Would be nice to see the Mexican porpoise to be alive and thriving in this timeline.will any animals that went extinct in otl not do so ittl?
Would be nice to see the Mexican porpoise to be alive and thriving in this timeline.will any animals that went extinct in otl not do so ittl?
Fuck me, that was a depressing read just now on WikipediaWould be nice to see the Mexican porpoise to be alive and thriving in this timeline.
I think this movement might happen after the Central European War, as British economy (from what I understand) will probably take a hit due to the war, while the neutrals will benefit from selling goods to the warring countries in the most expensive prices they can come up with.I can’t wait for the rest of the planet to go wait why the hell are following British dictates they haven’t fought an actual war in 80 years (crimea though my time may be off)
• British industry completely surpassed by American and GermanI can’t wait for the rest of the planet to go wait why the hell are following British dictates they haven’t fought an actual war in 80 years (crimea though my time may be off)
Maybe all the nations of the world can come together and resolve their disputes by invading Britain together and that’s the what stops the European war
Interesting. What are the Arab-majority provinces up to?"...and with that speech, Ahmet Riza had totally announced himself to the public, [1] and Sabahaddin had for the first time since sweeping to prominence and power a genuine rival who could appeal to the Ottoman street and intelligentsia alike.
Love to see Australia leading the way!😁😉👍"...among the most important pieces of legislation passed by an Australian government; indeed, almost unamended today, the Commonwealth Electoral Act served to fundamentally reshape Australian governance for good.
Beyond the small and obvious tweak of extending a parliamentary term from three years to four - inviting the beginning of an eighty-four year, uninterrupted cadence of quadrennial elections beginning in the fall of 1921 until the "election that came early" of 2008 - what Hughes did that was truly revolutionary was his shifting Australia to the process of single-transferable vote, known at that time as the alternate vote, which was intended to smooth out some of the problems inherent with a system that at that time used first-past-the-post in the nature of other Westminster democracies. This was sold as an egalitarian change - in a "FPTP" system with three major parties, it was thought to produce more stable majorities without wasting votes - but in many ways was intended to solidify Labor, a result that between the act's passage in 1919 and the watershed elections of 1989 the system produced much more often than not.
Key to this "Hughes system," as it came to be known before long, was the Prime Minister's keen sense of what divided Reform and Liberal. There were a great many members of Reform who were socially conservative but economically interventionist to support agricultural prices, and they were gettable as a second vote to keep the "party of bankers" out of power; conversely, many Labor voters in marginal seats were just as hostile to Liberal economic orthodoxy that they would second-preference Reform if necessary. The alternative vote, thus, quickly served to relegate the Liberals to near-permanent third-party status; they would not lead a government again until 1981, and saw their role primarily as one propping up either Labor or Reform (or after 1926, National) governments in return for policy concessions. At the same time, many Liberals - urban and socially moderate - were turned off by Reform's ardent agrarianism and voted for moderate Labor candidates in marginal seats, preventing Reform from building an appeal to the Australian city at a time when they could have otherwise likely absorbed Liberals wholesale.
Thus the vote splitting of before became a more subtle triangulation by Labor against her two rivals, locking in a considerable advantage in both the Commons and the Senate, and allowing Hughes to take the next step of building an ever-more sophisticated electoral machine through which to deliver patronage to loyal Labor divisions and fine-tune his operation into one of the most dominant in the democratic, industrial world..."
- The Little Welshman: Billy Hughes and the Founding of Australia's Labor Dynasty
Germany might have to make concessions to get the British to accept the post-war status quo, and the channel ports would be the first among them. They might lobby for the Netherlands to annex back Northern Belgium, if not all of Flanders.• German victory in the Central European War, resulting in German supremacy on the continent (with the Germans dominating Belgium and the Port of Antwerp), the greatest terror for British political thinkers since the First French Empire and its emperor of a certain island in Mediterranean.
Concession? Sure but in general the British hand is not good enough to pressure Germany beyond a certain point, not with France, Belgium and A-H defeated and Russia also wanting some concession and putingt an enormous hole in any blockade plus British huffing and puffing aside, both the German and italian government after a war like the CEW (that while enormous for TTL, will be a lot less destructive of OTL WWI) need first and foremost please their internal pubblic opinion with that level of blood and treasure spend as otherwise risk let's say...trouble of the revolutionary type.Germany might have to make concessions to get the British to accept the post-war status quo, and the channel ports would be the first among them. They might lobby for the Netherlands to annex back Northern Belgium, if not all of Flanders.
Awesome stop with the ottomans! thanks!"...and with that speech, Ahmet Riza had totally announced himself to the public, [1] and Sabahaddin had for the first time since sweeping to prominence and power a genuine rival who could appeal to the Ottoman street and intelligentsia alike.
What made Riza lethal to Sabahaddin's increasingly tenuous hold on power, however, was not just the credentials and oratory of the man himself, impressive as he was, but the fact that in so publicly denouncing the Treaty of Balta Liman he struck a chord with a frustrated Ottoman street, and that in his views he was exactly the kind of moderate who could actually eat into Sabahaddin's base. Riza had been a vicious foe of Abdulhamid to the point of multiple Parisian exiles, but he was also an Ittihadi who was a liberal democrat and strong believer in constitutionalism. For the emergent Muslim middle class across much of Rumelia and western Anatolia, he was exactly the type of figure who appealed to their sensibilities without, as Sabahaddin had often done, pandering to Greek, Armenian and Jewish constituencies in a way that many Turks and Kurds found unbecoming nor indulging in the kind of ultra-conservative piousness that many of them felt belonged in the previous century. And in Balta Liman, Riza had found the ultimate effigy to burn - the very real downsides of unfettered liberalism.
The Treaty of Balta Liman's parameters were straightforward - in return for supporting the Porte in 1838 at a time of severe crisis during the invasion from Egypt by Muhammad Ali, Britain had demanded all economic monopolies be disbanded, and that Ottoman protectionism against British goods be forever ceased. While many other bilateral agreements in the years since 1838 had opened Ottoman markets - notably ones with France and Germany - the unilateralism of Balta Liman, and the fact that the British had not once renegotiated it since and been one of the largest benefactors of the reviled OPDA, made it an unusually unpopular piece of foreign policy. By 1919, with the Ottoman economy slouching back into recession after several years of strong growth and wealthier working and middle classes left frustrated by the sudden and sharp downturn, it became a shibboleth, denounced by many Ittihadis (though not Riza himself, at least not in those terms) as the "Crime of 1838." A straight line was drawn from Balta Liman to the "cultural revolution" of the 1910s Empire, to the disposition of the fez hat and hijab by women, and the rapid secularization of the state's functions even as the Sultan proudly invoked his title as Caliph. The conservative backlash was brewing, and despite his own religious moderation, Riza was well-positioned to ride it, especially if he could appeal to a non-sectarian audience with a new proposal - the repeal of Balta Liman.
Sabahaddin was an Anglophile, but no fool, and even he had begrudgingly come around to the idea that Balta Liman left the Ottomans "supine." His nationalism had been flexed in eliminating the OPDA and he could do so again, he figured, trusting his relationship with the British. Those efforts in the spring of 1919 would prove stillborn fast, however. Britain's ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Roger Percival Smythe-Watson [2], refused outright to "entertain" the renegotiation of a treaty that, in his words, "formed the firmament of Anglo-Turkish relations as much as the Kuwait Protocol." With London well aware of the deterioration of Ottoman relations with France and Austria, and ever-present concerns about Italian ambitions in the Balkans as well as Russia, the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom saw little incentive to pursue a course that gave up all their advantages over Constantinople and removed a great deal of leverage. Sabahaddin was similarly cut off at the knees by Ahraris who were not just secular progressives but doctrinaire economic liberals, wholly committed to Anglophilic concepts of free trade as being the purest expression of human liberty as opposed to the rank conservative protectionism of other European powers; some of them made the absurd attempt to argue that tariffs were a form a usury, and thus haram, despite being men who otherwise scoffed at the idea of grounding Ottoman law in Islam.
The crisis of 1919 between the Great Powers of central Europe even failed to provide a needed distraction; Sabahaddin's failure to pursue a revision of Balta Liman was held up in the press as evidence of the failure of "national modernism," that for all his efforts Sabahaddin was yet another weak Ottoman figure bullied by Europeans. As France and Austria went to war with Germany and Italy, the multinational but primarily British concern that was developing a tunnel beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul suddenly collapsed, delaying the completion of the project until well into the early 1930s and becoming another symbolic blow. The Ottoman economy, despite the OPDA being dissolved, was dependent not only on British imports but British money to do much of anything; uneven industrialization and a deepening economic malaise only heightened this anger for those who were well-read enough to understand it.
As such, the quick decline of Sabahaddin's years in power was at hand. He was now a plodding conservative and moderate sellout to the radicals in his movement who found that national modernism was not moving rapidly enough in instilling a secular multicultural (and utopian) polity, while to conservatives he was the same dangerous and naive revolutionary he had always been, but to all his enemies he was now also a weakling who could not - or perhaps refused to - challenge his beloved Britian over Balta Liman and defend Ottoman national interests. The blood was in the water, spurred as Sabahaddin suspected by the paranoid Sultan Yusuf I who perpetually feared an Ahrari coup against him, and though he noted in his diaries that the opposition to Balta Liman was clearly totemic, it was nonetheless valuable to all those who had, after close to a decade, found much to oppose in his political and cultural project, and were finally coalescing in a way that genuinely threatened it..."
- The House of Osman
[1] Ahmet Riza is an interesting late-Ottoman figure OTL. He was a Young Turk, but an Anglophile and an opponent of the Three Pashas' policies regarding ethnic and religious minorities, who later became an ardent Kemalist. Here, he fits well into the "soft CUP" Ittihad Party, and was one of the more capable men to emerge from that current of Turkish nationalism. He's an obvious foil/opponent to a man like Sabahaddin (they had a courteous but oppositional relationship IRL), and one wonders what may have become of the OE had men like Ahmet Riza been in charge in 1911-14 rather than Enver Pasha and his fellow thugs.
[2] Fictional just wanted to come up with a silly, stereotypically British name
• British industry completely surpassed by American and German
• German victory in the Central European War, resulting in German supremacy on the continent (with the Germans dominating Belgium and the Port of Antwerp), the greatest terror for British political thinkers since the First French Empire and its emperor of a certain island in Mediterranean.
• Possible Russian industrialization in the 1920s, a nation that greatly eclipses the population and natural resources of Great Britain, in addition to being able to threaten the British Raj.
• Rise of Japan in the Pacific?
• Italian rise in the Mediterranean?
The heyday of the Victorian Era, where France was demographically stagnant, where Great Britain was the Factory of the World and the Royal Navy ruled the waves indisputably is over.
Concession? Sure but in general the British hand is not good enough to pressure Germany beyond a certain point, not with France, Belgium and A-H defeated and Russia also wanting some concession and putingt an enormous hole in any blockade plus British huffing and puffing aside, both the German and italian government after a war like the CEW (that while enormous for TTL, will be a lot less destructive of OTL WWI) need first and foremost please their internal pubblic opinion with that level of blood and treasure spend as otherwise risk let's say...trouble of the revolutionary type.
In poor words, London will go to the peace conference that will end the war discovering that the famed balance of power that she loves so much is deader than dead and that her desires, while still important, are not anymore the most important thing of the world
I agree with @lukedalton and @Curtain Jerker that the British have already seen their diplomatic prowess considerably reduced as it is, and 1919 onwards will further compound that effect.@lukedalton is right. The New World told the Brits to kick rocks at the Niagara Conference - the only thing the USA, CSA, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile could all agree on in the summer of 1913 was that Brits had no business there. Here's hoping Germany follows that lead and tells the Brits to screw off as well.
Show me the lie lolView attachment 904548
I don't think the British will be able to turn the Russians and Italians against the Germans hahahaha
Arab nationalism is becoming more of a thing, certainly, but more about local emirs and regions (Syria, Egypt, etc) than Pan-Arabism as a whole, since at this point in time there wasn't really much of a consciousness of Arabs being a single people (and divides between Shia, Sunni, Druze, Alawites, Arab Christians, etc definitely exacerbated this quite a bit).Interesting. What are the Arab-majority provinces up to?
Yeah you're definitely not getting a German annexation of Antwerp herself, but Flamenpolitik would point towards a union with the Netherlands being the most straightforward future path (and I've tipped my hand that this will happen, just not when or how).Germany might have to make concessions to get the British to accept the post-war status quo, and the channel ports would be the first among them. They might lobby for the Netherlands to annex back Northern Belgium, if not all of Flanders.
The British will still have a fairly strong hand, as long as Germany believes the price of dealing with them is not worth another war. They still have the biggest navy, a significant economy, and significant financial resources.Concession? Sure but in general the British hand is not good enough to pressure Germany beyond a certain point, not with France, Belgium and A-H defeated and Russia also wanting some concession and putingt an enormous hole in any blockade plus British huffing and puffing aside, both the German and italian government after a war like the CEW (that while enormous for TTL, will be a lot less destructive of OTL WWI) need first and foremost please their internal pubblic opinion with that level of blood and treasure spend as otherwise risk let's say...trouble of the revolutionary type.
In poor words, London will go to the peace conference that will end the war discovering that the famed balance of power that she loves so much is deader than dead and that her desires, while still important, are not anymore the most important thing of the world