Would be nice to see the Mexican porpoise to be alive and thriving in this timeline.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
The House of Osman
"...and with that speech, Ahmet Riza had totally announced himself to the public, [1] and Sabahaddin had for the first time since sweeping to prominence and power a genuine rival who could appeal to the Ottoman street and intelligentsia alike.
What made Riza lethal to Sabahaddin's increasingly tenuous hold on power, however, was not just the credentials and oratory of the man himself, impressive as he was, but the fact that in so publicly denouncing the Treaty of Balta Liman he struck a chord with a frustrated Ottoman street, and that in his views he was exactly the kind of moderate who could actually eat into Sabahaddin's base. Riza had been a vicious foe of Abdulhamid to the point of multiple Parisian exiles, but he was also an Ittihadi who was a liberal democrat and strong believer in constitutionalism. For the emergent Muslim middle class across much of Rumelia and western Anatolia, he was exactly the type of figure who appealed to their sensibilities without, as Sabahaddin had often done, pandering to Greek, Armenian and Jewish constituencies in a way that many Turks and Kurds found unbecoming nor indulging in the kind of ultra-conservative piousness that many of them felt belonged in the previous century. And in Balta Liman, Riza had found the ultimate effigy to burn - the very real downsides of unfettered liberalism.
The Treaty of Balta Liman's parameters were straightforward - in return for supporting the Porte in 1838 at a time of severe crisis during the invasion from Egypt by Muhammad Ali, Britain had demanded all economic monopolies be disbanded, and that Ottoman protectionism against British goods be forever ceased. While many other bilateral agreements in the years since 1838 had opened Ottoman markets - notably ones with France and Germany - the unilateralism of Balta Liman, and the fact that the British had not once renegotiated it since and been one of the largest benefactors of the reviled OPDA, made it an unusually unpopular piece of foreign policy. By 1919, with the Ottoman economy slouching back into recession after several years of strong growth and wealthier working and middle classes left frustrated by the sudden and sharp downturn, it became a shibboleth, denounced by many Ittihadis (though not Riza himself, at least not in those terms) as the "Crime of 1838." A straight line was drawn from Balta Liman to the "cultural revolution" of the 1910s Empire, to the disposition of the fez hat and hijab by women, and the rapid secularization of the state's functions even as the Sultan proudly invoked his title as Caliph. The conservative backlash was brewing, and despite his own religious moderation, Riza was well-positioned to ride it, especially if he could appeal to a non-sectarian audience with a new proposal - the repeal of Balta Liman.
Sabahaddin was an Anglophile, but no fool, and even he had begrudgingly come around to the idea that Balta Liman left the Ottomans "supine." His nationalism had been flexed in eliminating the OPDA and he could do so again, he figured, trusting his relationship with the British. Those efforts in the spring of 1919 would prove stillborn fast, however. Britain's ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Roger Percival Smythe-Watson [2], refused outright to "entertain" the renegotiation of a treaty that, in his words, "formed the firmament of Anglo-Turkish relations as much as the Kuwait Protocol." With London well aware of the deterioration of Ottoman relations with France and Austria, and ever-present concerns about Italian ambitions in the Balkans as well as Russia, the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom saw little incentive to pursue a course that gave up all their advantages over Constantinople and removed a great deal of leverage. Sabahaddin was similarly cut off at the knees by Ahraris who were not just secular progressives but doctrinaire economic liberals, wholly committed to Anglophilic concepts of free trade as being the purest expression of human liberty as opposed to the rank conservative protectionism of other European powers; some of them made the absurd attempt to argue that tariffs were a form a usury, and thus haram, despite being men who otherwise scoffed at the idea of grounding Ottoman law in Islam.
The crisis of 1919 between the Great Powers of central Europe even failed to provide a needed distraction; Sabahaddin's failure to pursue a revision of Balta Liman was held up in the press as evidence of the failure of "national modernism," that for all his efforts Sabahaddin was yet another weak Ottoman figure bullied by Europeans. As France and Austria went to war with Germany and Italy, the multinational but primarily British concern that was developing a tunnel beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul suddenly collapsed, delaying the completion of the project until well into the early 1930s and becoming another symbolic blow. The Ottoman economy, despite the OPDA being dissolved, was dependent not only on British imports but British money to do much of anything; uneven industrialization and a deepening economic malaise only heightened this anger for those who were well-read enough to understand it.
As such, the quick decline of Sabahaddin's years in power was at hand. He was now a plodding conservative and moderate sellout to the radicals in his movement who found that national modernism was not moving rapidly enough in instilling a secular multicultural (and utopian) polity, while to conservatives he was the same dangerous and naive revolutionary he had always been, but to all his enemies he was now also a weakling who could not - or perhaps refused to - challenge his beloved Britian over Balta Liman and defend Ottoman national interests. The blood was in the water, spurred as Sabahaddin suspected by the paranoid Sultan Yusuf I who perpetually feared an Ahrari coup against him, and though he noted in his diaries that the opposition to Balta Liman was clearly totemic, it was nonetheless valuable to all those who had, after close to a decade, found much to oppose in his political and cultural project, and were finally coalescing in a way that genuinely threatened it..."
- The House of Osman
[1] Ahmet Riza is an interesting late-Ottoman figure OTL. He was a Young Turk, but an Anglophile and an opponent of the Three Pashas' policies regarding ethnic and religious minorities, who later became an ardent Kemalist. Here, he fits well into the "soft CUP" Ittihad Party, and was one of the more capable men to emerge from that current of Turkish nationalism. He's an obvious foil/opponent to a man like Sabahaddin (they had a courteous but oppositional relationship IRL), and one wonders what may have become of the OE had men like Ahmet Riza been in charge in 1911-14 rather than Enver Pasha and his fellow thugs.
[2] Fictional just wanted to come up with a silly, stereotypically British name
What made Riza lethal to Sabahaddin's increasingly tenuous hold on power, however, was not just the credentials and oratory of the man himself, impressive as he was, but the fact that in so publicly denouncing the Treaty of Balta Liman he struck a chord with a frustrated Ottoman street, and that in his views he was exactly the kind of moderate who could actually eat into Sabahaddin's base. Riza had been a vicious foe of Abdulhamid to the point of multiple Parisian exiles, but he was also an Ittihadi who was a liberal democrat and strong believer in constitutionalism. For the emergent Muslim middle class across much of Rumelia and western Anatolia, he was exactly the type of figure who appealed to their sensibilities without, as Sabahaddin had often done, pandering to Greek, Armenian and Jewish constituencies in a way that many Turks and Kurds found unbecoming nor indulging in the kind of ultra-conservative piousness that many of them felt belonged in the previous century. And in Balta Liman, Riza had found the ultimate effigy to burn - the very real downsides of unfettered liberalism.
The Treaty of Balta Liman's parameters were straightforward - in return for supporting the Porte in 1838 at a time of severe crisis during the invasion from Egypt by Muhammad Ali, Britain had demanded all economic monopolies be disbanded, and that Ottoman protectionism against British goods be forever ceased. While many other bilateral agreements in the years since 1838 had opened Ottoman markets - notably ones with France and Germany - the unilateralism of Balta Liman, and the fact that the British had not once renegotiated it since and been one of the largest benefactors of the reviled OPDA, made it an unusually unpopular piece of foreign policy. By 1919, with the Ottoman economy slouching back into recession after several years of strong growth and wealthier working and middle classes left frustrated by the sudden and sharp downturn, it became a shibboleth, denounced by many Ittihadis (though not Riza himself, at least not in those terms) as the "Crime of 1838." A straight line was drawn from Balta Liman to the "cultural revolution" of the 1910s Empire, to the disposition of the fez hat and hijab by women, and the rapid secularization of the state's functions even as the Sultan proudly invoked his title as Caliph. The conservative backlash was brewing, and despite his own religious moderation, Riza was well-positioned to ride it, especially if he could appeal to a non-sectarian audience with a new proposal - the repeal of Balta Liman.
Sabahaddin was an Anglophile, but no fool, and even he had begrudgingly come around to the idea that Balta Liman left the Ottomans "supine." His nationalism had been flexed in eliminating the OPDA and he could do so again, he figured, trusting his relationship with the British. Those efforts in the spring of 1919 would prove stillborn fast, however. Britain's ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Roger Percival Smythe-Watson [2], refused outright to "entertain" the renegotiation of a treaty that, in his words, "formed the firmament of Anglo-Turkish relations as much as the Kuwait Protocol." With London well aware of the deterioration of Ottoman relations with France and Austria, and ever-present concerns about Italian ambitions in the Balkans as well as Russia, the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom saw little incentive to pursue a course that gave up all their advantages over Constantinople and removed a great deal of leverage. Sabahaddin was similarly cut off at the knees by Ahraris who were not just secular progressives but doctrinaire economic liberals, wholly committed to Anglophilic concepts of free trade as being the purest expression of human liberty as opposed to the rank conservative protectionism of other European powers; some of them made the absurd attempt to argue that tariffs were a form a usury, and thus haram, despite being men who otherwise scoffed at the idea of grounding Ottoman law in Islam.
The crisis of 1919 between the Great Powers of central Europe even failed to provide a needed distraction; Sabahaddin's failure to pursue a revision of Balta Liman was held up in the press as evidence of the failure of "national modernism," that for all his efforts Sabahaddin was yet another weak Ottoman figure bullied by Europeans. As France and Austria went to war with Germany and Italy, the multinational but primarily British concern that was developing a tunnel beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul suddenly collapsed, delaying the completion of the project until well into the early 1930s and becoming another symbolic blow. The Ottoman economy, despite the OPDA being dissolved, was dependent not only on British imports but British money to do much of anything; uneven industrialization and a deepening economic malaise only heightened this anger for those who were well-read enough to understand it.
As such, the quick decline of Sabahaddin's years in power was at hand. He was now a plodding conservative and moderate sellout to the radicals in his movement who found that national modernism was not moving rapidly enough in instilling a secular multicultural (and utopian) polity, while to conservatives he was the same dangerous and naive revolutionary he had always been, but to all his enemies he was now also a weakling who could not - or perhaps refused to - challenge his beloved Britian over Balta Liman and defend Ottoman national interests. The blood was in the water, spurred as Sabahaddin suspected by the paranoid Sultan Yusuf I who perpetually feared an Ahrari coup against him, and though he noted in his diaries that the opposition to Balta Liman was clearly totemic, it was nonetheless valuable to all those who had, after close to a decade, found much to oppose in his political and cultural project, and were finally coalescing in a way that genuinely threatened it..."
- The House of Osman
[1] Ahmet Riza is an interesting late-Ottoman figure OTL. He was a Young Turk, but an Anglophile and an opponent of the Three Pashas' policies regarding ethnic and religious minorities, who later became an ardent Kemalist. Here, he fits well into the "soft CUP" Ittihad Party, and was one of the more capable men to emerge from that current of Turkish nationalism. He's an obvious foil/opponent to a man like Sabahaddin (they had a courteous but oppositional relationship IRL), and one wonders what may have become of the OE had men like Ahmet Riza been in charge in 1911-14 rather than Enver Pasha and his fellow thugs.
[2] Fictional just wanted to come up with a silly, stereotypically British name
I think this movement might happen after the Central European War, as British economy (from what I understand) will probably take a hit due to the war, while the neutrals will benefit from selling goods to the warring countries in the most expensive prices they can come up with.
• British industry completely surpassed by American and German
• German victory in the Central European War, resulting in German supremacy on the continent (with the Germans dominating Belgium and the Port of Antwerp), the greatest terror for British political thinkers since the First French Empire and its emperor of a certain island in Mediterranean.
• Possible Russian industrialization in the 1920s, a nation that greatly eclipses the population and natural resources of Great Britain, in addition to being able to threaten the British Raj.
• Rise of Japan in the Pacific?
• Italian rise in the Mediterranean?
The heyday of the Victorian Era, where France was demographically stagnant, where Great Britain was the Factory of the World and the Royal Navy ruled the waves indisputably is over.
Maybe all the nations of the world can come together and resolve their disputes by invading Britain together and that’s the what stops the European war
I don't think the British will be able to turn the Russians and Italians against the Germans hahahaha
Germany might have to make concessions to get the British to accept the post-war status quo, and the channel ports would be the first among them. They might lobby for the Netherlands to annex back Northern Belgium, if not all of Flanders.
Concession? Sure but in general the British hand is not good enough to pressure Germany beyond a certain point, not with France, Belgium and A-H defeated and Russia also wanting some concession and putingt an enormous hole in any blockade plus British huffing and puffing aside, both the German and italian government after a war like the CEW (that while enormous for TTL, will be a lot less destructive of OTL WWI) need first and foremost please their internal pubblic opinion with that level of blood and treasure spend as otherwise risk let's say...trouble of the revolutionary type.
In poor words, London will go to the peace conference that will end the war discovering that the famed balance of power that she loves so much is deader than dead and that her desires, while still important, are not anymore the most important thing of the world
@lukedalton is right. The New World told the Brits to kick rocks at the Niagara Conference - the only thing the USA, CSA, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile could all agree on in the summer of 1913 was that Brits had no business there. Here's hoping Germany follows that lead and tells the Brits to screw off as well.
Ireland Unleashed
"...to the average Irishman, one could have questioned whether anything had much changed at all. A British flag still flew at the Four Courts and Dublin Castle; the Royal Irish Constabulary still patrolled the streets. But change had indeed come, and it occurred on February 11, 1919 - today celebrated as Ireland Day or, in some parlances, Dominion Day, one of Ireland's most important national public holidays. It was on February 11 that the Assembly of Ireland, the new bicameral legislature, was convened, with Joseph Devlin at the head of its government as the transitional council fully dispersed. In a move of profound symbolism, Devlin chose to call into session the Assembly of Ireland at Parliament House, the home of the pre-1800 Irish legislature, which had since then been used as a bank; this was meant to be a temporary location, and indeed was, for within months the Assembly would be renting the larger Leinster House from the Royal Dublin Society as they debated where to site a new, permanent home for both Houses of the Assembly which they could over time grow into.
Devlin joked, "As we were saying, before we were interrupted," in the first words of his address to the Assembly, eliciting a number of cheers and polite applause, a celebration of Irish parliamentarianism returning after over a century suspended. Street fairs erupted across the island, with businesses closing to celebrate, church bells ringing in anticipation, and even fireworks being launched over the Dublin quays. But Ireland Day was just one day, and it was the day for mirth; there was a tomorrow, after all, and it would be the day after, and the day after that, in which the true hard work of state building began to loom. To what extent was this new Kingdom of Ireland going to eschew its roots as a subsidiary of the British Empire? What kind of relationship would it have with London, which in theory controlled her foreign policy? If Ireland was now co-equal with Canada or Australia, what did that say about Ireland, since those two dominions had begun as colonies? This question, in particular, was an uncomfortable one for Irish nationalists to grapple with.
It was also the case that despite Devlin's Ulster roots and his overtures of magnanimity - he denounced a group of former IRB men who tried to lower the British Union Jack and replace it with St. Patrick's Saltire on the very first day - the Protestant minority in the north was deeply worried about what was to come. The British Army was still barracked on the island, the police still the RIC, and their flag still flew, but how long would these things last? Small-scale violence simmered across Ulster in February and March of 1919, with St. Patrick's Day a particularly violent one even with the internal conflict over. It was after all just five years earlier that the Curragh Mutiny had been staged and had for a brief moment seemed to suggest that Ulster would bring down the power of the British government to protect its interests, and now it was governed not by London but by Dublin directly. Times had changed, rapidly, and there was great trepidation in Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere about what exactly Ireland would look like five years hence..."
- Ireland Unleashed
Devlin joked, "As we were saying, before we were interrupted," in the first words of his address to the Assembly, eliciting a number of cheers and polite applause, a celebration of Irish parliamentarianism returning after over a century suspended. Street fairs erupted across the island, with businesses closing to celebrate, church bells ringing in anticipation, and even fireworks being launched over the Dublin quays. But Ireland Day was just one day, and it was the day for mirth; there was a tomorrow, after all, and it would be the day after, and the day after that, in which the true hard work of state building began to loom. To what extent was this new Kingdom of Ireland going to eschew its roots as a subsidiary of the British Empire? What kind of relationship would it have with London, which in theory controlled her foreign policy? If Ireland was now co-equal with Canada or Australia, what did that say about Ireland, since those two dominions had begun as colonies? This question, in particular, was an uncomfortable one for Irish nationalists to grapple with.
It was also the case that despite Devlin's Ulster roots and his overtures of magnanimity - he denounced a group of former IRB men who tried to lower the British Union Jack and replace it with St. Patrick's Saltire on the very first day - the Protestant minority in the north was deeply worried about what was to come. The British Army was still barracked on the island, the police still the RIC, and their flag still flew, but how long would these things last? Small-scale violence simmered across Ulster in February and March of 1919, with St. Patrick's Day a particularly violent one even with the internal conflict over. It was after all just five years earlier that the Curragh Mutiny had been staged and had for a brief moment seemed to suggest that Ulster would bring down the power of the British government to protect its interests, and now it was governed not by London but by Dublin directly. Times had changed, rapidly, and there was great trepidation in Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere about what exactly Ireland would look like five years hence..."
- Ireland Unleashed
I agree with @lukedalton and @Curtain Jerker that the British have already seen their diplomatic prowess considerably reduced as it is, and 1919 onwards will further compound that effect.
Show me the lie lol
Arab nationalism is becoming more of a thing, certainly, but more about local emirs and regions (Syria, Egypt, etc) than Pan-Arabism as a whole, since at this point in time there wasn't really much of a consciousness of Arabs being a single people (and divides between Shia, Sunni, Druze, Alawites, Arab Christians, etc definitely exacerbated this quite a bit).
Yeah you're definitely not getting a German annexation of Antwerp herself, but Flamenpolitik would point towards a union with the Netherlands being the most straightforward future path (and I've tipped my hand that this will happen, just not when or how).
The British will still have a fairly strong hand, as long as Germany believes the price of dealing with them is not worth another war. They still have the biggest navy, a significant economy, and significant financial resources.
The question for the Germans won't be "Can we beat the British?", but "would the effort it takes to beat them (which would still be a massive undertaking, since it'll be years till they can challenge them at sea) be worth it, relative to the price of appeasing them?". The answer to that will likely be no, unless the British go apeshit and start demanding too much. Germany not annexing Channel Ports is a reasonable demand, and a Germany that doesn't have the naval lobby of OTL wouldn't even care that much.
United Kingdom general election, 1919
United Kingdom general election, 1919
TOTAL (670):
National Conservative: 258 (+70)
Liberal: 314 (+11)
New Conservative: 0 (-6)
Social Democratic Labour Party: 98 (+24)
Irish Unionist: 0 (-22)
Irish Parliamentary: 0 (-58)
Sinn Fein: 0 (-10)
Irish Republican: 0 (-7)
Irish Labour: 0 (-2)
----
"...shortly after his electoral defeat in 1949, when asked to name some of the greatest own goals in British political history, the outgoing Prime Minister Sir Archie Sinclair smiled ruefully and listed the most obvious of all: the decision by his fellow Liberal, Austen Chamberlain, to call a snap election in late February of 1919 upon the "evacuation from Westminster" of Ireland. Sinclair did not hold up other contemporary cases such as the elder Chamberlain's "tariff election" or the failure of the Curzon government over the Education Act 1910, because those were electoral setbacks (or losses) grounded, at the very least, in an attempt to effect policy. No, 1919 stood head and shoulders above all other electoral debacles if for no other reason than that it was wholly unnecessary and a moment of uncharacteristic ego on the part of Chamberlain.
The House of Commons had six hundred and seventy seats for Members of Parliament, of which ninety-nine had been at the 1918 polls reserved for Ireland. As the date upon which Irish removal from the Commons drew closer, it became a spirited debate within the Commons what should be done to adjust for this coming transition. The obvious solution to many was to simply deduct those seats permanently (or for the time being) from the Commons, keeping the constituencies across Britain the same and reducing the House to five hundred and seventy-one MPs. This would have had the straightforward result, too, of delivering the Liberals a majority government that they currently did not possess, which would have allowed Chamberlain to govern effectively well into the 1920s until he had to call another election.
However, the size of the Commons was governed by statute, and the drawing of its constituencies had been partly influenced by the Nationals in the Curzon years; the "Full House" cadre of Liberals, making up a plurality of the party's thinking and including Chamberlain, argued that reallocating those ninety-nine seats across Britain would inevitably add dozens of new seats in Liberal-friendly urban areas while compacting National-friendly agrarian regions. Over the course of the autumn of 1918, despite a flagging British economy and war fears rising rapidly on the continent after the Hofburg Affair, the Chamberlain ministry became grievously divided on the Full House Question, as its proponents increasingly talked themselves into it. Finally, Chamberlain agreed to the full reallocation, and gave an address on November 29th to the Commons introducing the act and declaring that a new election was necessary with the "historic constitutional shift" in the "nature of the composition of this House." The Electoral Act 1919, which was passed in the second week of January, redistributed new constituencies that were equal in population and geographically compact, but which seemed to have suspiciously drawn borders in a few crucial areas that seemed to benefit the Liberals exclusively in marginal areas. The act, and the calling of the election, were both hugely unpopular with Nations and Socialists alike, and a strong minority of the Liberal grassroots protested the move as well. This opposition would, it turn out, prove prescient.
For the second time in a year, Britain went to the polls; for the second time in a year, Liberals gained a strong minority government. However, at 314 seats, the Liberals were well short of the dominating majority that Chamberlain had assumed they would inherit by virtue of Irish peace. The vast majority of the "reallocation" as it came to be known was won by resurgent Nationals powered by their new, gruff leader Sir Walter Long (who was a gentry landowners and firm agrarian who helped the Nationals sweep much of rural England and Scottish districts once considered Liberal strongholds), who had purged most of the Hughligan faction from leadership; the SDLP, for its part, closed in just shy of a hundred seats, what would be their best result until 1936.
The 1919 elections thus, at first glance, changed little; the Liberals remained the largest party, tantalizingly close to a majority, and they remained dependent on the confidence of Barnes and the SDLP, thus foreclosing on any serious shifts to the right in Liberal policy. It was nonetheless perceived nationally as a debacle, a decision by Chamberlain to make a gamble he was unsure he had the cards to win and call an election of choice. Constitutionally, it may have been the right choice considering the sea change that Ireland's departure from the Commons represented; politically, it was poorly thought out, especially as the British public gazed nervously at the conflict that would explode on the continent within weeks and Chamberlain was pilloried in National-friendly press and even amongst many Socialists as making autocratic maneuvers that would have made his own father blush.
For once, Chamberlain had tried his hand at ruthlessness; and the only time he tried it, it badly misfired..." [1]
- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-24
[1] My thinking here was that the government really does need to debate how to address Ireland's evacuation from the Commons, and I was inspired a bit by the early 2021 Canadian general election that Trudeau called just for shits and giggles and it wound up just sorta not doing anything for him, only here it goes more than a bit worse for Chamberlain even as his party gains seats on paper.