an order of magnitude. Many farmers begin sending their children off to technical schools to gain the necessary mechanical knowledge or, failing that, find a bright young person to marry into the family.
World Events in 1892-1893
The Trucial States in the Persian Gulf are incorporated under British protection to guard against the spread of German commercial influence from Iran and the Ottoman Empire. This results in a noticeable uptick in spontaneous mid-journey searches for German merchant vessels by Royal Navy patrols but is otherwise a peaceful process.
In the United States, state and local laws mandating or otherwise allowing for separate-race accommodations are struck down in a Supreme Court case in which Chief Justice Harlan states that the US Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens". This case is emblematic of a growing second wave of American radicalism, which is rising in response to increased efforts to restore white supremacy in the South by Lost Causer die-hards.
The 1893 World's Fair opens in Chicago, Illinois, as part of the general craze for global expositions. While predominantly a showcase of American talent and innovation, there is some press attention paid to the German-American Friendship Exhibit, which showcases various devices developed by German-Americans and American Germans, as well as collaborations between America and Germany, including an all-steel woman-sized scale model of the Statue of Justice that people can pose with for pictures. While there, German Chief Representative Franz Schaefer makes a speech extolling the shared values of America and Germany, including their commitments to democracy and equality, as well as their love of progress and technological innovation.
While cholera continues to rage across Asia, Africa, South America, and parts of Europe, it has been more or less eradicated in Germany due to the Republic's innovative and wide-reaching health practices. Consequently, as a sign of international goodwill, surplus German medical supplies are dispatched to France, China, Iran, Japan, and the South American republics, where the disease still reigns, while shipments sent to Russia are turned back at the border.
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