EU ISOT to virgin earth
The ISOT happens early 2020, just after Brexit was finalized.
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This is the world 100 years later
New countries (all are EarthGov members): Russia, England, Levant, Mesopotamia, Hejaz
2037 Vienna treaty:
- Reorganizes EU into a World Government (EarthGov)
- Secession illegal
- Single currency and open borders everywhere
- Demilitarization
- Expansion of welfare state
The arrival, as with any ISOT scenario immediately lead to some chaos. Economic collapse of the markets occurred instantly, but that hardly mattered compared to the situation regarding food and fuel. Luckily the event happened in the spring so heating fuel wouldn’t become a pressing issue for 6 months. Food was an immediate issue, but on balance there was just enough to go around with some major changes to diet and smaller portions. The virgin seas also yielded tremendous seafood stocks which could supplement the diets of millions for a while. A few incidents of starvation occurred, mostly in isolated communities that had suddenly lost their neighbours during the first few weeks before production was redirected. France in particular relied on fishing almost exclusively to support their overseas regions (only those in the Union had been brought along).
With such a reduced human population environmental concerns were much diminished for the time and oil extraction was immediately redeveloped in the North Sea and Mediterranean regions. After the immediate situation was taken stock many things required addressing. All physical property owned by people not present after the event was nationalized. Much was used as housing for tourists and foreign business people who could never go home and the rest usually sold at auction. Local branches of many multinational companies were spun off as their own corporations. All holdings outside the EU were declared legally void.
Now turn to territory. In Western Europe there were only a few regions of the virgin earth which replaced the microstates and Switzerland. In the Balkans a significant expanse was suddenly heavily forested and uninhabited. Kalingrad, Norway, Russia, Great Britain, Turkey, Africa and the Middle East! All were uninhabited, all were in a state untouched by man. Everywhere along the borders there were occasionally deadly encounters with the wildlife, including large predators not seen since the ice age.
The microstates were annexed to their larger neighbours and mostly made into parks. Switzerland was partitioned between France, Germany, and Italy. Kalingrad was annexed entirely to Lithuania in exchange for Polish control of all Belarus and beyond. Norway to Sweden. The north of the island and Scotland to Ireland.The Danes who went back to Iceland found it looking like it had when their ancestors first discovered it millennia ago, half covered in vast forests. North Africa was quite a bit more forested and the deserts were smaller then they used to be. Everywhere climates were slightly colder and the forests denser and wilder then anything seen for thousands of years.
Greece began to expand into Turkey while Croatia occupied the former regions of Bosnia and Montenegro and western Serbia. Northern Serbia was annexed to Hungary, also Carpathian Ukraine. Eastern Serbia to Bulgaria, along with Kosovo, most of Albania, and North Macedonia. All of Eastern Europe expanded further east, Finland into Karelia and northern Russia. Estonia and Latvia both into nearby areas of former Russia, Poland through Belarus and Ukraine into Russia, and Romania into southern Ukraine and the Crimea. Poland is even scheming a trans-Siberian to open up northern Asia, which remains uninhabited. In Africa France returned to Algeria and Tunis, Spain colonized Morocco, Italy Libya and Egypt (rebuilding the Suez Canal), while further south we have Swedish Somalia and the Dutch Cape along with a renewed French Settlement around Senegal and a small Belgian outpost at the mouth of the Congo.
The Middle East holds the majority of the new established countries with the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Hejaz. Levant is a heavily Christian state built around the new Jerusalem headquarters of the Catholic Church. Mesopotamia is something of a melting pot of mostly Arab speaking former refugees and economic migrants from across what used to be the Muslim world, a secular democracy rebuilt along western government principles. Hejaz is a more traditional Muslim state that doesn’t go for things like separation of church and state, but still maintains a democratic parliament (people tend to just vote their religious leaders into political office). Built around the holy cities of Mecca and Median.
Further afield the French have made a point of reoccupying all their former overseas territories, and they also have colonies in Newfoundland and Panama (for the canal), the Indian Ocean, along with many of the lesser Antilles islands and an expanded Guiana. Indeed France claims all her former colonial territory in Africa and Indochina, along with large swaths besides. Germany America is by far the biggest settled area outside of Europe, consisting of the eastern seaboard and parts inland from Quebec to Louisiana. Colonial regions in this world have been directly incorporated into the metropole. The German state of Plymouth for example has the same federal status as Saxony or Bavaria. Spain has the Greater Antilles and has started some towns on the shore of Mexico. The Dutch are back to the ABC islands and the nearby shore, while Portugal has settled the coast of southern Brazil and the Rio de la Plata delta along with Cape Verde. Lastly is the far off New Ireland colony (formerly New Zealand) which as you might expect, has few people and a lot of sheep.
After about a decade the most critical issue facing this world was population decline. Every country had a below replacement birthrate and people were aging fast. Immigration from fast growing countries was no longer available as a supplement and the trials of a new world had (at least temporarily) halted and reversed the upwards trend of life expectancy. The plan to solve it was necessarily twofold.
Economically first: Social welfare programs were expanded to the point that raising a child became essentially free to the parent, and beyond that even cash flow positive, all on the taxpayers dime. Years of paid parental leave, tax breaks, stipends per child, free food for children, free education including the tertiary level, free childcare from the youngest days, subsidies for all children’s products to make cloths, shoes, school supplies, and common toys even dirt cheep.
But the efficacy of that still fell short of the social engineering: Advertising to pressure young families into having kids, strong public discouragement of birth control and abortions, campaigns to encourage marriage at younger ages before completing tertiary education. Girls were again taught a public school curriculum that emphasized the role of women as mothers and home makers, while suggesting a career was something optional to be done later in life. And most significantly collaboration with Christian churches, who’s attendance jumped considerably after the event, both among inactive nominal members and ex atheists who figured they’d just witnessed an act of god. Strongly religious communities had already maintained higher birth rates than the general population because of their morality, this only became more pronounced.
To be clear, teen pregnancy was still discouraged, but with the measure’s above it was much less of an imposition on the mother’s life, who could still finish education if she wanted and go on to whatever life she had intended to persue at only a marginal disadvantage compared to what it used to be. Likewise abortions were not banned most places they had previously been legal, the lesson had been learned that that just creates a black market. They were shamed though. Almost no one would publicly encourage a woman to abort her child in any circumstance less than rape, incest or elevated risk of death during childbirth.
These measures weren’t implemented universally or simultaneously, but countries that lagged behind began to see their birthrates diverge and realized they would simply fade away if they didn’t. So they did. Ultimately though both these approaches, while helpful for raising the birthrate had a smaller effect then a set of circumstances no one could engineer.
Europe at the time of the event was a highly developed economy. Meaning that many of the dirty jobs were outsourced to poorer countries. For a while Europeans were content to do without because the situation demanded it but soon enough were clamouring once again for all manner of mass produced products. Within 5 years of the event industry started coming back to Europe in a big way. Factories and mass production (automation notwithstanding), along with a booming trades and construction industry created tens of millions of new mid-skilled jobs that required less formal education and more on the job learning. People who go to work and settle down at a younger age spend less time in school have children sooner and bigger families. It’s always been that way. Then there were the new lands. Naturally young people with a sense of adventure and enthusiasm for exploration and hard work were those drawn to the frontier. The rural environment has always fostered larger families than cities do. Living in open land with obvious and plentiful space to grow encourages and optimism about the future, and a desire to be part of it. Combine that with the measures listed above and the population of newly settled lands quickly boomed. Some of the next generation would move back to the cities in the old country of course, or found new ones at important junctures but most moved further out, where the living was rough and real, but every person could get free and plentiful land to farm traditionally if they wanted, or just to enjoy while doing all manner of important work either with their hands or remotely over the Internet.
Ultimately cities became again what they used to be, a place to work and to die, with a population supplemented by rurals continually moving there despite the local population being constantly in decline. Now because of old age and low fertility rates rather than disease. In the modern day the Polish eastern provinces, German Amerika, and French Africa have the biggest fast growing populations in the world. Most “new territory” areas have a fertility rate approaching four children per woman and are almost doubling every generation, whereas the rural “old territory” is back up comfortably above replacement.
Speaking of disease this world was able to settle the tropics with historically unprecedented ease due to a lack of several tropical diseases that used to decimate any population of European settlers who dared stay there too long. Malaria, notably was eradicated in the French overseas regions which were put under a strict quarantine before anyone could leave them. Without a human reservoir it had never existed anywhere else.
In the century since the event technology has advanced somewhat. Especially in biotech, healthcare, and computers, whereas other areas have had only moderate gains or remained relatively stable. Food is cheep or even free in most places. Phones are more powerful and have better cameras but how much do people really need? Electricity is generated exclusively from Nuclear or renewables but hydrocarbon fuels are still used in some limited applications. Cars are all electric and most have self driving ability. Life in the new territories is often old tech or at least a more traditional lifestyle so there hasn’t been a huge push towards innovation. In old Europe on the other hand development is ridiculously high and wealth is abundant, but complacency, a welfare state, and a heavy regulatory burden mean it’s far from an entrepreneurial paradise and innovation moves slowly. Nuclear fusion has been done but was ultimately uneconomical compared to the existing methods. Life expectancy is over 90 worldwide and a large percentage of deaths are accidents rather than disease. There is a lot more dangerous work to be done after all. Space travel has advanced a bit and people have gone back to the moon, along with an Apollo style mission to Mars. A fully reusable rocket still remains elusive though. The Guiana spaceport did expand a lot and a lifted many communications satellites along with exploration probes and an Internet network similar to the under construction Starlink system. Indeed most launches are done on something resembling a ripped off Falcon 9 (all patents and intellectual property held outside Europe were declared to be in the public domain) but it still required a lot of figuring things out.
There have of course been a few political crises, (The Maltese crisis of 2084 is infamously decried as a failure of democracy by it’s losers) but in a demilitarized society it’s hard for a government to get too authorization without pushback. The frontier is a great vent for any brand of political extremism and many groups have trekked off into the wood to found their utopia, most fail quickly. There are of course thousands of small communities scattered across the world outside of state control but most are peacefully isolationist and accept the inevitable of eventual reintegration when society make it that far out, they’re just hoping it wont happen in their lifetimes.
All in all life on earth is pretty good. Every country maintains an acceptably democratic government, even if some parties or political families are very entrenched. The world has been demilitarized since the 30’s. Free stuff is everywhere. Every country is a member of EarthGov, which is fully democratic and handles the high stakes areas of governance. In another century or two the world might start to fill up again and birthrates may drop, but hopefully by then humanity will be heading to the stars...
