MoF 21: VOX POPULI

This round shall finish on Sunday, 5th of September.

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Andalusia Plebiscites, 1898



The more liberal coastal regions, which had closer political and cultural links to the Republic of Granada, voted to join Granada; the more conservative inland regions, by contrast, voted to remain part of the Kingdom of Spain.

Not shown on the map: Río Muni and Bioko (voted for transfer to the USA); Río de Oro and Saguia el-Hamra (voted to remain Spanish rather than American).

New Amsterdam Referendum

This is a little something from An Alternate History of the Netherlands.

Following the independence of the Empire of Brazil in personal union with the United Provinces, the Staaten-General took up the issue of New Amsterdam. For two centuries this colony has remained a Dutch stronghold. In 1824, the Staaten-General gave the colony three choices: 1) Remain a colony; 2) Independence in Personal Union with the U.P. and Brazil; 3) Full independence. The New Amsterdammers, with their strongest economic ties with cities like Boston and Philidelphia, demanded a fourth option: admission to the United States. Weeks after the election, New Amsterdam was admitted as the 24th State, and the only state to have a Parliamentary Republican form of government.

(The Constitution requires states to have Republican forms of government, but doesn't specify Presidential, Semi-Presidential or Parlimentary.)

Herp derp noot noot.

The Costa Selvagem Referendum

Some background information regarding this infograph I found from the Times of Hindustan, date 05-02-1978 ATL:

The infograph was made after the referendum of 21-01-1978 ATL, but before the planned secession of August 12th 1978 ATL.

Russia was more aggressive in courting China to try and get access to Tibet, and the British became convinced that the Qing were intending to sell the region. This led to a larger and more permanent annexation of Tibet into the British empire. This humiliation by a foreign power became the straw that broke the camels back for China, and led to an earlier revolution than OTL.

The bloody chaos of the revolution led to Tibet's borders expanding into it's historical ones, and encompassing most of the regions occupied by Tibetan peoples. China, meanwhile, fought civil wars with itself. Han chauvinism and xenophobia, but matched with a relentless drive for modernisation, marked the new regime that eventually took control of China, renaming the nation Hanminguo "The Country of the Han People". It was soon very unpleasant for non-Han living there.

Warlords supported by non-Han and non-Tibetan minorities in the southwest carved out a state out of Yunnan and parts of southern Szechuan, known as Dali after the medieval kingdom. This state recieved a lot of support from Japan, whose foreign policy soon took a turn for towards "containing this xenophobic monster to our West", mostly by helping itself to a nice little empire of islands, and helping Corea, Dali and a rump Manchuria to modernize. At any rate, there was sufficient disconnect between the unpleasant Asian situation and the unpleasant Europe situation that the twains never did meet.

Exhausting wars with fascists in Europe bankrupted Britain, and forced them to begin the long process of decolonization. After India went it's own way, the issue came up of what to do about Tibet. Continuing to manage the colony was costly and unrewarding, and becoming more difficult due to it now being surrounded by independant states. Still, the British felt an obligation to Tibet, to help them against the Communists of Central Asia and the irredentist Han.

That said, there was a lot of support for independence among the people (most simply assuming that switching patrons from Great Britain to the US-Japan alliance that dominates the Pacific will be sufficient defence). However, there are strong differences of opinion. Many conservatives wish a return to the rule of the Dalai Lama, while young, Western-educated intellectuals demand a modern republic.

Here are the results of the first, inconclusive Tibetan plebiscite of 1953.

EDIT: Cleaned up a bit of off-colouring.

Antarctique referundum

More or less self-explaining i suppose

Hungarian Referendums, 1919

The year is 1919. Germany, Hungary and Italy stand victorious in the War to end all Wars. The War, as everyone simply referred to it, had been raging for six years, and the only thing that put an end to it was Ukraine and Poland's finally agreeing to send troops to the Western Front.

It had started in May of 1913 when the Bulgarians declared war on Serbia, eager to gain Serbia's southern lands, which were mostly Bulgarian. The Bulgarians were certain that they would be able to beat the Serbs before their allies, the Russians, were able to intervene.

However that was a fatal mistake, perhaps indeed the most fatal mistake in their entire history. Two days after the Bulgarians declared war on the Serbs, the Russians, French and British (henceforth known as the Entente, a French word meaning 'agreement') declared war not only on the Bulgarians, but on the entire Quintuple Alliance (consisting of the Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Ottomans, and the United States). This made Emperor Wilhelm and President Sinclair* consider abandoning the Bulgarians, but in the end reason won out, as they would be at war either way, and it would be political decapitation to abandon a loyal ally. So began the Great War, and both sides knew that they would win, the Entente because they had a better navy and more manpower, the Alliance because they had superior land technology and higher morale. The Germans immediately started marching into Belgium, hoping to bypass French defences and thus reach Paris the next year. The Italians marched across the mountain passes of the Western Alps, hoping to gain territory in Provence, a rich French wine region, and in Dauphiné, a region which was rich in light industry and some metals. The two nations, however, greatly underestimated the French, and within two months both fronts were locked in a stalemate.

But the Germans and Italians were slowly winning, and by the spring of 1915 the Gremans had driven the French out of most of Belgium, and the Italians had reached the city of Gap, and thus were out of the worst part of the Alps. French morale was damaged but not dead by this, and the French continued fighting valiantly, aided by British expeditionary forces.

By 1916 the French had made small gains against the Germans, who feared a French breakthrough in case they did not strengthen considerably. There was one way to do so: the Netherlands. Flanders, the northern half of Belgium, was populated mostly by Dutch people, and the Queen of the Netherlands and her Government also loathed the British for annexing the Boer republics in Southern Africa. The creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 slightly eased relations, but the Dutch still wanted to fight back in the name of their fallen brethren. This made them perfect allies for the Germans, who asked them to join the Alliance in exchange for Flanders. The Dutch were eager to accept the alliance, and in September of 1916 the Dutch army joined with the Germans at the Western Front.

The next year the Alliance achieved a breakthrough, thanks to a new invention: chlorine gas. This chlorine gas was poisonous, and thus, theoretically, it could be used to bombard the enemy lines; thus killing most of the entrenched French troops and allowing the German and Dutch soldiers to capture the enemy fortifications, allowing a breakthrough. Theoretically. However when the Germans tried it out at Ypres in 1915 the results were disastrous, due to the Germans not having invented a device to keep the gas away from their own troops. By 1917 however the Germans had developed gas masks which covered the whole face of the soldier, and were connected to oxygen tubes on the soldier's back. The French were not equally prepared, and thus in an incredible stroke of luck, the Germans were able to release the gas all across the front, and start capturing French defences. By August the Germans had captured the cities of Reims, Amiens, and Épinal, and by early October they were marching in on Paris. The French, who were overwhelmed by the quick German offensive, quickly asked for an armistice.

Around the time of the armistice with France, Russia saw a revolution. This revolution overthrew the Tsar and established a republic. The Russian Republic was very unstable, and this in turn caused many factions of Russian politics, most notably the Bolsheviks, to strike. The Germans as well saw this as a perfect opportunity to strike, as they were after all at war with the Russians. The German Army crossed the Russian border on the 14th of March, 1918, after waiting out the Russian winter. They promised the Poles, Lithuanians, Finns and Ukrainians independence in exchange for military support. Thanks to this they were able to score a quick victory against the Russians, who were forced to sign a humiliating armistice at Poltava, where the Russians had defeated the Swedish two hundred and ten years earlier. This armistice marked an end to the War to end all Wars. The Alliance was victorious.

However, in 1919 a major question arose; what to do with the territory gained? The Poles, Lithuanians, Finns and Ukrainians were granted independence, as the Germans had promised a year earlier. The Dutch were granted Flanders, and the Germans were quick to annex Lorraine, Franche-Comté, and western Courland, thus making the German Empire almost as large as the Holy Roman Empire in 1648. The Bulgarians were able to annex the parts of Serbia populated by their brethren, as they were indeed what started the war in the first place. The United States, which had made a successful campaign in North America, were allowed to annex the Canadian Pacific Coast, the Canadian Maritimes, the northern third of Mexico and Russian Alaska. The Italians annexed half of Dauphiné and Provence from France. Hungary, however, was more of a quandry, it had not gained any land in the area, but still it was a patchwork of ethnicities waiting to revolt. The Germans pressed the Hungarian government for a referendum, and after considerable pressure agreed to hold one.

The two referendums that were held turned out to be suspicious to say the least, but still the Hungarians agreed to cede surprisingly much land to its neighbors, in fears of a Russian-style revolution. The method of doing this is commonly known as gerrymandering, and inbolves redrawing the constituencies, not the vote, to reflect the desires of the ruling party, be it a political or ethnic one. The Hungarians made heavy use of this, especially in Northern Transylvania. The referendum was arranged in two parts; first the constituencies would decide whether to stay in Hungary or secede, and second those who voted for secession would vote to either become independent or join a nearby country.

The results of the referendums, as well as the situation in the Pannonian Plain after the referendums, is shown on the map below.

* Not Upton Sinclair, but Arnold Sinclair, a fictional/ITTL character.