The idea is simple: a somewhat satyrical reversale of what we saw in our history. Ending with the supercilious Europeans musing on how America, meaning northern America, cost the international community two world wars, plus the usual squabbles between rednecks, yankees, "negroes", Jews, redskins, californios, Mormons etc.
While the American revolution failed at Saratoga and George Washington died while in hiding, the United States of Europe are an unintended creation of the French Revolution, picked up by enthusiast militant supporters grown into the liberal, lluminist and early Romantic culture and eager to shake the yoke of the ancien régime throughout the continent - or at least its more evolved areas. By 1796-97, to much surprise of observer, what seemed like yet another imperialistic war of French aggrandizement with an ideological travesty turned into a full blown movement for the unification of Europe under the revolutionary tricolor. Its most noted military leader was a young and ambitious man from Corsica, grown in the French military: Napoleone Bonaparte. His 1799 coup against the ailing Directory was supported by a host of European allies, now worried by the Austro-Russian military revival. He was elected President for Life of the United States of Europe in 1805 and waged the long attrition war with the coalition that Britain's hostility and Austrian envy regularly mounted against him. In the end, after the ill-fated invasion of Russia, aborted just in sight of Moscow, the glorious victory at the Battle of Magdeburg in 1813 forced the enemies of the Revolution to come to terms. The Britons were in short term expelled from Spain and Portugal, where they had enjoyed a short-lived popular support by troublesome Catholic rebels, and forced to a compromise peace; their American colonies anew erupted in open revolt, this time separately, to win, after prolonged and bloody wars that drained British exchequers, full independence with European benediction (and discreet funding and military help). That was some years after President Bonaparte's premature and much lamented death in 1821; he, after having set a federal capital in Bruxelles, was succeeded by the popular and brilliant Joachim Murat, former governor of the yet non-state Neapolitan Territories, who proceeded to implement the First Constitution developed in the previous years by the monocameral Congress of Strasbourg, the parliamentary capital chosen for being bilingual, and thus ideally European.
(Northern) America, while capable of very remarkable progress, was to remain divided into several states (Québec, Canada, Métis, Vermont, New England, New York, Atlantica, Pennsylvania, Virginia, "Dixie", Louisiana, the ill-fated Iroquois Confederacy...) often bitter rivals with violent wars and internecine strife, and the southern part of the immense continent had quickly conquered a difficult independence from the defunct Spanish empire, while Europe prospered; Britain, conversely, had to suffer. Its advantage in the Industrial Revolution wasn't to endure for long; by 1830 industrialization began in earnest also in Belgium, France, Germany and northern Italy.
The mid-century crisis, from 1846, hit hard both Britain and the United States of Europe: for the latter it spelled the start of the most troubled phase and the gravest internal risk of its entire history, but for the power of the former it sounded, in retrospective, a death knell. Millions Irishmen fled to the Americas, where new and litigious polities emerged as the white man marched West, gun in hand and family on the cart, amidst ferocious warlike native tribes. The poverty of the exploited toliers in the sweatshop was appalling, nor the social system seemed to allow any real progress in the face of the population bomb, despite the great strives in technology and science. In Europe a series of bad harvests set in motion again the never fully peasant question and revealed the price of the first industrialization. Then, an issue began to split most gravely the United States of Europe. The nationalist card had been played consistently for years by the always meddling British, hoping one day to again divide and control Europe for their aims: to no avail till towards the half of the 19th century when the Teutophile party began stirring resentment at the de facto French supremacy in the giant superstate. These agitators soon gained the support of the always troubled areas that historically had resisted the progressive tendencies of the federal government of Bruxelles, such as the Alpine Catholic Swiss states, Flaminia and Neapolitania in Italy or most of the Iberian peninsula with the restive states of Castile, Portugal, Aragon and Andalusia, lands dominated by reactionary landholders and priests. This was the set for the European Civil War which from 1860 shook the very foundations of the young continental republic and saw the subsequent intervention of any conceivable enemy the United States of Europe had: from Britain with what remained of its once vaunted fleet and professional army to Austria with its fierce Balkan fighters and Russia with its marauding Cossacks. Even Barbary piracy would see its last hurrahs, while help came instead from northern and southern American volunteers and adventurers who flocked to Europe in the thousands in an unheard of migration in reverse to help the Fatherland of Freedom.
But that's a story to be told: who wants to write it down?
While the American revolution failed at Saratoga and George Washington died while in hiding, the United States of Europe are an unintended creation of the French Revolution, picked up by enthusiast militant supporters grown into the liberal, lluminist and early Romantic culture and eager to shake the yoke of the ancien régime throughout the continent - or at least its more evolved areas. By 1796-97, to much surprise of observer, what seemed like yet another imperialistic war of French aggrandizement with an ideological travesty turned into a full blown movement for the unification of Europe under the revolutionary tricolor. Its most noted military leader was a young and ambitious man from Corsica, grown in the French military: Napoleone Bonaparte. His 1799 coup against the ailing Directory was supported by a host of European allies, now worried by the Austro-Russian military revival. He was elected President for Life of the United States of Europe in 1805 and waged the long attrition war with the coalition that Britain's hostility and Austrian envy regularly mounted against him. In the end, after the ill-fated invasion of Russia, aborted just in sight of Moscow, the glorious victory at the Battle of Magdeburg in 1813 forced the enemies of the Revolution to come to terms. The Britons were in short term expelled from Spain and Portugal, where they had enjoyed a short-lived popular support by troublesome Catholic rebels, and forced to a compromise peace; their American colonies anew erupted in open revolt, this time separately, to win, after prolonged and bloody wars that drained British exchequers, full independence with European benediction (and discreet funding and military help). That was some years after President Bonaparte's premature and much lamented death in 1821; he, after having set a federal capital in Bruxelles, was succeeded by the popular and brilliant Joachim Murat, former governor of the yet non-state Neapolitan Territories, who proceeded to implement the First Constitution developed in the previous years by the monocameral Congress of Strasbourg, the parliamentary capital chosen for being bilingual, and thus ideally European.
(Northern) America, while capable of very remarkable progress, was to remain divided into several states (Québec, Canada, Métis, Vermont, New England, New York, Atlantica, Pennsylvania, Virginia, "Dixie", Louisiana, the ill-fated Iroquois Confederacy...) often bitter rivals with violent wars and internecine strife, and the southern part of the immense continent had quickly conquered a difficult independence from the defunct Spanish empire, while Europe prospered; Britain, conversely, had to suffer. Its advantage in the Industrial Revolution wasn't to endure for long; by 1830 industrialization began in earnest also in Belgium, France, Germany and northern Italy.
The mid-century crisis, from 1846, hit hard both Britain and the United States of Europe: for the latter it spelled the start of the most troubled phase and the gravest internal risk of its entire history, but for the power of the former it sounded, in retrospective, a death knell. Millions Irishmen fled to the Americas, where new and litigious polities emerged as the white man marched West, gun in hand and family on the cart, amidst ferocious warlike native tribes. The poverty of the exploited toliers in the sweatshop was appalling, nor the social system seemed to allow any real progress in the face of the population bomb, despite the great strives in technology and science. In Europe a series of bad harvests set in motion again the never fully peasant question and revealed the price of the first industrialization. Then, an issue began to split most gravely the United States of Europe. The nationalist card had been played consistently for years by the always meddling British, hoping one day to again divide and control Europe for their aims: to no avail till towards the half of the 19th century when the Teutophile party began stirring resentment at the de facto French supremacy in the giant superstate. These agitators soon gained the support of the always troubled areas that historically had resisted the progressive tendencies of the federal government of Bruxelles, such as the Alpine Catholic Swiss states, Flaminia and Neapolitania in Italy or most of the Iberian peninsula with the restive states of Castile, Portugal, Aragon and Andalusia, lands dominated by reactionary landholders and priests. This was the set for the European Civil War which from 1860 shook the very foundations of the young continental republic and saw the subsequent intervention of any conceivable enemy the United States of Europe had: from Britain with what remained of its once vaunted fleet and professional army to Austria with its fierce Balkan fighters and Russia with its marauding Cossacks. Even Barbary piracy would see its last hurrahs, while help came instead from northern and southern American volunteers and adventurers who flocked to Europe in the thousands in an unheard of migration in reverse to help the Fatherland of Freedom.
But that's a story to be told: who wants to write it down?
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