The Widening Gyre: The Great War and the Remaking of Europe

[The Laurent]

It's funny how, despite things going much better, they're still deeply reliant on the prospect of a German revolution, which would likely free them of the obligations for Reparations or at least massively change the calculus.

 

[Bisexual-Mart]

I was disturbed to see the seminary school dropout listed as "People's Commisar for Nationalities", but then gladdened to see that post occupied by someone else.

I'd assume that the seminary school dropout ended up assigned to some meaningless post like "Chief Inspector of the Revolutionary Dairies" or something stupid.

 

[The Laurent]

I was disturbed to see the seminary school dropout listed as "People's Commisar for Nationalities", but then gladdened to see that post occupied by someone else.

I'd assume that the seminary school dropout ended up assigned to some meaningless post like "Chief Inspector of the Revolutionary Dairies" or something stupid.

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No? He's been promoted to Military Affairs. He's doing pretty well for himself, and to be fair at this point he's not done anything particularly rancid or horrible to get rebuke? Like, will he eventually? One may hope.

But at the moment he's just a random "some guy."

 

[Whilryke]

He also solidified his rear by gaining control of several small Siberian cities, including Zlatoust, Ekeratinberg, Tyumen, Omsk, and Novosibisk.

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Before 1926, Novosibisk was actually called Novonikolayevsk. I'm assuming you're using the contemporary names since I doubt Ekaterinburg would keep its name even in an alternate Soviet Russia.

I was disturbed to see the seminary school dropout listed as "People's Commisar for Nationalities", but then gladdened to see that post occupied by someone else.

I'd assume that the seminary school dropout ended up assigned to some meaningless post like "Chief Inspector of the Revolutionary Dairies" or something stupid.

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What if I told you he occupied this position in OTL from 1917 to 1923?

 

[The Laurent]

Logically it (kinda) makes sense. He was a Georgian, so presumably he would actually have relevant opinions on the issue.

 

[WaltzinBrunhilda]

Well that and Stalin was the most recognized figure in the Bolsheviks on the topic pre-war. Even though there are some theories that Lenin just used Stalin as a shadow writer on his book on the topic.

 

[Nervos Belli]

As a player in Blackstar's MNKh quest, I'm happy to see Sergo getting a position in the 2nd government. He was an interesting guy who had some good ideas, although the Stakhanovite plan was a bit of a bust.

 

[mango363]

Did you forget about the Czechoslovak Foreign Legion in Russia or are our soldiers not there ITTL? Same thing about the Czechoslovak Legions in France and Italy. Can't wait to see what happens to Austria-Hungary. I foresee 2 outcomes: Democratic Confederation of The Danube (with Otto's support), or it just shattering as in OTL.

 

[Curby]

Did you forget about the Czechoslovak Foreign Legion in Russia or are our soldiers not there ITTL? Same thing about the Czechoslovak Legions in France and Italy. Can't wait to see what happens to Austria-Hungary. I foresee 2 outcomes: Democratic Confederation of The Danube (with Otto's support), or it just shattering as in OTL.

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They are there, they're just slightly less relevant because they were badly mauled in the Austro-German counteroffensive in 1916. I haven't included precise numbers, but as a whole former soldiers are somewhat less important ITTL's civil war due to the massive Russian casualties at the front; the overall size of the various combatant forces is 25-30% smaller, and drawn much more from irregular red guard units, local militias, and cossacks than IOTL. This actually makes Russia even more vulnerable to a renewed German offensive, which is part of the reason they agree to such a punitive reparations bill.

Spoiler: Czechoslovak Legion Spoiler

Because Britain controls the Black Sea, the remnants of the Czechoslovak Legion are evacuated near the beginning of the conflict to Greece; they'll play a pretty important role there.

 

[Curby]

1919: Endsieg and Revolution

To children returning from vacation, the home is new, fresh, festive. But nothing has changed in it, since they left. Only because the duties were forgotten, of which every piece of furniture, every window, every lamp is otherwise a reminder, does the Sabbath peace once more repose, and for minutes one is at home in the multiplication table of rooms, chambers and corridors, as it will appear for the rest of one's life only in lies. Not otherwise did the world appear during the first days of the Month of Roses, nearly unchanged, in the steady light of its day of celebration, when it no longer stands under the law of labor, and the duties of those returning home are as light as vacation play.

-Theodor Adorno.

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are days where decades happen.

-Vladimir Lenin.

The fatal defect of the socialist is his desire to immanentize the eschaton, to make of politics a new and secular religion.

-Eric Voegelin.

"In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face."

-Karl Mannheim

O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

-W.B. Yeats, 1919

Oh that year is a long time gone,
Oh that year is a long time gone,
But it'll be back before long…
'Till then I'll be singing this song

Say, there, did you hear the news?
The world has woken from its blues
Workers are striking in every town
They're gonna tear the bosses down

Richard was a family man
had three daughters in Birmingham
He was shipped off to France one year
Been fighting so long his mind's gone queer

Oh Richard could see some things right
That whole war was a madman's fight
He met up with some krauts that day
They resolved to make their masters pay…

Henry was a Minnesota lad
who worked the mines till his back went bad
He voted Bryan in sixteen
Just to see him shot by the machine

Oh Henry was a peaceful fellow
His friends all called him Mr. mellow
But when Wilson drafted his only son
He picked back up his old shotgun

The politicians told the men around
they'd cut all the radicals down,
bring the workers down to heel,
even if a man just wanted a meal.

I'll tell you the prosecutors' names,
Wilson, Churchill, and Petain,
For all their strutting they could never see,
The working man just wants to be free.

Oh that year is a long time gone,
Oh that year is a long time gone,
But it'll be back before long…
'Till then I'll be singing this song."

-Woody Guthrie, 1919

"Revisiting the Revolutions", European Broadcasting Collective -"The Month of Roses", November 19, 1998.
​

Optional Music:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OidIzOPERp8​

We are situated in the large, rectangular common area of one of the neo-modernist apartment buildings constructed in Naples during the 1960s, now converted into an assisted living facility for the elderly. The room is bathed in natural light from a single, continuous window pane stretching along the entirety of the upper portion of the right wall. A light-gray synthetic cotton and wool couch hugs an adjacent wall, which is decorated with the flags of the German Socialist Republic and Free Italian Council Republic. Both of these flags find contemporary use primarily on ceremonial occasions.

The camera is focused on a woman of mixed vietnamese-european heritage, who sits upright on a finely crafted wooden upholstered armchair in casual garb. She addresses the viewer in German, employing a tone which is solemn but not condescending.

"This month, we celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Amid the ongoing debate over the decommodification initiatives, it has become common to invoke its memory as a point of argument - perhaps you have done so yourself. And yet, for all we read about and discuss the revolution, there are fewer individuals than ever who have lived through it. Our EBC researchers learned that in this very apartment in Naples, there are no less than a half-dozen individuals who participated in the November Revolution. Today, we talk to them to get a sense of how it was made and experienced."

The camera slowly rotates, revealing six venerable individuals, all likely over the age of 90. They are dressed in clothes made primarily of cotton and synthetic fabrics; most of them are casual and relatively light, matching the warm climes of Naples.

"We are talking today to Anneliese, Tommaso, Bianca, Paolo, Cornelia, and Albert. Anneliese worked at a textile plant in Berlin."

*The camera zooms to Anneliese before recolored images are displayed of the worker's tenements in Neukolln.*

"Tommaso was a skilled metalworker, shop steward, and labor activist in Genoa."

A sheepish smile flashes across the face of the wiry Italian man, and then the program cuts to another recolored image, this one of a gathering of men in workmen's clothes discussing something among themselves at a factory canteen. A similar process is repeated as we are introduced to Bianca, a tenant farmer in Sicily, Albert, a Bavarian soldier serving on the western front, Paolo, an agricultural laborer in Romagna, and Cornelia, the wife of a shopkeeper in Rotterdam.

"I wanted to begin with you, Anneliese. What were you doing at the time?"

The lady adjusts her glasses, and speaks in a slow, precise tone, mixing occasional Italian words with German ones.

"Well, I was working in a small workshop, making clothes at the time…I began the war as a secretary, you see, and that…that ended in 1915, when the business was shuttered. My husband, Johanne, had just been sent off, which I truly didn't believe to be possible - you see, he worked making the shells, and for five years that had protected him from the draft, even as the other men of Neukolln were emptied out of the neighborhood."

"What do you remember of the months leading up to November?"

"Oh, it was intolerable - the whole war was, but 1919…" She pauses to think for a moment, her face frozen. "With the flu, and the street-goons, and the lack of bread, with the news of what was going on at the front…it appeared that the whole world was on the verge of collapsing."

"How about November? Did you get any hint of what was to occur?"

"No, not truly. There was always a plan for some strike or some action, but these never really came to anything at all. It's why, well-".

She pauses for a moment, now chuckling softly. The host urges her to continue on.

"Oh, I was unsure if you wanted me to speak of what happened in November yet."

"Please do."

"Well, as I was saying - it seemed to me, certainly at the time, and even moreso now - it seemed to me that there was something miraculous about these events. Now, I know what you are thinking - I am not a religious person, but I have found no other way to account for what happened."

"Can you expand on this?"

"Oh, well, perhaps I am being sentimental. You know, it is just that for five years, we had been living under a kind of terror, and then in a few days, in what felt like an instant, it was all gone. Not truly, but in that month, that is how it felt.

The whole city was draped in the red flags, the overseer was gone from the workshop, the police had laid down their arms, but what was most striking, really, was that it seemed that all of Berlin was in the middle of some sort of celebration…music blaring, men locking arms and singing, young women in the street with boys…it all seemed out of a dream, but then, when we heard of what was happening in Italy, in France,, and even in America and England, well…you must understand, even then nobody really understood what we were living through."

"Well, we've come to refer to the period as the November Revolution." A chorus of chuckles from the other participants, who have thus far been silent. "But you say you didn't understand it - do you think we do so better now?"

Anneliese frowns and gives a slight shake of her head. "No…if anything, I feel as if we understand it less. Now it is all about, well, the worker's struggle, the achievement of socialism, and I don't mean to gainsay these things, but that month, well, to me it felt more like a shedding of the past than a leap into the future. That came later, that was a different matter."

That verdict seems to hang over the gathered conversationalists for a moment, until Tommaso speaks up.

"I felt the same way at the time. I was involved in the walkout of a few dozen men, but the whole revolution, it did appear at first as something almost miraculous…there weren't many of us who thought we could win, you see, who really could imagine us workers taking power, but there were enough. I think, well, I think that one can't today really understand the revolution in the sense Anneliese wants us to, but it's not any failing of the young, really, they haven't lived through what we did, and they couldn't know what it was like when the spell of the war, really, of the whole past, was finally broken.

We had an expression for the time - the month of roses - you see, it really was just a month, in which we all felt that we could forget the war, the past, when it seemed as if something new was about to be born, and we just had to wait for it to emerge. That would take a good while longer, of course, and maybe we are…" The man glances to Anneliese for a moment. "Maybe we are simply being sentimental, but I do think there is something in that month which should be preserved, beyond the fighting and the struggle. There was a sense, I suppose, that things once closed had been opened, that for a time all things were possible, that we had at last come to an unexplored and undiscovered country which had been simply awaiting our arrival."

History as Apocalypse: Eschatological Experiences of the Great War, Karl Mannheim​

…In the final year of the great war, people began to understand their experience in overtly eschatological terms. The shift into a more religious register of discourse is present not only for nationalists and catholics, but also among socialists, secular liberals and revolutionaries of all stripes. Ravaged by plague, food shortages, and the depredations of state-funded paramilitaries, individuals started to conceive of the war's final year as a prelude to the apocalypse. Parallel visions also proliferated of a new age of abundance, to be ushered in by nationalist victory, the end of the nation-state, socialist revolution, the second coming of christ, or even American intervention in the war.

The widening of the conflict and the acceleration of fighting on the western front fed this eschatological understanding; the war was "meant" to wind down at this point, it was only "natural" for civilization to return to its normal order, and yet it appeared to only grow larger and more deadly as Netherlands and China entered the fray. Many started to predict that the conflict would soon consume the entire world, that the last five years were merely an introduction to the real conflict which was now beginning…

For the socialists, the call became "Either Socialism or Barbarism", either a clean break with the past or the continuation of the war until it transformed European states into massive, all-seeing military dictatorships and their populations into little more than slaves. For the nationalists, the slogan was either victory or degeneration, either a valiant campaign of national defense or a defeat in which the nation would inevitably disintegrate into the anarchy and lawlessness of social revolution. For liberal pacifists, only a peace followed by the creation of a unified democratic confederacy of nations could save Europe from the horror of both social revolution and permanent military dictatorship. The players had revealed their cards, and few would brook any compromise with the enemy…

Incompetence or Historical Destiny: International Socialism in the Great War, Wilhelm Pieck​

…The standard line, adopted by the Luxemburgists and eagerly parroted by the successors of the Social-Democrats and Italian syndicalists, has been that the European revolution of 1919 was by necessity a movement from the masses upwards, in which the spontaneous action of the proletariat burst asunder the old regimes of Europe. This neatly absolves responsibility (and perhaps blame) from the international socialist movement, which met on no less than four occasions and, by the time of the Trenton Conference, at least signaled they were willing to use strike action to end the conflict and force a status quo peace.

Given the manifestly revolutionary situation that already existed in early 1919, it is a small wonder that the socialist movement in both its centrist and left-wing varieties did so little to coordinate organized resistance. If there were not a November Revolution, we socialists would be astounded at the timidity of even the most radical factions, and their consistent inability to work in tandem with worker's movements. We might even call it a historic mistake, a missed opportunity - but alas, the November Revolution has diverted attention from such questions.

Here, I will try to call us back to them. Why was the spread of socialism in both the factory and the trench not matched by an effort of socialist parties to wield their expanding social base for revolutionary ends? Was a popular revolt inevitable and the chaos of the revolutionary period inevitable, or might a trained and disciplined socialist party on the Bolshevik model been capable of carrying out a revolution by January, 1919, thus saving millions of lives from the lunacy of the decaying European bourgeoisie?

"Endsieg" and the War in 1919, Arthur Schlesinger Jr​

The key question of 1919 is not how revolution occurred, but why the combatants continued to wage war even when the danger of revolution was so palpable. For the entente powers, the answer had a great deal to do with the punitive German war goals; whatever the threat of social revolution, it was felt by French military officers and politicians that surrendering the eastern territories and consenting to harsh German reparations would constitute a national humiliation that France could not recover from. In Britain, pacifist sentiment among elites was significantly more widespread, but the realignment of politics in East Asia and the fear of an American-German alliance in the postwar era meant that most felt they had to keep fighting to contain the potential German hegemon before confronting the burgeoning North American one.

In many respects, Entente prospects improved in 1919. After a year in which their advantage in raw troop numbers deteriorated, the infusion of colonial troops allowed them to once again achieve a favorable correlation of forces. In conjunction with the technological superiority of the allied forces, most British generals believed that they could prevent a German breakout to Paris and bleed the Central Powers until Ludendorff was forced to come to the table. Few envisioned that the Germans would so quickly make up their military-technological deficit.

As for Germany and Austria-Hungary, matters were somewhat more clear. Even if we backet the idiosyncrasies of Ludendorff, most of the OHL and members of the cabinet privately expressed that the only way to avert revolution was to win the war. In fact, this was a sentiment also shared in France, Bulgaria, Greece, and Austria. Leaders broadly felt that the years of hardship must be compensated for with a decisive victory that would reconcile the people to the state. A defeat, or perhaps even worse - a negotiated, status quo peace - would call into question the entire purpose of the war, and thereby delegitimize the political elites who brought the nation into the conflict.

The decision to continue the war was a gamble made by desperate men fighting for their own survival. It was also a decision made with full knowledge of the deteriorating morale in the army. German and French soldiers were both close to their breaking point. A man can only fight in such miserable conditions for so long. As German Tanks began rolling onto the front in February, the fighting took on an entirely new character. The widespread dispersal of more effective offensive weaponry meant that the trenches no longer offered the same protection from assault. Simultaneously, the exhaustion of the soldiers precluded large-scale offensives. Consequently, the fighting devolved into small-scale, often extraordinarily brutal skirmishes. Even though the number of soldiers on the frontlines were around 20% smaller than in 1916 and 1918, casualties were 10% higher.

In a recent text, Enzo Traverso contends that from 1917-1919, the war shifted from a consensual "war of peoples" to a coercive "war of states". In 1919, this tendency reached its culmination with the introduction of manifold new forms of repression. At the front, three new forms of personnel were introduced in 1919. Though some of these were present in part in previous years, only in the final year of the war did they form an interlocking system of social control.

Firstly, there were the so-called "military police". These were not soldiers tasked with policing occupied areas, but loyalist, politically reliable personnel, typically junior officers, who had the task of ensuring discipline and quashing dissent. They frequently acted as conduits between the state and two other institutions: the frontline reservists and the office of internal military intelligence. The latter was typically, though not universally, a formally established institution within the military, which had the task of monitoring and tracking troop discontent and socialist agitation; in contrast, the presence of "frontline reservists" was rarely officially recognized, but they were employed pervasively throughout 1919. "Frontline reservists" was itself something of a euphemism, as the soldiers who composed these brigades were neither reservists nor truly on the frontline. Instead, they were situated several hundred yards behind the front, with the task of detaining or simply shooting soldiers who attempted to desert or flee.

The different nations employed these institutions differently, and frequently leaned on some more heavily than others. In Britain, the frontline reservists rarely shot soldiers, most often detaining them for a future court-martial. While there were an informal class of "military police", in practice they tended to be enlisted in the intelligence services. The relative lack of coercion can likely be accounted for by the British Army's superior morale, which was bolstered by generous leave times and (comparatively) luxurious supplies.

In France, Germany, and Austria, much more weight was placed on coercion. Germany created an expansive and efficient military police system, built on the solid bedrock of its stellar junior officer class. These officers frequently had some level of camaraderie with their soldiers, and, unlike in the French system, they were not designated officially as military police. More overt forms of coercion were farmed out to the troops at the rear and the military intelligence units, who frequently visited the front to arrest soldiers suspected of disloyalty. In France, the military police were much more reviled, but they also were smaller and only composed a fraction of the total officer class. Much more common was the use of loyal common soldiers as informants and spies.

The growth of the surveillance and disciplinary apparatus drained resources from the actual task of war. States started to conceive of the war as a battle on "two fronts": against the external enemy, and against internal military and domestic agitators. This new war, between the state and the domestic population, constituted the final culmination of the tendency toward the accumulation of state power identified by Traverso. Among the primary combatants, a whole slate of new government offices were created, tasked with the explicit purpose of repressing domestic and military disobedience. Only in England was there a sufficiently active liberal civil society to offer meaningful resistance to the state's assault on civil liberties; everywhere, the entire tradition of Liberal individualism was under relentless siege by totalizing military-bureaucratic states.

The metastasis and deformation of the state was a logical consequence of the miserable conditions which were imposed on domestic populations and the corresponding surge of social unrest. In part, so long as states continued to participate in the war, they had little control over this: the skyrocketing inflation in nearly every belligerent power could only be avoided by fiscal retrenchment, something which was politically and militarily impossible in this final and most deadly phase of the war. There were efforts made by these states to pacify domestic populations - more, in fact, than were made at almost any other point in the war. The war against the internal agitator had to be paired with a war of pacification which would improve living conditions and exterminate the poverty and want which fed discontent. In France, Germany, and Austria, real efforts were made to placate labor unions and improve factory conditions. Harsh new laws were passed against war profiteering. By the time the revolution broke out, it is likely that the burden of the war was more equally distributed than at any other point.

Yet by this point, this was more an equality of want than anything else. The growth of the state apparatus did not allow it to conjure forth the resources and wealth that had been decimated by the war. The decline in living standards - in the ability of the vast majority of individuals to reliably procure the most basic necessities - fell inescapably in every nation, and effected an ever-wider proportion of the population. By this point, it was the extensive policing apparatus of the state, not its meager attempts to rectify wartime shortages, which held back the tides of revolution. And it was not equipped to do so indefinitely.

 

[LeonSolarpunk]

That interview at the beginning with the "month of roses" was powerful stuff.

 

[The Laurent]

As beautiful as the idea of these motherfuckers being "several hundred years" behind the front, I assume you meant yards, @Curby

 

[wallabon]

As beautiful as the idea of these motherfuckers being "several hundred years" behind the front

Click to shrink...

Like some nightmarish version of Timecop

 

[The Laurent]

Like some nightmarish version of Timecop

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When he wrote "several hundred years behind" I was almost imagining the "frontline reservists" declaring that they will preserve the rightful Bourbon monarchy against Jacobin agitation.

 

[Traveller76]

So the various European countries have come up with Barrier units.

 

[wallabon]

When he wrote "several hundred years behind" I was almost imagining the "frontline reservists" declaring that they will preserve the rightful Bourbon monarchy against Jacobin agitation.

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Ah, I was getting more of a "kill their ancestors so those damn rabble rousers will never be born" vibe, but that would make more sense than the Surprise Prussian Time Machine™️

 

[QueenOfRoses]

We had an expression for the time - the month of roses - you see, it really was just a month, in which we all felt that we could forget the war, the past, when it seemed as if something new was about to be born, and we just had to wait for it to emerge.

Click to shrink...

"Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too."

 

[Bisexual-Mart]

So, we're just waiting for the inevitable German Revolution. And also, the Woody Guthrie song snippets. It's funny how it's similar to Woody Guthrie's OTL song. But what I wonder is: why is he called "Woody" Guthrie ITTL? IOTL he was named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie by his father, an admirer of Woodrow Wilson. However, with Wilson less prominent ITTL, one would assume that his father would have named him after a different figure.

 

[Curby]

Hey all! Smaller update, catching us up on what's going on in the Ottoman Empire, Spain, and South America. Mostly focused on political economy with the latter two - I will cover politics and labor in more detail when there are more significant divergences from OTL.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Global Great War​

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire fought a long war, longer perhaps than any of the other combatants. Since the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, the nation had been at arms; full demobilization would only occur well into the 1920s. Fighting devastated not only the borderlands of Iraq and Palestine, but also the heartlands of Turkish Anatolia. The urban population would not recover until the early 1960s.

Many in the ruling Committee of Union and Progress had some sense that the Empire was at grave risk, and there was broad support in the party for a project of national revitalization. The difficulties came, as always, in the specifics: a pacific majority looked to England and France for protection and hoped for integration into the British-led global market, while a more radical minority faction led by the Ottoman general Enver Pasha sought to imitate Germany's militarized, heavy-industrial pattern of modernization. The bold and frequently secretive maneuvering of the military faction forced the party majority into a purely reactive stance; the popular acclamation of the successful Albanian gamble led the pro-entente majority to endorse the provocative coup against their better instincts. However, it is likely that the greatest weakness of the anti-German faction was England's persistent indifference to Ottoman diplomatic entreaties, which delegitimized their attempt to chart a different course for the declining Empire.

Although the Committee of Union and Progress had rapidly turned Turkey into a one-party state, power was still broadly dispersed. In addition to the Central Committee, there was a general assembly of party-members and a government cabinet; the leaders of the party were forced to vie with each other for the support of CUP representatives, introducing some elements of internal democracy. With the onset of war, Russian and Serbian bellicosity helped rally the general assembly to the radical faction, and general mobilization began weeks in advance of the other powers, in response to the threat of a Russian invasion of Western Armenia.

Turkey's war has frequently been compared to Italy's: marked at its beginning by disastrous military failures which would only worsen over time, delegitimizing the national leadership and paving the way for revolutionary upheaval. By the end of 1915, Enver and Djemal Pasha, two of the most important figures in the CUP, had been humiliated by crushing defeats in Armenia and Sinai (respectively). The loss of Lebanon, Palestine, and much of Syria in the war's first year led to the dismissal of Djemal from army command, while Enver was demoted and cast out from party leadership. The one remaining member of the so-called "triumvirate", Talaat Pasha, steadily accumulated power as his rivals were exiled. Russia's weakened position following the Polish offensive allowed the Ottomans to retake a good deal of Western Armenia in 1916, which bolstered Talaat's position. Increasingly, he surrounded himself with hardline Turkish nationalists; the Armenian massacres and death-marches carried out in the wake of the reconquest of Western Armenia killed at least 1.1 million people, and in 1955 was officially recognized as an ethnocide by the League of Nations.

The Dardanelle Campaign soon presented Tasha with a new crisis. The German commander in the area, Lyman von Sanders, had repeatedly urged the Turks to expand the local defensive fortifications, but Talaat and his military advisors believed that there was little chance of Britain launching a concerted assault after they had already committed such sizable troop contingents to Syria and Iraq. Additionally, most thought - here, perhaps, more justifiably - that Britain would not risk its battle-fleet in a suicidal operation in the Dardanelle Staits.

The British attack, particularly the bold and daring maneuvers of the Navy, achieved strategic surprise. The horrific losses incurred - over ten ships sunk in total, with many more damaged - did not stop the bulk of the fleet from breaking through into the Sea of Marmara, where it could act as mobile artillery. Even more devastating was the blow to Ottoman Morale following the shelling of Constantinople, which spread panic in the city, hampering the resupply of Ottoman defenders. When British soldiers finally approached the city, threatening to encircle what remained of Turkey's European armies, many predicted that Talaat would sue for peace. An additional blow came just days later when the city of Smyrna fell to a revolt of the Ottoman Garrison, which declared loyalty to Mehmeht Sabahaddin, an exiled member of the pro-entente Liberal party.

While the Ottoman government began entering negotiations for an armistice, Mustafa Kemal, a corps-level commander, made the decision to evacuate the entirety of the 3rd Army in Constantinople, requisitioning a small fleet of sailing boats and dinghies to cross the Bosphorus in the middle of night, in some cases mere dozens of yards from British patrol boats. The success of this operation greatly enhanced Kemal's prestige, who was shortly thereafter given command of the entire 3rd Army. His reputation only grew when he marched this force to Smyrna, crushing the rebellious garrison and capturing Sabahaddin, who would be executed for treason shortly thereafter.

Emboldened by Kemal's heroics and outraged by British armistice terms, the Turks resolved to go on fighting. Talaat Pasha remained as the de facto head of the CUP, but faced increased challenges from an ultra-nationalist, ultra-secularist segment of the party aligned with Mustafa Kemal and the Ziya Gokalp. Simultaneously, a minority faction associated with the previous Grand Vizier, Said Halim Pasha, pushed for an end to the war and the acceptance of British terms.

The next two years seemed to validate the decision to continue the war. Germany looked to be on the cusp of victory, and the chaos following the October revolution allowed the Turks to regain additional territories in the caucuses and eastern anatolia. Army reforms improved the effectiveness of the military, which prevented several attempts by British forces to break out from Aleppo. The larger problem was the inability to procure weapons and ammunition from Germany; efforts were made at creating a domestic arms manufacturing sector, but these could only supply a fraction of the weapons that the army needed. The state had to turn to smuggling operations to supply its troops, which were frequently forced to ration artillery rounds and small arms ammunition. The hope was that the British would launch no major offensive, and that the nation could remain in the war and survive until Germany victory in the west forced British capitulation. In 1919, these assumptions would be cruelly disappointed.

Spain

Unlike the Nordic neutrals and the Netherlands, Spain's decision to adopt a policy of neutrality was informed less by its lack of war goals and territorial ambitions than the fragility of the state, the weakness of its army, and Spanish economic reliance on various belligerents. The Spanish constitutional system was in large part meant to empower landowning elites, with protectionist conservative interests and free trade, liberal ones alternating power in a corrupt system known as El Turno Pacifico. The exclusion of both the laboring masses and industrial bourgeoisie from political participation created political tensions that rendered the state weak and reliant on the military to prop up its rule. Uneven industrial development had also begun to exacerbate preexisting regionalist sentiments in Catalonia, the center of Spain's small but growing domestic industry.

Even though Spain did not fight in the Great War, the pressures it unleashed ushered in a transformation of the Spanish economic order with long consequences. In just over a half-decade, wealth and power shifted decisively from the old landowning elite to the Northern bourgeoisie and well-organized labor movements. The inability of the state to reconcile itself to the emerging class of industrial capitalists gave rise to regionalist movements and eventually created an improbable (and temporary) cross-crass alliance between the military and bourgeoisie which threatened the foundations of the Spanish social order.

In the near-term, the outbreak of the war led to a sharp decline in imports as Spain's traditional trading partners, Britain and France, scaled down their civilian industries and dedicated the produce of those which remained to domestic consumption. This led to a sharp rise in the price of every-day commodities, particularly foodstuffs and coal, which was followed by a more general inflation. For the millions of Spaniards who lived at a subsistence level, this rise in prices was an intolerable assault on their livelihood, and protests from the laboring poor brought down the conservative Dato government in early 1916. Even for workers who lived above subsistence level, the decline in standard of living was comparable to that of workers in the belligerent powers.

Equally important to Spain's wartime development was the surge of exports, caused by the demand of the warring powers for raw materials to feed their war machines. In the short-term, this led to a tremendous growth in corporate profitability and domestic capital, which was employed to expand the extractive sector, and in the medium-term, civilian-goods production. By late 1915, it appeared that the chronic import crisis and the attendant social unrest would act as a bottleneck of sorts on Spain's industrial expansion, but then the decline in trade between Britain and America allowed Spanish markets to absorb the difference. Not only did American imports spike during this period, bringing down inflation and gradually improving the standard of living for the working class, but exports to Britain increased once again as it sought iron and textiles which did not have to be purchased in dollars.

The wealth this brought to Spain bolstered the government of the Prime Minister Alvaro de Figueroa, also known as the 1st Count of Romanones. One of the most liberal figures in the political establishment, he was unable to solve the social problems that plagued the country, though the temporary rise in living standards did buy his government time and allow it to pass a budget through Parliament for the first time in many years. More consequential was his dalliance with the Entente, which led many of the Pro-German conservatives to suspect he was preparing to bring Spain into the war. In early 1917, a vicious, German-funded press campaign was initiated to bring down Romanones' government; it succeeded in sullying his reputation, but not in toppling him from power.

The next challenge to the government came from the "defense juntas". These were organizations of peninsular soldiers displeased with the system of army promotion, which was based on merit rather than seniority. In practice, this meant that soldiers stationed in the Army of Morocco received much better pay and were, on average, of higher rank. The count was dismissive of these juntas, and he issued an order for them to be disbanded in June; they refused, and the soldiers sent to arrest them were soon inconspicuously absent. Romanones government fell shortly thereafter. Dato came back to power, and issued a series of pay raises to the juntas that eventually convinced most of the soldiers to disband.

Dato's government would soon confront its own challenges, collectively called the "Crisis of 1918". Most date its beginning to the resumption of German unrestricted submarine warfare, which wrecked the Spanish merchant marine. Within 6 months, nearly 35% of ships had been lost, and merchants were refusing to send out more unless their safety could be guaranteed. The blow to Spanish imports was also severe, causing living standards to begin declining once again, though this took some time. In the near-term, the submarine warfare inflamed anti-German sentiment, contributed to the radicalization of the northern middle-class, and nearly led Spain into war with Germany.

In March, the regionalist league of Catalonia, an interest group for the Catalonian bourgeoisie, demanded that the government convene a regional Catalonian parliament to discuss foreign policy and the best means of revitalizing trade; when this was denied by Dato's government, the elected deputies met illegally and demanded the recognition of Catalonian regional autonomy. In response, the government sent the military to crack down on the meetings, which it did successfully in mid-April. Yet this proved to be only a temporary salve, for as soon as most military units had left, the meetings began again, prompting the Dato government to dedicate a division to "occupy" Catalonia. The socialist UGT narrowly voted to strike against the repressive military occupation, creating the bizarre spectacle of workers leaving their factories to protest in defense of a body constituted primarily by representatives of their employers.

Tensions eased somewhat with the fall of the Dato government and its replacement with a liberal one led by Manuel Prieto, who promised to negotiate with the Catalonian autonomists. Yet these attempts at diplomacy proved manifestly unsuccessful, and as 1919 neared, the two major Spanish trade unions prepared for a general strike, a prospect that put both the Catalonian bourgeois and Spanish government on edge.

South America

While the different nations of South America had varying cultures and patterns of immigration, they occupied a sufficiently similar place in the international economy to warrant speaking of them as a group. As a whole, these nations organized their economies around the export of agricultural goods and raw materials to overseas markets. By the turn of the century, Argentina had been the clearest beneficiary of this developmental pattern, becoming one of the wealthiest societies in the world off the back of its lucrative meat and grain trade with Britain. The relative lack of domestic capital and the weakness of the state (which lacked sophisticated means for raising revenue) meant that South American countries were dependent on wealthier, more developed ones to fund infrastructure and capital goods expansion, particularly Britain, Germany, France and America. On the political plane, they excluded most of the population from active participation in politics, despite having nominally democratic constitutions.

The onset of the war brought drastic inflation as imports shriveled and exports soared. The relative lack of domestic capital also meant that the expansion of export-oriented industries was slower than in other places. This was exacerbated by an evacuation of European investment capital from the entire continent, a process that began in the Second Balkan War as the outbreak of international conflict looked increasingly likely. In 1916, this process gained further steam after Britain overhauled its war financing; the new, high-yield bonds on offer led to another selloff of South American assets, which the nascent national bourgeois were now in a better position to buy. American capital did make some inroads, particularly in Brazil and the Northern countries, but following the crisis of confidence in the Entente foreign investment shifted to China rather than South America.

On the whole, these nations conducted most of their wartime trade with Britain and France, though with American neutrality and the leakiness of the British blockade, there continued to be significant trade with Germany and Austria until 1917. The contraction of trade with the Central Powers following the failure of Britain and America to renew the Alexandria Accords only led to a fall of total exports in Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia; the giant of the continent, Brazil, had already been strong-armed by British bankers into winding down its trade with Germany.

Overwhelming British naval superiority, economic ties to the Entente, and traditional francophilia precluded any of the South American nations from joining the Central Powers. In early 1918, during the high tide of German submarine warfare, several nations grew close to declaring a war on Germany, but balked once William Jennings Bryan made clear that such a move would incur American sanctions. Even Bryan's warnings were not enough to stop Argentina from declaring war on Germany at the end of 1918; the loss of over a dozen merchant vessels had fed a sense of nationalist aggrievement, and elites believed that they could slow the meteoric growth of the anarchist-influenced trade union movement through the mobilization of an army. In this, they were to be gravely mistaken.

In almost all South American countries, the war strengthened labor and political radicals. Social catholicism, indeginism, and Hispanism flourished in both the cultural and political spheres. Increasingly, Spanish societies were turning away from European models of state-building and development, which were discredited by the horror of the trenches. While some looked to the social-democratic model of Bryan's America, more turned to a form of rural-communalist romanticism, which shared some affinities with the anarcho-syndicalism of the trade unions. Art and literature concerned with the local and particular flourished; South America was imagined as a "Golden Land", unperturbed by the conflicts in Europe. While some have viewed this tendency as a form of romanticist retreat, it also contributed to the emergence of modern states and unified national identities.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Summary of Divergences from OTL​

Spain

In Spain, the largest difference is that there is an even larger industrial expansion, with somewhat less social strife due to a higher standard of living for the working class. Compared to OTL, there is more growth in the socialist CGT rather than the anarchist CNT, but on the whole, both unions are around 20-35% bigger. Consequently, the labor movement is moderately more powerful, and slightly less radical.

The differences in Spain's development mean that there's no general strike in 1917. This leads to a pretty important change - without a big strike to scare the regional bourgeois into the hands of the state, the secessionist movement in Catalonia refuses to compromise with the government, causing an escalating spiral of repression and radicalization. Expect a lot of divergences from here on out.

South America

In South America, the largest change is the emergence of a much larger national bourgeois due to the more thorough evacuation of European capital. Industrial development is about the same; slightly faster in the south (Argentina and Chile), and slightly slower in the north (Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia). However, this development is also much more uneven than IOTL, occurring more tepidly before 1916, and more rapidly thereafter. The consequence is increased labor radicalization and the consolidation of anarchism in the Brazlian, Chilean, and Argentinian trade unions. All of this (plus Argentina's participation in the war without American assistance) is going to lead to some big downstream effects, but we won't begin to see them until the next few years. Stay tuned!

 

[Curby]

The New Great Game: Britain, America, and the War for East Asia
George Kennan, 1952

"Eastern Asia is the prize for which all energetic nations are grasping"
-Brooke Adams

"Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations — all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism."
-Vladimir Lenin​

Overview

The cataclysmic final year of the Great War is today remembered principally for the massive twilight offensive of October and the economic depression and revolutionary upheaval which followed in its wake. When it is discussed at all, the events in East Asia are treated as a sideshow. Yet the struggle that began in 1919 was as much an augury of the future world order as the revolutions in Europe. The future contest that would be waged between Britain and America for control of the world's markets was signaled by the hardening geopolitical alignments of Japan and China and the beginning of a proxy war between the world's two largest economies. William Jennings' Bryan is frequently cast as an outsider to typical Washington politics, but his commitment to anti-imperialism and sinophilic foreign policy were tempered but never broken by future American presidents. In this respect, the 2nd Sino-Japanese war not only foreshadowed the battles of the thirty-year Cold War from which we are now emerging, but also played an essential role in shaping its basic structure.

1919 marked the endpoint of a process of deteriorating Anglo-American relations that began with the Bryan Inauguration. It was, in the end, only the pacific sentiments of Bryan and the pragmatism of the British foreign ministry which prevented America from joining the war as a Central Power. In retrospect, British behavior throughout the two diplomatic crises was legally justifiable but extraordinarily reckless as state policy - this attested to the frustration that the nation's diplomats felt with Bryan's administration and rising anti-American sentiment in Britain.

The Parvus Affair

It all began with a January 8th Chicago Tribune article detailing the Bryan administration's decision to grant asylum to Alexander Parvus, a Marxist theoretician and German social-democrat who had requested refuge following his attendance at the Trenton Conference. Pavus himself was a dubious character in the pay of German intelligence; the Tribune alleged that he was involved in the Bolshevik revolution, an accusation we now know to be only partially correct. Congress began an investigation into Parvus, and quickly uncovered links between the social-democrat and prominent diplomats at the German consulate in San Francisco. On January 22nd, they uncovered bribes offered by Parvus to several mid-ranking bureaucrats of the American immigration office, but then learned that these were uniformly rejected. The question quickly became if anyone with knowledge of Parvus' shady history was involved in the approval of his Asylum application.

The Republican house investigation received a major windfall on January 28th, when Eduard Bernstein (another social-democratic refugee) testified that Parvus had bragged about meeting several high-ranking American state department officials. On February 2nd, Parvus himself was apprehended by the police in Bend, Oregon. In exchange for a plea deal with prosecutors, he quickly revealed the details of a vast Indo-German operation being run out of Germany's San Francisco Consulate. Parvus claimed that he had no involvement with this particular intelligence operation, which was likely true. Further investigations soon demonstrated that a fairly large money laundering operation was being run out of San Francisco; British intelligence actually knew of this, but had little idea of the complicity of American law enforcement. Attention soon turned to the California governor, Hiram Johnson. Johnson was a convenient target for Congress - despite being a lifelong Republican, he had been one of Bryan's most vocal defenders and had even broken with his ally Theodor Roosevelt to campaign for him in 1916. Widely considered something of a Judas, he was nonetheless broadly popular in California. It soon became clear that Johnson knew of the German intelligence efforts but had remained silent, perhaps out of loyalty to an unknown benefactor. He vociferously denied that he was personally involved in asking law enforcement to "look the other way".

Alexander Parvus, German Social-Democrat and spy. Trotsky is said to have remarked that "He never believed such a scoundrel could nearly cause another inter-imperialist war!".​

On February 19th, the Chicago Tribune published a document which it alleged to be a "memo from the American State Department". The document, purportedly written by the Secretary of State William Borah, instructed diplomats and members of the intelligence services to "so far as possible, ensure that the German operations in San Francisco remain covert." Although we now know that this document was a British forgery, most of its details were not too far from the truth. At the time, the state department's invocation of executive privilege in response to a congressional subpoena was considered an admission of guilt.

Meanwhile, British intelligence concluded that it was overwhelmingly likely that the Bryan administration had given some form of support to the Indo-German conspiracy. British concerns were heightened in the wake of increased unrest in East Bengal - workers had been leaving their jobs en masse, and appeared to possess a seemingly inexhaustible strike fund. On the 26th, Arthur Balfour publicly accused the Bryan Administration of funding Indian separatists, and demanded the speedy arrest of all the American officials associated with the Ghadar plot. Shortly thereafter, William Borah offered his resignation to Bryan, hoping that this would redirect attention from the President. Bryan refused, determined not to bow to the pressure. On 29th, articles of impeachment passed the house and were sent to the Senate.

Bryan's Speech and the 2nd Sino-Japanese War

On March 1st, Bryan spoke before congress, giving a speech which once more stunned the nation, and this time nearly brought it to war.

"...There are a great many calumnies which have been levied against this administration in the past year, and their full dissection would require more patience than I can bear at the present moment. My task, in fact, is not to dispel the rumors which menacingly circulate around this august body. I forthrightly admit to the charges you have brought, and yet I insist that what is here deemed a high crime is an act of simple patriotism.

Less than a year ago, I instructed the members of my administration to do what they could to provide aid to the freedom-loving peoples of this world. In this decision, I was motivated solely by considerations of national interest. Sympathy for the plight of the Indian people does not arise from unfriendliness toward those of England or any other nation. This sympathy is due to the fact that we, as Americans, believe in the principles of self-government and repudiate those of monarchy. If at any point this nation surrenders its conviction in the universal application of the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, it will be fatally diminished.

We must recognize that the pursuit of Empire is ruinous for not merely this nation, but all humanity. The valleys of France and fields of Poland lay bloodied with the countless victims sacrificed upon its unholy altar. Our own nation is threatened by parasitic elements which will have us recapitulate the tragedy in Europe. If this world is to be made safe for democracy, the law of master and slave must be broken; only then will the common man be guaranteed his rightful share in the common enterprise of humanity.

This administration does not seek war. While the vast system of despotism known as the British Empire shares no true principle in common with this great nation, we have and will continue to do all in our power to ensure the continuation of peace between Britain and America. On the matter of India, we will commit to the dissolution of any operations intended to stir unrest amongst the native peoples, while insisting that Britain fulfill its obligation to give full autonomy and self-rule to the Indian people, who are the rightful inheritors of a civilization as old and distinguished as our own."

Needless to say, the speech was received quite poorly in Britain. Winston Churchill and a few others favored an immediate declaration of war. It was quickly realized that this would likely lead to the loss of Canada, the breaking of the blockade, and an American-German alliance that might prove the end of the British Empire. Still, it was felt something must be done. Britain expelled around half the American diplomatic staff in protest of Bryan's remarks, but did not formally break off relations.

Britain received a diplomatic cable the next day from Bryan himself, who expressed his desire for peace and informed them that he was sending John W. Davis, an anglophilic southern congressman, as a special envoy. As a show of goodwill, he also provided the names of the German officials involved in the operation, though most of these were already known to British intelligence. Bryan himself appears to have been genuinely conciliatory at the time, hoping to avoid war, even if it meant backtracking on the support for the Indian rebels.

Events in the next few days would change Bryan's attitude. On March 6th, Japan declared war on China. Knowing the effect this would have on America, Balfour pleaded with the Japanese to delay the operation, but was met with obstinate refusal. On the 4th, Balfour actually informed America of an impending attack on China; this was relayed to the Chinese ambassador, and gave the army crucial time to prepare its defenses. Some commentators believed it may have prevented the encirclement and destruction of the Beiyang Army.

Bryan was outraged by the attack on China, and demanded that Britain break off its relations with Japan in response to the act of war. In another speech before congress, he excoriated this "latest act of British-financed imperialism" - this time, he received cheers from Republicans as well as Democrats, who were concerned about growing Japanese influence in the Pacific. Britain, of course, did not break off its relations, instead declaring "strict neutrality" in the Sino-Japanese conflict. With overwhelming congressional support, a bill was passed authorizing a partial embargo against Japan.

The German government believed it could use this opportunity to bring America into the war, ending the blockade and the nation's economic entanglement. Ludendorff coerced the Chinese into formally declaring themselves a member of the Central Powers, hoping that this would lead Britain to declare war on China. But China would not directly declare war on Britain, and, for the moment, Britain also refused to take the bait.

In America, impeachment once again stirred up domestic disquiet. Opinion polls indicated that though popular opinion was trending against Bryan, a narrow majority opposed removing him from office. Most simply did not believe that involvement with the Ghadar conspiracy constituted a high crime, and many sympathized with the Indian independence struggle. Most thought that the impeachment was a pretext for bringing the nation to war, a belief that was reinforced by the rumored anglophilia of the Vice President Woodrow Wilson.

Massive protests broke out once it became clear the Senate would move forward with a conviction vote. Once again, the antiwar movement and American leagues mobilized, bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets to decry the attempt to remove the pacifist president. Bryan encouraged the movement, and in an unprecedented move, accused Vice President Woodrow Wilson of "Fomenting a coup against the nation's rightful government". By just two votes, impeachment failed in the Senate. It is hard to say if the popular mobilization had an effect on the Senate vote, though it is possible that northern democrats and progressive republicans were convinced by the protests that Bryan still had a substantial following which would punish them at the ballot box.

Bryan's success in frustrating a conviction in the Senate gave his political career a new lease on life. Traditionally anglophilic Senate Republicans started to sour on Britain when it became clear that they were acting as anything but a truly neutral party in the Sino-Japanese war. A growing chorus of anti-japanese sentiment culminated in race riots in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Shortly after the impeachment vote, a sweeping new bill placed a complete embargo on Japanese goods and provided more money for the expansion of the Navy. Hawks decried the "Anglo-Japanese plot to enslave China and dominate the Pacific". In Congress, Bryan finally achieved the support needed to regulate war loans; a formal moratorium was placed on lending to both Britain and France. Believing that America was on the verge of declaring war, Ludendorff called off unrestricted submarine attacks on American shipping.

In April, massive protests began in China against "Japanese-European Imperialism", coinciding with a wave of unrest in Europe. The fall of Beijing prompted a radicalization of the Chinese government's rhetoric. On April 14th, a mob in Hong Kong approached the British Legation and was fired upon by British soldiers, killing over two hundred Chinese civilians. The "Hong Kong massacre" prompted the local Chinese Army in the area, under the influence of a nationalist, KMT general, to invade the British possession. A day later, Britain declared war on China, and recognized Japan as an ally in the Sino-Japanese war.

On the 16th, the American stock market plunged nearly 10% as rumors proliferated of an American entry into the war. Bryan was photographed with the German ambassador Johann Heinrich von hernstorff. In a fiery speech, he denounced British imperialism and threatened to declare war if either Britain or Japan interfered in the flow of trade between China and America. A list of ten demands was issued to the governments of both Britain and Japan; taken together, they guaranteed the freedom of American merchant vessels and proscribed the expansion of British influence in China.

The British conservative government, dealing with widespread revolt in India, spiraling domestic discontent, and a worsening crisis of troop discipline on the western front, knew that it was in no position to fight a war with the American behemoth. Bonar Law's conservatives were forced to agree to almost all of Bryan's demands, humiliating and discrediting the government amongst the British people. Japan's government reluctantly agreed to do the same, a decision which was hugely unpopular among the military establishment. Bryan surged in popularity following the successful political maneuvering; he seemed to have accomplished through diplomacy and persuasion what others would have only been able to achieve with war. In reality, Bryan had resigned himself to the expansion of Japanese influence in China, but the continuation of trade would at least allow the Chinese Army to stay in the fight.

Bryan used his windfall of political capital to press for the war-industrial act of 1919, perhaps the most controversial piece of legislation ever introduced by Congress. Influenced by the work of the political philosopher John Dewey, it called for the nationalization and reorganization of the booming American war industries along industrial-democratic lines. Workers at these plants would be required to join a union - likely Lewis' CIO - and union delegates would sit on the boards of the nationalized corporations, along with government bureaucrats and private investors, who were promised lucrative terms. Unsurprisingly, Bryan was accused of trying to introduce Bolshevism into America.

In Britain, Bonar Law's government was undergoing its own crisis of confidence following its capitulation to American demands. The conservatives were confronting what seemed to be a never-ending cascade of crisis and dissent both at home and across the Empire. In Ireland, the civil war had resumed, and much of its rural hinterland was already lost to the rebel nationalists. Further afield, protests and strikes wracked India, along with a low-level insurgency. Most INC chapters refused to negotiate, insisting that they did not have control over the boycott and strike campaign. Others pressed for maximalist demands. The dominions, too, appeared to be growing tired of the war, and both Canada and Australia were stalling on requests to raise fresh divisions.

Largely peaceful antiwar protests and strikes shook major British cities in early April, and the use of mounted police to dismiss a "war wives" demonstration in Manchester led to the denunciation of the government from liberal radicals. Then, in a shocking, unprecedented act, the British Prime Minister was shot by a radical suffragette; though Bonar Law survived, he would be indisposed for some time. This provided the impetus for a change in government - Winston Churchill, the most popular of the British conservatives, invited Lloyd George's centrist liberals and a minority faction of pro-war Labor parliamentarians into government. At a little under 45 years of age, he was the youngest Prime minister in over 100 years. Churchill's appointment as Prime Minister capped a rise as improbable as it was meteoric; in 4 years, he went from a little-known figure reviled among most Tory Politicians to a celebrated conservative leader and household name. Like Clemenceau, he came to power at a time of national crisis. He promised to use "all the means this island has at its disposal to ensure a final and dignified victory in this conflict which shall determine the fate of the British Empire".

Britain Pursues Detente

Many hoped that the new government would seek a rapprochement with the American behemoth. The moratorium on loans was beginning to place increased fiscal strain on Britain, which had already been having trouble attracting domestic credit following its decision to leave the gold standard. Liberals pressed especially hard for a resumption of normal relations, though this would not be easy - detente would require some settlement of the situation in East Asia. The liberals planned to sign a separate peace with China, and now seemed as opportune a time as any, with British forces having recently repulsed a Chinese assault on Hong Kong. Moreover, it was clear that Qurui's government was desperate to avoid a war on two fronts, and it had signaled on several occasions that it had no desire for a fight with England.

Unfortunately, any peace with China would violate the London agreement, which prohibited any of the Entente powers from signing a separate peace with a member of the Central Powers. Some ministers of the new government worried that setting a precedent for breaking the treaty would prompt France to quit the war, leaving Britain alone in fending off the inevitable assault on the middle east. Others point out that betraying Japan would likely deprive Britain of its key ally in the Pacific, opening up the region to American domination. In the nearer-term, it seemed exceedingly unlikely in this scenario that Japan would respect the agreement limiting their zone of influence, and Britain had little means of enforcing the terms of the secret treaty.

Grey suggested the notion of a four-power conference, between America, China, Japan, and Britain. Perhaps if Japan was once again threatened with a joint British-American intervention, it would be convinced to step down. Of course, if Japan was to remain an ally, it had to be given at least some of the concessions which it sought. They were well-positioned to enforce at least some of their war goals, having seized the key cities of Nanjing and Beijing and forced the Chinese government to evacuate to Wuhan.

The other three powers all proved receptive to the idea. Duan Qurui's government hoped to end the war as quickly as possible, fearing a nationalist coup while it was displaced from its power base in Berlin. Japan's civilian administration and navy worried that continuing the fight would unduly empower the army. And Bryan hoped to stabilize the East-Asia situation so he could focus on passing domestic legislation.

Edward Grey, William Borah, Uchida Kosai, and V.K. Wellington Koo met in Shanghai on June 5th. Thus far, no armistice had been agreed to, but the news of the conference was sufficient to stir unrest in both Japan and China. In the former, soldiers garrisoning Manchuria had gone on "strike" with the support of their generals, protesting Japan's interest in a negotiated peace. In China, the unrest was spread much more broadly throughout the population. In Wuhan and several coastal cities still under Chinese control, students and workers protested the decision to seek a peace deal. Both governments feared a coup in response to an unfavorable peace settlement. Sun Yatsen, who previously joined the government as a minister in a national unity cabinet, now denounced Qurui's decision to "concede more of China's rightful territory to the British imperialists and their Japanese lapdogs".

Negotiations proceeded slowly. Though Japanese maximalism was hardly surprising, the degree of Chinese intransigence was something of a shock to the British. Chinese diplomats ruled out any further economic or territorial concessions, though they were open to granting Japanese citizens additional extraterritorial rights. Japan eventually scaled back many of its harshest demands, but it still desired the formal cession of the territory around key Chinese railways. Grey suggested that Japan be allowed to control ownership stakes in the railways, but both parties were reluctant to accept this idea.

This is how the conference proceeded, with Chinese and Japanese intransigence met with largely futile, and largely British, attempts at forging compromise, until on June 19th the entire affair was rendered merely academic. On this date, which much of China today celebrates as "National Independence Day", the 2nd Chinese Army seized Wuhan, arrested Duan Qurui, and declared loyalty to a new government led by Sun Yatsen. Student's and worker's marches in support of the new government commenced in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other large cities, prompting the governors of the coastal provinces to declare loyalty to the new government. Speaking in Wuhan, Sun Yatsen vowed to continue the "war of Chinese independence" to its victorious conclusion. Bryan congratulated China on its "Democratic Revolution", and, already in a pique over Japanese demands, gave a speech outlining America's "commitment to the freedom of the Chinese People from foreign, imperialist aggression".

The Japanese government reacted to the developments with great consternation - the military was demanding an increasing share of domestic resources, and the Chinese Army had been bloodied but not defeated decisively in the field. Its steady retreat into China's rural hinterlands was posing increasing logistical problems for Japan, and the march west along the Yangtze river was proceeding at a snail's pace. There was little that could be done to stop the flow of American arms into China beyond enforcing a complete blockade, which would likely lead to a declaration of war. It was an option that the Japanese government now felt obliged to contemplate.

Over the next four months, Anglo-American tensions slowly calmed as each nation turned away from East Asia, toward domestic (and imperial) discontent. Despite frequent Japanese entreaties, Britain made little contribution to the war against China beyond keeping Hong Kong and its other concessions well-garrisoned; Sun Yatsen had the requisite political acumen to avoid provoking the British. Grey still feared that in the event of victory, Japan would press for far more concessions than those initially agreed to, enough to turn all of China into its protectorate. By September, Britain had calculated that a stalemate was preferable to a Japanese victory, and it began covertly supplying weapons to the Chinese through a Hong Kong smuggling network. Later that month, a bill passed Congress rescinding the moratorium on British loans. Over 75% of Congressmen voted to override Bryan's veto, and new loans were being issued to Britain by the 29th. Two weeks later, William Jennings Bryan was assassinated by a lone gunman while addressing supporters in Illinois; the ascension of the more anglophilic Woodrow Wilson to the presidency marked the beginning of the first Anglo-American rapprochement, and the end of the first act of the new Great Game.

 

[Rainbow Whitey]

And so instead of Kennedy becoming number 4 in 1963, we have Bryan becoming number 4 in 1919. A difference of 18 years between two successful presidential assassinations as opposed to 62 IOTL. I'm sure that's fine.

Edit: After looking it up, it actually comes out to a successful assassination every 15-20 years IOTL, minus Kennedy who died against the grain. So actually Bryan dying now is just par for the course really.
Edit 2: Whoops, just noticed I was off by 10 years when mentioning McKinley's assassination IOTL. Fixed

 

[The Laurent]

I know that you don't gotta hand it to him, but I'll miss Bryan tbh? He was one of the ones of all time.

 

[PrognosticHannya]

RIP Bryan, he was real. Not sure real what, but real something, at least. My respect.
Also if Wilson drags America into the war there will be so many conspiracy theories.

 

[Nuew]

The big question is who assassinated Bryan? There's lots of candidates.

 

[The Laurent]

The big question is who assassinated Bryan? There's lots of candidates.

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