Pedantically, I think that Confederal would make more sense than Federal in these cases.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I guess Mexico might be the most likely host for an exiled Brazilian monarchy unless I've forgotten any hitches in the two empires' relationship. Or, even more likely I think if the monarchy is gotten rid of less suddenly, the royal family might just live in the country as normal rich people/nobles like Spain before the possibility of restoration.
I'm trying to figure out how many monarchies we could see exiled by 1925: Brazil, France (Bonaparte), Austro-Hungarian (I presume that it is Austro-Hungary rather than Austria, I don't think the POD affects that), Belgian and possibly Danish.
(And they all end up in Mexico and in 1995 there is a rom/com movie set in about 1950 with the children (prince and princesses) of all of the Exiles. Simultaneously filmed in both English and Spanish, it is both the most successful movie in Mexican and USAian Cinema *and* banned in most of Europe)
(And they all end up in Mexico and in 1995 there is a rom/com movie set in about 1950 with the children (prince and princesses) of all of the Exiles. Simultaneously filmed in both English and Spanish, it is both the most successful movie in Mexican and USAian Cinema *and* banned in most of Europe)
The Central European War
"...wrote that 'the Central European War may have been mostly contested in Europe, but in many ways it was not entirely about Europe.' This adage especially applies to the rivalry between France and Germany, which was as much about which of the two would financially, politically and militarily dominate west-central Europe but also who would extend that domination to challenge Britain, Russia and increasingly the United States on the world stage. In this view, French paranoia and German ambition - or French ambition and German paranoia - delivered a conflagration that consumed the continent for nearly three bloody, brutal years, but ironically many of the things that delivered the final detonation flowed an accumulation of events on the periphery of both powers.
This particular volume of this study of the Central European War has already covered in detail events such as the Monegasque Crisis of 1912, the Revolutions of 1912, the Budapest Congress of 1913, the deteriorating relationship between Vienna and Budapest and the parallel Italian ambitions in the Balkans vis a vis Greece, all in the shadow of Britain's declining influence and Russia's continued choice to remain focused on consolidating her Central and East Asian empire, both internally and externally. Most of these crises, however, with the partial exception of Monaco, did not directly involve a bilateral dispute between France and Germany that could directly threaten the fraying Grand Detente forged by Napoleon V and Friedrich III and tentatively maintained by their heirs in the years since both had died. The Anglo-German Convention of 1916 changed all that, irreversibly, as Germany's imperial advantage became completely impossible to ignore.
The chaotic governments of Portugal are beyond the remit of this volume, but the small, poor Iberian state had for a quarter-century by early 1916 pirouetted from unstable government to unstable government, with Cabinets frequently appointed based on the Prime Minister's proximity to King Carlos I and heavily dependent upon a handful of core statesmen of the Progressist and Regenerator parties, which were both monarchist but agreed on little else. Republican and socialist movements had captured the imaginations of the urban intelligentsia in Lisbon and Porto, while in rural communities the Catholic Church maintained perhaps a tighter vice than anywhere else in Europe save Galicia and certain communities in western Ireland. By 1916, most of the experienced statesmen of the Kingdom of Portugal who had rotated the Premiership amongst themselves at the behest of Carlos I had died, leaving a younger, less tenured generation to take their place, and many of the more credible names in that cadre would pass during the decade as well. In late 1915, Carlos I tapped Admiral Francisco Ferreira as Prime Minister at the head of an independent technocratic Cabinet to solve the country's rapidly deteriorating financial situation without an eye towards partisanship or ideology; Ferreira sold off two of his beloved naval vessels to show his seriousness but it nonetheless could not solve the black hole that was corrupt Portugal's treasury. It was not merely a question of taxes and spending, which were both fairly low in early 20th century Portugal even by the less statist standards of the time, but simply the fact that the country was poor, the civil service was corrupt, and the massive African colonial empire produced too little income to justify its own existence. Ferreira, after three months on the job, quipped that he was unable to rub two coins together to make a hundred - Portugal, having already had two small partial defaults on its external debt in the 1890s, defaulted on its entire debt load on January 11, 1916, debt owed primarily to its longtime ally the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent Germany.
While this set of events was disastrous in Portugal and for a brief moment brought the survival of the monarchy into question - Ferreira resigned on January 13, followed by the abdication of Carlos I in favor of his considerably more popular son Luis Filipe I after the Anglo-German Convention in early February - its impact would reverberate throughout Europe. That Portugal had been avoiding bankruptcy and hanging onto its vast "Austral-Africa" holdings by the skin of its teeth for close to two decades had not been a secret in Europe and many powers had coveted the land, despite the increasingly expensive nature of colonialism at that time, but it was well known that Britain, as owner of the bulk of Portuguese debt, would have first choice of absorbing much of that land. The expectation in other European capitals, though, had been that a Congress would be called to resolve the matter eventually, even if it was resolved in Britain's favor.
Not so. Britain had long maintained secret agreements with Germany to consult them first in the event of a Portuguese default and the African territories becoming "available," and Foreign Secretary Ian Malcolm met with his German counterpart, Gottlieb von Jagow, in Hamburg to finalize the contours of the long-discussed, long-secret negotiations that both sides had tentatively agreed to in principle as far back as the Joseph Chamberlain years. The Anglo-German Convention of 1916 thus was not a secret treaty dropped upon Europe from on high, but rather the culmination of years of negotiations regarding spheres of influence in the Americas, Africa and Asia as well as Europe, and formalized and finalized longstanding principles and interests shared by both states. Critically, it was pointedly not a military alliance, to Germany's dismay, but it did very definitively close most of the disputes Britain had with Germany, and simultaneously emboldened Germany in Europe and overseas and terrified France and Austria alike..." [1]
- The Central European War
[1] The next update will cover the terms of the Anglo-German Convention and the howls of anger from Paris when it is disseminated
This particular volume of this study of the Central European War has already covered in detail events such as the Monegasque Crisis of 1912, the Revolutions of 1912, the Budapest Congress of 1913, the deteriorating relationship between Vienna and Budapest and the parallel Italian ambitions in the Balkans vis a vis Greece, all in the shadow of Britain's declining influence and Russia's continued choice to remain focused on consolidating her Central and East Asian empire, both internally and externally. Most of these crises, however, with the partial exception of Monaco, did not directly involve a bilateral dispute between France and Germany that could directly threaten the fraying Grand Detente forged by Napoleon V and Friedrich III and tentatively maintained by their heirs in the years since both had died. The Anglo-German Convention of 1916 changed all that, irreversibly, as Germany's imperial advantage became completely impossible to ignore.
The chaotic governments of Portugal are beyond the remit of this volume, but the small, poor Iberian state had for a quarter-century by early 1916 pirouetted from unstable government to unstable government, with Cabinets frequently appointed based on the Prime Minister's proximity to King Carlos I and heavily dependent upon a handful of core statesmen of the Progressist and Regenerator parties, which were both monarchist but agreed on little else. Republican and socialist movements had captured the imaginations of the urban intelligentsia in Lisbon and Porto, while in rural communities the Catholic Church maintained perhaps a tighter vice than anywhere else in Europe save Galicia and certain communities in western Ireland. By 1916, most of the experienced statesmen of the Kingdom of Portugal who had rotated the Premiership amongst themselves at the behest of Carlos I had died, leaving a younger, less tenured generation to take their place, and many of the more credible names in that cadre would pass during the decade as well. In late 1915, Carlos I tapped Admiral Francisco Ferreira as Prime Minister at the head of an independent technocratic Cabinet to solve the country's rapidly deteriorating financial situation without an eye towards partisanship or ideology; Ferreira sold off two of his beloved naval vessels to show his seriousness but it nonetheless could not solve the black hole that was corrupt Portugal's treasury. It was not merely a question of taxes and spending, which were both fairly low in early 20th century Portugal even by the less statist standards of the time, but simply the fact that the country was poor, the civil service was corrupt, and the massive African colonial empire produced too little income to justify its own existence. Ferreira, after three months on the job, quipped that he was unable to rub two coins together to make a hundred - Portugal, having already had two small partial defaults on its external debt in the 1890s, defaulted on its entire debt load on January 11, 1916, debt owed primarily to its longtime ally the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent Germany.
While this set of events was disastrous in Portugal and for a brief moment brought the survival of the monarchy into question - Ferreira resigned on January 13, followed by the abdication of Carlos I in favor of his considerably more popular son Luis Filipe I after the Anglo-German Convention in early February - its impact would reverberate throughout Europe. That Portugal had been avoiding bankruptcy and hanging onto its vast "Austral-Africa" holdings by the skin of its teeth for close to two decades had not been a secret in Europe and many powers had coveted the land, despite the increasingly expensive nature of colonialism at that time, but it was well known that Britain, as owner of the bulk of Portuguese debt, would have first choice of absorbing much of that land. The expectation in other European capitals, though, had been that a Congress would be called to resolve the matter eventually, even if it was resolved in Britain's favor.
Not so. Britain had long maintained secret agreements with Germany to consult them first in the event of a Portuguese default and the African territories becoming "available," and Foreign Secretary Ian Malcolm met with his German counterpart, Gottlieb von Jagow, in Hamburg to finalize the contours of the long-discussed, long-secret negotiations that both sides had tentatively agreed to in principle as far back as the Joseph Chamberlain years. The Anglo-German Convention of 1916 thus was not a secret treaty dropped upon Europe from on high, but rather the culmination of years of negotiations regarding spheres of influence in the Americas, Africa and Asia as well as Europe, and formalized and finalized longstanding principles and interests shared by both states. Critically, it was pointedly not a military alliance, to Germany's dismay, but it did very definitively close most of the disputes Britain had with Germany, and simultaneously emboldened Germany in Europe and overseas and terrified France and Austria alike..." [1]
- The Central European War
[1] The next update will cover the terms of the Anglo-German Convention and the howls of anger from Paris when it is disseminated
So the British Government won't be *in* the Central European War, but will be *blamed* at least in part for the Central European War. (Definitely not rolling all 6s iTTL).And whether the Brazilian Royalty goes to Portugal isn't going to depend on politics, it will depend on how much money he can escape with.
I'm sure the famously technocratic, forward-thinking, and even-keeled government of France will react with the caution and sobriety that they've been known for since Nap IV shuffled off this mortal coil in 1905 when this agreement is announced.
I think France and Austria believe that Germany wants to isolate them. I doubt that was the intention from Berlin’s perspective but French policymakers do seem to be pretty paranoid. The closest comparison is probably Russia deciding to enter the Dual Alliance of 1887 with France. It was worried that Britain would enter the Triple Alliance and it did not enjoy the benefits of German protection and so it was in search of allies. Another comparison is probably the Italian-French agreement wherein Italy chose not to annex Algeria in return for France respecting Italian interests in Libya. That agreement ensured that Germany/Austria couldn’t use Italy against France. It is true that this agreement is aimed at the partition of Portugal’s colonies. But the French might think it paves the way for broader Anglo-German cooperation.
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Agostinho Neto vs Henry Kissinger anyone??
Wait... Its just otl.
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Perfidious Albion, baby!
Ayup
Raymond Poincaré in particular is known for his sober-minded attitudes towards Berlin
This is more or less the precise crux of the problem
And there’s three years of this shitshow to go!
kham_coc
Banned
And i think equally importantly, see its strategic objectives on the continent totally shattered, presumably because its completely impossible to intervene on behalf of France, and Germany being perfectly happy in ignoring whatever they are saying.
We know France is going to be dismantled, and unable to constrain Germany, and my guess is that as a co-belligerent Belgium isn't long for this world.
Worst case scenario, Germany annexes Flanders, and Anschlusses Austria.
If there us any good news its that maybe Italy now has some beef with Germany (Tyrol, maybe Trieste) but not even the Italians would be stupid enough to pick a fight with that Germany.
The winner of the CEW won't be the German/Italian coalition...it will be the USA and Russia, who will make lots of sweet dollars/rubles selling everything from beans to bullets to bandages (and lots of other things that don't start with B) to all sides.
Russian grain, American arms and factory goods, Argentine beef, Mexican oil, hell, even Chilean timber will all be snapped up by all sides during the fighting.
Russian grain, American arms and factory goods, Argentine beef, Mexican oil, hell, even Chilean timber will all be snapped up by all sides during the fighting.
We’re in the 1911-14 equivalent of TTL now
That too. CEW is a serious strategic setback for Britain, especially because Russia comes out wealthier and unscathed from the whole affair
Indeed!
If anyone is curious how the US gets out of its 1917-20 postwar malaise, well… *points at this post*
Also why Democrats are later glad to win 1920 rather than 1916’s poisoned chalice
Russia might just want to snatch some pieces of Ah depending on how things go in the aftermath....or not that topic I think had some debate and for lack of better words Russia does not exactly need the ideology here in the west given it's gotten a boom from American war and can now feed off the European one to help strengthen the empire and the holdings in the East.
That being said sooner or later it will end the boom will end and I imagine it's going to a bit hard adjusting after 2 solid boom phases, then again maybe they can crib notes off Canada on that process.
That being said sooner or later it will end the boom will end and I imagine it's going to a bit hard adjusting after 2 solid boom phases, then again maybe they can crib notes off Canada on that process.