Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
@KingSweden24 didn’t specify which branch of Hapsburg gonna survive though, he could just mean Mexican monarchy is still going strong in TTL 2024, which we already know.
Oh thank god(Literally! Gotta stand up for my good Catholic monarchs
)! I'm always sick of seeing the Habsburgs collapse in every timeline. I've long wondered if we don't see Austria and Hungary split between two different branches of the family. Franz Ferdinand faces exile, yes, but you see a more Magyarphile member of the dynasty on the throne of Hungary, while FF's heir is left to rule over a rump Austria and attached lands. THAT would be something we haven't seen before, and would actually be rather fascinating. (and a Hungarian Habsburg has been set up a bit by the argument that, since FF wasn't coronated in Budapest, he effectively abdicated his role as King of Hungary. I'm sure there's a dynast somewhere in the chain of succession who'd be more than happy to take up his responsibilities - especially if FF can't stop them due to 1) losing a war and 2) living out the rest of his life as a cherished guest in Mexico City).There's certainly some bad blood between the Hungarian nationalists and the Habsburgs at this point; but I suspect there's still a good part of the population that is loyalist, and if the right candidate can be found, and he works on it, such bad feelings can be mollified over time (especially if he accept a strong Parliament and a slightly more ceremonial role of course).
And Nice, and Corsica, and Bohemia, and Carniola...
As well, would Britain and Russia be as opposed to maximalist Italian gains versus maximalist German ones? Personally, I think not...
Well, I think Austrian opinion would be pretty complex, at least as long as the Germans don't go apeshit during the occupation, which they don't really have a reason for. Some people would blame the Germans, but I think the Royal Family will be blamed the most. Compared to OTL WW1, this war will likely be extremely unpopular in the Empire, while avenging the murder of Franz Ferdinand was something most people could get behind. Here, it'll likely be a combination of their own internal instability and tagging along with the Belgians and the French, which is not nearly as inspiring and unifying.
Add to this that the Habsburgs are already starting the war worse off in terms of image (instead of a a figure of stability and longevity like Franz Joseph, you got Franz Ferdinand whose made blunder after blunder), and an Empire already looking shaky, and I'm extremely skeptical of the odds of the Habsburgs being accepted in Austria. Even OTL no one seriously entertained they idea of a restoration, unlike Germany where the conservatives were generally pro-return to the monarchy.
There's also the fact that Austria, in something like its current borders, wasn't considered a viable state back then. Territorial losses within the German-speaking areas will only inflame this sentiment. While of course, considering it's nowadays a perfectly fine state, that notion was not quite true, it was alive during much of the interwar years, and pretty much any economic crisis will give it credence. I could also see some people aspiring to get back the lost territories by joining them inside Germany.
I also disagree on Germany not jumping at the chance of getting another 10 million people at a time when demographics and population growth were considered key in Great Power games (see: Germany's concerns when it came to Russia, and France's concerns when it came to Germany) at the price of maybe putting down a few rebellions until people get used to it, but we've already had this discussion.
Republic Reborn
"...portrayal in many Yankee newspapers, particularly ones sympathetic to Liberals, as a "total surrender" - Henry Cabot Lodge, the grand champion of antislavery causes both before and after the war, was particularly pilloried, most viciously in his home state of Massachusetts, where the abolitionist, Negro-owned and edited Boston Lantern periodical savaged him as "a supine coward, a liar who spoke out of both ends of his mouth on the criticality of the noble cause of the eradication of slave economy, who fooled us all when he cited it time and time again as the most important moral crusade of our time."
Though Lodge only had himself to blame for appearing to make a remarkable volte face on the question of never conceding an inch on the question of slavery, the decision by Root to demand Lodge extend recognition to the Republic of Texas was born instead out of pragmatism rather than righteousness or surrender. Root was firmly in the abolitionist camp and supported the continued line in the sand of giving no compromise to what little national government the Confederacy had left until its amendment for total and permanent emancipation was passed, but he had never been identified as one of the movement's key figures, and the circumstances of spring and summer 1916 had proven to him that Texas, its Republican leadership in particular, was not Vardamanite Dixie. Texas was not an ally but it was also not an enemy; there was no serious discussion of prolonging Yankee occupation of border towns in Texas, in particular Wichita Falls, and there was zero appetite of pushing deeper into the Second Republic to occupy Dallas again or other major cities again. Formal recognition that with it explicitly outlined that there was no state of war was no carrot to give, and changed no facts on the ground, and for a Root administration that was increasingly about as popular as leprosy, anything to continue moving to a point where they could credibly say that the postwar settlements were consolidating was a win.
It was also the case that slavery in Texas had collapsed almost as much as elsewhere in Dixie; as many as eighty percent of the prewar state's enslaved population had either been freed by Yankee soldiers or their masters, been evacuated to the Confederacy as order collapsed, or simply fled their bondage to freedmen's colonies across Texas' vastness or into the United States, with a notable population of free Texas-born Negroes having consolidated in Albuquerque, New Mexico and a smaller, similar community in the south of Denver. The state that already had the highest proportion of free people of color in the Confederacy behind only Louisiana was not some slaveholding holdout, and especially with the Law of Free Birth passed in 1917 to mollify the United States, more had been done proactively in Austin than in any Confederate capital that was not done under armed duress.
As such, on May 10, 1918, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Texas as a sovereign state, via a Congressional vote rather than a simple exchange of ministers and diplomatic formalities. The vote was narrower than Root would have hoped for on such a perfunctory move, but it nonetheless suggested even a friendly United States Congress that was exhausted by maximalist goals from men like Lodge. Countries like Argentina and Peru followed the American lead shortly thereafter, and last European holdouts like Italy or Spain did as well.
For President Gore, this was the endgame he had sought since inauguration day in December 1916 - Yankee recognition considerably reduced the threat of Loyalist Texan organizing in New Orleans against the Republic, because he was confident that the United States would intervene militarily in the event of the Confederacy attempting to re-absorb Texas by force. Flags flew, the revised "Yellow Rose of Texas" was sung and played, and barbecues were held - the greatest impediment to Texan sovereignty had been seen off, and the continued consolidation of the Republic beckoned..."
- Republic Reborn
Though Lodge only had himself to blame for appearing to make a remarkable volte face on the question of never conceding an inch on the question of slavery, the decision by Root to demand Lodge extend recognition to the Republic of Texas was born instead out of pragmatism rather than righteousness or surrender. Root was firmly in the abolitionist camp and supported the continued line in the sand of giving no compromise to what little national government the Confederacy had left until its amendment for total and permanent emancipation was passed, but he had never been identified as one of the movement's key figures, and the circumstances of spring and summer 1916 had proven to him that Texas, its Republican leadership in particular, was not Vardamanite Dixie. Texas was not an ally but it was also not an enemy; there was no serious discussion of prolonging Yankee occupation of border towns in Texas, in particular Wichita Falls, and there was zero appetite of pushing deeper into the Second Republic to occupy Dallas again or other major cities again. Formal recognition that with it explicitly outlined that there was no state of war was no carrot to give, and changed no facts on the ground, and for a Root administration that was increasingly about as popular as leprosy, anything to continue moving to a point where they could credibly say that the postwar settlements were consolidating was a win.
It was also the case that slavery in Texas had collapsed almost as much as elsewhere in Dixie; as many as eighty percent of the prewar state's enslaved population had either been freed by Yankee soldiers or their masters, been evacuated to the Confederacy as order collapsed, or simply fled their bondage to freedmen's colonies across Texas' vastness or into the United States, with a notable population of free Texas-born Negroes having consolidated in Albuquerque, New Mexico and a smaller, similar community in the south of Denver. The state that already had the highest proportion of free people of color in the Confederacy behind only Louisiana was not some slaveholding holdout, and especially with the Law of Free Birth passed in 1917 to mollify the United States, more had been done proactively in Austin than in any Confederate capital that was not done under armed duress.
As such, on May 10, 1918, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Texas as a sovereign state, via a Congressional vote rather than a simple exchange of ministers and diplomatic formalities. The vote was narrower than Root would have hoped for on such a perfunctory move, but it nonetheless suggested even a friendly United States Congress that was exhausted by maximalist goals from men like Lodge. Countries like Argentina and Peru followed the American lead shortly thereafter, and last European holdouts like Italy or Spain did as well.
For President Gore, this was the endgame he had sought since inauguration day in December 1916 - Yankee recognition considerably reduced the threat of Loyalist Texan organizing in New Orleans against the Republic, because he was confident that the United States would intervene militarily in the event of the Confederacy attempting to re-absorb Texas by force. Flags flew, the revised "Yellow Rose of Texas" was sung and played, and barbecues were held - the greatest impediment to Texan sovereignty had been seen off, and the continued consolidation of the Republic beckoned..."
- Republic Reborn
Lol, true, though that isn't what I was referring to, haha.
Monarchies across Europe are a lot more hostile to republicanism than IOTL; the appetite for the Hohenzollerns to just punt the Habsburgs, what with their thousand years of monarchic legitimacy, will be next to zero. Just because Ferdinand is tossing his personal prestige into the woodchipper doesn't mean the whole family is.
What I'm getting at, I guess, is that not having Third Republic France and Fourteen Points USA onboard as combatants makes a huge difference for eventual settlements.
This is definitely asking the right questions and thinking in the right direction.Oh thank god(Literally! Gotta stand up for my good Catholic monarchs
There's certainly some bad blood between the Hungarian nationalists and the Habsburgs at this point; but I suspect there's still a good part of the population that is loyalist, and if the right candidate can be found, and he works on it, such bad feelings can be mollified over time (especially if he accept a strong Parliament and a slightly more ceremonial role of course).
Haha well, you know, I thought those two were a given...
Bingo. Thiccaly scares Britain (and obviously Russia) way less than a maximalist Germany.
Very true
Austria's perceived viability won't be as much of an issue iTTL, though I'll get to that later.
@KingSweden24 Amazing new chapter! The yankee's have a long way to go but they will walk that path.
ITTL, as of 1914? No such thing, there are no republics on the European continent (depends on how you count Switzerland, of course)
There's potential for Thiccaly to cause problems for Russia eventually if they become competition for influence in the Balkans but that's definitely not a thing they'd foresee and would only be obvious with hindsight (IMO, anyways). Plus far below in the threat list compared to maximalist Germany.
Switzerland counts as "not a monarchy". Switzerland will be in an interesting place being the connection between allies in both direction, but I think there are enough powerful neutrals that would be annoyed at trying to use Switzerland as a cut through that it should be OK.
The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...affected young people more so than the elderly, a rare turn for an influenza. This was a particularly grim circumstance for war-torn Dixie, where despite mass famine being mostly avoided in 1917 and the start of 1918 - indeed, the second year of occupation saw something approximating a relatively normal planting season for food staple crops, at least at a local level - protein intake was dangerously low, and starvation was still hugely common and surviving veterans and civilians alike were gaunt, hungry, and often sick already due to poor sanitation and hygiene.
The "Dixie flu" that erupted perhaps as early as December of 1917 in central Arkansas but peaked in its deadly, horrific first wave in March and April of 1918 thus ran rampant through the depleted country. By the end of April, bodies had to be burned in fields because not only was there widespread fear of catching "the bug" from dead bodies, but there was also insufficient room in Dixie's already-stuffed mortuaries. Hillboy violence decreased markedly for the span of a few months, not because the Army was getting any better at interceding against them, but because many of them were too sick to fight and in their backwoods strongholds and hideouts, they lacked proper medicine. General Harbord, in his occupation district covering Alabama, Georgia and Florida, wrote back to Philadelphia about a particularly spectacular case in which a patrol had found a hillboy compound tucked in the Appalachian foothills with light artillery acting as a cannonade and a sophisticated arms depot - and near everyone inside of it dead, or too ill to fight.
Tamed as the insurgency might have briefly been by the devastation of the Great Influenza of 1918, it posed a number of problems for the occupation, most notably that viral strains do not recognize borders, and by the time the severity of the outbreak was clear in early April, it had already entered the United States several times over. The Army closed guarded border crossings with the CSA, Texas and Sequoyah on April 8th, and ended the ability of soldiers to go on leave in Cincinnati, St. Louis or Baltimore; on April 20th, an even stricter quarantine policy was imposed, mandating thirty days of isolation in specially-built medical facilities on the borders for soldiers being discharged and returned from duty permanently. This had the grimly ironic effect of simply exposing even more men to the virus than potentially otherwise could have happened, and did little to stop its spread through American cities for much of the spring.
The death toll of the spring 1918 wave was fairly small, though the number of sick people, especially children, was noticeable enough that many schools and universities shuttered their doors, and many factories had to run on reduced shifts to prevent their entire workforce from catching the flu, fully killing whatever recovery from the depression of 1917 may have been showing green shoots by then. The fall 1918 wave was indeed bigger and deadlier in the United States (it was about as bad in Dixie as it had been in the spring) and by then had spread to Canada and Europe, where the 1918-19 influenza season was regarded as remarkably and unusually severe, though still well short of the apocalyptic 1890-92 pandemic. [1] Island countries in the Pacific such as Fiji, Hawaii and Australia and Japan closed their borders for much of 1918, preventing the flu from having much impact there; across Asia, tens of millions died. What impact this "Great Influenza" had on the outbreak of war in 1919 between Germany, France, Austria and Italy is unclear, but an irritated, angry European population after a deadly pandemic certainly may have been a factor.
Local authorities largely did what they could to combat the flu, restricting public gatherings throughout the fall and even sometimes going so far as to close churches and other public businesses (saloons in particular were a popular target for prohibitionists angry they had not gotten everything they sought in the Liquor Control Act). These endeavors were, for a war-weary populace that had already been denied "normalcy" promised to them by the Root campaign in 1916, hugely unpopular and frequently flouted even despite the high-social trust culture of the times, and compounded all of Root's political problems more severely.
Still, the United States may not have gotten off as easy as Europe, but despite crammed factories and immigrant tenements becoming a breeding ground of airborne death, it did not further gut the country in the way it did in Dixie - and as socially divisive as the influenza's knock-on effects were in the moment, nothing like the conspiratorial rhetoric about the curiously and measurably lower incidence of infection and death amongst Dixie's Negro population ever took root north of the Ohio to poison public discourse further..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
[1] Essentially, the Spanish flu is way less devastating in Europe by not coming on the heels of four years of war, famine, and other diseases.
The "Dixie flu" that erupted perhaps as early as December of 1917 in central Arkansas but peaked in its deadly, horrific first wave in March and April of 1918 thus ran rampant through the depleted country. By the end of April, bodies had to be burned in fields because not only was there widespread fear of catching "the bug" from dead bodies, but there was also insufficient room in Dixie's already-stuffed mortuaries. Hillboy violence decreased markedly for the span of a few months, not because the Army was getting any better at interceding against them, but because many of them were too sick to fight and in their backwoods strongholds and hideouts, they lacked proper medicine. General Harbord, in his occupation district covering Alabama, Georgia and Florida, wrote back to Philadelphia about a particularly spectacular case in which a patrol had found a hillboy compound tucked in the Appalachian foothills with light artillery acting as a cannonade and a sophisticated arms depot - and near everyone inside of it dead, or too ill to fight.
Tamed as the insurgency might have briefly been by the devastation of the Great Influenza of 1918, it posed a number of problems for the occupation, most notably that viral strains do not recognize borders, and by the time the severity of the outbreak was clear in early April, it had already entered the United States several times over. The Army closed guarded border crossings with the CSA, Texas and Sequoyah on April 8th, and ended the ability of soldiers to go on leave in Cincinnati, St. Louis or Baltimore; on April 20th, an even stricter quarantine policy was imposed, mandating thirty days of isolation in specially-built medical facilities on the borders for soldiers being discharged and returned from duty permanently. This had the grimly ironic effect of simply exposing even more men to the virus than potentially otherwise could have happened, and did little to stop its spread through American cities for much of the spring.
The death toll of the spring 1918 wave was fairly small, though the number of sick people, especially children, was noticeable enough that many schools and universities shuttered their doors, and many factories had to run on reduced shifts to prevent their entire workforce from catching the flu, fully killing whatever recovery from the depression of 1917 may have been showing green shoots by then. The fall 1918 wave was indeed bigger and deadlier in the United States (it was about as bad in Dixie as it had been in the spring) and by then had spread to Canada and Europe, where the 1918-19 influenza season was regarded as remarkably and unusually severe, though still well short of the apocalyptic 1890-92 pandemic. [1] Island countries in the Pacific such as Fiji, Hawaii and Australia and Japan closed their borders for much of 1918, preventing the flu from having much impact there; across Asia, tens of millions died. What impact this "Great Influenza" had on the outbreak of war in 1919 between Germany, France, Austria and Italy is unclear, but an irritated, angry European population after a deadly pandemic certainly may have been a factor.
Local authorities largely did what they could to combat the flu, restricting public gatherings throughout the fall and even sometimes going so far as to close churches and other public businesses (saloons in particular were a popular target for prohibitionists angry they had not gotten everything they sought in the Liquor Control Act). These endeavors were, for a war-weary populace that had already been denied "normalcy" promised to them by the Root campaign in 1916, hugely unpopular and frequently flouted even despite the high-social trust culture of the times, and compounded all of Root's political problems more severely.
Still, the United States may not have gotten off as easy as Europe, but despite crammed factories and immigrant tenements becoming a breeding ground of airborne death, it did not further gut the country in the way it did in Dixie - and as socially divisive as the influenza's knock-on effects were in the moment, nothing like the conspiratorial rhetoric about the curiously and measurably lower incidence of infection and death amongst Dixie's Negro population ever took root north of the Ohio to poison public discourse further..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
[1] Essentially, the Spanish flu is way less devastating in Europe by not coming on the heels of four years of war, famine, and other diseases.
Wow, you've been busy these last few days! Not that I'm complaining - you have me excited for the start of the CEW now less than a year away...
Tyrol or better South Tyrol depend on arrangement with Germany and the precise border, Savoy can be left to France even if it cost political currency as is not a great irredentist claim and more an historical one, Istria well not even if the Uk and Russia menace war will be left to whatever nation take the place of of the Hapsburg Empire, too much important and there is the risk of revolution if they cede to Anglo-Russian pressure same for Nice and Corsica, Dalmatia can be divided but Rome will want at least some piece and Fiume well depend on the arrangment but i expect that will be not annexed due to the importance as port for the succesor state.
In general while both London and St. Petersburg will try to make the final peace treaty more compliant with their interest, well too much pressure and the Italian German alliance will survive the war and will look at UK and Russia as the new enemy and expecially Russia need to take in consideration minority like the Poles that will see the changes in the balkans and dream of a polish nation
An excellent point
It'll be ever more a den of spies as it is an important transit point, especially for German coal to Italy
I'm house-sitting this week and "working" remotely so lots of time to crank out 1918! Lol.
Indeed. Trentino is of course obvious, maybe parts of Savoy rather than all of it... and Zara (the city at least) is particularly low hanging fruit in Dalmatia, especially with Italy's influence in Montenegro making Cattoro an available port to them.
Istria, Nica and Corsica? Zero question.
Don't read official British Government publications to see which side lean toward in the CEW, see how willing the Royal Navy is to protect Coal shipments from Bristow to Naples. Probably more difficult to read the Ukrainian wheat contracts in terms of Russian Government opinions.
It will also be interesting in terms of the original "triangles" to see how much wheat for France gets shipped through Bilbao, Spain.
Socialism and Europe
"...few would have expected that Portugal, of all places, would be where a socialist party would enter government for the first time, but this misunderstands a number of factors, first among them the moderate influences on Portuguese socialism, and Iberian socialism more generally, due to the Proudhonist tradition of Spanish (and, by proxy, Portuguese), radicalism.
With the exception of Russia, Spain and Portugal had spent much of the 19th century regarded (if not outright dismissed, as in Napoleon's huffy comment that "Africa begins at the Pyrenees") [1] as Europe's impoverished, autocratic backwaters, countries that had peaked at the height of the Age of Discovery and, particularly in the wake of the collapse of their colonial empires, broken polities running on fumes economically and fueled by nostalgia, kept gripped tight by the firm hand of the Church and landed aristocracy. Both had been gripped by violent wars between political liberals and conservatives, with Spain's dance with personalism and instability concluding with the Glorious Revolution of 1868 led by moderate and progressive nobles and military officers who imposed a constitutional democracy with clearly delineated powers and invited in a new royal family, the German Hohenzollerns, to sustain it. While this experiment in Spanish democracy had been highly imperfect and indeed faced many of the same institutional problems that the Bourbons before had, particularly in rural areas, it nonetheless had delivered an internal stability that Spain had not experienced in decades.
Portugal, conversely, had never suffered from quite the decadal debacles of Spain and reformed more gradually under the Braganzas, but by the end of the 19th century was regarded as one of Europe's financial basket cases, frequently suffering defaults on her British-held debt and unable to maintain her vast and expensive African empire, and with the country increasingly run by two tired, revolving parties of the liberal and traditionalist right, resembling a closed oligarchy which became associated with not just the Church and nobility but the entire concept of monarchy itself. As such, the 1912 revolutions had nearly struck in Portugal, and the 1916 debt default had led to the King's abdication and the seizure of her African territories by Britain and Germany, an act that served to destabilize European politics and helped lead to the Central European War.
What both countries shared was a relatively small industrial base (much more so an issue in Portugal than in Spain) and a radical tradition that had been fundamentally anarchist as early as the 1870s and had always associated republicanism as an end to itself, particularly the appeal of anticlerical opposition to the Church's foundational role in a monarchical system. As such, bourgeoise radicalism for educated, urban middle classes sustained itself much more so than working class agitation, which was far more limited, and often steered by these bourgeoise radical progressives, who themselves rejected socialism as gauche. The revolution would not come from the labor movement in a place like Portugal, in other words, but rather from the literati. This posed a problem for middle class figures who found all these ideas fine in theory but started to balk once the extent to which their fellow republicans sought to reorder an already-fragile state became apparent, and also for the Socialist Party of Portugal, a relatively small though quickly growing outfit which was already badly split between its moderate faction and its syndicalist faction, particularly after the 1907 death of its longtime leader and co-founder, Azedo Gneco. [2]
Luis II, the Portuguese King, was determined to make significant changes to Portugal, and not just in light of his narrow personal interests of the survival of the monarchy. [3] Luis had been educated in Portugal, but he was thoroughly Anglophile in a way others in his family were not, in part out of genuine personal affinity for the country and in part thanks to his British wife, herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Though the marriage had been initially negotiated, it had been sealed out of true affection, and Luis was an honest, loyal husband to his wife, whom he doted on especially with the knowledge that formal, conservative Lisbon was not always to her liking. Queen Patricia's influence was clear - she encouraged him to pursue his interests in painting, geography and writing - but she had become unpopular with the Portuguese street after the "British betrayal" in which Austral-Africa was lost.
Luis was thus on a mission to restore the prestige of the monarchy, and also undo the tremendous cultural, economic and political stagnation of Portugal that had begun under his grandfather and namesake and continued under his father. As Britain was a country of great stability and wealth, and a successful constitutional monarchy, Luis looked to London as an example, and even though he knew that he would fall well shy of the United Kingdom, if he merely arrived at something approximating Hohenzollern Spain, he would have a successful reign. As such, when he called elections for June of 1918, they were the first elections called of his reign and thought to potentially be the first genuinely open elections in Portugal's history, with the Renovator and Progressist parties having all but collapsed.
In many ways, this was a dangerous gamble on the part of Luis, for the largest party in the country, by far, was the Republican. The "Crime of 1916," as Portuguese referred to the Malcolm-Jagow Agreement to split up Austral-Africa, had reenergized what had before 1912 been a flagging group losing popular support (or at least not gaining any). [4] Republican paramilitaries operated largely undeterred across much of the Lisbon area, in particular the Carbonaria, led by the secretive Manuel Buica and which had nearly successfully assassinated the king two years earlier in the wake of Malcolm-Jagow. Figures of the radical anticlerical left such as Afonso Costa gave long, stemwinding speeches across the country where they advocated for the abdication of the King and the imposition of a Republic; even fairly conservative figures such as Antonio Jose de Almeida had joined the call, as had opportunist figures such as the retired general Sidonio Pais, whose ideological orientation was often hard to entirely deduce. The Republicans were, crucially, not an illegal party - in his efforts to pursue a genuine settlement on the questions facing Portugal and give the 1918 elections a legitimacy that the old duopolistic oligarchy had not and could never, Luis would leave no group banned from the polls, a decision that suggested, at least to Republican leaders, that Luis would abdicate in the event they were to triumph. The stakes, in other words, could not have been higher for Portugal, and only brewing crises in the Belgian Congo and Hungary distracted Europe from the potential of the first successful republican revolution - this one by way of democratic elections rather than popular armed revolt - since the French Second Republic in 1848.
The problem for the Portuguese Republicans, however, was that their support was a kilometer wide, but only a meter deep. Their leaders were intellectuals and academics, composed of disillusioned career politicians, journalists, lawyers and artists, people clearly more comfortable in Lisbon's tony cafes near the Praca do Comercio than in the small, close-knit villages of rural Portugal. It was a party of literati in the Western European country with the lowest literacy rate, a party that relied on lodges of freemasonry to organize rather than the town square or the Church parish. In its near-total rejection of traditional Portuguese culture in a highly conservative and traditionalist country, the Republican Party - especially figures such as Costa - essentially declared to much of the population that they intended to rule them as they saw fit, not govern with the consent of the masses.
In contrast, the small Portuguese Socialist Party did anything but. As outlined in previous chapters, one of the central questions of socialism in the 1910s was a simple one with a deceptively complex answer: "Who is socialism for?" For Portugal's socialist leader Manuel Luis Figueiredo, that answer was simple: it was for the material benefit of the working class. For many of Europe's particularly radical socialists and syndicalists, revolution was the end itself; for the more moderate brand of democratic socialism that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula, the revolution was one means, perhaps a necessary one, but the end result of tangible material impact for organized labor was always to retain her primacy. Costa, Pais, and others campaigned largely in boroughs where they were already likely to do well, preaching to the masses in promising the intoxicating rush of revolution and reorder; Figueiredo, by contrast, kept his focus on Lisbon's canneries, Porto's port distilling houses, and textile mills, organizing workers of small but dedicated labor unions into "electoral cadres" and doing the hard work of electoralism with an eye towards influencing the final result.
The 1918 elections were thus muddled, returning no decisive result other than a fundamental shift in Portugal's electoral landscape and heralding, at least for a moment, a Portugal that could actually function as a true democracy. The Republicans were the largest party, winning over a third of the seats in the Parliament, but the Costa faction was notably weaker than the Pais faction. The second-largest party was, in a surprise, the Catholic Center, a party of lay organizations and moderate-to-conservative voters in the north, especially Porto, as well as the rural interior, led by the reformist law professor Antonio Lino Neto, and after those two groups followed Figueiredo's Socialists and the rumps of the Progressists and Renovators. The old oligarchic parties pledged to support Lino Neto, and so it was he who looked likeliest to form a government, but even then he lacked the full support of the Parliament; it was then that Figueiredo was surprised to receive a summons to the Lisbon Palace, where he was called into an audience with the King.
Luis was alarmed by the relative success of the Republicans, though heartened they had shot themselves in the feet and that the syndicalists of Manuel Ribeiro had rejected electoral democracy entirely and thus made themselves for the time being irrelevant. The meeting was thus part of his efforts to extrapolate exactly how tolerant of monarchy Figueiredo was, and if he was somebody who could support a Lino Neto government. [5] The choice for Figueiredo here was monumental: if he collaborated with Lino Neto, he endorsed the perpetuation of the monarchy rather than supporting a Republican regime that would quickly seek to abolish it, but with Pais and his nationalist, positivist conservative ethos ascendant amongst Republicans alongside the anticlerical zeal of Costa, he was unsure that the material benefits he hoped to deliver his constituents who had just fought to give their small trade unions a seat at the table would be realized.
"Who is socialism for?" In that moment, Figueiredo came to the conclusion that it was as much for the subjects of a monarchy as it was for the citizens of a republic, and more confident that Lino Neto would pursue a course similar to paternalist Catholic statist regimes like France or Austria, he told Luis that for a price, such as Cabinet ministries, a veto on policy and political nominations, and the further legalization of trade unionism and their incorporation into the daily life of Portugal, he would not just support but "participate with enthusiasm" a Lino Neto government. Luis thought the demand high, but he was not willing to test Figueiredo's openness to joining a government led by Pais or, worse, Costa.
With that, in June of 1918, Europe's first "Blue-Red" government (or "purple regime") was formed, a transactional bond between conservatives and social democrats in opposition to liberals and radicals. Like most Blue-Red governments, it would not be harmonious, and it would not last long, but Portugal was the first innovator in such a Cabinet, and the success of a targeted, disciplined and cabined social democratic campaign that could co-exist with monarchy did not go unnoticed elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Germany and Spain..."
- Socialism and Europe
[1] Or Naples, if you ask certain people in Northern Italy
[2] You can see shades of this dynamic iOTL - it was not the largely irrelevant socialists who drove Portuguese Revolution or who ran the First Republic, and in Spain, the PSOE (as well as Ferrer's anarchists!) were usually more moderate than many of the bourgeois figures and factions in the Second Republic.
[3] Or himself, considering how things ended for him in OTL 1908!
[4] Joao Franco never getting into power and a successful Pink Map buys the Braganzas way more time and prestige, basically.
[5] Lino Neto was himself ambivalent about monarchy, iOTL arousing some controversy with conservatives when he declined to advocate or agitate explicitly for his return, though it was the anticlerical Republicans who really detested him.
With the exception of Russia, Spain and Portugal had spent much of the 19th century regarded (if not outright dismissed, as in Napoleon's huffy comment that "Africa begins at the Pyrenees") [1] as Europe's impoverished, autocratic backwaters, countries that had peaked at the height of the Age of Discovery and, particularly in the wake of the collapse of their colonial empires, broken polities running on fumes economically and fueled by nostalgia, kept gripped tight by the firm hand of the Church and landed aristocracy. Both had been gripped by violent wars between political liberals and conservatives, with Spain's dance with personalism and instability concluding with the Glorious Revolution of 1868 led by moderate and progressive nobles and military officers who imposed a constitutional democracy with clearly delineated powers and invited in a new royal family, the German Hohenzollerns, to sustain it. While this experiment in Spanish democracy had been highly imperfect and indeed faced many of the same institutional problems that the Bourbons before had, particularly in rural areas, it nonetheless had delivered an internal stability that Spain had not experienced in decades.
Portugal, conversely, had never suffered from quite the decadal debacles of Spain and reformed more gradually under the Braganzas, but by the end of the 19th century was regarded as one of Europe's financial basket cases, frequently suffering defaults on her British-held debt and unable to maintain her vast and expensive African empire, and with the country increasingly run by two tired, revolving parties of the liberal and traditionalist right, resembling a closed oligarchy which became associated with not just the Church and nobility but the entire concept of monarchy itself. As such, the 1912 revolutions had nearly struck in Portugal, and the 1916 debt default had led to the King's abdication and the seizure of her African territories by Britain and Germany, an act that served to destabilize European politics and helped lead to the Central European War.
What both countries shared was a relatively small industrial base (much more so an issue in Portugal than in Spain) and a radical tradition that had been fundamentally anarchist as early as the 1870s and had always associated republicanism as an end to itself, particularly the appeal of anticlerical opposition to the Church's foundational role in a monarchical system. As such, bourgeoise radicalism for educated, urban middle classes sustained itself much more so than working class agitation, which was far more limited, and often steered by these bourgeoise radical progressives, who themselves rejected socialism as gauche. The revolution would not come from the labor movement in a place like Portugal, in other words, but rather from the literati. This posed a problem for middle class figures who found all these ideas fine in theory but started to balk once the extent to which their fellow republicans sought to reorder an already-fragile state became apparent, and also for the Socialist Party of Portugal, a relatively small though quickly growing outfit which was already badly split between its moderate faction and its syndicalist faction, particularly after the 1907 death of its longtime leader and co-founder, Azedo Gneco. [2]
Luis II, the Portuguese King, was determined to make significant changes to Portugal, and not just in light of his narrow personal interests of the survival of the monarchy. [3] Luis had been educated in Portugal, but he was thoroughly Anglophile in a way others in his family were not, in part out of genuine personal affinity for the country and in part thanks to his British wife, herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Though the marriage had been initially negotiated, it had been sealed out of true affection, and Luis was an honest, loyal husband to his wife, whom he doted on especially with the knowledge that formal, conservative Lisbon was not always to her liking. Queen Patricia's influence was clear - she encouraged him to pursue his interests in painting, geography and writing - but she had become unpopular with the Portuguese street after the "British betrayal" in which Austral-Africa was lost.
Luis was thus on a mission to restore the prestige of the monarchy, and also undo the tremendous cultural, economic and political stagnation of Portugal that had begun under his grandfather and namesake and continued under his father. As Britain was a country of great stability and wealth, and a successful constitutional monarchy, Luis looked to London as an example, and even though he knew that he would fall well shy of the United Kingdom, if he merely arrived at something approximating Hohenzollern Spain, he would have a successful reign. As such, when he called elections for June of 1918, they were the first elections called of his reign and thought to potentially be the first genuinely open elections in Portugal's history, with the Renovator and Progressist parties having all but collapsed.
In many ways, this was a dangerous gamble on the part of Luis, for the largest party in the country, by far, was the Republican. The "Crime of 1916," as Portuguese referred to the Malcolm-Jagow Agreement to split up Austral-Africa, had reenergized what had before 1912 been a flagging group losing popular support (or at least not gaining any). [4] Republican paramilitaries operated largely undeterred across much of the Lisbon area, in particular the Carbonaria, led by the secretive Manuel Buica and which had nearly successfully assassinated the king two years earlier in the wake of Malcolm-Jagow. Figures of the radical anticlerical left such as Afonso Costa gave long, stemwinding speeches across the country where they advocated for the abdication of the King and the imposition of a Republic; even fairly conservative figures such as Antonio Jose de Almeida had joined the call, as had opportunist figures such as the retired general Sidonio Pais, whose ideological orientation was often hard to entirely deduce. The Republicans were, crucially, not an illegal party - in his efforts to pursue a genuine settlement on the questions facing Portugal and give the 1918 elections a legitimacy that the old duopolistic oligarchy had not and could never, Luis would leave no group banned from the polls, a decision that suggested, at least to Republican leaders, that Luis would abdicate in the event they were to triumph. The stakes, in other words, could not have been higher for Portugal, and only brewing crises in the Belgian Congo and Hungary distracted Europe from the potential of the first successful republican revolution - this one by way of democratic elections rather than popular armed revolt - since the French Second Republic in 1848.
The problem for the Portuguese Republicans, however, was that their support was a kilometer wide, but only a meter deep. Their leaders were intellectuals and academics, composed of disillusioned career politicians, journalists, lawyers and artists, people clearly more comfortable in Lisbon's tony cafes near the Praca do Comercio than in the small, close-knit villages of rural Portugal. It was a party of literati in the Western European country with the lowest literacy rate, a party that relied on lodges of freemasonry to organize rather than the town square or the Church parish. In its near-total rejection of traditional Portuguese culture in a highly conservative and traditionalist country, the Republican Party - especially figures such as Costa - essentially declared to much of the population that they intended to rule them as they saw fit, not govern with the consent of the masses.
In contrast, the small Portuguese Socialist Party did anything but. As outlined in previous chapters, one of the central questions of socialism in the 1910s was a simple one with a deceptively complex answer: "Who is socialism for?" For Portugal's socialist leader Manuel Luis Figueiredo, that answer was simple: it was for the material benefit of the working class. For many of Europe's particularly radical socialists and syndicalists, revolution was the end itself; for the more moderate brand of democratic socialism that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula, the revolution was one means, perhaps a necessary one, but the end result of tangible material impact for organized labor was always to retain her primacy. Costa, Pais, and others campaigned largely in boroughs where they were already likely to do well, preaching to the masses in promising the intoxicating rush of revolution and reorder; Figueiredo, by contrast, kept his focus on Lisbon's canneries, Porto's port distilling houses, and textile mills, organizing workers of small but dedicated labor unions into "electoral cadres" and doing the hard work of electoralism with an eye towards influencing the final result.
The 1918 elections were thus muddled, returning no decisive result other than a fundamental shift in Portugal's electoral landscape and heralding, at least for a moment, a Portugal that could actually function as a true democracy. The Republicans were the largest party, winning over a third of the seats in the Parliament, but the Costa faction was notably weaker than the Pais faction. The second-largest party was, in a surprise, the Catholic Center, a party of lay organizations and moderate-to-conservative voters in the north, especially Porto, as well as the rural interior, led by the reformist law professor Antonio Lino Neto, and after those two groups followed Figueiredo's Socialists and the rumps of the Progressists and Renovators. The old oligarchic parties pledged to support Lino Neto, and so it was he who looked likeliest to form a government, but even then he lacked the full support of the Parliament; it was then that Figueiredo was surprised to receive a summons to the Lisbon Palace, where he was called into an audience with the King.
Luis was alarmed by the relative success of the Republicans, though heartened they had shot themselves in the feet and that the syndicalists of Manuel Ribeiro had rejected electoral democracy entirely and thus made themselves for the time being irrelevant. The meeting was thus part of his efforts to extrapolate exactly how tolerant of monarchy Figueiredo was, and if he was somebody who could support a Lino Neto government. [5] The choice for Figueiredo here was monumental: if he collaborated with Lino Neto, he endorsed the perpetuation of the monarchy rather than supporting a Republican regime that would quickly seek to abolish it, but with Pais and his nationalist, positivist conservative ethos ascendant amongst Republicans alongside the anticlerical zeal of Costa, he was unsure that the material benefits he hoped to deliver his constituents who had just fought to give their small trade unions a seat at the table would be realized.
"Who is socialism for?" In that moment, Figueiredo came to the conclusion that it was as much for the subjects of a monarchy as it was for the citizens of a republic, and more confident that Lino Neto would pursue a course similar to paternalist Catholic statist regimes like France or Austria, he told Luis that for a price, such as Cabinet ministries, a veto on policy and political nominations, and the further legalization of trade unionism and their incorporation into the daily life of Portugal, he would not just support but "participate with enthusiasm" a Lino Neto government. Luis thought the demand high, but he was not willing to test Figueiredo's openness to joining a government led by Pais or, worse, Costa.
With that, in June of 1918, Europe's first "Blue-Red" government (or "purple regime") was formed, a transactional bond between conservatives and social democrats in opposition to liberals and radicals. Like most Blue-Red governments, it would not be harmonious, and it would not last long, but Portugal was the first innovator in such a Cabinet, and the success of a targeted, disciplined and cabined social democratic campaign that could co-exist with monarchy did not go unnoticed elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Germany and Spain..."
- Socialism and Europe
[1] Or Naples, if you ask certain people in Northern Italy
[2] You can see shades of this dynamic iOTL - it was not the largely irrelevant socialists who drove Portuguese Revolution or who ran the First Republic, and in Spain, the PSOE (as well as Ferrer's anarchists!) were usually more moderate than many of the bourgeois figures and factions in the Second Republic.
[3] Or himself, considering how things ended for him in OTL 1908!
[4] Joao Franco never getting into power and a successful Pink Map buys the Braganzas way more time and prestige, basically.
[5] Lino Neto was himself ambivalent about monarchy, iOTL arousing some controversy with conservatives when he declined to advocate or agitate explicitly for his return, though it was the anticlerical Republicans who really detested him.
For Europe, yes. Though I suspect that the United States had it even worse than OTL (having just gotten done fighting a multi-year war, with the infrastructure still screwed up by Root's demobilization efforts, and the lackluster economy is going to cause more economic migrations than after WWI in the US in OTL) and the Confederacy ... well, yeah. The only reason the US looks good in this sitauton is that almost anywhere would look good compared to how hard the Confederacy got hit.