The 1916 Romanian Campaign?
Alternate History Thread V
- Thread starter Dachs
- Start date
The 1916 Romanian Campaign?
MjM
Deity
Can't wait for part IV!
das
Regeneration In Process
Actually, that's one of yours.
I suspected it, but wasn't sure and forgot to check.
I did remember sending Falkenhayn to China, though. I don't remember my exact thinking process there (to be honest, it probably had something to do with his not really that remarkable stint in Palestine and earlier association with China, though I was of course aware that he was a pretty cool guy in general), but I'm glad we can all agree it was a brilliant idea. 
Cheers re: the Bloody Baron.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
The Rise and Fall of the Frankish Empires
Part One: Consuetudines Novis
“For he seemed in all things to be the greatest of the kings of the Franks since the great Charles…”
-Abbot Hadamar of Fulda
At the dawn of the tenth century, the remnants of the regnum Francorum, what we call the Carolingian Empire, were in crisis.
Carolus Magnus, known in the vulgar languages as Charlemagne, Charles the Great and Karl der Große, rebuilt the Western Roman Empire some three centuries after its premature death. It was certainly not the Rome of late antiquity, but its language of learning, its titles religious and secular, were Latin. Crushing Lombards, Saxons, and any potential domestic threats, the expansion of Carolus’ dominion was checked only by the servants of the Saracen khalifa in Hispania.
The Carolingian Empire can be seen, in a way, as the ultimate triumph of Roman culture in post-Roman Europe, as a Germanic king was anointed imperator romanorum by the sole surviving institution of Roman authority: The Papacy. Charles’ empire could never match the contemporary architectural achievements (or sophisticated institutions of governance) showcased in Cordoba, Chang’an and Constantinople, but for his time and place, the territorial scope of the Carolingian conquest was unprecedented.
This world, as with the world of the Western Roman Empire, came to an end through internal division and external invasion. Charles’ son, Louis the Pious, did not adhere to a Roman conception of a united empire, instead choosing to divide his realm into regna among his sons according to ancient Germanic custom. For simplicity’s sake, we will focus, at least at first, on two: East Francia, which occupied much of today’s Germany, and West Francia, which constituted much of today’s France. Lotharingen, the third, was often traded between the two realms for much of this period.
In our world, the tenth century was one of revolutions. In both East and West Francia, the male line from Louis the Pious died out, the West Francian line surviving slightly longer, to be replaced by non-Carolingian dynasties. The title of rex francorum would soon resurface in the rapidly fragmenting remnants of West Francia with the election of dux francorum Hugh Capet, a man whose royal authority extended only as far as his lands. In Eastern Francia, the royal title shifted abruptly after the death of Louis the Child from rex francorum to that of rex teutonicorum. What was once East Francia transformed from a hereditary kingship to an elected kingship following the extinguishing of the last Carolingian scions.
The rulers of the stem duchies elected first Conrad of Franconia, and after his death, Henry the Fowler of Saxony, as German kings. It was Henry the Fowler’s son Otto I who became Otto the Great, recaptured the title of Holy Roman Emperor after it had fallen into disuse, and bridged the gap between the fall of the Carolingian Roman Empire, and the birth of the Holy Roman Empire which students of medieval history commonly recognize. But throughout the medieval period, any triumph of a Holy Roman Emperor over the duchies was temporary in nature. Between 911 and 1438, no German dynasty controlled the monarchy uncontested for more than a century. (The Ottonians held it for 105 years, but the point is trivial.)
Much of the dysfunction of the Holy Roman Empire can be traced to this precedent of elective kingship, which prevented Germany itself from being united under a royal line which was uncontestable. Rex teutonicorum, unlike rex francorum, was not a title one could pass to one’s sons without noble (and in some cases, papal) intervention. The great canniness of Hugh Capet and his successors was to escape the trap of elective monarchy by securing a hereditary kingship. The fact that the Capetian kings took special care to invest their sons as co-kings for many years after Hugh’s election reflected the relative fragility of their rule, and their desperation to maintain and expand it.
One other aspect of the Carolingian world bears mentioning. The divided empire was, almost all at once, assaulted at the fringes by Magyars, Saracens, and Vikings. These incursions, small raids at first, grew in places to be devastating. It was probably the inability of the ‘legitimate’ Carolingian authorities to deal with these threats that contributed greatly to the political fragmentation that is so commonly associated with the dawn of the second millennium, as local lords took the duties of the central power into their own hands.
Having re-established this broad background, it is time to depart from history.
It is immensely difficult, given the amount of hero-worship which has grown around the boy-king’s reign, to find an unbiased account of Louis the Great. [1] A fresco of the ‘two fathers of Francia,’ dated to 1104, shows a crowned Charlemagne and Louis, seated side by side, perhaps a conscious aping of the religious iconography of the Son enthroned at the right hand of the Father. What is certain is that Louis was born hale and hearty to his father Arnulf, Roman Emperor and King of East Francia, in 893, and his childhood passed without any signs of illness or injury.
The claim of unbroken imperial lineage put forth by the Kärntner (Carinthian) dynasty is somewhat complicated by the fact that Arnulf, the great-great-grandson of Charlemagne and only son of Carloman, King of Bavaria, was a bastard. Numerous attempts have been made in folklore and monastic commentaries to handwave this away, saying that Carloman eventually married the concubine by which he begat Arnulf, or that Arnulf’s anointment as Emperor somehow invalidated his bastardy.
Louis, or Ludwig, depending on whether one speaks to a Lotharingian or a Franklander, is alternatively regarded as the savior and the founder of modern Francia. While this claim is almost certainly exaggerated, it is easy to imagine the Ost Frankreich sharing the fate of their western cousins under the twin blows of external invasion and the absence or destruction of central authority. Indeed, East and West Francia faced remarkably similar challenges during this period, but diverged vastly in their outcomes.
With Emperor Arnulf’s death when Louis was only six, the child-king was left in the charge of several influential adult councilors. The most powerful of these were most likely Liutpold, the Margrave of Bavaria, and Hatto, the Archbishop of Mainz. It was the former that took charge of the defense of the Frankish realm during the boy-king’s minority, securing tribute and vassalage from Great Moravia, and the latter which helped neutralize various domestic threats, such as forcing the submission of the ambitious Zwentibold, a bastard son of Emperor Arnulf who ruled Lotharingia as a sub-kingdom under the authority of East Francia, and generally followed his powerful father's orders but was less likely to work for a baby. These actions certainly allowed Louis to survive to adulthood with his kingdom intact. But even they were helpless to deal with the practically existential threat of Magyar invasion.
A monastic chronicle claiming to be written by one of Louis’ tutors speaks of his “multitudinous graces and virtues,” and by all accounts the young king was beloved both by the common people and the chief retainers of the dynasty. (All surviving accounts are sadly biased, of course.) The first major action of his reign, perhaps apocryphal, was an inspirational appearance of the boy-king near the end of the Battle of Pressburg in 907, where Liutpold’s fleeing Bavarian army rallied in his presence. While the battle ended in a crushing victory for the Magyars, the Margrave and a portion of his army managed to survive and retreat in good order.
Following this battle, the Magyar raids increased in duration and intensity, ravaging Saxony and Alemannia. Liutpold’s influence is here ascribed to preventing the still young Louis from riding out to challenge the Magyars directly after Pressburg. In fact, the Margrave of Bavaria led an assemblage of German lords in offering a (possibly overestimated) thousand pounds of silver to the Grand Prince Arpad, which bought the East Frankish realm a few crucial years of peace, during which the Magyars raided northern Italy, Provence, and the Balkans. Of course, the existence of the bribe has been white-washed from the traditionally hagiographic accounts of Louis’ reign, but multiple reasonably authoritative Hungarian sources confirm its existence.
Concurrent with these events, in West Francia, the kingship had been traded in a pseudo-elective fashion between Carolingian and non-Carolingian alike for several decades, most recently with the election of Odo, the non-Carolingian hero of the Siege of Paris, as King of the Franks. While the Norman threat had receded slightly after the Siege of Paris thanks to Odo’s efforts, destructive and periodic pagan raids continued with little abatement. These Normans were led by the fierce Viking jarl Hrolfr, popularly called Rollo, who had continued the process of colonizing northern Neustria with his many followers, and had inflicted numerous defeats on the local nobles of Neustria and the Seine throughout the 890’s. The lack of a stable succession (and the increasing feudal instability brought about by the partition-centric inheritance laws of the Carolingians) contributed to Odo’s inability to decisively defeat the northmen, who were, while fierce and cunning fighters, by no means invincible.
Despite his more than decent battlefield abilities, the King of all Western Francia was forced into a brutal internecine conflict with his nobles, many of whom supported the accession of the Carolingian Charles III, "the Simple". Despite continued victory against the Normans, Odo failed to win over the Frankish lords, especially after Emperor Arnulf of East Francia declared for his relation Charles, despite Odo’s offer of allegiance. This touched off an intermittent four-year war with Charles and his supporters, settled in 899 by King Odo's death in battle. It was certainly Odo’s distraction with fighting his own nobles which prevented him from following up his victories with a complete expulsion of Norman forces, allowing Rollo to consolidate his power over the Normans, and prepare for the inevitable conflict with Charles.
Relations between the two Carolingian kings of East and West Francia soured after the death of Zwentibold, who was (as seemed to be all too common for any king in this time) murdered by his own Lotharingian nobles in 903. While Louis (or rather, his guardians) retained control of the region, several minor lords declared for Charles, a claim which the West Frankish king was completely unable to pursue, but which angered the East Frankish court, and reportedly resulted in a severing of embassies for some years. According to one chronicle, a large number of West Frankish lords fell away from actively supporting Charles the Simple following this event. Nonetheless, after several years of inactivity during which Charles seems to have been subduing various rebel lords and quarreling with Odo’s brother Robert, he marched north along the Seine with the intent of retaking Rouen.
As Charles marched to bring Rollo to decisive battle, Robert, the Count of Paris, declined to lend his support to the king’s armies. This was perhaps not the most pragmatic decision given the pressure that the Normans were constantly exerting down the Seine, but Charles was, in Robert’s mind, his brother’s murderer. And so Charles leaned more heavily on the greatest of his supporters, William, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Auvergne, granting him numerous titles and benefices as he marched to war.
The Battle of Vernon in 910, while more likely a series of interconnected battles along the Seine, would be remembered as the last stand of the unified West Frankish kingdom. While the ideal of a unified kingdom was still alive before the year 1000, Vernon was in retrospect the death knell of a disintegrating nation. While the first Viking ambush in the forests surrounding the town of Vernon targeting the king’s baggage train was fought off by Charles’ knights, the ultimate confrontation between the retainers of Rollo and Charles in the village itself resulted in the death of King Charles the Simple, pierced through the throat by a Viking arrow.
With this battle, the male Carolingian line in the west was extinguished, as Charles had only had female heirs. Naturally, the West Frankish lords who had already been lukewarm over Charles’ authority immediately fell to fighting over the crown. No less than four separate coronations were held within the next two years, as Robert of Paris contrived to have himself elected as King of the Franks at Soissons even as William of Aquitaine was acclaimed king by the monks of the newly-founded abbey of Cluny. However, the former was declared ‘rex aquitanium,’ with pretensions of the old Carolingian sub-kingdom, and William’s emissaries almost immediately did homage at the court of Louis in East Francia, begging for his support against the usurper Charles.
As for the ‘usurper’, Robert too did homage, claiming that the title was his by right as Count of Paris, brother of Odo, and dux francorum. Louis’ court remained cautiously neutral, accepting the homage of both men while declining to favor either. There was serious bad blood between William and Robert, the former having participated in Charles’ disastrous expedition of 910 while the latter refused, and the two fought a string of skirmishes and raids over the following years, dividing the West Frankish nobility between them. (Both men, of course, had been producing their own coinage and effectively acting independent of Charles, or any other authority, long before their coronations.) The remainder of the 910’s saw repeated clashes in Auvergne between the two evenly-matched foes, while Rollo expanded at their expense.
The third coronation occurred at Rouen, surprisingly enough. According to the Gesta Normanorum, “Rollo, strong of courage and will, learned like Constantinus upon the battlefield that manifold nations might be put to flight would he but accept the Christ.” A separate account of comes from the folk tale of his confrontation by Franco, Archbishop of Rouen, who reputedly invoked that Lord Rollo would lose all strength in his sword arm and die in his next battle if he refused conversion. That Franco was later sainted lends some credence to this tale. Regardless, the Norman warlord was ultimately baptized by St. Franco in the name of the Trinity at Rouen in 911, following which he declared himself ‘rex normanorum,’ with the Christian name of Simon, which we will henceforth call him.
[Most historians have attributed this sudden coronation to Franco’s influence, postulating that the bishop was a Carolingian loyalist seeking to prevent Robertian control over all West Francia, or mere pious desire to re-establish ecclesiastical control over Neustria under a Christian leader.]
The following years reportedly saw a major influx of Viking warriors to restore King Simon’s depleted horde, with a notable exodus coming from England, where Edward I, King of the Anglo Saxons, had scored several victories over the crumbling Danelaw, restricting Danish power to a small region around York. Immediately following his conversion, Simon intensified his raids down the Seine, and captured Chartres following a monthlong siege of the city in 913. His efforts to surround Paris in the subsequent years were parried by King Robert, but an invasion of Flanders in 916 resulted in the capture and ransoming of Count Baldwin II.
Though Robert remained claimant to the title of King of the Franks, his disputed reign was never acknowledged outside of the Seine basin, and the re-established Kingdom of Aquitaine and the newly declared Kingdom of Normania, both on Frankish territory, were openly hostile to his authority. When Robert died in 925, one year after William and he had both recognized one another’s titles, his son Hugh decided only to style himself Count of Paris, hoping that by abandoning the royal title he might get some East Frankish support against his ambitious rivals. (One monastic account has Robert being struck by lightning as punishment for his betrayal of Charles III.)
Now, at long last, we return to East Francia. The Magyar raids in force into Italy and Provence had been highly successful, but Germany remained a rich source of wealth, and the bribes were no longer forthcoming from Louis’ kingdom, which indeed acted very belligerently (or courageously, depending on whether one reads a Frankish or Hungarian source) towards the Magyar emissary in 921 requesting continued tribute from their German ‘vassals’. Louis had made good on his bought time, securing strong alliances with Rudolf II, king of Upper Burgundy, and with Henry the Fowler, a powerful and influential Saxon duke viewed by some to be a potential spoiler for the throne. It was his agreement to marry Henry’s daughter Hedwige which most likely sealed the deal with the Saxons.
In 923, the full force of the Magyar confederacy assembled to punish Francia for their defiance. Louis himself had given long thought to the coming war, realizing correctly that the skill of the Hungarian horse archers allowed them to inflict disparate casualties on their German foes while remaining out of their foes’ range. It is attributed to Louis and Margrave Liutpold the development of the Frankish mounted archer in response. While they were more heavily armored than their Hungarian foes, their bows were large enough to potentially outrange the Hungarians, or at least to keep them from raining down arrows incessantly without taking some in return. Louis also seems to have assembled a substantial coterie of knights loyal to him alone and not to the dukes, supplementing if not replacing his longstanding reliance on Bavarian and Saxon arms.
These new measures in place, the Franks mustered for battle as a great Magyar host moved up the Danube, their initial target the city of Augsburg, following which they most likely desired to ravage Lotharingen and Burgundy. Arriving ahead of the enemy with the imperial army, the King of the Franks restrained his aggression, realizing that it was the common tendency of the German armies to charge forward wildly which allowed their foes to encircle and destroy them. Keeping the city walls at his army’s back, with the newly-elected bishop, Siegfried, providing an inspirational force from the battlements, he allowed the Hungarian archers to attempt their traditional faint tactics, darting forward to shoot and retreat, but the German mounted pickets returned fire and drove off the Hungarian skirmishers.
According to most chronicles, at this point King Louis and his heavy cavalry charged directly into the Hungarian center, with the Saxons and Bavarians on his left and right wings advancing slowly in support. Some chronicles cite the king engaging in single combat with Grand Prince Zoltan, and while this is unlikely, the Hungarians found their traditional encirclement tactics failing on the hilly terrain, while the fierceness of the Frankish assault threatened to break the Hungarian forces in two. At this point, the Hungarians threw all their uncommitted soldiers in an attempt to break the Saxon contingent on the left, the smallest army on the field. Duke Henry was killed at this point attempting to hold back the fierce Magyar assault, but despite his death the Saxons fell back towards the city in a disciplined fashion, while a party of Burgundians detached from the center to keep the Hungarians from putting themselves between the Franks and Augsburg, and encircling them to boot.
With Louis’ cavalry overwhelming the Hungarian center, the steppe warriors began to disengage in a somewhat disorderly fashion, a good number of their right flank being surrounded and destroyed by King Rudolf’s pursuers. In the past, victorious Frankish armies had broken ranks in the immediate aftermath of battle to celebrate their victory, but the king and his men harried the Hungarians relentlessly, exacting a heavy price in casualties in a series of skirmishes (more like slaughters, but who's counting) which extended all the way to the Hungarian border. The Battle of Augsburg was a turning point in the Magyar invasion of Europe, and despite their later actions, never again would they attempt to invade East Francia in force.
What is known authoritatively beyond these accounts is that both on the battlefield that day, and in a ceremony at Pavia with Pope Anastasius IV some three years later, Louis IV, Ludwig der Große, was acclaimed imperator romanorum.
By the year 930, a very new political paradigm was in place. At least for the moment, the Francian realm was victorious and centered around an energetic, powerful king. It would be tempting to declare the Carolingian world restored, but this was not the case. The Magyars and Polabian Slavs would continue to present serious challenges to the state of Francia, while West Francia was lost in its entirety. The powerful, pseudo-independent kings of Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Provence were perfectly capable of pursuing their own policies, even as the former two acknowledged the new suzerain in Augsburg. This was to say nothing of the new Kingdom of Normania under Simon I.
In some forty years, the world had changed permanently. And it was about to change much, much more.
---
[1] I'm using Anglicized names where applicable, not vernacular translations. This will continue to be the case for Popes and Eastern Roman Emperors. I will say 'John' and not 'Ioannis.' It's just personal preference, and also the fact that I'm writing in English. Furthermore, if I wanted to adhere more closely to contemporary (10th century) scholarship, I'd be using Latin names to describe dubiously 'Latin' people, which would just confuse things further.
OOC: Shock, awe, a TL not written by Dachs! I'm not trying to compete of course, just give the historically-minded NESers something else to chew on and hopefully encourage more activity in here.
So, this is the first of what will hopefully be several installments. Errors and confusion may abound, I'll do my best to answer any questions.
Spain, Provence, and Italy are going to be dealt with in the next part. Obviously there are PoD effects going on, but I need to do a bit more research before I can authoritatively write on the goings on there. England and Eastern Rome are slightly further down on the to-do list, as naturally, major PoD effects take longer to reach there.
I'll probably take this timeline to somewhere between 1200 and 1300. Not sure yet.
Part One: Consuetudines Novis
“For he seemed in all things to be the greatest of the kings of the Franks since the great Charles…”
-Abbot Hadamar of Fulda
At the dawn of the tenth century, the remnants of the regnum Francorum, what we call the Carolingian Empire, were in crisis.
Carolus Magnus, known in the vulgar languages as Charlemagne, Charles the Great and Karl der Große, rebuilt the Western Roman Empire some three centuries after its premature death. It was certainly not the Rome of late antiquity, but its language of learning, its titles religious and secular, were Latin. Crushing Lombards, Saxons, and any potential domestic threats, the expansion of Carolus’ dominion was checked only by the servants of the Saracen khalifa in Hispania.
The Carolingian Empire can be seen, in a way, as the ultimate triumph of Roman culture in post-Roman Europe, as a Germanic king was anointed imperator romanorum by the sole surviving institution of Roman authority: The Papacy. Charles’ empire could never match the contemporary architectural achievements (or sophisticated institutions of governance) showcased in Cordoba, Chang’an and Constantinople, but for his time and place, the territorial scope of the Carolingian conquest was unprecedented.
This world, as with the world of the Western Roman Empire, came to an end through internal division and external invasion. Charles’ son, Louis the Pious, did not adhere to a Roman conception of a united empire, instead choosing to divide his realm into regna among his sons according to ancient Germanic custom. For simplicity’s sake, we will focus, at least at first, on two: East Francia, which occupied much of today’s Germany, and West Francia, which constituted much of today’s France. Lotharingen, the third, was often traded between the two realms for much of this period.
In our world, the tenth century was one of revolutions. In both East and West Francia, the male line from Louis the Pious died out, the West Francian line surviving slightly longer, to be replaced by non-Carolingian dynasties. The title of rex francorum would soon resurface in the rapidly fragmenting remnants of West Francia with the election of dux francorum Hugh Capet, a man whose royal authority extended only as far as his lands. In Eastern Francia, the royal title shifted abruptly after the death of Louis the Child from rex francorum to that of rex teutonicorum. What was once East Francia transformed from a hereditary kingship to an elected kingship following the extinguishing of the last Carolingian scions.
The rulers of the stem duchies elected first Conrad of Franconia, and after his death, Henry the Fowler of Saxony, as German kings. It was Henry the Fowler’s son Otto I who became Otto the Great, recaptured the title of Holy Roman Emperor after it had fallen into disuse, and bridged the gap between the fall of the Carolingian Roman Empire, and the birth of the Holy Roman Empire which students of medieval history commonly recognize. But throughout the medieval period, any triumph of a Holy Roman Emperor over the duchies was temporary in nature. Between 911 and 1438, no German dynasty controlled the monarchy uncontested for more than a century. (The Ottonians held it for 105 years, but the point is trivial.)
Much of the dysfunction of the Holy Roman Empire can be traced to this precedent of elective kingship, which prevented Germany itself from being united under a royal line which was uncontestable. Rex teutonicorum, unlike rex francorum, was not a title one could pass to one’s sons without noble (and in some cases, papal) intervention. The great canniness of Hugh Capet and his successors was to escape the trap of elective monarchy by securing a hereditary kingship. The fact that the Capetian kings took special care to invest their sons as co-kings for many years after Hugh’s election reflected the relative fragility of their rule, and their desperation to maintain and expand it.
One other aspect of the Carolingian world bears mentioning. The divided empire was, almost all at once, assaulted at the fringes by Magyars, Saracens, and Vikings. These incursions, small raids at first, grew in places to be devastating. It was probably the inability of the ‘legitimate’ Carolingian authorities to deal with these threats that contributed greatly to the political fragmentation that is so commonly associated with the dawn of the second millennium, as local lords took the duties of the central power into their own hands.
Having re-established this broad background, it is time to depart from history.
It is immensely difficult, given the amount of hero-worship which has grown around the boy-king’s reign, to find an unbiased account of Louis the Great. [1] A fresco of the ‘two fathers of Francia,’ dated to 1104, shows a crowned Charlemagne and Louis, seated side by side, perhaps a conscious aping of the religious iconography of the Son enthroned at the right hand of the Father. What is certain is that Louis was born hale and hearty to his father Arnulf, Roman Emperor and King of East Francia, in 893, and his childhood passed without any signs of illness or injury.
The claim of unbroken imperial lineage put forth by the Kärntner (Carinthian) dynasty is somewhat complicated by the fact that Arnulf, the great-great-grandson of Charlemagne and only son of Carloman, King of Bavaria, was a bastard. Numerous attempts have been made in folklore and monastic commentaries to handwave this away, saying that Carloman eventually married the concubine by which he begat Arnulf, or that Arnulf’s anointment as Emperor somehow invalidated his bastardy.
Louis, or Ludwig, depending on whether one speaks to a Lotharingian or a Franklander, is alternatively regarded as the savior and the founder of modern Francia. While this claim is almost certainly exaggerated, it is easy to imagine the Ost Frankreich sharing the fate of their western cousins under the twin blows of external invasion and the absence or destruction of central authority. Indeed, East and West Francia faced remarkably similar challenges during this period, but diverged vastly in their outcomes.
With Emperor Arnulf’s death when Louis was only six, the child-king was left in the charge of several influential adult councilors. The most powerful of these were most likely Liutpold, the Margrave of Bavaria, and Hatto, the Archbishop of Mainz. It was the former that took charge of the defense of the Frankish realm during the boy-king’s minority, securing tribute and vassalage from Great Moravia, and the latter which helped neutralize various domestic threats, such as forcing the submission of the ambitious Zwentibold, a bastard son of Emperor Arnulf who ruled Lotharingia as a sub-kingdom under the authority of East Francia, and generally followed his powerful father's orders but was less likely to work for a baby. These actions certainly allowed Louis to survive to adulthood with his kingdom intact. But even they were helpless to deal with the practically existential threat of Magyar invasion.
A monastic chronicle claiming to be written by one of Louis’ tutors speaks of his “multitudinous graces and virtues,” and by all accounts the young king was beloved both by the common people and the chief retainers of the dynasty. (All surviving accounts are sadly biased, of course.) The first major action of his reign, perhaps apocryphal, was an inspirational appearance of the boy-king near the end of the Battle of Pressburg in 907, where Liutpold’s fleeing Bavarian army rallied in his presence. While the battle ended in a crushing victory for the Magyars, the Margrave and a portion of his army managed to survive and retreat in good order.
Following this battle, the Magyar raids increased in duration and intensity, ravaging Saxony and Alemannia. Liutpold’s influence is here ascribed to preventing the still young Louis from riding out to challenge the Magyars directly after Pressburg. In fact, the Margrave of Bavaria led an assemblage of German lords in offering a (possibly overestimated) thousand pounds of silver to the Grand Prince Arpad, which bought the East Frankish realm a few crucial years of peace, during which the Magyars raided northern Italy, Provence, and the Balkans. Of course, the existence of the bribe has been white-washed from the traditionally hagiographic accounts of Louis’ reign, but multiple reasonably authoritative Hungarian sources confirm its existence.
Concurrent with these events, in West Francia, the kingship had been traded in a pseudo-elective fashion between Carolingian and non-Carolingian alike for several decades, most recently with the election of Odo, the non-Carolingian hero of the Siege of Paris, as King of the Franks. While the Norman threat had receded slightly after the Siege of Paris thanks to Odo’s efforts, destructive and periodic pagan raids continued with little abatement. These Normans were led by the fierce Viking jarl Hrolfr, popularly called Rollo, who had continued the process of colonizing northern Neustria with his many followers, and had inflicted numerous defeats on the local nobles of Neustria and the Seine throughout the 890’s. The lack of a stable succession (and the increasing feudal instability brought about by the partition-centric inheritance laws of the Carolingians) contributed to Odo’s inability to decisively defeat the northmen, who were, while fierce and cunning fighters, by no means invincible.
Despite his more than decent battlefield abilities, the King of all Western Francia was forced into a brutal internecine conflict with his nobles, many of whom supported the accession of the Carolingian Charles III, "the Simple". Despite continued victory against the Normans, Odo failed to win over the Frankish lords, especially after Emperor Arnulf of East Francia declared for his relation Charles, despite Odo’s offer of allegiance. This touched off an intermittent four-year war with Charles and his supporters, settled in 899 by King Odo's death in battle. It was certainly Odo’s distraction with fighting his own nobles which prevented him from following up his victories with a complete expulsion of Norman forces, allowing Rollo to consolidate his power over the Normans, and prepare for the inevitable conflict with Charles.
Relations between the two Carolingian kings of East and West Francia soured after the death of Zwentibold, who was (as seemed to be all too common for any king in this time) murdered by his own Lotharingian nobles in 903. While Louis (or rather, his guardians) retained control of the region, several minor lords declared for Charles, a claim which the West Frankish king was completely unable to pursue, but which angered the East Frankish court, and reportedly resulted in a severing of embassies for some years. According to one chronicle, a large number of West Frankish lords fell away from actively supporting Charles the Simple following this event. Nonetheless, after several years of inactivity during which Charles seems to have been subduing various rebel lords and quarreling with Odo’s brother Robert, he marched north along the Seine with the intent of retaking Rouen.
As Charles marched to bring Rollo to decisive battle, Robert, the Count of Paris, declined to lend his support to the king’s armies. This was perhaps not the most pragmatic decision given the pressure that the Normans were constantly exerting down the Seine, but Charles was, in Robert’s mind, his brother’s murderer. And so Charles leaned more heavily on the greatest of his supporters, William, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Auvergne, granting him numerous titles and benefices as he marched to war.
The Battle of Vernon in 910, while more likely a series of interconnected battles along the Seine, would be remembered as the last stand of the unified West Frankish kingdom. While the ideal of a unified kingdom was still alive before the year 1000, Vernon was in retrospect the death knell of a disintegrating nation. While the first Viking ambush in the forests surrounding the town of Vernon targeting the king’s baggage train was fought off by Charles’ knights, the ultimate confrontation between the retainers of Rollo and Charles in the village itself resulted in the death of King Charles the Simple, pierced through the throat by a Viking arrow.
With this battle, the male Carolingian line in the west was extinguished, as Charles had only had female heirs. Naturally, the West Frankish lords who had already been lukewarm over Charles’ authority immediately fell to fighting over the crown. No less than four separate coronations were held within the next two years, as Robert of Paris contrived to have himself elected as King of the Franks at Soissons even as William of Aquitaine was acclaimed king by the monks of the newly-founded abbey of Cluny. However, the former was declared ‘rex aquitanium,’ with pretensions of the old Carolingian sub-kingdom, and William’s emissaries almost immediately did homage at the court of Louis in East Francia, begging for his support against the usurper Charles.
As for the ‘usurper’, Robert too did homage, claiming that the title was his by right as Count of Paris, brother of Odo, and dux francorum. Louis’ court remained cautiously neutral, accepting the homage of both men while declining to favor either. There was serious bad blood between William and Robert, the former having participated in Charles’ disastrous expedition of 910 while the latter refused, and the two fought a string of skirmishes and raids over the following years, dividing the West Frankish nobility between them. (Both men, of course, had been producing their own coinage and effectively acting independent of Charles, or any other authority, long before their coronations.) The remainder of the 910’s saw repeated clashes in Auvergne between the two evenly-matched foes, while Rollo expanded at their expense.
The third coronation occurred at Rouen, surprisingly enough. According to the Gesta Normanorum, “Rollo, strong of courage and will, learned like Constantinus upon the battlefield that manifold nations might be put to flight would he but accept the Christ.” A separate account of comes from the folk tale of his confrontation by Franco, Archbishop of Rouen, who reputedly invoked that Lord Rollo would lose all strength in his sword arm and die in his next battle if he refused conversion. That Franco was later sainted lends some credence to this tale. Regardless, the Norman warlord was ultimately baptized by St. Franco in the name of the Trinity at Rouen in 911, following which he declared himself ‘rex normanorum,’ with the Christian name of Simon, which we will henceforth call him.
[Most historians have attributed this sudden coronation to Franco’s influence, postulating that the bishop was a Carolingian loyalist seeking to prevent Robertian control over all West Francia, or mere pious desire to re-establish ecclesiastical control over Neustria under a Christian leader.]
The following years reportedly saw a major influx of Viking warriors to restore King Simon’s depleted horde, with a notable exodus coming from England, where Edward I, King of the Anglo Saxons, had scored several victories over the crumbling Danelaw, restricting Danish power to a small region around York. Immediately following his conversion, Simon intensified his raids down the Seine, and captured Chartres following a monthlong siege of the city in 913. His efforts to surround Paris in the subsequent years were parried by King Robert, but an invasion of Flanders in 916 resulted in the capture and ransoming of Count Baldwin II.
Though Robert remained claimant to the title of King of the Franks, his disputed reign was never acknowledged outside of the Seine basin, and the re-established Kingdom of Aquitaine and the newly declared Kingdom of Normania, both on Frankish territory, were openly hostile to his authority. When Robert died in 925, one year after William and he had both recognized one another’s titles, his son Hugh decided only to style himself Count of Paris, hoping that by abandoning the royal title he might get some East Frankish support against his ambitious rivals. (One monastic account has Robert being struck by lightning as punishment for his betrayal of Charles III.)
Now, at long last, we return to East Francia. The Magyar raids in force into Italy and Provence had been highly successful, but Germany remained a rich source of wealth, and the bribes were no longer forthcoming from Louis’ kingdom, which indeed acted very belligerently (or courageously, depending on whether one reads a Frankish or Hungarian source) towards the Magyar emissary in 921 requesting continued tribute from their German ‘vassals’. Louis had made good on his bought time, securing strong alliances with Rudolf II, king of Upper Burgundy, and with Henry the Fowler, a powerful and influential Saxon duke viewed by some to be a potential spoiler for the throne. It was his agreement to marry Henry’s daughter Hedwige which most likely sealed the deal with the Saxons.
In 923, the full force of the Magyar confederacy assembled to punish Francia for their defiance. Louis himself had given long thought to the coming war, realizing correctly that the skill of the Hungarian horse archers allowed them to inflict disparate casualties on their German foes while remaining out of their foes’ range. It is attributed to Louis and Margrave Liutpold the development of the Frankish mounted archer in response. While they were more heavily armored than their Hungarian foes, their bows were large enough to potentially outrange the Hungarians, or at least to keep them from raining down arrows incessantly without taking some in return. Louis also seems to have assembled a substantial coterie of knights loyal to him alone and not to the dukes, supplementing if not replacing his longstanding reliance on Bavarian and Saxon arms.
These new measures in place, the Franks mustered for battle as a great Magyar host moved up the Danube, their initial target the city of Augsburg, following which they most likely desired to ravage Lotharingen and Burgundy. Arriving ahead of the enemy with the imperial army, the King of the Franks restrained his aggression, realizing that it was the common tendency of the German armies to charge forward wildly which allowed their foes to encircle and destroy them. Keeping the city walls at his army’s back, with the newly-elected bishop, Siegfried, providing an inspirational force from the battlements, he allowed the Hungarian archers to attempt their traditional faint tactics, darting forward to shoot and retreat, but the German mounted pickets returned fire and drove off the Hungarian skirmishers.
According to most chronicles, at this point King Louis and his heavy cavalry charged directly into the Hungarian center, with the Saxons and Bavarians on his left and right wings advancing slowly in support. Some chronicles cite the king engaging in single combat with Grand Prince Zoltan, and while this is unlikely, the Hungarians found their traditional encirclement tactics failing on the hilly terrain, while the fierceness of the Frankish assault threatened to break the Hungarian forces in two. At this point, the Hungarians threw all their uncommitted soldiers in an attempt to break the Saxon contingent on the left, the smallest army on the field. Duke Henry was killed at this point attempting to hold back the fierce Magyar assault, but despite his death the Saxons fell back towards the city in a disciplined fashion, while a party of Burgundians detached from the center to keep the Hungarians from putting themselves between the Franks and Augsburg, and encircling them to boot.
With Louis’ cavalry overwhelming the Hungarian center, the steppe warriors began to disengage in a somewhat disorderly fashion, a good number of their right flank being surrounded and destroyed by King Rudolf’s pursuers. In the past, victorious Frankish armies had broken ranks in the immediate aftermath of battle to celebrate their victory, but the king and his men harried the Hungarians relentlessly, exacting a heavy price in casualties in a series of skirmishes (more like slaughters, but who's counting) which extended all the way to the Hungarian border. The Battle of Augsburg was a turning point in the Magyar invasion of Europe, and despite their later actions, never again would they attempt to invade East Francia in force.
What is known authoritatively beyond these accounts is that both on the battlefield that day, and in a ceremony at Pavia with Pope Anastasius IV some three years later, Louis IV, Ludwig der Große, was acclaimed imperator romanorum.
By the year 930, a very new political paradigm was in place. At least for the moment, the Francian realm was victorious and centered around an energetic, powerful king. It would be tempting to declare the Carolingian world restored, but this was not the case. The Magyars and Polabian Slavs would continue to present serious challenges to the state of Francia, while West Francia was lost in its entirety. The powerful, pseudo-independent kings of Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Provence were perfectly capable of pursuing their own policies, even as the former two acknowledged the new suzerain in Augsburg. This was to say nothing of the new Kingdom of Normania under Simon I.
In some forty years, the world had changed permanently. And it was about to change much, much more.
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[1] I'm using Anglicized names where applicable, not vernacular translations. This will continue to be the case for Popes and Eastern Roman Emperors. I will say 'John' and not 'Ioannis.' It's just personal preference, and also the fact that I'm writing in English. Furthermore, if I wanted to adhere more closely to contemporary (10th century) scholarship, I'd be using Latin names to describe dubiously 'Latin' people, which would just confuse things further.
OOC: Shock, awe, a TL not written by Dachs! I'm not trying to compete of course, just give the historically-minded NESers something else to chew on and hopefully encourage more activity in here.
So, this is the first of what will hopefully be several installments. Errors and confusion may abound, I'll do my best to answer any questions.
Spain, Provence, and Italy are going to be dealt with in the next part. Obviously there are PoD effects going on, but I need to do a bit more research before I can authoritatively write on the goings on there. England and Eastern Rome are slightly further down on the to-do list, as naturally, major PoD effects take longer to reach there.
I'll probably take this timeline to somewhere between 1200 and 1300. Not sure yet.
Did the Magyars under OTL circumstances ever reach as far as Italy and Provence, or did that just occur TTL because of their new dealings with East Francia. Also, how were they able to develop horse archers seemingly at will and with such ease? It seems that developing a style of warfare which I believe (apologies if I am wrong) was more or less foreign to the German population would be rather difficult. All in all though, great to see someone else writing atl's good job thlayly. Like the historiography, and its clearly quite well researched.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
They did get that far in OTL. The circumstances under which they did in ATL are somewhat different, as will be seen. (Spoiler alert: Poor Italy.)
It was pretty much mounted knights who learned to shoot from horseback. They weren't as good as the Hungarian archers, obviously, but Louis had a few years to drill it into them. Besides that one detail, the course of the battle was reasonably similar to Lechfeld. (Byzantium is another example of a non-steppe culture that developed armored horseback-riding bowmen in response to a more mobile enemy.)
It was pretty much mounted knights who learned to shoot from horseback. They weren't as good as the Hungarian archers, obviously, but Louis had a few years to drill it into them. Besides that one detail, the course of the battle was reasonably similar to Lechfeld. (Byzantium is another example of a non-steppe culture that developed armored horseback-riding bowmen in response to a more mobile enemy.)
My comments made elsewhere stand: interesting read (awfully political, but then again, I'm hardly one to talk), worthy subject (if chiefly because of butterflies). But there's not enough of it, and there are a few holes in your description of period political trends, albeit not ones that dramatically alter the course of the story.
Byzantines aren't really comparable; pasturage in Anatolia was excellent, while the core of their mounted archer formations was comprised initially of foreigners who did do horse archery as a way of life - Huns, various Turks, Magyars, and so forth. Also, even on the most optimistic estimates (e.g. Luttwak 2008) they took nearly a century to train their initial horse-archer cadres to a point where they were effective, and they still fought dismounted more often than not (see e.g. the Battle of Taginae). Also also they had a sizable state apparatus to spend money on a long-service professional army - Louis does not.
They did it in OTL.
Good point. Also, insufficient pasturage and no apparent locus for training. Not a long-term institution. Might have worked better if the horse archers were simply hired hands - seasonal mercenaries, as it were. Better idea: counter with foot archers, who have longer range and greater accuracy.Yui108 said:
Byzantines aren't really comparable; pasturage in Anatolia was excellent, while the core of their mounted archer formations was comprised initially of foreigners who did do horse archery as a way of life - Huns, various Turks, Magyars, and so forth. Also, even on the most optimistic estimates (e.g. Luttwak 2008) they took nearly a century to train their initial horse-archer cadres to a point where they were effective, and they still fought dismounted more often than not (see e.g. the Battle of Taginae). Also also they had a sizable state apparatus to spend money on a long-service professional army - Louis does not.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
So in retrospect I might edit out the passage regarding horse archers if it's so unrealistic. Still considering it.
Besides that, I'll treat with social developments eventually, but as they're not exactly *done* transitioning from Carolingian to "medieval" I'll probably do a generalized year 1000 overview when I get that far.
The difficult part of this TL was making sure that I wasn't missing an heir or having OTL personages do unrealistic things. Hopefully the writing will get easier as time goes on.
Besides that, I'll treat with social developments eventually, but as they're not exactly *done* transitioning from Carolingian to "medieval" I'll probably do a generalized year 1000 overview when I get that far.
The difficult part of this TL was making sure that I wasn't missing an heir or having OTL personages do unrealistic things. Hopefully the writing will get easier as time goes on.
The Aftermath of the Eurasian War.
In the fall of 1915, Walther Rathenau, the German Jewish entrepreneur and lately the head of Germanys effort to organize war production, took a walk with former Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow down the Unter den Linden in Berlin. As they neared the Brandenburg Gate, Rathenau pointed to it and said, Can a monarch of such arresting personality, so charming and human a man so utterly inadequate as a ruler, as is the Emperor Wilhelm with an impossible chancellor like Hertling and a frivolous chief of staff like Mackensen ever expect a triumphal return through that gate? If he gets it, history will have no meaning. Rathenau was now the chief of the War Raw Materials Section for the war ministry; he was devoting every effort to making sure Germany won the war. But he had seen the upper levels of the Reichs government, and how they made decisions. His misgivings were well founded.
But, apparently, history did have no meaning, for if anybody had won the Eurasian War, it was Germany. The High Seas Fleet commanded the North Sea, while all Europe and Asia east of the Vosges played host to German garrisons. Tsar Nikolais imperial throne was held up by German bayonets. So were those of the Xuantong Emperor in the Forbidden City, and of Franz Ferdinand in Vienna. Germanys material gains were relatively small the Shandong Province in China. But in terms of influence, an informal German empire covered a third of the globe. While the French could congratulate themselves on standing tall, in reality, their efforts to reclaim the Lost Provinces had stalled, while their allies had collapsed one by one: Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan states, and Sun Yat-sens Guomindang. Britain, too, might be on the verge of dissolution, with a running sore in Ireland and incipient revolts elsewhere in the colonies.
That German victory was made even more apparent in the years immediately following the armistice. For while Frances remaining allies continued to struggle with their problems, the Germans quickly moved against their own. In Russia, with the tsars armies near dissolution, German troops worked to put down rebellions from Central Asia to the Great Russian countryside. Disorder in Hungary was put down with further violence, adding to the quiet genocide there. And in Greece and Italy, German troops moved to silence the last vestiges of dissent.
One area where such fighting was conspicuously absent was sub-Saharan Africa, where European fears about black nationalism were quickly laid to rest. While plenty of local European-trained intellectuals believed that the hundreds of thousands of Africans who served in the militaries of the various powers would be able to make a strong case for independence or at least autonomy, the veterans themselves thought otherwise. Rather than being tied to some inchoate desire for independence, the pride of the men who served as askaris was more of a manifestation of traditional tribal (and, incidentally, nontribal) notions of masculinity. Others fought with the professionals pride: they were being paid to do a job, and did it well because it was their vocation. Thousands had been paid by both Germany and Britain and had done their duty to both. Most of the Africans who served in the war served as porters, and did so in large part because the pay was better than any other job readily available. (And porters were badly needed by both sides: where the railroads did not reach, Zimmermann, Lettow, Smuts and the others had to form a human chain hundreds of miles long to supply their troops.) Attempts to hype the wars effects on African nationalism were the work either of European publicists who saw white troops drawn to Asia and Europe to the battlefields while missions in Africa were Africanized, or by later African nationalists who sought to legitimize their struggle with a veneer of history. If anything, the Eurasian War advanced the cause of colonialism in Africa instead of retarding it, but since the mission had shifted from conquest to civilization, the effects were not so visible in London, Paris, or Berlin.
While most of the colonies south of the Sahara remained quiet, North Africa was pretty tumultuous. Spain and France had carved up Morocco in 1906 and again in 1912, but border changes on a map and troop detachments in the major cities did not translate well to control on the ground. In the Rif Mountains, a long-running insurgency had absorbed the attention of French commanders in Algeria. The Spanish had not even tried to occupy most of the territory they had received around Melilla and Ceuta, a source of constant frustration to Hubert Lyautey, the French résident général in Morocco, who wished to eradicate the bases from which the Rifian insurgents operated. The celebrated Lyautey, who was the darling of the French war ministry when he lost his regulars in 1915, to be replaced by older reservists and territorials, he actually liked it better, since he saw his mission as civilization and believed the Moroccans would respect senior veterans with experience in civilian life based his strategy around the cornerstones that France had relied on since the 1840s: fortified posts, from which flying columns periodically traversed the countryside, which served both as military bases and as centers for commerce and trade to transform the social fabric of the country. Within French-controlled territory, by and large, he succeeded. But it was not until 1921 that the Spanish tried to do more than control the Ceuta-Melilla coastal road out of their nominal sphere, and their initial attempts to expand their territory ended in straight-up military defeat. In addition, the Libyan situation was in flux. While the Senussi uprising had been more or less quashed by the Italians as of late 1917, the Italians themselves had evacuated the country in the following year, and the Senussi were the best placed to establish their authority in the region. They went as far as attacking the French in Tunisia in the fall of 1918, and so drew on them both French and British wrath. Forced to start over again from square one, Anglo-French pacification of their respective regions, though conducted with close cooperation, was not fully completed until 1922. The difficulty was only exacerbated by a series of strikes in Algeria in 1921-22 that nearly immobilized the French army.
Where the epithet recolonization wars was most apt was in Russia. The Russian East was a delicate matter, for married to the civil war in Europe were conflicts over Central Asia, Mongolia, and the Caucasus. There were plenty of colorful figures involved, some romantic like Enver, who worked to unite the Basmachis in the hopes of a general pan-Turanian uprising and some sinister like the Russian cavalry commander Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, nicknamed the Bloody Baron, who ordered thousands massacred in Bukhara and Samarkand. It was here that Russias German allies were particularly useful, for the Germans, in addition to fighting extremely well, were able to expand Russias infrastructural network by building badly-needed railroads to fuel offensives. The downside was that these Germans owned the very railways that they were setting up. In October 1919 they also gained part ownership of the Trans-Siberian Railway itself as part of a new plan for a Berlin-Beijing railroad to expand German power in the Far East.
In Bukhara, the Basmachi movement had been directed by the emir, who had successfully co-opted it, so when he died in Afghanistan at British hands in 1920, the city capitulated to Ungern-Sternberg (who massacred most of the population anyway). In Khiva, however, the resistance was a grass-roots movement led by Russian-educated students and was much harder to eradicate. The Ferghana Valley, where the revolt had begun, remained dangerous for Russian forces for years, despite the death of Enver in 1921 (killed in an ambush near Pishpek); he had been something of a glue for the Basmachis, but had been chiefly useful in expanding the movement to new regions, while in defense, his followers were as tenacious as ever. Outside of Ferghana, though, the movement did not have legs, especially with the tsar temporarily suspending efforts at Russification to aid the forces fighting the rebels. With German assistance, the tsarist forces were able to crush the Basmachi revolt by 1923. It was the longest-lasting revolt; the anarchists in Ukraine had been defeated the previous year (with Makhno fleeing for Paris) and the major locus of Caucasus rebellion, the Georgian rebels of Leo Keresselidze, had been extirpated at the same time.
The Greek civil war was resolved much more quickly, albeit with roughly the same proportionate amount of pain involved. At the price of a major naval base (German control of the Piraeus), Admiral Wilhelm Souchons Mediterranean Division (augmented by several armored cruisers dispatched from the High Seas Fleet) established naval superiority over the Aegean in 1920, following a battle with Pavlos Kountouriotis Venizelist fleet off Amorgos. In April, Souchon shelled Heraklion to cover royalist landings there. Venizelos himself fled to London; his supporters werent so lucky. Following up on the heady success of the Dekemvriana, thousands were massacred by the victorious royalists on Crete and Rhodes.
In December 1919, the French and Germans formed a joint council to coordinate the Italian intervention at Milan (then held by German forces). Despite significant animosity on both sides, apparently the commanders appointed, Mangin and Rupprecht, were able to get along reasonably well. Socialist forces put up unexpected resistance on the march to Rome, which began in March 1920 after a few fits and starts, and were able to repulse a halfhearted French gunboat attack on the city. Mangin, to the general approval of most of the Germans, had procured several of the French armys tanks, though, and was able to blow through the revolutionaries attempts to entrench in Perugia. This spawned a frantic attempt to fortify Rome in preparation for a communard last stand. Rupprecht, whose mostly-Bavarian troops were fired by the execution of many of the curia back in June of the previous year (much of the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, along with Pope Benedict XV, had managed to escape to Austrian-held Venice), was not particularly inclined to show any sort of mercy to defectors, and had most of them shot anyway. When the city itself was stormed after the requisite gas attack between May 5 and 8, the Bavarians were good as their word, instituting mass reprisals that even the French were willing to go along with. The Italian socialists passed, unmourned, into history. Agrarian rebellions in southern Italy took significantly more time to subdue, but by 1921 they, too, had ceased to be.
Already in the fall of 1920 the European Great Powers had convened a congress on Italian affairs in Munich. The Habsburg delegation, led by Foreign Minister Ottokar von Czernin, argued that Italy should be completely broken up into princely states, with Austria to regain Venetia, but this was deemed unworkable on the grounds that most of those princely states had no regional loyalty anymore and besides, the French were uncomfortable with the idea of a series of monarchies, doubtless with German-supplied rulers, sitting on their southern border. Neapolitan and Sicilian regionalism did exist, but it was mostly bound up in socialist-leaning groups like the Fasci Siciliani, which after the failed socialist revolution in central Italy were not even going to taste power. Ultimately, the most logical solution was deemed the revival of an even older plan. Italy was federated into several smaller states, most of which were amalgamations of preexisting provinces, and all of which were tied together by a constitution which made the Pope the formal, if rather powerless, president while outlawing socialist and syndicalist parties. There was to be no actual national government, much less a national military, such that the Pope in reality played the role of a mediator between the various Italian states. Widely denounced by French anticlericalists at the time as the resurrection of the Papal States, the move ended any possibility of a concordat with France (a movement towards which Franco-Papal relations had been building for most of the 1910s), although the Austrians, of course, loved the move. Surprisingly, the new constitution was validated by the 1922 elections, which returned governments of Popolari, the national Catholic party, in almost every one of the new Italian states. Individual states became the catspaw of the Great Powers; French influence predominated in Piedmont, while most of north-central and central Italy formed a regional bloc oriented towards Austria. Predictably, Vito Cascioferro, the notorious Cosa Nostra boss, practically ruled the new Sicilian government.
The disorders in Ulster had bedeviled Lloyd Georges government for a year, with the British eventually bringing in a full field army of regular troops to quash the rioting. But when the army stormed the UVF bastions in Belfast and Londonderry, rather bloodily at that, resistance merely devolved to the countryside. The army made the mistake of believing that, since a German arms-smuggler had kicked off the uprising, the resistance must have had a central purchaser and so, once it was broken in the cities and driven into the countryside, it would be starved of weaponry. This fundamentally underestimated the strength of the gun culture in the British Isles in general and Ireland in particular. Many of the members of the UVF had their own motley equipment on which to fall back after they were out of ammunition for their Mausers or whatever. British army columns thus had little way of striking back at the UVF, which was able to continue ambushing British army detachments with impunity. And by the fall of 1919, the southern Irish had had enough, too. With Redmond and the Nationalists badly discredited in light of their inability to actually force the implementation of Home Rule, Eoin MacNeills faction of the Irish Volunteers split from the main group. Key members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, sometimes referred to as the Fenians, held leadership roles in MacNeills Volunteers, and, led by Sean MacDermott, they pushed for their own guerrilla campaign to drive the British out of the south. Inaugurated by a series of bombings on the British army camp at the Curragh on October 9, the IRBs terrorist campaign soon forced the British army in southern Ireland to pull back to Cork and Dublin and a few major transportation arteries to try to hold as much as it could.
The unkindest cut of all came in early November, when Britains Irish problems were overshadowed by a massive financial crisis. As noted before, the British had badly depleted their currency reserves abroad to pay for American goods to fuel the war effort. Their available reserves were so stretched over various loans that, on November 7, the American Federal Reserve Board issued a formal recommendation to member banks to stop purchasing foreign treasuries out of a growing realization that the British couldnt cover all their bets. Effectively, since the Germans and Russians had been behind the blockade for most of the war (and didnt rely on foreign borrowing anyway), this note referred to Britain, France, and Japan. Almost immediately, the note triggered a run on the pound, a collapse in government shares on the various Entente markets, and a billion-pound shortfall on the City exchanges. The Tokyo markets were hit nearly as bad, while the Paris bourse was nearly wiped out. The Banque de France was in a particularly bad bind. Unlike the Bank of England, the Banque de France had kept its credit separate from the government. In theory, this would have acted as a restraint on the French state increasing its issue of notes, but in practice, France, like every other belligerent, had lost control of its war budget. Inflation that had already been pretty high during the war itself, to cover government expenditure, skyrocketed; the bank itself, of course, nearly collapsed.
Back in October, Lloyd George had rammed a Reform Act through the Commons that reduced property qualifications to vote (although it neither changed the age requirement nor enfranchised women), which he had hoped would give him an edge, and promptly dissolved Parliament. Any initial advantage he gained from widening the electorate was wiped out by the, uh, wipeout in the City. The acrimonious campaign that followed was the death knell of the Liberal Party. When the election returns came in with several constituencies in Ireland unable to hold elections at all due to the fighting the Liberals effectively ceased to exist, retaining only forty seats. So too did Redmonds Nationalists, who kept only one seat and ended up disbanding. The separatist Sinn Féin took almost all of the seats in southern Ireland (at least, the ones where elections were successfully held), but its members boycotted Parliament and tried to form their own government in Dublin (which was broken up by the army). But by and large, Bonar Laws Tories had the clear victory, ending up with over three hundred seats in the Commons although Labour also made small gains.
Law soon was able to pass a revised Home Rule Act that expanded Ulster to the entirety of the Six Counties and won the support of the scattered UVF. With the Act now ready to be implemented, Law hoped to be able to divide Sinn Féin over the issue of Tyrone and Fermanagh and force at least some to join the new Irish Parliament to be formed in Dublin. Surprisingly, Sinn Féin maintained a solid front and continued to refuse to take their seats, instead forming an independent assembly, the Dáil Éireann, which proclaimed a Republic in December at the behest of the Fenians. The troubles in Ireland, therefore, only intensified. Britains economic problems were slightly less intractable. The Americans betrayal made it even easier for Law to pass a bill that finally enshrined Imperial Preference, Joseph Chamberlains party-splitting tariff reform proposal, in law. If the British could not get their raw materials from the United States, they would get them from Canada, Australia, and the rest of the Dominions. Although this last drew a considerable amount of public ire the Tories had been voted in because they were not the Liberals, and because they promised an era of retrenchment and withdrawal, not because of Imperial Preference or Home Rule Laws government was able to survive the ensuing resignation of Winston Churchill (who had recrossed the aisle in 1918 and assumed leadership of the Board of Trade in Laws government) and rammed the proposal down the Dominions throats at a desultory conference at Buckingham Palace a few months later.
Laws government had some success in the foreign arena as well. Amanullah Khan, who had successfully seized Kabul in June 1919, had managed to inflict disproportionate losses on British forces in occupation, drawing the attention of several divisions of the Indian Army. Although the British failed to make much headway towards Kabul, Amanullah soon opened negotiations with Edmund Ironside, the local British commander, informing him that he was just trying to regain Afghan independence. He was ready to agree to peace with the British on the basis of the Durand Line so long as the British would support him against his uncle, Nasrullah, who was the main obstacle to making an agreement. In January 1920, Amanullah finalized an agreement for an armistice that left the British with a very loose protectorate and provided him with the backing to eliminate Nasrullah. For their part, the British were quite happy to disengage from Afghanistan in order to deal with widespread riots in the Punjab.
India itself had become increasingly restive ever since the inflammatory reign of the Lord Curzon as viceroy from 1899 to 1905. Curzons attempt to partition Bengal had lit off a series of terrorist attacks that did not abate when the partition was reversed in 1912; Hindu groups had started the campaign, but Muslim groups, outraged over the backstep, carried it on. While the government of India, terrified of domestic insurrection in the face of global war, had successfully acquired new law enforcement powers to quash the violence by 1914-5, the resistance cells themselves were never broken up, and instead fled overseas. By 1916 many Hindu groups had coalesced in the United States as an organization unofficially known as Ghadr, after the newspaper it published. Operating from bases on the American West Coast, in the Philippines, in Siam, and in the Dutch East Indies, Ghadr was able to supply several thousand small arms of various types to cells in Bengal, and it was never totally possible for the British to strike back. From 1918, Ghadr also enjoyed the support of the German military attaché to the ambassador to the United States, Franz von Papen, who met with representatives of the organization in St. Louis and San Francisco and was able to funnel several million Reichsmarks to the cause. Muslim-initiated terrorism did not have quite the same impact until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918-9 and the Basmachi rising in Central Asia spawned a surge in pan-Islamic sentiment. In June 1919, Ubaydullah Sindhi and Mahmudul Hasan formed the Anjuman-i-Khuddam-i-Kaaba (the Society for the Servants of the Kaaba) to protect the Holy Places, and began recruiting volunteers to aid the sharif of Mecca in resisting British rule. Farcically, Husayn bin Ali, the aforementioned sharif, had already negotiated a British protectorate in exchange for the throne of Transjordan, one of Britains new Levantine properties. Yet even the Society garnered impressive recruitment, and Muslim violent sentiment in India was hardly limited to the comic-opera variety. Bombings broke out in Agra in 1920 after a road construction project demolished a local mosques watering place; violence, seemingly, was on a hair trigger.
Of course, the more moderate of the Hindus and Muslims were prepared to try to use the attacks as an opportunity. Both the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League applied to the government of India for a Home Rule proposal, attempting to play on the sacrifices of India and the Indian Army for the British Empire during the war and claiming that Ghadr and other organizations would only be able to poach more moderate members away from them if the British continued to drag their feet. They could gain no concessions from Lloyd Georges government, and in 1918 did the unthinkable by combining in agreeing to a mutual call the Lucknow Declaration for constitutional change and dual electorate (one for each confession). Laws secretary of state for India, Austen Chamberlain, was more willing to listen than were the Liberal ministers; using Ireland as an example of what happens when Home Rule was not granted quickly and on the right terms, he argued in cabinet that Indian constitutional reform, at the very least, ought to be pursued as a part of the general goal to tie to tie the Dominions closer together. But Chamberlains counterproposal to the AIML and INC fell short of their expectations, and only incited more defections to violent parties; the failure to rescind the extraordinary security powers given to the government of India, despite the end of the Eurasian War, incited both violent and nonviolent protests. The British got antsier, especially after the mass mutiny of a Rajput rifle division in Kurdistan in January 1921, and thus ended up responding violently to reports of a protest meeting during a Sikh festival at the Golden Temple of Amritsar a few months later, leaving hundreds dead. A few months later, several assassinations of local British officials lit off a massive rebellion in Bengal.
In the fall of 1915, Walther Rathenau, the German Jewish entrepreneur and lately the head of Germanys effort to organize war production, took a walk with former Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow down the Unter den Linden in Berlin. As they neared the Brandenburg Gate, Rathenau pointed to it and said, Can a monarch of such arresting personality, so charming and human a man so utterly inadequate as a ruler, as is the Emperor Wilhelm with an impossible chancellor like Hertling and a frivolous chief of staff like Mackensen ever expect a triumphal return through that gate? If he gets it, history will have no meaning. Rathenau was now the chief of the War Raw Materials Section for the war ministry; he was devoting every effort to making sure Germany won the war. But he had seen the upper levels of the Reichs government, and how they made decisions. His misgivings were well founded.
But, apparently, history did have no meaning, for if anybody had won the Eurasian War, it was Germany. The High Seas Fleet commanded the North Sea, while all Europe and Asia east of the Vosges played host to German garrisons. Tsar Nikolais imperial throne was held up by German bayonets. So were those of the Xuantong Emperor in the Forbidden City, and of Franz Ferdinand in Vienna. Germanys material gains were relatively small the Shandong Province in China. But in terms of influence, an informal German empire covered a third of the globe. While the French could congratulate themselves on standing tall, in reality, their efforts to reclaim the Lost Provinces had stalled, while their allies had collapsed one by one: Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan states, and Sun Yat-sens Guomindang. Britain, too, might be on the verge of dissolution, with a running sore in Ireland and incipient revolts elsewhere in the colonies.
That German victory was made even more apparent in the years immediately following the armistice. For while Frances remaining allies continued to struggle with their problems, the Germans quickly moved against their own. In Russia, with the tsars armies near dissolution, German troops worked to put down rebellions from Central Asia to the Great Russian countryside. Disorder in Hungary was put down with further violence, adding to the quiet genocide there. And in Greece and Italy, German troops moved to silence the last vestiges of dissent.
One area where such fighting was conspicuously absent was sub-Saharan Africa, where European fears about black nationalism were quickly laid to rest. While plenty of local European-trained intellectuals believed that the hundreds of thousands of Africans who served in the militaries of the various powers would be able to make a strong case for independence or at least autonomy, the veterans themselves thought otherwise. Rather than being tied to some inchoate desire for independence, the pride of the men who served as askaris was more of a manifestation of traditional tribal (and, incidentally, nontribal) notions of masculinity. Others fought with the professionals pride: they were being paid to do a job, and did it well because it was their vocation. Thousands had been paid by both Germany and Britain and had done their duty to both. Most of the Africans who served in the war served as porters, and did so in large part because the pay was better than any other job readily available. (And porters were badly needed by both sides: where the railroads did not reach, Zimmermann, Lettow, Smuts and the others had to form a human chain hundreds of miles long to supply their troops.) Attempts to hype the wars effects on African nationalism were the work either of European publicists who saw white troops drawn to Asia and Europe to the battlefields while missions in Africa were Africanized, or by later African nationalists who sought to legitimize their struggle with a veneer of history. If anything, the Eurasian War advanced the cause of colonialism in Africa instead of retarding it, but since the mission had shifted from conquest to civilization, the effects were not so visible in London, Paris, or Berlin.
While most of the colonies south of the Sahara remained quiet, North Africa was pretty tumultuous. Spain and France had carved up Morocco in 1906 and again in 1912, but border changes on a map and troop detachments in the major cities did not translate well to control on the ground. In the Rif Mountains, a long-running insurgency had absorbed the attention of French commanders in Algeria. The Spanish had not even tried to occupy most of the territory they had received around Melilla and Ceuta, a source of constant frustration to Hubert Lyautey, the French résident général in Morocco, who wished to eradicate the bases from which the Rifian insurgents operated. The celebrated Lyautey, who was the darling of the French war ministry when he lost his regulars in 1915, to be replaced by older reservists and territorials, he actually liked it better, since he saw his mission as civilization and believed the Moroccans would respect senior veterans with experience in civilian life based his strategy around the cornerstones that France had relied on since the 1840s: fortified posts, from which flying columns periodically traversed the countryside, which served both as military bases and as centers for commerce and trade to transform the social fabric of the country. Within French-controlled territory, by and large, he succeeded. But it was not until 1921 that the Spanish tried to do more than control the Ceuta-Melilla coastal road out of their nominal sphere, and their initial attempts to expand their territory ended in straight-up military defeat. In addition, the Libyan situation was in flux. While the Senussi uprising had been more or less quashed by the Italians as of late 1917, the Italians themselves had evacuated the country in the following year, and the Senussi were the best placed to establish their authority in the region. They went as far as attacking the French in Tunisia in the fall of 1918, and so drew on them both French and British wrath. Forced to start over again from square one, Anglo-French pacification of their respective regions, though conducted with close cooperation, was not fully completed until 1922. The difficulty was only exacerbated by a series of strikes in Algeria in 1921-22 that nearly immobilized the French army.
Where the epithet recolonization wars was most apt was in Russia. The Russian East was a delicate matter, for married to the civil war in Europe were conflicts over Central Asia, Mongolia, and the Caucasus. There were plenty of colorful figures involved, some romantic like Enver, who worked to unite the Basmachis in the hopes of a general pan-Turanian uprising and some sinister like the Russian cavalry commander Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, nicknamed the Bloody Baron, who ordered thousands massacred in Bukhara and Samarkand. It was here that Russias German allies were particularly useful, for the Germans, in addition to fighting extremely well, were able to expand Russias infrastructural network by building badly-needed railroads to fuel offensives. The downside was that these Germans owned the very railways that they were setting up. In October 1919 they also gained part ownership of the Trans-Siberian Railway itself as part of a new plan for a Berlin-Beijing railroad to expand German power in the Far East.
In Bukhara, the Basmachi movement had been directed by the emir, who had successfully co-opted it, so when he died in Afghanistan at British hands in 1920, the city capitulated to Ungern-Sternberg (who massacred most of the population anyway). In Khiva, however, the resistance was a grass-roots movement led by Russian-educated students and was much harder to eradicate. The Ferghana Valley, where the revolt had begun, remained dangerous for Russian forces for years, despite the death of Enver in 1921 (killed in an ambush near Pishpek); he had been something of a glue for the Basmachis, but had been chiefly useful in expanding the movement to new regions, while in defense, his followers were as tenacious as ever. Outside of Ferghana, though, the movement did not have legs, especially with the tsar temporarily suspending efforts at Russification to aid the forces fighting the rebels. With German assistance, the tsarist forces were able to crush the Basmachi revolt by 1923. It was the longest-lasting revolt; the anarchists in Ukraine had been defeated the previous year (with Makhno fleeing for Paris) and the major locus of Caucasus rebellion, the Georgian rebels of Leo Keresselidze, had been extirpated at the same time.
The Greek civil war was resolved much more quickly, albeit with roughly the same proportionate amount of pain involved. At the price of a major naval base (German control of the Piraeus), Admiral Wilhelm Souchons Mediterranean Division (augmented by several armored cruisers dispatched from the High Seas Fleet) established naval superiority over the Aegean in 1920, following a battle with Pavlos Kountouriotis Venizelist fleet off Amorgos. In April, Souchon shelled Heraklion to cover royalist landings there. Venizelos himself fled to London; his supporters werent so lucky. Following up on the heady success of the Dekemvriana, thousands were massacred by the victorious royalists on Crete and Rhodes.
In December 1919, the French and Germans formed a joint council to coordinate the Italian intervention at Milan (then held by German forces). Despite significant animosity on both sides, apparently the commanders appointed, Mangin and Rupprecht, were able to get along reasonably well. Socialist forces put up unexpected resistance on the march to Rome, which began in March 1920 after a few fits and starts, and were able to repulse a halfhearted French gunboat attack on the city. Mangin, to the general approval of most of the Germans, had procured several of the French armys tanks, though, and was able to blow through the revolutionaries attempts to entrench in Perugia. This spawned a frantic attempt to fortify Rome in preparation for a communard last stand. Rupprecht, whose mostly-Bavarian troops were fired by the execution of many of the curia back in June of the previous year (much of the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, along with Pope Benedict XV, had managed to escape to Austrian-held Venice), was not particularly inclined to show any sort of mercy to defectors, and had most of them shot anyway. When the city itself was stormed after the requisite gas attack between May 5 and 8, the Bavarians were good as their word, instituting mass reprisals that even the French were willing to go along with. The Italian socialists passed, unmourned, into history. Agrarian rebellions in southern Italy took significantly more time to subdue, but by 1921 they, too, had ceased to be.
Already in the fall of 1920 the European Great Powers had convened a congress on Italian affairs in Munich. The Habsburg delegation, led by Foreign Minister Ottokar von Czernin, argued that Italy should be completely broken up into princely states, with Austria to regain Venetia, but this was deemed unworkable on the grounds that most of those princely states had no regional loyalty anymore and besides, the French were uncomfortable with the idea of a series of monarchies, doubtless with German-supplied rulers, sitting on their southern border. Neapolitan and Sicilian regionalism did exist, but it was mostly bound up in socialist-leaning groups like the Fasci Siciliani, which after the failed socialist revolution in central Italy were not even going to taste power. Ultimately, the most logical solution was deemed the revival of an even older plan. Italy was federated into several smaller states, most of which were amalgamations of preexisting provinces, and all of which were tied together by a constitution which made the Pope the formal, if rather powerless, president while outlawing socialist and syndicalist parties. There was to be no actual national government, much less a national military, such that the Pope in reality played the role of a mediator between the various Italian states. Widely denounced by French anticlericalists at the time as the resurrection of the Papal States, the move ended any possibility of a concordat with France (a movement towards which Franco-Papal relations had been building for most of the 1910s), although the Austrians, of course, loved the move. Surprisingly, the new constitution was validated by the 1922 elections, which returned governments of Popolari, the national Catholic party, in almost every one of the new Italian states. Individual states became the catspaw of the Great Powers; French influence predominated in Piedmont, while most of north-central and central Italy formed a regional bloc oriented towards Austria. Predictably, Vito Cascioferro, the notorious Cosa Nostra boss, practically ruled the new Sicilian government.
The disorders in Ulster had bedeviled Lloyd Georges government for a year, with the British eventually bringing in a full field army of regular troops to quash the rioting. But when the army stormed the UVF bastions in Belfast and Londonderry, rather bloodily at that, resistance merely devolved to the countryside. The army made the mistake of believing that, since a German arms-smuggler had kicked off the uprising, the resistance must have had a central purchaser and so, once it was broken in the cities and driven into the countryside, it would be starved of weaponry. This fundamentally underestimated the strength of the gun culture in the British Isles in general and Ireland in particular. Many of the members of the UVF had their own motley equipment on which to fall back after they were out of ammunition for their Mausers or whatever. British army columns thus had little way of striking back at the UVF, which was able to continue ambushing British army detachments with impunity. And by the fall of 1919, the southern Irish had had enough, too. With Redmond and the Nationalists badly discredited in light of their inability to actually force the implementation of Home Rule, Eoin MacNeills faction of the Irish Volunteers split from the main group. Key members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, sometimes referred to as the Fenians, held leadership roles in MacNeills Volunteers, and, led by Sean MacDermott, they pushed for their own guerrilla campaign to drive the British out of the south. Inaugurated by a series of bombings on the British army camp at the Curragh on October 9, the IRBs terrorist campaign soon forced the British army in southern Ireland to pull back to Cork and Dublin and a few major transportation arteries to try to hold as much as it could.
The unkindest cut of all came in early November, when Britains Irish problems were overshadowed by a massive financial crisis. As noted before, the British had badly depleted their currency reserves abroad to pay for American goods to fuel the war effort. Their available reserves were so stretched over various loans that, on November 7, the American Federal Reserve Board issued a formal recommendation to member banks to stop purchasing foreign treasuries out of a growing realization that the British couldnt cover all their bets. Effectively, since the Germans and Russians had been behind the blockade for most of the war (and didnt rely on foreign borrowing anyway), this note referred to Britain, France, and Japan. Almost immediately, the note triggered a run on the pound, a collapse in government shares on the various Entente markets, and a billion-pound shortfall on the City exchanges. The Tokyo markets were hit nearly as bad, while the Paris bourse was nearly wiped out. The Banque de France was in a particularly bad bind. Unlike the Bank of England, the Banque de France had kept its credit separate from the government. In theory, this would have acted as a restraint on the French state increasing its issue of notes, but in practice, France, like every other belligerent, had lost control of its war budget. Inflation that had already been pretty high during the war itself, to cover government expenditure, skyrocketed; the bank itself, of course, nearly collapsed.
Back in October, Lloyd George had rammed a Reform Act through the Commons that reduced property qualifications to vote (although it neither changed the age requirement nor enfranchised women), which he had hoped would give him an edge, and promptly dissolved Parliament. Any initial advantage he gained from widening the electorate was wiped out by the, uh, wipeout in the City. The acrimonious campaign that followed was the death knell of the Liberal Party. When the election returns came in with several constituencies in Ireland unable to hold elections at all due to the fighting the Liberals effectively ceased to exist, retaining only forty seats. So too did Redmonds Nationalists, who kept only one seat and ended up disbanding. The separatist Sinn Féin took almost all of the seats in southern Ireland (at least, the ones where elections were successfully held), but its members boycotted Parliament and tried to form their own government in Dublin (which was broken up by the army). But by and large, Bonar Laws Tories had the clear victory, ending up with over three hundred seats in the Commons although Labour also made small gains.
Law soon was able to pass a revised Home Rule Act that expanded Ulster to the entirety of the Six Counties and won the support of the scattered UVF. With the Act now ready to be implemented, Law hoped to be able to divide Sinn Féin over the issue of Tyrone and Fermanagh and force at least some to join the new Irish Parliament to be formed in Dublin. Surprisingly, Sinn Féin maintained a solid front and continued to refuse to take their seats, instead forming an independent assembly, the Dáil Éireann, which proclaimed a Republic in December at the behest of the Fenians. The troubles in Ireland, therefore, only intensified. Britains economic problems were slightly less intractable. The Americans betrayal made it even easier for Law to pass a bill that finally enshrined Imperial Preference, Joseph Chamberlains party-splitting tariff reform proposal, in law. If the British could not get their raw materials from the United States, they would get them from Canada, Australia, and the rest of the Dominions. Although this last drew a considerable amount of public ire the Tories had been voted in because they were not the Liberals, and because they promised an era of retrenchment and withdrawal, not because of Imperial Preference or Home Rule Laws government was able to survive the ensuing resignation of Winston Churchill (who had recrossed the aisle in 1918 and assumed leadership of the Board of Trade in Laws government) and rammed the proposal down the Dominions throats at a desultory conference at Buckingham Palace a few months later.
Laws government had some success in the foreign arena as well. Amanullah Khan, who had successfully seized Kabul in June 1919, had managed to inflict disproportionate losses on British forces in occupation, drawing the attention of several divisions of the Indian Army. Although the British failed to make much headway towards Kabul, Amanullah soon opened negotiations with Edmund Ironside, the local British commander, informing him that he was just trying to regain Afghan independence. He was ready to agree to peace with the British on the basis of the Durand Line so long as the British would support him against his uncle, Nasrullah, who was the main obstacle to making an agreement. In January 1920, Amanullah finalized an agreement for an armistice that left the British with a very loose protectorate and provided him with the backing to eliminate Nasrullah. For their part, the British were quite happy to disengage from Afghanistan in order to deal with widespread riots in the Punjab.
India itself had become increasingly restive ever since the inflammatory reign of the Lord Curzon as viceroy from 1899 to 1905. Curzons attempt to partition Bengal had lit off a series of terrorist attacks that did not abate when the partition was reversed in 1912; Hindu groups had started the campaign, but Muslim groups, outraged over the backstep, carried it on. While the government of India, terrified of domestic insurrection in the face of global war, had successfully acquired new law enforcement powers to quash the violence by 1914-5, the resistance cells themselves were never broken up, and instead fled overseas. By 1916 many Hindu groups had coalesced in the United States as an organization unofficially known as Ghadr, after the newspaper it published. Operating from bases on the American West Coast, in the Philippines, in Siam, and in the Dutch East Indies, Ghadr was able to supply several thousand small arms of various types to cells in Bengal, and it was never totally possible for the British to strike back. From 1918, Ghadr also enjoyed the support of the German military attaché to the ambassador to the United States, Franz von Papen, who met with representatives of the organization in St. Louis and San Francisco and was able to funnel several million Reichsmarks to the cause. Muslim-initiated terrorism did not have quite the same impact until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918-9 and the Basmachi rising in Central Asia spawned a surge in pan-Islamic sentiment. In June 1919, Ubaydullah Sindhi and Mahmudul Hasan formed the Anjuman-i-Khuddam-i-Kaaba (the Society for the Servants of the Kaaba) to protect the Holy Places, and began recruiting volunteers to aid the sharif of Mecca in resisting British rule. Farcically, Husayn bin Ali, the aforementioned sharif, had already negotiated a British protectorate in exchange for the throne of Transjordan, one of Britains new Levantine properties. Yet even the Society garnered impressive recruitment, and Muslim violent sentiment in India was hardly limited to the comic-opera variety. Bombings broke out in Agra in 1920 after a road construction project demolished a local mosques watering place; violence, seemingly, was on a hair trigger.
Of course, the more moderate of the Hindus and Muslims were prepared to try to use the attacks as an opportunity. Both the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League applied to the government of India for a Home Rule proposal, attempting to play on the sacrifices of India and the Indian Army for the British Empire during the war and claiming that Ghadr and other organizations would only be able to poach more moderate members away from them if the British continued to drag their feet. They could gain no concessions from Lloyd Georges government, and in 1918 did the unthinkable by combining in agreeing to a mutual call the Lucknow Declaration for constitutional change and dual electorate (one for each confession). Laws secretary of state for India, Austen Chamberlain, was more willing to listen than were the Liberal ministers; using Ireland as an example of what happens when Home Rule was not granted quickly and on the right terms, he argued in cabinet that Indian constitutional reform, at the very least, ought to be pursued as a part of the general goal to tie to tie the Dominions closer together. But Chamberlains counterproposal to the AIML and INC fell short of their expectations, and only incited more defections to violent parties; the failure to rescind the extraordinary security powers given to the government of India, despite the end of the Eurasian War, incited both violent and nonviolent protests. The British got antsier, especially after the mass mutiny of a Rajput rifle division in Kurdistan in January 1921, and thus ended up responding violently to reports of a protest meeting during a Sikh festival at the Golden Temple of Amritsar a few months later, leaving hundreds dead. A few months later, several assassinations of local British officials lit off a massive rebellion in Bengal.
The early twenties were also a violent period for Jiangs dictatorship in southern China. Militarily, the new president had to contend with Cai Es rebellion in Yunnan, which was not successfully dispersed until 1923. Even then, Cai and several of his fellow generals managed to escape; some, like Zhu De, moved to Guizhou and Sichuan to continue the fight with small bands of outlaws, while Cai himself, now revered as a folk hero in the southwest, went to America to join the still-coalescing leadership of the Guomindang. Politically, Jiang faced the thankless task of creating an organization to replace the Guomindang out of fragmentary remains of the old Tongmenghui. The result, his New Life movement, created a vision of a young, reborn China that similarly needed a social rebirth to accompany it; in actual implementation, this grandiose vision ended up focusing on pointless trivialities, like attempts to ban smoking or determine clothing styles. The interest in mass politics was there, but the actual ability to carry it through was lacking. Meanwhile, since Jiangs control over the countryside was still quite limited, he could not even begin to think about attempting to collect an income tax; instead, his states attenuated fiscal resources were to be shored up by duties on products. Such a burden fell disproportionately on Chinas entrepreneurs. For instance, up to 1922, Chinas cigarette industry had been booming, reliant on American leaf and Paul Songs excellent connections with trans-Pacific suppliers. In particular, the Jian familys cigarette corporation was able to successfully compete with the British-American Tobacco Corporation. But the tobacco duties introduced that year crippled the homegrown industry, while Paul Song himself, due to his sister being Sun Yat-sens widow, was forced to flee the country. By 1924, the Republics industrial output was collapsing, government revenues were utterly insufficient to the task of both maintaining Jiangs army and attempting to alleviate the terrible conditions in the countryside, and Jiang was now forced to contend both with the remnant of the Guomindang and with emerging communist parties in the coastal cities.
Jiangs regime was the target of intense frustration by southern Chinas intellectuals in particular. Many of them had joined the demonstrations in Nanjing on Double Eight Day, 1919, when word broke that Jiang was agreeing to an armistice with the hated Qing. The Double Eight demonstrations had attracted support from all walks of urban life, united by Chinese nationalism. They had been dispersed, but gave their name to the subsequent movement, sometimes also called the Chinese Enlightenment, that permeated among the countrys intellectual elite in the next several years. Incorporating both a nationalist-energizing agenda and a social one that even included revised, equal gender roles (fires stoked by the American Margaret Sangers lecture tour in the Republics universities in 1920, and by Henrik Ibsen, whose 1918 play A Dolls House gained wide popularity in the country), Double Eight authors like Chen Duxiu and Zhou Shuren achieved wide followings outside the universities where they had their home base, partially through the widely encouraged use of more vernacular Chinese. Perversely, Jiang tried to harness the reformist agenda at the core of the Double Eight movement, promising as part of his New Life program to revitalize the country for another throw at both the foreigners in their spheres of influence in southern China and Germanys pawns to the north. Naturally, he failed to carry through on any of these proposals, but what remained by 1924 was a sense of profound disillusionment by those who had initially been persuaded by Jiangs youthful optimism. The result was a groundswell of support for the return of the Guomindang.
While Jiang made several mistakes (some of which would have been, admittedly, very hard to avoid) in his attempt to construct a new order in the Republic, his growing list of opponents made very few. The Guomindang slowly reconstituted itself in the United States and Japan after the disasters of 1918, and, more successfully, talked the talk of the Double Eight movement. Sun Yat-sen had been a professional revolutionary who was rather unsuccessful as a revolutionary but had unrivaled power as a symbol from abroad. Much of that rubbed off on his energetic widow, Song Qingling, who only added to her wide ties to the Chinese diaspora communities in the years after her enforced exile. By the 1921 party congress in San Francisco, she was the clear leader of the Guomindang in exile and a widely admired symbol both in China itself and abroad. Madame Sun was also very adept at keeping her ideological balance, successfully appealing to both the Chinese left (which, along with the failure of the 1919 revolutions, minimized the defections away from the Guomindang to communism) and to the decidedly nonsocialist American Congress. Jiangs alienation of the Republics industrial captains and her own familial connections to both Paul Song and Kong Xiangxi (H. H. Kong in the United States) gave her even more allies.
Yet Jiangs regime still had a preponderance of military force, and there the Guomindang could not even hope to match him. But that preponderance of force was rapidly put into serious danger in 1925, when Chinas civil war abruptly broke out again. Its still not quite clear why the Qing decided to force a crisis over Sichuan in March of that year, but the most probable reason lies in the infighting at the top of the Beiyang Army after Yuans death of old age in 1920. Duan Qirui had initially seized the premiership and, like Jiang, attempted to create a New Order based, somewhat confusingly, on Buddhism, authoritarian government, and a Japan-like invented tradition around the Manchu monarchy and the still-young Xuantong Emperor. He was mostly uninterested in renewing the civil war and instead chose to consolidate the gains in north China, and so enjoyed the support of Germany and its cadre of advisors, led by Max Bauer after 1922. But in 1924 he was overthrown by a cabal of officers led by Wu Peifu and Feng Guozhang, who dumped his New Order plans. Wu and Feng who gained the war ministry and the premiership, respectively, in the new government were instead convinced that Jiangs Republic was the real enemy, followed closely by the Germans and Russians, and wanted to create a constitutional monarchy to appeal to many of the former revolutionaries in the south so that they could launch a war of reconquest against them. Their own plans were to wait until a few years, so they could keep bilking the Germans and Russians of railroad and arms money while ensuring the stable installment of the constitutional monarchy, but a group of even more aggressive generals, led by Kang Youwei, forced their hand by initiating a military incident in Chongqing in March 1925, leading elements of the Beiyang Army to occupy the city in the confusion.
The fighting that ensued was relatively low-key in its actual substance. Feng was not ready to fight a war of conquest, and Jiang was worried about his ability to suppress internal insurrection. But, although the actual engagements were fairly quiet, they absorbed the attention of most of the two sides armies while Germany, Russia, Japan, and the UK attempted to mediate an end to the crisis. Unexpectedly, a revolt against Jiang lit off in Guangdong on April 3, with the rebels calling for an end to the dictatorship and a return of the Guomindang. While Wang Jingwei canvassed the Great Powers to try to prevent a unified opposition to the return of democracy, Song Qingling and Cai E boldly sailed to Guangzhou to lend their support. By April 7, the Guangdong rebels had diverted several of Jiangs divisions from the front line, causing the fall of Chongqing. Two days later, Sun Liren, the commander of Jiangs Eighth Route Army in Jiangsu, marched on Nanjing, invested the city, and called on Jiang to step down in favor of the Guomindang. The generalissimo shot himself on April 12, and Sun Lirens troops occupied the capital in the name of the Guomindang. Promises of amnesty and a united front against the Qing led to the defection of most of Jiangs army within a few weeks. Even so, it is doubtful that the Republic could have stopped the Beiyang Army, which was already bombarding the tri-cities of Wuhan by mid-April, were it not for Zhu Des Sichuan bandit force, which linked up with elements of several of Jiangs scattered divisions and delivered a bloody nose to Kang Youweis troops at Wanxian. Finally equipped with an excuse to dump the radicals, Wu Peifu promptly made Kang and Feng the scapegoats for the whole thing, staged a coup in Beijing and had them both executed. A German-brokered compromise ended hostilities on April 27, with prewar borders as well as the Qings German advisors restored.
In the aftermath, Sun Liren, acting as provisional president, organized a fresh constitutional convention to reintroduce the Republic. Song Qingling was easily swept into office in the July 1925 elections, promising relief in the countryside and an end to the harassment of Chinese industry, while broadly hinting at land reform and the income tax. Sun himself was canny enough to gain the war ministry, having made a preelection agreement with the Guomindang. For his part, Wu reconstituted the Qing government based on his old cronies from the Zhili Army now somewhat derisively referred to as the Zhili Clique and made plans for constitutional government. Bauer, restored to his post, gave his full approval to the plans for a parliament, on the grounds that it would certainly help provide the Qing government with stability.
Germany had been busy in the past five years. Max von Badens government had presided over a general drawdown and demobilization (insofar as it could be done without impeding Germanys ability to crush the Greek, Italian, and Russian insurrections), but what Germany lacked in military protagonism it more than made up for in the world of finance and industry. Germanys revived merchant marine brought trade back up dramatically in 1920 and 1921. And, since Germanys financial reserves had been largely saved during the war, since, other than Russian grain, there was little to use them for, the Germans were well placed to benefit from the near-collapse of the British financial system in 1919-20. By the time the British got back on their feet, New York had finally (barely) replaced London as the worlds banking center but Hamburg and Frankfurt were catching up as well.
German industrys longstanding practice had been to cartelize. This had arguably helped the Germans during the war years, when Rathenaus Raw Materials Office was able to maintain connections with a relatively limited number of German firms. The Stinnes and Krupp giants only grew after the war, with Hugo Stinnes in particular using his vast fortune to finance a political career. (He joined with Tirpitz in supporting the Fatherland Party, which in 1923 briefly became the largest single party in Germany, encompassing both elements of the old Conservatives along with most of the various extremist right-wing groups like the Pan-German League.) In 1924, several dye manufacturers joined to form IG Farbenindustrie AG, which soon encompassed even more industrial firms; the following year, Fritz Thyssen profited from the breakup of the Stinnes empire on Hugo Stinnes death to merge his Flick steel firms and other Ruhr companies into Vestag (Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG, or the United Steel Works). IG Farbens muscle permitted it to expand its markets even more, gaining ground in China and even against DuPont in the United States; Vestag continued Stinnes cross-border policies and made cartel agreements with several French firms. Kurt Schmitt made Allianz the largest insurance company in the world in a series of acquisitions and mergers in 1924-5. And in 1926, the German governments plan to create a national airline system based on regional companies came to fruition when several airline companies merged to form Deutsche Luft Hansa AG.
Financially, Germany benefited from the end of the prewar gold standard and the fragmentation of the financial world into several semiconnected currency zones at least in the short run. Even today, it is hard to find agreement on why the gold standard worked if it did at all, although virtually all contemporary observers thought it did. At the beginning of the war, most of the belligerents, except the United Kingdom, had gone off the gold standard, although most did so in order to permit the resumption of it at the end of fighting. By 1917, even the neutral countries had rejected it, save the United States; places like Switzerland had accumulated plenty of gold, but saw that it did not prove to be a sufficiently good hedge against inflation. But the Americans remained on it, and so the basis of British financial policy, the sterling-dollar exchange, remained intact for the moment. British depletion of their dollar reserves by 1919 and the subsequent November crash had ended that idea.
German politics lost nothing of their contentiousness, though. Max von Baden had been a compromise candidate, and had little ability to actually lead, while the Kaiser wanted to rid himself of the liberal albatross as quickly as possible. The Chancellor was put out to pasture in 1922 and replaced by a foreign office man, Richard von Kühlmann, who initially was able to manage the Reichstag by using Tirpitz and Stinnes Fatherland Party as a stick with which to hit the Social Democrats and Progressives. Stinnes death in 1924 put that policy on notice, though, and the Fatherland Party fractured within two years. Meanwhile, the 1923 elections had returned even more Social Democrats and Progressives, although national liberalism was beginning to make a comeback as well with the impressive growth rates in finance and industry. In effect, Kühlmanns government attempted to return to business as usual, going back to the days of trying to govern without the Reichstag instead of through it that Bethmann had tried before his dismissal.
The conservative consensus was breaking down in the United Kingdom, as well. Laws death in 1922 had placed Austen Chamberlain in the drivers seat. Chamberlain, following through on his general distaste for Irish questions, formalized the end of British rule in Ireland by permitting the island less the Six Counties to leave the Empire and become an independent republic in 1923, ending the long running sore but embittering many Tories who had staked their reputations on Unionism. Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary, Balfour, also pursued rapprochement with Germany in an effort at retrenchment, trying to end the naval arms race that was still sputtering along. He could make no headway in the face of Kühlmanns government, buttressed by a Kaiser enamored of his High Seas Fleets successes. Instead, Chamberlain and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Walter Long (his old opponent from the 1912 leadership contest), proposed to radically curtail the battleship-construction program and focus on a new pivot for naval power, the aircraft carrier. This nearly led to a revolt in the Commons, as many Conservatives were enamored of Dreadnoughts and felt that poor management, not intrinsic design problems, had ruined the Grand Fleet, while Labour railed against the false savings, as the new program would cost even more initially due to expenditure on plant and retraining. Chamberlain and Long plowed ahead with the carriers anyway, and incorporated spending on them into the 1924 budget, which still reduced the overall naval expenditure dramatically.
When the budget failed in the Commons, the ensuing election was expected to return the Liberals to power. But Lloyd George held the partys purse strings, while Asquith held the partys loyalty and controlled many of the whips; neither could find it within himself to reconcile with the other. Dissension in the Liberals ranks prevented effective campaigning. Meanwhile, the Tories managed to hold together behind Chamberlain, despite a significant amount of backbiting and mutual distrust, but national discontent with the party which had notably failed to solve the economic problems stemming from the 1919 collapse led to, of all things, a Labour majority in the returns. Labour had mostly been quiet under Arthur Henderson, and had even seen a bit of fracturing during the war years, with the abortive Russian revolution spawning an equally abortive Socialist Party. The depression was a boon to party membership, as it hit the industrial areas of the north hard. Longs proposed cuts in naval expenditure were sure to reduce employment at places like the Jarrow shipyards even further. So Labour was swept into power with a twenty-seat majority, with Henderson easily able to form a government.
Britains first Labour government rapidly demonstrated that the voters trust might have been misplaced. Despite calls from men like Ramsay MacDonald, a former party leader, that Labour should prove itself fit to govern by relatively conventional policies, Henderson and Oswald Mosley, his Chancellor of the Exchequer (whom, many suspected, wore the pants in the relationship between the two, with Mosley reportedly referring to Henderson as a useful idiot at a party in 1925), proposed a series of radical responses to the depression to rejuvenate the economy. Mosleys proposed 1924 budget, which also included vast amounts of fresh levies on land and other property, as well as the hated death duties, split the Labour Party and caused the governments demise within three months. Mosley retained the confidence of the more die-hard Labourites, including most of the ideologues (which formed the Independent Labour Party); MacDonald had the support of many Liberals, free-trade Labourites like Philip Snowden, and most of the moderate wing of the party. Despite an unlikely alliance between Mosleys Independent Labourites and the syndicalist guild socialists of G. D. H. Cole, the election resulted in a hung parliament, with Chamberlains Tories possessing a small plurality over the Mosleyites and MacDonalds Lab-Lib group (the Liberals themselves having nearly vanished into oblivion). MacDonald and Chamberlain patched up an alliance, and Chamberlain returned to office as Prime Minister in October, promising to cut spending across the board, patch up relations with America, and reestablish the full gold standard.
Before Labour was forced out of government, Henderson and his Foreign Secretary, Arthur Ponsonby, had tried to make a splash by guaranteeing Portugals latest government a vaguely socialist one a sizable loan. Due to British financial weakness, Ponsonby had chosen to enlist German aid, to try to establish the same sort of détente that Chamberlain had failed to muster up and further justify savings on naval expenditure. Kühlmann was willing to give it a try, partially because he was looking for a wedge into the Portuguese colonial empire and figured that hed use Henderson as a useful idiot, too. But the Portuguese socialists had less ability to manage the governments finances than Henderson and Ponsonby thought they did, and within three months Portugal still went bankrupt contributing to Labours poor showing in the second 1924 general election. Chamberlain, when he returned to office, decided to use the opportunity to reach out to Germany even further, and renewed a few old agreements about the Portuguese colonial empire.
Amid the increasing tension between Portugal and the Anglo-German powers in the spring of 1925, the Portuguese seized a German merchantman allegedly supplying rebels in southern Angola with small arms and ammunition. This Freya incident sparked a diplomatic crisis, in which Stanley Baldwin and Arthur Zimmermann, the British and German foreign ministers, demanded Portuguese colonies as restitution. In response, the Portuguese general Manuel Gomes da Costa launched a military coup, seeking to prevent further humiliations at the hands of the Great Powers and ending the republic; he rejected the ultimatum and, insanely, declared war on Germany and Britain, perhaps expecting French aid. Souchon and Admiral Sir John de Robeck led a combined fleet despite all of the coordination problems and residual mistrust left over from the Eurasian War in shelling Lisbon. South African troops seized Lourenço Marques, while Germans stormed Luanda and ANZACs hit the beach near Dili. It was hardly fair; within three weeks all semblance of Portuguese military resistance had collapsed. Gomes da Costa was ousted in favor of a national defense council that lasted long enough to sign a treaty ceding all its colonial possessions before losing control of Lisbon as a fresh wave of riots swept over the country. As for themselves, the Germans and British conveniently had a partition agreement dating back to 1898; with a few modifications, it was implemented a few months after the treaty was signed. Mozambique south of the Zambezi went to South Africa, East Timor went to the Australians, the Indian colonies (Goa, Daman, and Diu) to the Raj, and Guinea-Bissau, the Azores, Madeira, and Macao went straight to British direct control. Everything else Angola and northern Mozambique was absorbed into the German colonial empire.
1925 also marked a watershed year in the Habsburg Empire. For eight years, Franz Ferdinand had, effectively, ruled by decree. The Reichsrat had not met since the failure of the Ausgleich negotiations, and the Hungarian Diet had obviously ceased to exist. Franz Ferdinand had originally expected to change that in the aftermath of the war, but changed his mind. But the autocracy was not good for the Empire. While Franz Ferdinand himself continued to be uneasy at his dependence on the German Army, the national problem would not simply go away, and now it was added to a social problem, with the Austrian really, the Austro-Bohemian Socialist Party gaining in membership rapidly and coordinating strikes in the industrial regions of the Empire. But Trialism was dead, and quite conclusively so, for the Hungarians could not be trusted on their own, even after their ranks had been somewhat thinned. So, in 1925, Franz Ferdinand ended the period of autocracy and reintroduced parliamentary government on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. Instead of working to solve the nationality problem, he deliberately ignored it, with many electoral districts drawn in ignorance of the distribution of language-speakers. The initial result, while chaotic, returned enough conservatives and reactionaries to the government that the Kaiser felt vindicated and pushed ahead, attempting to pass wide fiscal reform legislation to give the government enough budgetary room for a military expansion program.
Franz Ferdinands reforms were the first cracks in Germanys Eurasiatic hegemony. More began to appear in Russia. In 1926, a fresh rebellion kicked off in the countryside, which the Russian military either failed to crush or didnt want to. Although the German army detachments in Russia, commanded by the inimitable Hoffmann, did manage to defeat the rebels, it was becoming clear that the Russo-German alliance, while not quite a dead letter, was on wobbly ground. Germany had, it seemed, reached too far. The tsar was beginning to rethink his own position, under significant influence from the Black Hundreds, whose hatred of Jews was easily transferred to a hatred of Germans (especially since they were frequently the same thing; witness Walther Rathenau). The SRs, or what was left of them, obviously despised the Germans. But, at the same time, many recognized that Germanys control over the tsarist state was minimal to nonexistent, restricted to major railways and some finances and little else. Germans, indeed, were pouring cash into Russian industry (insofar as Germany, still a state of limited liquidity, could pour cash into anything). Some German companies seized Russian markets for themselves, but others, like IG Farben, formed profitable cartelization agreements with major Russian firms. Increasingly, Russian liberals like Pavel Milyukov looked to Germany as a model for a potential Russian constitutional monarchy.
But Milyukov and others like him tended to be on the outside. Nikolai II was on the inside. And the tsar increasingly thought of Germanys treatment of Russia after the war as a betrayal of monstrous proportions. In 1927 he invited Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the Black Hundred leaders, into government as minister of the interior; at the same time, he reached out to Franz Ferdinand about breaking away from the German alliance and abrogating the Three Emperors League, while contacting the French about a potential alliance to replace the German one. The Russian army drew up an elaborate plan for seizing control of the Berlin-Beijing Railway and taking the entire German military force in the country prisoner. But the tsar lost his nerve, and postponed the plan repeatedly. When he died in 1930, the plans were ultimately binned, but the resentment among the officer corps and in much of Russia remained. His brother came to power as Mikhail II, under whom everything seemed to be business as usual; it remained unclear whether this was because of his personal sympathies for the Black Hundreds and the like, or because it was too dangerous as yet to move openly against them and institute a parliamentary monarchy.
Elsewhere, Germanys influence was, if anything, shored up. In the brave new world of the twentieth century, dynastic ties usually counted for very little; in Greece, however, they counted for a great deal, now that King Konstantinos had instituted the autokratia with the aid of the military. Konstantinos death in 1924 did not change things, as his son Georgios II assumed the same position with the aid of Generals Panagiotis Gargalidis and Nikolaos Triantafyllakos, who put down a fresh Venizelist rising and reaffirmed the commitment to Germany. During the early 1920s, German investments poured into the country and helped fuel a minor economic revival. The pattern was mirrored in Turkey, where Mustafa Kemal had instituted a wide-ranging plan to bring his new RPP-led dictatorship out of the Ottoman era. His reform plan included a linguistic reform, secularization, and financial reform the last of which met with some skepticism by the Germans. At any rate, Kemals new nationalist reforms were quite exciting; they were also quite expensive, and only dubiously popular. German support was one of the key things propping up his new regime. Unfortunately for the Germans, Greek and Turkish support was purchased at a quite hefty cost: the end of the Bulgarian alliance, as Bulgaria leaned more and more towards Vienna under the continuing leadership of Vasil Radoslavov. In a Bulgarian-Turkish dispute over a series of Adrianople riots in 1926, the Germans came down on the side of the Turks, forcing the Bulgarians to pay reparations but effectively cutting ties with Sofia for good.
Jiangs regime was the target of intense frustration by southern Chinas intellectuals in particular. Many of them had joined the demonstrations in Nanjing on Double Eight Day, 1919, when word broke that Jiang was agreeing to an armistice with the hated Qing. The Double Eight demonstrations had attracted support from all walks of urban life, united by Chinese nationalism. They had been dispersed, but gave their name to the subsequent movement, sometimes also called the Chinese Enlightenment, that permeated among the countrys intellectual elite in the next several years. Incorporating both a nationalist-energizing agenda and a social one that even included revised, equal gender roles (fires stoked by the American Margaret Sangers lecture tour in the Republics universities in 1920, and by Henrik Ibsen, whose 1918 play A Dolls House gained wide popularity in the country), Double Eight authors like Chen Duxiu and Zhou Shuren achieved wide followings outside the universities where they had their home base, partially through the widely encouraged use of more vernacular Chinese. Perversely, Jiang tried to harness the reformist agenda at the core of the Double Eight movement, promising as part of his New Life program to revitalize the country for another throw at both the foreigners in their spheres of influence in southern China and Germanys pawns to the north. Naturally, he failed to carry through on any of these proposals, but what remained by 1924 was a sense of profound disillusionment by those who had initially been persuaded by Jiangs youthful optimism. The result was a groundswell of support for the return of the Guomindang.
While Jiang made several mistakes (some of which would have been, admittedly, very hard to avoid) in his attempt to construct a new order in the Republic, his growing list of opponents made very few. The Guomindang slowly reconstituted itself in the United States and Japan after the disasters of 1918, and, more successfully, talked the talk of the Double Eight movement. Sun Yat-sen had been a professional revolutionary who was rather unsuccessful as a revolutionary but had unrivaled power as a symbol from abroad. Much of that rubbed off on his energetic widow, Song Qingling, who only added to her wide ties to the Chinese diaspora communities in the years after her enforced exile. By the 1921 party congress in San Francisco, she was the clear leader of the Guomindang in exile and a widely admired symbol both in China itself and abroad. Madame Sun was also very adept at keeping her ideological balance, successfully appealing to both the Chinese left (which, along with the failure of the 1919 revolutions, minimized the defections away from the Guomindang to communism) and to the decidedly nonsocialist American Congress. Jiangs alienation of the Republics industrial captains and her own familial connections to both Paul Song and Kong Xiangxi (H. H. Kong in the United States) gave her even more allies.
Yet Jiangs regime still had a preponderance of military force, and there the Guomindang could not even hope to match him. But that preponderance of force was rapidly put into serious danger in 1925, when Chinas civil war abruptly broke out again. Its still not quite clear why the Qing decided to force a crisis over Sichuan in March of that year, but the most probable reason lies in the infighting at the top of the Beiyang Army after Yuans death of old age in 1920. Duan Qirui had initially seized the premiership and, like Jiang, attempted to create a New Order based, somewhat confusingly, on Buddhism, authoritarian government, and a Japan-like invented tradition around the Manchu monarchy and the still-young Xuantong Emperor. He was mostly uninterested in renewing the civil war and instead chose to consolidate the gains in north China, and so enjoyed the support of Germany and its cadre of advisors, led by Max Bauer after 1922. But in 1924 he was overthrown by a cabal of officers led by Wu Peifu and Feng Guozhang, who dumped his New Order plans. Wu and Feng who gained the war ministry and the premiership, respectively, in the new government were instead convinced that Jiangs Republic was the real enemy, followed closely by the Germans and Russians, and wanted to create a constitutional monarchy to appeal to many of the former revolutionaries in the south so that they could launch a war of reconquest against them. Their own plans were to wait until a few years, so they could keep bilking the Germans and Russians of railroad and arms money while ensuring the stable installment of the constitutional monarchy, but a group of even more aggressive generals, led by Kang Youwei, forced their hand by initiating a military incident in Chongqing in March 1925, leading elements of the Beiyang Army to occupy the city in the confusion.
The fighting that ensued was relatively low-key in its actual substance. Feng was not ready to fight a war of conquest, and Jiang was worried about his ability to suppress internal insurrection. But, although the actual engagements were fairly quiet, they absorbed the attention of most of the two sides armies while Germany, Russia, Japan, and the UK attempted to mediate an end to the crisis. Unexpectedly, a revolt against Jiang lit off in Guangdong on April 3, with the rebels calling for an end to the dictatorship and a return of the Guomindang. While Wang Jingwei canvassed the Great Powers to try to prevent a unified opposition to the return of democracy, Song Qingling and Cai E boldly sailed to Guangzhou to lend their support. By April 7, the Guangdong rebels had diverted several of Jiangs divisions from the front line, causing the fall of Chongqing. Two days later, Sun Liren, the commander of Jiangs Eighth Route Army in Jiangsu, marched on Nanjing, invested the city, and called on Jiang to step down in favor of the Guomindang. The generalissimo shot himself on April 12, and Sun Lirens troops occupied the capital in the name of the Guomindang. Promises of amnesty and a united front against the Qing led to the defection of most of Jiangs army within a few weeks. Even so, it is doubtful that the Republic could have stopped the Beiyang Army, which was already bombarding the tri-cities of Wuhan by mid-April, were it not for Zhu Des Sichuan bandit force, which linked up with elements of several of Jiangs scattered divisions and delivered a bloody nose to Kang Youweis troops at Wanxian. Finally equipped with an excuse to dump the radicals, Wu Peifu promptly made Kang and Feng the scapegoats for the whole thing, staged a coup in Beijing and had them both executed. A German-brokered compromise ended hostilities on April 27, with prewar borders as well as the Qings German advisors restored.
In the aftermath, Sun Liren, acting as provisional president, organized a fresh constitutional convention to reintroduce the Republic. Song Qingling was easily swept into office in the July 1925 elections, promising relief in the countryside and an end to the harassment of Chinese industry, while broadly hinting at land reform and the income tax. Sun himself was canny enough to gain the war ministry, having made a preelection agreement with the Guomindang. For his part, Wu reconstituted the Qing government based on his old cronies from the Zhili Army now somewhat derisively referred to as the Zhili Clique and made plans for constitutional government. Bauer, restored to his post, gave his full approval to the plans for a parliament, on the grounds that it would certainly help provide the Qing government with stability.
Germany had been busy in the past five years. Max von Badens government had presided over a general drawdown and demobilization (insofar as it could be done without impeding Germanys ability to crush the Greek, Italian, and Russian insurrections), but what Germany lacked in military protagonism it more than made up for in the world of finance and industry. Germanys revived merchant marine brought trade back up dramatically in 1920 and 1921. And, since Germanys financial reserves had been largely saved during the war, since, other than Russian grain, there was little to use them for, the Germans were well placed to benefit from the near-collapse of the British financial system in 1919-20. By the time the British got back on their feet, New York had finally (barely) replaced London as the worlds banking center but Hamburg and Frankfurt were catching up as well.
German industrys longstanding practice had been to cartelize. This had arguably helped the Germans during the war years, when Rathenaus Raw Materials Office was able to maintain connections with a relatively limited number of German firms. The Stinnes and Krupp giants only grew after the war, with Hugo Stinnes in particular using his vast fortune to finance a political career. (He joined with Tirpitz in supporting the Fatherland Party, which in 1923 briefly became the largest single party in Germany, encompassing both elements of the old Conservatives along with most of the various extremist right-wing groups like the Pan-German League.) In 1924, several dye manufacturers joined to form IG Farbenindustrie AG, which soon encompassed even more industrial firms; the following year, Fritz Thyssen profited from the breakup of the Stinnes empire on Hugo Stinnes death to merge his Flick steel firms and other Ruhr companies into Vestag (Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG, or the United Steel Works). IG Farbens muscle permitted it to expand its markets even more, gaining ground in China and even against DuPont in the United States; Vestag continued Stinnes cross-border policies and made cartel agreements with several French firms. Kurt Schmitt made Allianz the largest insurance company in the world in a series of acquisitions and mergers in 1924-5. And in 1926, the German governments plan to create a national airline system based on regional companies came to fruition when several airline companies merged to form Deutsche Luft Hansa AG.
Financially, Germany benefited from the end of the prewar gold standard and the fragmentation of the financial world into several semiconnected currency zones at least in the short run. Even today, it is hard to find agreement on why the gold standard worked if it did at all, although virtually all contemporary observers thought it did. At the beginning of the war, most of the belligerents, except the United Kingdom, had gone off the gold standard, although most did so in order to permit the resumption of it at the end of fighting. By 1917, even the neutral countries had rejected it, save the United States; places like Switzerland had accumulated plenty of gold, but saw that it did not prove to be a sufficiently good hedge against inflation. But the Americans remained on it, and so the basis of British financial policy, the sterling-dollar exchange, remained intact for the moment. British depletion of their dollar reserves by 1919 and the subsequent November crash had ended that idea.
German politics lost nothing of their contentiousness, though. Max von Baden had been a compromise candidate, and had little ability to actually lead, while the Kaiser wanted to rid himself of the liberal albatross as quickly as possible. The Chancellor was put out to pasture in 1922 and replaced by a foreign office man, Richard von Kühlmann, who initially was able to manage the Reichstag by using Tirpitz and Stinnes Fatherland Party as a stick with which to hit the Social Democrats and Progressives. Stinnes death in 1924 put that policy on notice, though, and the Fatherland Party fractured within two years. Meanwhile, the 1923 elections had returned even more Social Democrats and Progressives, although national liberalism was beginning to make a comeback as well with the impressive growth rates in finance and industry. In effect, Kühlmanns government attempted to return to business as usual, going back to the days of trying to govern without the Reichstag instead of through it that Bethmann had tried before his dismissal.
The conservative consensus was breaking down in the United Kingdom, as well. Laws death in 1922 had placed Austen Chamberlain in the drivers seat. Chamberlain, following through on his general distaste for Irish questions, formalized the end of British rule in Ireland by permitting the island less the Six Counties to leave the Empire and become an independent republic in 1923, ending the long running sore but embittering many Tories who had staked their reputations on Unionism. Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary, Balfour, also pursued rapprochement with Germany in an effort at retrenchment, trying to end the naval arms race that was still sputtering along. He could make no headway in the face of Kühlmanns government, buttressed by a Kaiser enamored of his High Seas Fleets successes. Instead, Chamberlain and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Walter Long (his old opponent from the 1912 leadership contest), proposed to radically curtail the battleship-construction program and focus on a new pivot for naval power, the aircraft carrier. This nearly led to a revolt in the Commons, as many Conservatives were enamored of Dreadnoughts and felt that poor management, not intrinsic design problems, had ruined the Grand Fleet, while Labour railed against the false savings, as the new program would cost even more initially due to expenditure on plant and retraining. Chamberlain and Long plowed ahead with the carriers anyway, and incorporated spending on them into the 1924 budget, which still reduced the overall naval expenditure dramatically.
When the budget failed in the Commons, the ensuing election was expected to return the Liberals to power. But Lloyd George held the partys purse strings, while Asquith held the partys loyalty and controlled many of the whips; neither could find it within himself to reconcile with the other. Dissension in the Liberals ranks prevented effective campaigning. Meanwhile, the Tories managed to hold together behind Chamberlain, despite a significant amount of backbiting and mutual distrust, but national discontent with the party which had notably failed to solve the economic problems stemming from the 1919 collapse led to, of all things, a Labour majority in the returns. Labour had mostly been quiet under Arthur Henderson, and had even seen a bit of fracturing during the war years, with the abortive Russian revolution spawning an equally abortive Socialist Party. The depression was a boon to party membership, as it hit the industrial areas of the north hard. Longs proposed cuts in naval expenditure were sure to reduce employment at places like the Jarrow shipyards even further. So Labour was swept into power with a twenty-seat majority, with Henderson easily able to form a government.
Britains first Labour government rapidly demonstrated that the voters trust might have been misplaced. Despite calls from men like Ramsay MacDonald, a former party leader, that Labour should prove itself fit to govern by relatively conventional policies, Henderson and Oswald Mosley, his Chancellor of the Exchequer (whom, many suspected, wore the pants in the relationship between the two, with Mosley reportedly referring to Henderson as a useful idiot at a party in 1925), proposed a series of radical responses to the depression to rejuvenate the economy. Mosleys proposed 1924 budget, which also included vast amounts of fresh levies on land and other property, as well as the hated death duties, split the Labour Party and caused the governments demise within three months. Mosley retained the confidence of the more die-hard Labourites, including most of the ideologues (which formed the Independent Labour Party); MacDonald had the support of many Liberals, free-trade Labourites like Philip Snowden, and most of the moderate wing of the party. Despite an unlikely alliance between Mosleys Independent Labourites and the syndicalist guild socialists of G. D. H. Cole, the election resulted in a hung parliament, with Chamberlains Tories possessing a small plurality over the Mosleyites and MacDonalds Lab-Lib group (the Liberals themselves having nearly vanished into oblivion). MacDonald and Chamberlain patched up an alliance, and Chamberlain returned to office as Prime Minister in October, promising to cut spending across the board, patch up relations with America, and reestablish the full gold standard.
Before Labour was forced out of government, Henderson and his Foreign Secretary, Arthur Ponsonby, had tried to make a splash by guaranteeing Portugals latest government a vaguely socialist one a sizable loan. Due to British financial weakness, Ponsonby had chosen to enlist German aid, to try to establish the same sort of détente that Chamberlain had failed to muster up and further justify savings on naval expenditure. Kühlmann was willing to give it a try, partially because he was looking for a wedge into the Portuguese colonial empire and figured that hed use Henderson as a useful idiot, too. But the Portuguese socialists had less ability to manage the governments finances than Henderson and Ponsonby thought they did, and within three months Portugal still went bankrupt contributing to Labours poor showing in the second 1924 general election. Chamberlain, when he returned to office, decided to use the opportunity to reach out to Germany even further, and renewed a few old agreements about the Portuguese colonial empire.
Amid the increasing tension between Portugal and the Anglo-German powers in the spring of 1925, the Portuguese seized a German merchantman allegedly supplying rebels in southern Angola with small arms and ammunition. This Freya incident sparked a diplomatic crisis, in which Stanley Baldwin and Arthur Zimmermann, the British and German foreign ministers, demanded Portuguese colonies as restitution. In response, the Portuguese general Manuel Gomes da Costa launched a military coup, seeking to prevent further humiliations at the hands of the Great Powers and ending the republic; he rejected the ultimatum and, insanely, declared war on Germany and Britain, perhaps expecting French aid. Souchon and Admiral Sir John de Robeck led a combined fleet despite all of the coordination problems and residual mistrust left over from the Eurasian War in shelling Lisbon. South African troops seized Lourenço Marques, while Germans stormed Luanda and ANZACs hit the beach near Dili. It was hardly fair; within three weeks all semblance of Portuguese military resistance had collapsed. Gomes da Costa was ousted in favor of a national defense council that lasted long enough to sign a treaty ceding all its colonial possessions before losing control of Lisbon as a fresh wave of riots swept over the country. As for themselves, the Germans and British conveniently had a partition agreement dating back to 1898; with a few modifications, it was implemented a few months after the treaty was signed. Mozambique south of the Zambezi went to South Africa, East Timor went to the Australians, the Indian colonies (Goa, Daman, and Diu) to the Raj, and Guinea-Bissau, the Azores, Madeira, and Macao went straight to British direct control. Everything else Angola and northern Mozambique was absorbed into the German colonial empire.
1925 also marked a watershed year in the Habsburg Empire. For eight years, Franz Ferdinand had, effectively, ruled by decree. The Reichsrat had not met since the failure of the Ausgleich negotiations, and the Hungarian Diet had obviously ceased to exist. Franz Ferdinand had originally expected to change that in the aftermath of the war, but changed his mind. But the autocracy was not good for the Empire. While Franz Ferdinand himself continued to be uneasy at his dependence on the German Army, the national problem would not simply go away, and now it was added to a social problem, with the Austrian really, the Austro-Bohemian Socialist Party gaining in membership rapidly and coordinating strikes in the industrial regions of the Empire. But Trialism was dead, and quite conclusively so, for the Hungarians could not be trusted on their own, even after their ranks had been somewhat thinned. So, in 1925, Franz Ferdinand ended the period of autocracy and reintroduced parliamentary government on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. Instead of working to solve the nationality problem, he deliberately ignored it, with many electoral districts drawn in ignorance of the distribution of language-speakers. The initial result, while chaotic, returned enough conservatives and reactionaries to the government that the Kaiser felt vindicated and pushed ahead, attempting to pass wide fiscal reform legislation to give the government enough budgetary room for a military expansion program.
Franz Ferdinands reforms were the first cracks in Germanys Eurasiatic hegemony. More began to appear in Russia. In 1926, a fresh rebellion kicked off in the countryside, which the Russian military either failed to crush or didnt want to. Although the German army detachments in Russia, commanded by the inimitable Hoffmann, did manage to defeat the rebels, it was becoming clear that the Russo-German alliance, while not quite a dead letter, was on wobbly ground. Germany had, it seemed, reached too far. The tsar was beginning to rethink his own position, under significant influence from the Black Hundreds, whose hatred of Jews was easily transferred to a hatred of Germans (especially since they were frequently the same thing; witness Walther Rathenau). The SRs, or what was left of them, obviously despised the Germans. But, at the same time, many recognized that Germanys control over the tsarist state was minimal to nonexistent, restricted to major railways and some finances and little else. Germans, indeed, were pouring cash into Russian industry (insofar as Germany, still a state of limited liquidity, could pour cash into anything). Some German companies seized Russian markets for themselves, but others, like IG Farben, formed profitable cartelization agreements with major Russian firms. Increasingly, Russian liberals like Pavel Milyukov looked to Germany as a model for a potential Russian constitutional monarchy.
But Milyukov and others like him tended to be on the outside. Nikolai II was on the inside. And the tsar increasingly thought of Germanys treatment of Russia after the war as a betrayal of monstrous proportions. In 1927 he invited Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the Black Hundred leaders, into government as minister of the interior; at the same time, he reached out to Franz Ferdinand about breaking away from the German alliance and abrogating the Three Emperors League, while contacting the French about a potential alliance to replace the German one. The Russian army drew up an elaborate plan for seizing control of the Berlin-Beijing Railway and taking the entire German military force in the country prisoner. But the tsar lost his nerve, and postponed the plan repeatedly. When he died in 1930, the plans were ultimately binned, but the resentment among the officer corps and in much of Russia remained. His brother came to power as Mikhail II, under whom everything seemed to be business as usual; it remained unclear whether this was because of his personal sympathies for the Black Hundreds and the like, or because it was too dangerous as yet to move openly against them and institute a parliamentary monarchy.
Elsewhere, Germanys influence was, if anything, shored up. In the brave new world of the twentieth century, dynastic ties usually counted for very little; in Greece, however, they counted for a great deal, now that King Konstantinos had instituted the autokratia with the aid of the military. Konstantinos death in 1924 did not change things, as his son Georgios II assumed the same position with the aid of Generals Panagiotis Gargalidis and Nikolaos Triantafyllakos, who put down a fresh Venizelist rising and reaffirmed the commitment to Germany. During the early 1920s, German investments poured into the country and helped fuel a minor economic revival. The pattern was mirrored in Turkey, where Mustafa Kemal had instituted a wide-ranging plan to bring his new RPP-led dictatorship out of the Ottoman era. His reform plan included a linguistic reform, secularization, and financial reform the last of which met with some skepticism by the Germans. At any rate, Kemals new nationalist reforms were quite exciting; they were also quite expensive, and only dubiously popular. German support was one of the key things propping up his new regime. Unfortunately for the Germans, Greek and Turkish support was purchased at a quite hefty cost: the end of the Bulgarian alliance, as Bulgaria leaned more and more towards Vienna under the continuing leadership of Vasil Radoslavov. In a Bulgarian-Turkish dispute over a series of Adrianople riots in 1926, the Germans came down on the side of the Turks, forcing the Bulgarians to pay reparations but effectively cutting ties with Sofia for good.
While the rapprochement with Britain continued albeit somewhat ephemerally and the alliance with Russia and Austria began to break down, the French, who had been more or less quiescent for the past several years, suddenly began to look nasty again. The Third Republic had fallen into political crisis with the end of the Eurasian War, exacerbated by the depression. As the government stumbled from one ineffective cabinet to another, infighting in the Chamber of Deputies multiplied, and policy began to gridlock. The recriminations were worst of all: French victory had been aborted, circumcised, however you want to say it, and as a consequence, somebody had to be blamed. Blame fell on Joffre, for being too methodical, unable to seize the advantage, too willing to wait for the British, too willing to disperse his forces to the Balkans, not willing enough to disperse his forces to the Balkans
Blame fell on Foch, too, but Foch was a more adept debater than the taciturn Joffre. To claims that he had squandered French resources on futile efforts, Foch responded that he never gained the support from the government that he ought to have patently false, as the finance ministrys worst failing was cost overrun in pursuit of the militarys absurd budgets, but it held the ring of truth for a generation of soldiers that had emerged from the trenches to find a society to which they could no longer relate.
Foch was a republican with impeccable credentials, and would never have dreamed of Boulangism and overthrowing the Republic. Others were not so sanguine. Fochs own chief of staff, Maxime Weygand, was one of the latter. He had been an antidreyfusard thirty years prior, and lacked Fochs and Joffres republicanism. By the twenties, he was associated with several veterans associations, and close friends with the far-right gang boss François de la Rocque. Yet he still retained his commission, somehow, despite becoming a focus for opposition to the various Left governments that held power in France during the twenties a bewildering kaleidoscope of presidents and premiers, including Painlevé, Clemenceau, Ribot, Blum, and Viviani. But he was not the only locus of far-right opposition, for Orléanists, like Action Française, and other monarchists gained support at the same time as well. Such support didnt manifest itself in the elections, but on the streets, where veterans organizations and gangs terrorized Jews and leftists and engaged in gang wars. The traditional Right was badly discredited by the war experience, just as much as the Left was; Doumergues bloc national found its support eroding as early as 1920, and had virtually evaporated by 1925, the victim of Great War policies and an inability to deal with the depression.
Eventually, in 1927, Weygand resigned his commission, formed a political party (PPF, Parti Populaire Française, or the French Popular Party), and contested the Presidency after Alexandre Ribots resignation from the office that year. Although it was a largely powerless office, the Presidency offered significant scope for influence on the Chamber of Deputies, and could be of symbolic use. Weygand managed to squeak out a victory amid accusations of fraud and intimidation by various members of the cartel des gauches, the major political organization on the Left. The marshal used his considerable prestige to advance the PPF agenda in the press. In military terms, new theories and utilization of technological wonder-weapons (like the tank, the airplane, the submarine, and the aircraft carrier) would form the centerpiece of Frances new armed forces; in economic terms, Weygand proposed to hand French finances over to the planistes, a group that had begun to pop up since the depression of 1919 started, who advanced theories of state intervention similar to those of Mosley in the UK. With a new platform for popularizing his ideas, Weygand won plenty of converts, and the PPF swept through the 1928 legislative elections with a clear majority (despite, again, allegations of ballot-stuffing, intimidation, and all the rest). The government introduced a referendum a few months later that rewrote the constitution, giving the presidency immense powers (some even called the new French president an elected Kaiser) and initiating the Fourth Republic.
Weygands revitalization of France was not the final blow to hit the Reich in the mid-twenties, though. For, as it happened, the Portuguese colonies had been poisoned fruit, for the war had accelerated the disintegration of central authority in the metropole. The chaos in Portugal, by itself, probably wouldnt have been worth worrying about. After all, it was just Portugal. But Spain, too, was experiencing serious problems as well. After yet another Rifian failure, a military dictatorship had been installed under General Miguel Primo de Rivera, but his 1924 offensive in the Rif had been the most disastrous of all, ending with 5,000 Spanish casualties and a retreat back to Ceuta and Melilla. Primo de Rivera resigned in 1925, but was succeeded by a junta all the same, this one led by José Sanjurjo. But Sanjurjo was incapable of commanding the loyalty of enough of the army to stay in power, while a general strike organized by the National Confederation of Labor (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, or CNT), a major anarchosyndicalist labor union, put enough pressure on him that he resigned in the spring of 1926. With that, King Alfonso XIII gave up, abdicating his throne and fleeing the country, while the CNT established control of Barcelona and called for revolution. Spain collapsed into a series of warring factions. Briefly, the ultranationalist and ultramontanist Carlists appeared to be on the verge of controlling the country, after successfully seizing control of Madrid for several months in late 1926, but by November the CNT, which had joined up with the Partido Comunista de España in forming an alliance of convenience with Catalan nationalists, had managed to drive them out. On April 18, 1927, after a two-week siege, Lisbon capitulated to PCE/CNT forces, who, led by Francisco Largo Caballero, promptly declared the existence of a new Iberian Commune.
Of course, the new Commune was hardly welcomed by the rest of Europe, but nobody was prepared to act against it. The British were certainly worried for Gibraltar, but they considered the Comunistas too weak to threaten it unlike France or Germany, who, if permitted to intervene in Iberia, would get dangerously close to the gateway to India. Furthermore, the Chamberlain administration still limping along after the 1924 elections was confronted with a series of scandals in the winter of 1926-7, topped by a general strike that spring that immobilized the government. France was experiencing the climax of the riots, gang violence, and general turmoil that eventually brought Weygand to power, and was quite distracted by its own problems, thank you. Perhaps Kühlmann could have molded them all together, but he was confronted with the highly unwelcome news that neither the High Seas Fleet nor the army had the money to mobilize and fight in Iberia much less the ability to crush the Comunistas entirely and restore royalist government.
Nevertheless, Kühlmann made a brave effort at it. His attempts to gain the funds for intervention from the Reichstag were stymied by the SPD, which so long as it was united commanded a bare majority. On this occasion, it was united; under the leadership of Hermann Müller, the SPD demanded instead a series of expansions to the Reich social insurance and welfare programs, and flatly refused to consider fresh levies for an Iberian war. Confronted with an immovable object, the Kaiser, on Kühlmanns advice, dissolved the government and began elections. But the elections of fall 1927 returned even more SPD deputies, who remained firmly united under Müller. To Kühlmanns despair, the right-wing milieu had fragmented even further; the cannibalized remnant of the Fatherland Party now had to contend with twenty others, some grass-roots, some old-style, some like Alfred Hugenbergs National Party trying out the mass-politics game and failing at it. None could serve as an appropriate makeweight to Müller and the SPD. Stymied by the Reichstag and exhausted by his past several years as Chancellor, Kühlmann resigned in November 1927.
He went without a replacement for several weeks while the Kaiser pondered what to do. Several officers in his entourage, including Rüdiger von der Goltz and Walther von Lüttwitz, pushed the Kaiser towards a coup detat to end the Reichstag and establish a proper autocracy. Wilhelm had toyed with the idea of a coup several times before the war, but never went through with it. This time, he nearly did, but eventually backed off and went on a yacht cruise in the Baltic for several days to mull things over. When he returned, he appointed former Chief of the General Staff and war minister Wilhelm Groener as Chancellor with instructions to resolve the deadlock in the Reichstag. Groener, the son of a Swabian paymaster, was the first non-noble to ascend to the office. But few had won greater laurels than he had, as chief of the railway section for the General Staff, then war minister and head of Rathenaus Raw Materials Office, then succeeding Mackensen at the head of the General Staff itself in 1922. The appointment of a newly retired army officer to the chancellorship horrified the Reichstag deputies, who assumed it was a prelude to the coup Wilhelm had been thought to be planning. But instead, Groener addressed the Reichstag, not in battle dress with the proverbial lieutenant and ten men, but by himself, in the usual jacket and tie. His speech was not a conciliatory one on its own merits charged with anti-Comunista rhetoric but its lack of military threats and, of course, the fact that he was delivering it at all, made it a welcome surprise, even an olive branch, to the SPD leadership.
Groener soon went on the offensive, sounding out Müllers deputy, Gustav Noske, as to the terms for a compromise. Noske was generally amenable to a military increase had indeed long been interested in matters of security but knew that the government would have to reduce spending elsewhere to finance the army and the fleet, and informed Groener that no SPD deputy would vote for a budget with such a cut. Instead, Noske and the SPD demanded that new taxes be levied. Groener was not unsusceptible to such arguments. As war minister, he had bashed his head against the inability of the Reich government to institute effective direct taxation. The main political debate of the prewar era reared its ugly head. Bismarck had appropriated indirect taxation and tariffs to the Reich, leaving direct taxation to the states. In 1871, Berlin had gotten the money-maker, but by the early twentieth century, the reverse was true. The ensuing constitutional struggle as various Reich chancellors attempted to seize the purse-strings from the states had meshed with party politics and security in an ever-more-uncomfortable spiral. In 1906, the government had passed an inheritance tax that was toothless due to conservative opposition; the same groups submarined an attempt to institute a capital gains tax in 1912. The SPD and Progressives preferred progressive direct taxation and, even before the war, some of their members (not enough) had been willing to support increased arms expenditures to get it. But Bethmann had proven incapable of mustering their full support, Hertling had simply turned to the Catholic Center, and Max von Baden had not had the will nor the time to push through a comprehensive taxation reform program. Instead, war had been financed by short-term expedients, made explicitly short-term to prevent them from being used as a precedent. Most useful of these had been the war profits tax of 1917, backed by Groener but it had expired after a year.
In short, Noske and the SPD wanted to institute radical, constitution-altering taxes to finance an expansion of the army and navy and to expand the Reichs social programs. Groener was a receptive listener. The next Reich budget did include a new progressive income tax, as well as expanded inheritance taxes; it removed many services from the purview of the states and placed them under the federal government; it raised the regular (as in, not extraordinary, as the army and navy during the Eurasian War had been financed through extraordinary measures) military budgets for the first time since 1913. Müller and Noske led the SPD in approving the new budget. An angry set of representatives from the Kleinstaaterei awaited the Kaiser and Groener in the Bundesrat where the Reich government resorted to strong-arming instead of the negotiation that had characterized what was later called the Noske-Groener Pact but to all intents and purposes, they had passed the biggest hurdle.
Perversely, the reorganization and fallout from the 1928 tax reform legislation immobilized the German government for nearly a year. By then, the Comunistas had already begun to consolidate their position in Iberia, fight off a few attempts at reactionary coups, and then with the aid of Russian and Italian émigrés begin exporting the revolution. Their target, due to linguistic and historical ties if nothing else, was Latin America. Despite somewhat-fertile ground there, due in part to the economic problems in the region, many would-be revolutionaries regarded the grizzled Iberian barricade veterans as colonialist thugs. Furthermore, despite the initial lack of American aid (see below), the dictators of Central and South America were hardly pushovers. But there were a few that, given a proper nudge (and all the Comunistas could do was nudge), would tumble, and it was on these the Iberians intelligently focused.
Mexico had undergone its own revolutionary period, highlighted by an American intervention under President Charles Evans Hughes from December 1916 to August 1918. The result was ultimately a victory for the federal government which, after a fashion, had been established after the end of the Porfiriato in 1911. The eventual winner, President Álvaro Obregón, had sponsored land reform programs and rewritten the constitution to permit him to run for another term a classic Bonapartist, essentially. Obregóns assassination by a comunista in the summer of 1928 threw Mexico into chaos, with his flunkies Plutarco Elias Calles and Adolfo de la Huerta promptly turning on each other, sparking a fresh civil war. Syndicalist and comunista uprisings lit off in the Mexico City area and in Sonora. If the Iberians had had an effectively directed grand strategy, one might say that this first attempt was just designed to distract the various interventionist powers from the real revolutions.
But, of course, they did not have such a strategy. Efforts at planning were compromised by the governments general lack of control over the men and women who went west; moreover, official advisors, like the Russian émigré Lev Bronshtein, were distrusted more than the nearly fifteen thousand common veterans of the civil war. In addition, further attempts at coordination were weakened by the popularity of the pan-American socialist movement. Parties like APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) in Peru provided an established hard core of resistance to foreign socialism. APRA, which under Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre never gained widespread electoral support, was nevertheless impossible to eradicate and provided a constant bone in the throat of the revolutionaries who thought Peru an easy target; with electoral efforts thwarted, a civil war erupted instead, with three-sided fighting consuming the country until an eventual government victory in 1930. Comunista attempts to bring down the coronelismo governments of Brazil instead spurred a military coup from the right under Governor Getúlio Vargas in the fall of 1928. Similar efforts in Chile and Argentina miscarried as well.
Indeed, the most obvious result of the Comunista interventions was to divide the Left in the Latin American countries and provide enough of a credible threat for foreign powers chiefly, the United States to increase their influence. The Americans did badly need an excuse. Theodore Roosevelts American Empire had faltered during the 1910s and early 1920s, due in significant part to isolationism and the fallout from the Eurasian War. James Beauchamp Champ Clark, who had seized the moment in 1912 with the fracturing of the Republican Party into pro- and anti-Roosevelt factions to snag the Presidency, had initiated a period of indolence and neglect, although Progressivism continued its bold march forward. Clarks response to the Eurasian War insouciance did not play well with the electorate, who restored the Republicans to power in 1916. Charles Evans Hughes, who advocated rearmament to safeguard American neutrality from the depredations of Britain and Germany (which, fortunately, never materialized), oversaw a sort of American golden age. The usual interventions in the banana republics went ahead on the usual grounds. The United States Navy continued building; by 1920, when the Tennessee class of four Dreadnoughts was commissioned, it was on a numerical par with the Germans, although personnel quality was comparatively low. While the Army remained somewhat neglected, the Marines saw action all over the Caribbean.
And at home, Hughes continued the Progressive era, ramming an income tax amendment through Congress, instituting the Federal Reserve in 1917, and adding women to the franchise in 1921. But the Republicans started to lose electoral ground in the early twenties, with the surge of post-Russian revolutionary socialism in the Rust Belt that weakened the post-Civil War electoral consensus. Hughes saw it coming, and refused to run again in 1924, instead making his way back to the Supreme Court. The ensuing leadership squabble opened the way for Al Smith, governor of New York and notable Catholic, to win the Democratic nomination (despite the overwhelming opposition of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, who nearly caused a riot at the convention). With the Solid South once again firmly behind him after picking up Joseph Robinson of Arkansas as his running mate, Smith narrowly won in November over the Republican Frank Orren Lowden. Robert La Follettes Farmor-Labor Party, which amalgamated Socialist and Progressive elements, successfully stole several Rust Belt states from the Republicans and proved to be the key spoiler.
The 1924 electoral season also coincided with a significant economic downturn in the United States. Smith wanted to maintain Progressivism, although enthusiasm for it was starting to run low. But to finance that, he had to cut the armed services, of course. The latest armament plans for the Navy fell through the proposed South Dakota class of battleships was to have matched the new German Mackensens in armor and speed and outclassed them in weight of broadside as did the latest expansion bill for the Marine Corps. Smith avoided Latin American entanglements and instead focused on shifting the burden of American interests onto nonstate actors or state actors that werent American. For instance, the Open Door in China (or, at least, southern China) was revived with the demise of Jiangs Chinese dictatorship, and it didnt hurt that the Guomindang was largely financed by American interests. In Ireland, the American-born and Boston-financed Éamon de Valera ascended to the Presidency of the new Republic in 1925 after a vicious civil war; de Valera didnt exactly turn Ireland into a satellite of the United States, but he recognized that British economic imperialism made Irish independence a fiction and attempted to use the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Germany, but Kühlmann was unwilling to jeopardize his British ties) to gain some breathing room.
Smiths governments foreign policy-on-the-cheap was reasonably successful while the United States lacked challenges in the Western Hemisphere. But as the Comunistas started to filter into the region throughout the mid-to-late 1920s, a fresh Red scare combined with anxiety over the Smith administrations general inactivity to reach a fever pitch of intensity in 1927-8. Already the Democrats had suffered in the midterm elections in 1926. The collapse of the Mexican government in 1928 nearly proved to be an October surprise, and the disintegration of the FLP after La Follettes death a few years prior weakened opposition to the Republicans in the north, but Smith managed to successfully squeak out a win over Charles Curtis Republican ticket partly by promising rearmament and sending troops to occupy Veracruz. Bolstered by the appearance of a strong stand on foreign affairs and by Norman Thomas Socialists weakening Curtis cause (Curtis also suffered from name-recognition problems, being a politician from, of all places, Kansas), Smith moved with what seemed to be decisiveness in the short run. American Marines provided the backbone of de la Huertas reorganized army, which smashed Calles anti-American (and, in a personal affront to Smith, anti-clerical) forces in the course of 1929. De la Huertas newly-stabilized Mexican federal government now existed effectively at the sufferance of the Americans. Secretary of State Franklin Roosevelt a protégé of Smiths from New York negotiated a treaty that would have put the McLane-Ocampo agreement to shame; Americans received rights in Mexico akin to the Chinese and Ottoman capitulations, control over police in most of the north of the country, extended control over Mexican oil fields, and the rights to several Mexican railroads and highways.
The Mexican intervention was the only organized American effort of the next several years, though. Smith still preferred to work things without sending in the Marines. He was unable to avoid that in 1930, when a Comunista-backed revolt flared up in southern Cuba. But American cash and arms were behind Perus successful suppression of the Aprista/Comunista civil war. And they bolstered the Chilean government when it was near to collapsing in 1929. This was all quite vanilla stuff, and arguably success stories for Smiths policy. But starting in 1930, the government started to take some serious hits. One of the worst famines in recorded history struck the southern part of the Great American Steppe, exacerbated by poor farming policies; the resulting Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, Kansas, and northern Texas (bad dust storms and famine troubled the entire steppe up to Saskatchewan and down to New Mexico, but centered on Oklahoma) ruined much of the American agricultural sector, along with the Plains economy, and caused a massive migration of some three million people. More poor harvests hit the agrarian southeast, which had been industrializing in fits and starts before capital began to dry up in the late 1920s. The depression that was beginning to seize the rest of the country was worst here and in the Rust Belt. Louisiana Governor Huey Long seized on this with a particularly appealing brand of populism; after destroying the Klan in his home state while constructing one of the most dominant political machines in the country, Long toured the country, espousing wealth-redistribution, agricultural-relief, and work-project schemes (rather similar, in their aggregate, to Mosleys ILPs platform) that won him followers around the country and inspired Smith to refer to him as the most dangerous man in America.
The worst hit of all was in foreign policy, though. Partly because of the Dust Bowl in Canada and partly because of ongoing poor Anglo-American relations, Prime Minister Leo Amery (who had taken control of the Conservative-Labour national government in 1928 with Chamberlains retirement) had begun to zero in on Argentina as a key supplier of agricultural foodstuffs to the UK. Argentinas Radical governments had leaned towards a special relationship with the British throughout their period of dominance. But the Comunistas began to upset the Radical political balance, while the military with significant amounts of German support began to toy with a coup to stabilize the situation. In October 1930, a Comunista-backed socialist organization bombed the Ministry of Finance in Buenos Aires, killing the British military attaché and provoking Amery to dispatch a fleet to the Rio de la Plata to bolster Hipólito Yrigoyens faltering Radical government. An outcry in the American press demanded that Smith force the British to withdraw, making hysterical assertions about the death of the Monroe Doctrine. But Smith backed down, provoking Secretary of State Roosevelt into resignation and spawning a historic collapse in the Democrats position in the House and Senate in the midterm elections a few weeks later.
Foch was a republican with impeccable credentials, and would never have dreamed of Boulangism and overthrowing the Republic. Others were not so sanguine. Fochs own chief of staff, Maxime Weygand, was one of the latter. He had been an antidreyfusard thirty years prior, and lacked Fochs and Joffres republicanism. By the twenties, he was associated with several veterans associations, and close friends with the far-right gang boss François de la Rocque. Yet he still retained his commission, somehow, despite becoming a focus for opposition to the various Left governments that held power in France during the twenties a bewildering kaleidoscope of presidents and premiers, including Painlevé, Clemenceau, Ribot, Blum, and Viviani. But he was not the only locus of far-right opposition, for Orléanists, like Action Française, and other monarchists gained support at the same time as well. Such support didnt manifest itself in the elections, but on the streets, where veterans organizations and gangs terrorized Jews and leftists and engaged in gang wars. The traditional Right was badly discredited by the war experience, just as much as the Left was; Doumergues bloc national found its support eroding as early as 1920, and had virtually evaporated by 1925, the victim of Great War policies and an inability to deal with the depression.
Eventually, in 1927, Weygand resigned his commission, formed a political party (PPF, Parti Populaire Française, or the French Popular Party), and contested the Presidency after Alexandre Ribots resignation from the office that year. Although it was a largely powerless office, the Presidency offered significant scope for influence on the Chamber of Deputies, and could be of symbolic use. Weygand managed to squeak out a victory amid accusations of fraud and intimidation by various members of the cartel des gauches, the major political organization on the Left. The marshal used his considerable prestige to advance the PPF agenda in the press. In military terms, new theories and utilization of technological wonder-weapons (like the tank, the airplane, the submarine, and the aircraft carrier) would form the centerpiece of Frances new armed forces; in economic terms, Weygand proposed to hand French finances over to the planistes, a group that had begun to pop up since the depression of 1919 started, who advanced theories of state intervention similar to those of Mosley in the UK. With a new platform for popularizing his ideas, Weygand won plenty of converts, and the PPF swept through the 1928 legislative elections with a clear majority (despite, again, allegations of ballot-stuffing, intimidation, and all the rest). The government introduced a referendum a few months later that rewrote the constitution, giving the presidency immense powers (some even called the new French president an elected Kaiser) and initiating the Fourth Republic.
Weygands revitalization of France was not the final blow to hit the Reich in the mid-twenties, though. For, as it happened, the Portuguese colonies had been poisoned fruit, for the war had accelerated the disintegration of central authority in the metropole. The chaos in Portugal, by itself, probably wouldnt have been worth worrying about. After all, it was just Portugal. But Spain, too, was experiencing serious problems as well. After yet another Rifian failure, a military dictatorship had been installed under General Miguel Primo de Rivera, but his 1924 offensive in the Rif had been the most disastrous of all, ending with 5,000 Spanish casualties and a retreat back to Ceuta and Melilla. Primo de Rivera resigned in 1925, but was succeeded by a junta all the same, this one led by José Sanjurjo. But Sanjurjo was incapable of commanding the loyalty of enough of the army to stay in power, while a general strike organized by the National Confederation of Labor (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, or CNT), a major anarchosyndicalist labor union, put enough pressure on him that he resigned in the spring of 1926. With that, King Alfonso XIII gave up, abdicating his throne and fleeing the country, while the CNT established control of Barcelona and called for revolution. Spain collapsed into a series of warring factions. Briefly, the ultranationalist and ultramontanist Carlists appeared to be on the verge of controlling the country, after successfully seizing control of Madrid for several months in late 1926, but by November the CNT, which had joined up with the Partido Comunista de España in forming an alliance of convenience with Catalan nationalists, had managed to drive them out. On April 18, 1927, after a two-week siege, Lisbon capitulated to PCE/CNT forces, who, led by Francisco Largo Caballero, promptly declared the existence of a new Iberian Commune.
Of course, the new Commune was hardly welcomed by the rest of Europe, but nobody was prepared to act against it. The British were certainly worried for Gibraltar, but they considered the Comunistas too weak to threaten it unlike France or Germany, who, if permitted to intervene in Iberia, would get dangerously close to the gateway to India. Furthermore, the Chamberlain administration still limping along after the 1924 elections was confronted with a series of scandals in the winter of 1926-7, topped by a general strike that spring that immobilized the government. France was experiencing the climax of the riots, gang violence, and general turmoil that eventually brought Weygand to power, and was quite distracted by its own problems, thank you. Perhaps Kühlmann could have molded them all together, but he was confronted with the highly unwelcome news that neither the High Seas Fleet nor the army had the money to mobilize and fight in Iberia much less the ability to crush the Comunistas entirely and restore royalist government.
Nevertheless, Kühlmann made a brave effort at it. His attempts to gain the funds for intervention from the Reichstag were stymied by the SPD, which so long as it was united commanded a bare majority. On this occasion, it was united; under the leadership of Hermann Müller, the SPD demanded instead a series of expansions to the Reich social insurance and welfare programs, and flatly refused to consider fresh levies for an Iberian war. Confronted with an immovable object, the Kaiser, on Kühlmanns advice, dissolved the government and began elections. But the elections of fall 1927 returned even more SPD deputies, who remained firmly united under Müller. To Kühlmanns despair, the right-wing milieu had fragmented even further; the cannibalized remnant of the Fatherland Party now had to contend with twenty others, some grass-roots, some old-style, some like Alfred Hugenbergs National Party trying out the mass-politics game and failing at it. None could serve as an appropriate makeweight to Müller and the SPD. Stymied by the Reichstag and exhausted by his past several years as Chancellor, Kühlmann resigned in November 1927.
He went without a replacement for several weeks while the Kaiser pondered what to do. Several officers in his entourage, including Rüdiger von der Goltz and Walther von Lüttwitz, pushed the Kaiser towards a coup detat to end the Reichstag and establish a proper autocracy. Wilhelm had toyed with the idea of a coup several times before the war, but never went through with it. This time, he nearly did, but eventually backed off and went on a yacht cruise in the Baltic for several days to mull things over. When he returned, he appointed former Chief of the General Staff and war minister Wilhelm Groener as Chancellor with instructions to resolve the deadlock in the Reichstag. Groener, the son of a Swabian paymaster, was the first non-noble to ascend to the office. But few had won greater laurels than he had, as chief of the railway section for the General Staff, then war minister and head of Rathenaus Raw Materials Office, then succeeding Mackensen at the head of the General Staff itself in 1922. The appointment of a newly retired army officer to the chancellorship horrified the Reichstag deputies, who assumed it was a prelude to the coup Wilhelm had been thought to be planning. But instead, Groener addressed the Reichstag, not in battle dress with the proverbial lieutenant and ten men, but by himself, in the usual jacket and tie. His speech was not a conciliatory one on its own merits charged with anti-Comunista rhetoric but its lack of military threats and, of course, the fact that he was delivering it at all, made it a welcome surprise, even an olive branch, to the SPD leadership.
Groener soon went on the offensive, sounding out Müllers deputy, Gustav Noske, as to the terms for a compromise. Noske was generally amenable to a military increase had indeed long been interested in matters of security but knew that the government would have to reduce spending elsewhere to finance the army and the fleet, and informed Groener that no SPD deputy would vote for a budget with such a cut. Instead, Noske and the SPD demanded that new taxes be levied. Groener was not unsusceptible to such arguments. As war minister, he had bashed his head against the inability of the Reich government to institute effective direct taxation. The main political debate of the prewar era reared its ugly head. Bismarck had appropriated indirect taxation and tariffs to the Reich, leaving direct taxation to the states. In 1871, Berlin had gotten the money-maker, but by the early twentieth century, the reverse was true. The ensuing constitutional struggle as various Reich chancellors attempted to seize the purse-strings from the states had meshed with party politics and security in an ever-more-uncomfortable spiral. In 1906, the government had passed an inheritance tax that was toothless due to conservative opposition; the same groups submarined an attempt to institute a capital gains tax in 1912. The SPD and Progressives preferred progressive direct taxation and, even before the war, some of their members (not enough) had been willing to support increased arms expenditures to get it. But Bethmann had proven incapable of mustering their full support, Hertling had simply turned to the Catholic Center, and Max von Baden had not had the will nor the time to push through a comprehensive taxation reform program. Instead, war had been financed by short-term expedients, made explicitly short-term to prevent them from being used as a precedent. Most useful of these had been the war profits tax of 1917, backed by Groener but it had expired after a year.
In short, Noske and the SPD wanted to institute radical, constitution-altering taxes to finance an expansion of the army and navy and to expand the Reichs social programs. Groener was a receptive listener. The next Reich budget did include a new progressive income tax, as well as expanded inheritance taxes; it removed many services from the purview of the states and placed them under the federal government; it raised the regular (as in, not extraordinary, as the army and navy during the Eurasian War had been financed through extraordinary measures) military budgets for the first time since 1913. Müller and Noske led the SPD in approving the new budget. An angry set of representatives from the Kleinstaaterei awaited the Kaiser and Groener in the Bundesrat where the Reich government resorted to strong-arming instead of the negotiation that had characterized what was later called the Noske-Groener Pact but to all intents and purposes, they had passed the biggest hurdle.
Perversely, the reorganization and fallout from the 1928 tax reform legislation immobilized the German government for nearly a year. By then, the Comunistas had already begun to consolidate their position in Iberia, fight off a few attempts at reactionary coups, and then with the aid of Russian and Italian émigrés begin exporting the revolution. Their target, due to linguistic and historical ties if nothing else, was Latin America. Despite somewhat-fertile ground there, due in part to the economic problems in the region, many would-be revolutionaries regarded the grizzled Iberian barricade veterans as colonialist thugs. Furthermore, despite the initial lack of American aid (see below), the dictators of Central and South America were hardly pushovers. But there were a few that, given a proper nudge (and all the Comunistas could do was nudge), would tumble, and it was on these the Iberians intelligently focused.
Mexico had undergone its own revolutionary period, highlighted by an American intervention under President Charles Evans Hughes from December 1916 to August 1918. The result was ultimately a victory for the federal government which, after a fashion, had been established after the end of the Porfiriato in 1911. The eventual winner, President Álvaro Obregón, had sponsored land reform programs and rewritten the constitution to permit him to run for another term a classic Bonapartist, essentially. Obregóns assassination by a comunista in the summer of 1928 threw Mexico into chaos, with his flunkies Plutarco Elias Calles and Adolfo de la Huerta promptly turning on each other, sparking a fresh civil war. Syndicalist and comunista uprisings lit off in the Mexico City area and in Sonora. If the Iberians had had an effectively directed grand strategy, one might say that this first attempt was just designed to distract the various interventionist powers from the real revolutions.
But, of course, they did not have such a strategy. Efforts at planning were compromised by the governments general lack of control over the men and women who went west; moreover, official advisors, like the Russian émigré Lev Bronshtein, were distrusted more than the nearly fifteen thousand common veterans of the civil war. In addition, further attempts at coordination were weakened by the popularity of the pan-American socialist movement. Parties like APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) in Peru provided an established hard core of resistance to foreign socialism. APRA, which under Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre never gained widespread electoral support, was nevertheless impossible to eradicate and provided a constant bone in the throat of the revolutionaries who thought Peru an easy target; with electoral efforts thwarted, a civil war erupted instead, with three-sided fighting consuming the country until an eventual government victory in 1930. Comunista attempts to bring down the coronelismo governments of Brazil instead spurred a military coup from the right under Governor Getúlio Vargas in the fall of 1928. Similar efforts in Chile and Argentina miscarried as well.
Indeed, the most obvious result of the Comunista interventions was to divide the Left in the Latin American countries and provide enough of a credible threat for foreign powers chiefly, the United States to increase their influence. The Americans did badly need an excuse. Theodore Roosevelts American Empire had faltered during the 1910s and early 1920s, due in significant part to isolationism and the fallout from the Eurasian War. James Beauchamp Champ Clark, who had seized the moment in 1912 with the fracturing of the Republican Party into pro- and anti-Roosevelt factions to snag the Presidency, had initiated a period of indolence and neglect, although Progressivism continued its bold march forward. Clarks response to the Eurasian War insouciance did not play well with the electorate, who restored the Republicans to power in 1916. Charles Evans Hughes, who advocated rearmament to safeguard American neutrality from the depredations of Britain and Germany (which, fortunately, never materialized), oversaw a sort of American golden age. The usual interventions in the banana republics went ahead on the usual grounds. The United States Navy continued building; by 1920, when the Tennessee class of four Dreadnoughts was commissioned, it was on a numerical par with the Germans, although personnel quality was comparatively low. While the Army remained somewhat neglected, the Marines saw action all over the Caribbean.
And at home, Hughes continued the Progressive era, ramming an income tax amendment through Congress, instituting the Federal Reserve in 1917, and adding women to the franchise in 1921. But the Republicans started to lose electoral ground in the early twenties, with the surge of post-Russian revolutionary socialism in the Rust Belt that weakened the post-Civil War electoral consensus. Hughes saw it coming, and refused to run again in 1924, instead making his way back to the Supreme Court. The ensuing leadership squabble opened the way for Al Smith, governor of New York and notable Catholic, to win the Democratic nomination (despite the overwhelming opposition of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, who nearly caused a riot at the convention). With the Solid South once again firmly behind him after picking up Joseph Robinson of Arkansas as his running mate, Smith narrowly won in November over the Republican Frank Orren Lowden. Robert La Follettes Farmor-Labor Party, which amalgamated Socialist and Progressive elements, successfully stole several Rust Belt states from the Republicans and proved to be the key spoiler.
The 1924 electoral season also coincided with a significant economic downturn in the United States. Smith wanted to maintain Progressivism, although enthusiasm for it was starting to run low. But to finance that, he had to cut the armed services, of course. The latest armament plans for the Navy fell through the proposed South Dakota class of battleships was to have matched the new German Mackensens in armor and speed and outclassed them in weight of broadside as did the latest expansion bill for the Marine Corps. Smith avoided Latin American entanglements and instead focused on shifting the burden of American interests onto nonstate actors or state actors that werent American. For instance, the Open Door in China (or, at least, southern China) was revived with the demise of Jiangs Chinese dictatorship, and it didnt hurt that the Guomindang was largely financed by American interests. In Ireland, the American-born and Boston-financed Éamon de Valera ascended to the Presidency of the new Republic in 1925 after a vicious civil war; de Valera didnt exactly turn Ireland into a satellite of the United States, but he recognized that British economic imperialism made Irish independence a fiction and attempted to use the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Germany, but Kühlmann was unwilling to jeopardize his British ties) to gain some breathing room.
Smiths governments foreign policy-on-the-cheap was reasonably successful while the United States lacked challenges in the Western Hemisphere. But as the Comunistas started to filter into the region throughout the mid-to-late 1920s, a fresh Red scare combined with anxiety over the Smith administrations general inactivity to reach a fever pitch of intensity in 1927-8. Already the Democrats had suffered in the midterm elections in 1926. The collapse of the Mexican government in 1928 nearly proved to be an October surprise, and the disintegration of the FLP after La Follettes death a few years prior weakened opposition to the Republicans in the north, but Smith managed to successfully squeak out a win over Charles Curtis Republican ticket partly by promising rearmament and sending troops to occupy Veracruz. Bolstered by the appearance of a strong stand on foreign affairs and by Norman Thomas Socialists weakening Curtis cause (Curtis also suffered from name-recognition problems, being a politician from, of all places, Kansas), Smith moved with what seemed to be decisiveness in the short run. American Marines provided the backbone of de la Huertas reorganized army, which smashed Calles anti-American (and, in a personal affront to Smith, anti-clerical) forces in the course of 1929. De la Huertas newly-stabilized Mexican federal government now existed effectively at the sufferance of the Americans. Secretary of State Franklin Roosevelt a protégé of Smiths from New York negotiated a treaty that would have put the McLane-Ocampo agreement to shame; Americans received rights in Mexico akin to the Chinese and Ottoman capitulations, control over police in most of the north of the country, extended control over Mexican oil fields, and the rights to several Mexican railroads and highways.
The Mexican intervention was the only organized American effort of the next several years, though. Smith still preferred to work things without sending in the Marines. He was unable to avoid that in 1930, when a Comunista-backed revolt flared up in southern Cuba. But American cash and arms were behind Perus successful suppression of the Aprista/Comunista civil war. And they bolstered the Chilean government when it was near to collapsing in 1929. This was all quite vanilla stuff, and arguably success stories for Smiths policy. But starting in 1930, the government started to take some serious hits. One of the worst famines in recorded history struck the southern part of the Great American Steppe, exacerbated by poor farming policies; the resulting Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, Kansas, and northern Texas (bad dust storms and famine troubled the entire steppe up to Saskatchewan and down to New Mexico, but centered on Oklahoma) ruined much of the American agricultural sector, along with the Plains economy, and caused a massive migration of some three million people. More poor harvests hit the agrarian southeast, which had been industrializing in fits and starts before capital began to dry up in the late 1920s. The depression that was beginning to seize the rest of the country was worst here and in the Rust Belt. Louisiana Governor Huey Long seized on this with a particularly appealing brand of populism; after destroying the Klan in his home state while constructing one of the most dominant political machines in the country, Long toured the country, espousing wealth-redistribution, agricultural-relief, and work-project schemes (rather similar, in their aggregate, to Mosleys ILPs platform) that won him followers around the country and inspired Smith to refer to him as the most dangerous man in America.
The worst hit of all was in foreign policy, though. Partly because of the Dust Bowl in Canada and partly because of ongoing poor Anglo-American relations, Prime Minister Leo Amery (who had taken control of the Conservative-Labour national government in 1928 with Chamberlains retirement) had begun to zero in on Argentina as a key supplier of agricultural foodstuffs to the UK. Argentinas Radical governments had leaned towards a special relationship with the British throughout their period of dominance. But the Comunistas began to upset the Radical political balance, while the military with significant amounts of German support began to toy with a coup to stabilize the situation. In October 1930, a Comunista-backed socialist organization bombed the Ministry of Finance in Buenos Aires, killing the British military attaché and provoking Amery to dispatch a fleet to the Rio de la Plata to bolster Hipólito Yrigoyens faltering Radical government. An outcry in the American press demanded that Smith force the British to withdraw, making hysterical assertions about the death of the Monroe Doctrine. But Smith backed down, provoking Secretary of State Roosevelt into resignation and spawning a historic collapse in the Democrats position in the House and Senate in the midterm elections a few weeks later.
Amery did not manage to enjoy the fruits of his intervention for long. A few months later, the great Arab Revolts of 1931 kicked off, seriously shaking (and in some cases toppling) the governments that the British and French had placed over the Middle East in 1919-20. Those governments relied on monarchs for the most part. The sharif of Mecca had gained a great deal by his cooperation with the British; his Hashimite family controlled thrones in Baghdad and ‘Amman in addition to the Hijazi emirate. In addition, Egypt remained a khedival state under its own native monarchy, although the khedive, Ahmad Fu’ad, claimed the title of malik (king) in 1924 with British approval. All of these states shared constitutions based on the 1831 Belgian constitution, deemed an acceptable balance between royal power and that of local notables, while offering a veneer of parliamentary structure to appease the British. In reality, most of the Hashimite rulers, and certainly the malik of Egypt, ruled without governments, embittering the local notables that, after the fashion of those in many European states in the previous century, yearned for political protagonism. All of the revolts had different causes, but all were at least somewhat related. Though no sort of pan-Arab nationalism existed – indeed, one of the key rebellions was staged by the Druze, who were hardly Arab at all – each of the Middle Eastern states provided an example to the others and acted as sort of a signpost to British (or French, as it were) policy in dealing with the local governments.
In Egypt, Fu’ad’s decision to govern without a government had stemmed largely from the success of the Wafd party at the elections. The Wafd, whose deified leader, Sa’d Zaghlul, was an icon of intransigence, stood for complete independence from British rule. It had flirted with German ties during the war, but nothing had come of them; with no makeweight and no room for agreement with Fu’ad, they were simply forced to remain out of government – their policy, it increasingly seemed, was more about “being” than “doing”. Hence it began to fragment significantly as the twenties wore on and its supporters increasingly demanded action, a process accelerated by Zaghlul’s death in 1926, but it was still the heavyweight in Egyptian politics up to 1930. Insofar as Egyptian nationalists among the electorate – a small electorate, dominated by the owners of the great Egyptian estates – had a coherent plan, it was to secure a new Anglo-Egyptian Treaty to formalize the relationship between the two and increase native autonomy. But the Wafd continued to block such a proposal, refusing to consider any sort of compromise on acceptable terms to the British, who generally considered the whole thing to be a massive headache and wanted it resolved. Fu’ad’s attempt to break the stalemate in 1930 precipitated a major crisis. To rewrite the constitution on more authoritarian lines, he brought in a Strafford, Isma’il Sidqi, but Sidqi’s confrontations with the press and the Wafd-led opposition were not successful, and he was forced to resign in December 1930, ostensibly on grounds of ill health. Within two weeks, demonstrations started in Cairo, with the Wafd showing unexpected muscle on the streets. Independence was an easy rallying cry to get behind. It was followed up by strikes in the major cities. Ultimately, the British intervened and put down the uprisings, but Fu’ad was forced to abdicate in favor of his ten-year-old son Faruq, whose ministers brought the Wafd into government.
More dramatic were the uprisings in Palestine, which had not received a monarchy. Instead, it had received Jews. Arthur Balfour had issued a White Paper in 1922 supporting Zionist efforts to settle increasing numbers of Jews in Palestine. The response had been a bit tepid, and ultimately came in waves, most frequently associated with Black Hundred-organized pogroms in Russia and American institutions of immigration quotas. As such, the majority of these immigrants – which were predominantly Eastern European, socialist, and Zionist – caused a dramatic shift in Palestinian Jewish politics by the late 1920s. Immigrants made up over half the population by 1930. Pragmatically, the British viewed the Jews as a potential pillar of the colonial government; their community, the Yishuv, received its own administration, the Jewish Agency, and effectively managed to govern itself. It even established its own private army, the Hagana, which numbered some 30,000 by 1930 (including both standing forces and reservists). The Yishuv’s preoccupation with its own affairs and developing the Jewish community in Palestine left it somewhat isolated from the rest of the regional populace.
Yet, initially, it was not the Jews that embittered the local Palestinians. Palestinian unrest did not coincide with the waves of Jewish immigration – indeed, it coincided with periods when immigration was low. Instead, local politics were the football of notable families, namely the Jerusalem clans of Husayn and Nashashib. In particular, the position of mufti of Jerusalem was a key prize under British rule, as the British, to save time, had made the mufti their key conduit with the Muslim Palestinian population. Only in 1929, with the beginning of a formal program of Jewish land purchase, did Palestinians begin to organize in clear opposition to the Yishuv. And then, they failed to seize political opportunities properly. The British offered the Palestinians a council with extremely limited power to advise the colonial government in administration; the Palestinians rejected it, unable to see that the council could be useful as a pressure point, or as a foot in the door. Ultimately, they were increasingly left with violent action as a recourse to the Jewish land purchase policy, and they resorted to it, beginning in October 1929 with the Wailing Wall riots and accelerating in March 1931 with a series of strikes and demonstrations. The notables desperately tried to gain control of the strikes to coordinate them, but the whole thing ended up dissolving in infighting; the British made things worse by firing on demonstrators in Nablus in the first week of April. By the early summer, the revolt could not be called anti-Zionist anymore; it had elements of anti-Zionism, true, but it also incorporated battles between village factions, running fights with the Christians and the Druze, social conflict between peasants and notables, garden-variety banditry, and simple bloody-mindedness. Rebels seized large portions of the rural West Bank and called for a general revolt. The call was unanswered, but outside the towns, British control remained tenuous to nonexistent.
The Syrian revolt had its origins earlier, as well; its start came with disturbances in the Jabal Druze. In 1927 a French officer had become governor of southern Syria and Lebanon and decided that the local notables were impeding efforts at rational reform to benefit the cultivating population. His efforts at reform drew the ire of those notables, who took their complaints to Damascus in 1929 only to be arrested for their trouble by Weygand’s new Popular Party officials. This sparked a general Druze uprising led by those local particularists, who demanded a Druze governor and the departure of the French garrison from the Jabal Druze. But the rebellion only smoldered for eighteen months, with the French unable to care enough to bring sufficient forces to bear against the Druze to defeat them. The rebellion gained new life in spring 1931 when the Palestinian rebellion got hot; in Damascus itself, a group of Syrians got together and formed a revolutionary committee that called for rebellion employing an odd cocktail of Revolutionary French rhetoric, exhortations to holy war, and Syrian nationalistic independence demands. With this distraction to draw the French away, the Druze gained ground in the south. Weygand was forced to commit nearly 50,000 troops to crush the rebellion, which Charles Huntziger, chief of the Army of the Levant, did in a workmanlike summer campaign. In the aftermath, Huntziger attempted to woo the Syrians with a constitutional convention, but the Syrian consensus demands were utterly unacceptable to the French, who gave Syria a constitution of their own in November, albeit one that removed virtually all power to the French military and civil governments. This was only a stopgap, and all parties knew it.
British efforts to deal with the Palestinian rebellion were significantly less violent. While initially leery of inviting intervention by foreign powers, British military weakness in the region induced Ramsay MacDonald, who held the colonial portfolio in the “national” government, to ask for the Hashimite rulers to call for a truce. This helped mitigate the violence initially and permit a general conference on the solution to the Palestinian disorders. A British commission report issued in September described the problems as intractable and called for partition, a solution rejected out of hand by the Arab representatives. Failure to compromise on partition made the revolt even worse, and by winter the British were forced to consider a military solution.
Problems in Japan rounded out the major crises in 1931. The country’s domestic response to the Eurasian War had been lukewarm at best – at least Korea had been taken, and a sphere of influence in southern China retained. But dissatisfaction over the result of the war remained: opportunities in Zhili and Manchuria had been squandered, as had the naval supremacy that Japan had maintained in the East until the end of the war. Public expenditures had been outrageous and the casualty list – especially after the Zhili Campaign – was frightful. Under such circumstances, the Japanese might have been best off under a stable government, or at least one with normal change-offs. But resentment over the war eventually turned to resentment at the genrō, the elder statesmen who more or less ran Japanese government with the Taishō Emperor in the condition he was in. In 1922, Hara Takashi became Japan’s first commoner Prime Minister ever, but did not last longer than eight months, and his was only the most notable in an on-again, off-again series of short-lived governments. Unlike the situation before the war, government instability resulted in a wildly inconsistent foreign policy, and increased tension at home; the depression resulting from the 1919 economic collapse made things decidedly worse, and discredited pretty much whoever was in power at the time.
By 1927, both the liberal Minseitō party – backed by an odd coalition of urban middle-class voters and Mitsubishi – and the militaristic Seiyūkai of the bureaucrats and genrō were in serious electoral trouble. Instead, other, more marginal groups gained support. The Comunista-backed Japanese Communist Party polled nearly a million voters in 1928 and was promptly banned and forced underground. But the challenge to Taishō democracy – which became Shōwa democracy in 1927 after the ascension of Prince Regent Hirohito to the throne – was arguably even stronger from the extreme right. The Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society, a reference to the Amur River), which began as a fringe group that advocated a resumption of war with Russia, alliance with Germany, and an end to rule by the Diet, had swelled to a two-million-member political party that commanded a significant minority in the legislature. In August 1931, its members tried their luck at a coup that briefly seized control of several government buildings in Tokyo before loyal army elements put it down. Yet opposition within the General Staff prevented a more thorough response and the society as a whole remained at large and unpunished – although when sympathetic members of the House of Peers boycotted the legislature a few months later, Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi took the opportunity to pass a measure granting women over the age of 25 the vote. Such small victories, however, meant little when the Kokuryūkai controlled such support.
The attempted coup inspired a few imitators in East Asia. Wu Peifu dissolved the Qing parliament for ‘security reasons’ in October after a failed putsch in Xi’an, and it did not meet again for the remainder of the year. Siam’s King Rama VII was temporarily overthrown by a group of paramilitaries (which had been organized by his late older brother and predecessor) before the French military mission in the capital put down the rebellion and restored him to power. The Republic of China was perhaps the most stable of the East Asiatic states under the rule of the near-deified President Song Qingling; the real danger for the Guomindang had passed in 1929 when efforts at land reform prompted a reactionary putsch that was put down by Sun Liren and loyalist army elements, which took the opportunity to purge the army of the late Jiang’s remaining cronies. The worry, however, was that Sun himself might be becoming too independently minded, even Weygandist, as the accusations went. Such fears were groundless in 1931, but they might not remain that way for long.
Yet outside of those hotspots, the wider world remained relatively calm, almost suspiciously so; there were no Great Power confrontations, even though there were ample opportunities for such – a Russo-Finnish border incident, an Iberian fighter flight missing over the Western Mediterranean, a rash of bombings in São Paulo that put the German ambassador in harm’s way. It was clear to all that 1932 would be a year likely to alter the course of history – presidential elections in France and the United States pending, along with a key Guomindang party congress and a British general election. The Middle East remained an open sore, and India only slightly less so. But a great statesman, a Bismarck or a Katō, can turn crisis to an advantage – and there were plenty of would-be Bismarcks ready to make their mark in 1932.
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This is the end of the narrative section of the TL. I'll be making a final "overview" or "snapshot" installment to provide the equivalent of nation backgrounds and to sum up topics like the naval arms race and the world economic situation. And, also, to provide the final map. Phew.
Comments, criticism...yada yada yada, you know the drill, I love it when you talk to me.
In Egypt, Fu’ad’s decision to govern without a government had stemmed largely from the success of the Wafd party at the elections. The Wafd, whose deified leader, Sa’d Zaghlul, was an icon of intransigence, stood for complete independence from British rule. It had flirted with German ties during the war, but nothing had come of them; with no makeweight and no room for agreement with Fu’ad, they were simply forced to remain out of government – their policy, it increasingly seemed, was more about “being” than “doing”. Hence it began to fragment significantly as the twenties wore on and its supporters increasingly demanded action, a process accelerated by Zaghlul’s death in 1926, but it was still the heavyweight in Egyptian politics up to 1930. Insofar as Egyptian nationalists among the electorate – a small electorate, dominated by the owners of the great Egyptian estates – had a coherent plan, it was to secure a new Anglo-Egyptian Treaty to formalize the relationship between the two and increase native autonomy. But the Wafd continued to block such a proposal, refusing to consider any sort of compromise on acceptable terms to the British, who generally considered the whole thing to be a massive headache and wanted it resolved. Fu’ad’s attempt to break the stalemate in 1930 precipitated a major crisis. To rewrite the constitution on more authoritarian lines, he brought in a Strafford, Isma’il Sidqi, but Sidqi’s confrontations with the press and the Wafd-led opposition were not successful, and he was forced to resign in December 1930, ostensibly on grounds of ill health. Within two weeks, demonstrations started in Cairo, with the Wafd showing unexpected muscle on the streets. Independence was an easy rallying cry to get behind. It was followed up by strikes in the major cities. Ultimately, the British intervened and put down the uprisings, but Fu’ad was forced to abdicate in favor of his ten-year-old son Faruq, whose ministers brought the Wafd into government.
More dramatic were the uprisings in Palestine, which had not received a monarchy. Instead, it had received Jews. Arthur Balfour had issued a White Paper in 1922 supporting Zionist efforts to settle increasing numbers of Jews in Palestine. The response had been a bit tepid, and ultimately came in waves, most frequently associated with Black Hundred-organized pogroms in Russia and American institutions of immigration quotas. As such, the majority of these immigrants – which were predominantly Eastern European, socialist, and Zionist – caused a dramatic shift in Palestinian Jewish politics by the late 1920s. Immigrants made up over half the population by 1930. Pragmatically, the British viewed the Jews as a potential pillar of the colonial government; their community, the Yishuv, received its own administration, the Jewish Agency, and effectively managed to govern itself. It even established its own private army, the Hagana, which numbered some 30,000 by 1930 (including both standing forces and reservists). The Yishuv’s preoccupation with its own affairs and developing the Jewish community in Palestine left it somewhat isolated from the rest of the regional populace.
Yet, initially, it was not the Jews that embittered the local Palestinians. Palestinian unrest did not coincide with the waves of Jewish immigration – indeed, it coincided with periods when immigration was low. Instead, local politics were the football of notable families, namely the Jerusalem clans of Husayn and Nashashib. In particular, the position of mufti of Jerusalem was a key prize under British rule, as the British, to save time, had made the mufti their key conduit with the Muslim Palestinian population. Only in 1929, with the beginning of a formal program of Jewish land purchase, did Palestinians begin to organize in clear opposition to the Yishuv. And then, they failed to seize political opportunities properly. The British offered the Palestinians a council with extremely limited power to advise the colonial government in administration; the Palestinians rejected it, unable to see that the council could be useful as a pressure point, or as a foot in the door. Ultimately, they were increasingly left with violent action as a recourse to the Jewish land purchase policy, and they resorted to it, beginning in October 1929 with the Wailing Wall riots and accelerating in March 1931 with a series of strikes and demonstrations. The notables desperately tried to gain control of the strikes to coordinate them, but the whole thing ended up dissolving in infighting; the British made things worse by firing on demonstrators in Nablus in the first week of April. By the early summer, the revolt could not be called anti-Zionist anymore; it had elements of anti-Zionism, true, but it also incorporated battles between village factions, running fights with the Christians and the Druze, social conflict between peasants and notables, garden-variety banditry, and simple bloody-mindedness. Rebels seized large portions of the rural West Bank and called for a general revolt. The call was unanswered, but outside the towns, British control remained tenuous to nonexistent.
The Syrian revolt had its origins earlier, as well; its start came with disturbances in the Jabal Druze. In 1927 a French officer had become governor of southern Syria and Lebanon and decided that the local notables were impeding efforts at rational reform to benefit the cultivating population. His efforts at reform drew the ire of those notables, who took their complaints to Damascus in 1929 only to be arrested for their trouble by Weygand’s new Popular Party officials. This sparked a general Druze uprising led by those local particularists, who demanded a Druze governor and the departure of the French garrison from the Jabal Druze. But the rebellion only smoldered for eighteen months, with the French unable to care enough to bring sufficient forces to bear against the Druze to defeat them. The rebellion gained new life in spring 1931 when the Palestinian rebellion got hot; in Damascus itself, a group of Syrians got together and formed a revolutionary committee that called for rebellion employing an odd cocktail of Revolutionary French rhetoric, exhortations to holy war, and Syrian nationalistic independence demands. With this distraction to draw the French away, the Druze gained ground in the south. Weygand was forced to commit nearly 50,000 troops to crush the rebellion, which Charles Huntziger, chief of the Army of the Levant, did in a workmanlike summer campaign. In the aftermath, Huntziger attempted to woo the Syrians with a constitutional convention, but the Syrian consensus demands were utterly unacceptable to the French, who gave Syria a constitution of their own in November, albeit one that removed virtually all power to the French military and civil governments. This was only a stopgap, and all parties knew it.
British efforts to deal with the Palestinian rebellion were significantly less violent. While initially leery of inviting intervention by foreign powers, British military weakness in the region induced Ramsay MacDonald, who held the colonial portfolio in the “national” government, to ask for the Hashimite rulers to call for a truce. This helped mitigate the violence initially and permit a general conference on the solution to the Palestinian disorders. A British commission report issued in September described the problems as intractable and called for partition, a solution rejected out of hand by the Arab representatives. Failure to compromise on partition made the revolt even worse, and by winter the British were forced to consider a military solution.
Problems in Japan rounded out the major crises in 1931. The country’s domestic response to the Eurasian War had been lukewarm at best – at least Korea had been taken, and a sphere of influence in southern China retained. But dissatisfaction over the result of the war remained: opportunities in Zhili and Manchuria had been squandered, as had the naval supremacy that Japan had maintained in the East until the end of the war. Public expenditures had been outrageous and the casualty list – especially after the Zhili Campaign – was frightful. Under such circumstances, the Japanese might have been best off under a stable government, or at least one with normal change-offs. But resentment over the war eventually turned to resentment at the genrō, the elder statesmen who more or less ran Japanese government with the Taishō Emperor in the condition he was in. In 1922, Hara Takashi became Japan’s first commoner Prime Minister ever, but did not last longer than eight months, and his was only the most notable in an on-again, off-again series of short-lived governments. Unlike the situation before the war, government instability resulted in a wildly inconsistent foreign policy, and increased tension at home; the depression resulting from the 1919 economic collapse made things decidedly worse, and discredited pretty much whoever was in power at the time.
By 1927, both the liberal Minseitō party – backed by an odd coalition of urban middle-class voters and Mitsubishi – and the militaristic Seiyūkai of the bureaucrats and genrō were in serious electoral trouble. Instead, other, more marginal groups gained support. The Comunista-backed Japanese Communist Party polled nearly a million voters in 1928 and was promptly banned and forced underground. But the challenge to Taishō democracy – which became Shōwa democracy in 1927 after the ascension of Prince Regent Hirohito to the throne – was arguably even stronger from the extreme right. The Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society, a reference to the Amur River), which began as a fringe group that advocated a resumption of war with Russia, alliance with Germany, and an end to rule by the Diet, had swelled to a two-million-member political party that commanded a significant minority in the legislature. In August 1931, its members tried their luck at a coup that briefly seized control of several government buildings in Tokyo before loyal army elements put it down. Yet opposition within the General Staff prevented a more thorough response and the society as a whole remained at large and unpunished – although when sympathetic members of the House of Peers boycotted the legislature a few months later, Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi took the opportunity to pass a measure granting women over the age of 25 the vote. Such small victories, however, meant little when the Kokuryūkai controlled such support.
The attempted coup inspired a few imitators in East Asia. Wu Peifu dissolved the Qing parliament for ‘security reasons’ in October after a failed putsch in Xi’an, and it did not meet again for the remainder of the year. Siam’s King Rama VII was temporarily overthrown by a group of paramilitaries (which had been organized by his late older brother and predecessor) before the French military mission in the capital put down the rebellion and restored him to power. The Republic of China was perhaps the most stable of the East Asiatic states under the rule of the near-deified President Song Qingling; the real danger for the Guomindang had passed in 1929 when efforts at land reform prompted a reactionary putsch that was put down by Sun Liren and loyalist army elements, which took the opportunity to purge the army of the late Jiang’s remaining cronies. The worry, however, was that Sun himself might be becoming too independently minded, even Weygandist, as the accusations went. Such fears were groundless in 1931, but they might not remain that way for long.
Yet outside of those hotspots, the wider world remained relatively calm, almost suspiciously so; there were no Great Power confrontations, even though there were ample opportunities for such – a Russo-Finnish border incident, an Iberian fighter flight missing over the Western Mediterranean, a rash of bombings in São Paulo that put the German ambassador in harm’s way. It was clear to all that 1932 would be a year likely to alter the course of history – presidential elections in France and the United States pending, along with a key Guomindang party congress and a British general election. The Middle East remained an open sore, and India only slightly less so. But a great statesman, a Bismarck or a Katō, can turn crisis to an advantage – and there were plenty of would-be Bismarcks ready to make their mark in 1932.
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This is the end of the narrative section of the TL. I'll be making a final "overview" or "snapshot" installment to provide the equivalent of nation backgrounds and to sum up topics like the naval arms race and the world economic situation. And, also, to provide the final map. Phew.
Comments, criticism...yada yada yada, you know the drill, I love it when you talk to me.
I don't understand why the Qing would have returned to pre-war borders after a war in which they apparently were doing quite well in spite of some setbacks. Extensive European pressure? Also, was the Dust Bowl milder, or worse than OTL?
Really excited for the NES
EDIT: Stupid, stupid, question edited out.
Really excited for the NES
EDIT: Stupid, stupid, question edited out.
Wrymouth3
Emperor
This is an awesome thread. I apologize if I may have missed it, but what's going on in the Caribbean? Considering this is almost when El Jefe comes along in the Dominican in OTL
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Welcome to NESing, Wry. Given that you seem to like alternate history, hope you stay around.
das
Regeneration In Process
Read; APPROV'D. I think I'll wait for the overview for any comments; as is, I don't have much to say. I think your... rollbacks of certain events were quite appropriate in retrospect.
Kraznaya
Princeps
soooooo
what's ma bufang up to
what's ma bufang up to
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