Near-Future/Sci-Fi Settings, Societies, Cultures, Histories

Sounds perfectly plausible to me. Heck, if Glastnost had gone a little differently, we could practically be living it now.

Would it be also plausible for that scenario to result in the cultures of the Eastern and Southeastern European members of this Eurasian superstate sharing a common sentiment of deep resentment towards "the West" (here referring to the countries of Europe that comprise the EF, which lie mostly west of the Eurasian superstate) for abandoning all of its commitments to them and locking them out of the EU's successor out of "elitism" — a new "Western betrayal", if you will?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I'd sooner see them resenting both sides, with the occasional uprisings / civil wars whenever someone tries to take a side against everyone else's objections.

Since that basically describes how many of them feel now, I think you're safe projecting that into your setting.

O_O Why would they resent the Eurasian superstate they're now a member of if they had largely welcomed its creation with open arms and had since its inception been successful at fulfilling its critical promises to its citizens? Yes, of course there would be politicians and citizens who are adamantly against being under a supranational government (just look at all the Euroskeptics in the EU IRL), but I imagine such people would be increasingly marginalized and decline in popular support as the superstate gradually proves to have been a really good idea (unlike the real-life EU, whose ineffeciencies, confusing structure, and a host of other flaws provide considerable fuel for Euroskepticism to maintain and even increase its power base).

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 23rd 2022 at 12:01:05 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I guess I'm getting "Eurasion Superstate" and your "European Federation" confused with each other? Maybe you could rephrase your question in simpler terms?

To be fair, I have an extremely pessimistic opinion on separate peoples' willingness to cooperate in the long-term without a shithead or five coming out of nowhere every once in a while, convincing everyone to tear each others' throats out just for the hell of it and everyone blindly following them like sheep.

It's been experimentally proven that humans are psychologically drawn to loud and aggressive leader figures over competent ones. It's our old animal instincts at work. The Eurasian Superstate can be as prosperous and competent as it wants, but all it takes is a small handful of demagogues to ruin everything.

Besides, I don't think Eastern Europe will be forgiving to their eastern neighbor's predecessors' crimes against them so long as anyone alive remembers them.

Yeah, you are. The Eurasian superstate is the one that was formed by the post-Soviet states and the other countries in Europe and Asia that Russia had courted and built solid political and economic ties to, as per my aforementioned scenario. I'm just calling it the "Eurasian superstate" because I thought it would be easier for you guys to remember a combination of familiar and logically descriptive terms than the actual name (Union of Volduravian Republics, AKA Volduravian Union). I guess I was wrong.

Why do you think I set this within a time frame 50 to 100 years in the future? This allows for new generations to be born and grow into adulthood that are sufficiently (though not necessarily entirely) detached from the traumas of the past for many of them to grow tired of the older generations' screeching about past crimes and "never forget" and all that shit when by their reckoning their own countries aren't that much better themselves.

And if you are skeptical, I direct you to France, which was one of the countries that had been most savaged by the Nazis, and yet it didn't take more than a mere 11 years before French neo-Nazi groups started emerging and rising to national significance.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Ok, I think I understand better now, but it still seems plausible to me that countries which were excluded from the Federation and accepted by the Union would generally feel pretty positive toward the Union and negative toward the Federation. And further I think you are correct that it only takes a generation sometimes for popular opinion to do a complete 180 switch with respect to attitudes toward a foreign power.

Oh, I thought you were agreeing with Amita, who was saying that the "lesser" member states of the Volduravian Union would resent their membership in it and hate the European Federation for the betrayal that led to their current situation.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Really, it's your story, so let it be driven by the plot.

I know, I just want to improve the plausibility of my scenarios as much as it's feasible. If I could do that by tweaking certain details or adding factors I hadn't originally thought of, then I want to do so.

FWIW, the wider setting has the world's countries congregate into large supranational unions or outright superstates, with international relations being rather tense, be it due to rivalries between former allies (e.g. the USA and Europe; NATO has long broken apart by this point) or bad blood from past violent clashes.

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 25th 2022 at 2:53:28 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Public opinion is so volatile and irrational at times I think you an safely handwave almost anything. Anyway, I see no "verisimilitude killers" in your proposed story outline, so go for it.

Thinking about it, would it be plausible to have the Second Russian Revolution happen as a result of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine being much more unpopular among both Russian troops and civilians, to the point that unexpectedly huge mutinies and protests erupt more or less spontaneously and too fast to be suppressed by the regime's security agencies (which themselves may be suffering their own civil wars due to disillusionment with the leadership's increasingly obvious incompetence)? Then Russia would spend many decades painfully purging itself of the deep-rooted corruption and rebuilding its economy and society, during which the EU lapses back to being increasingly eroded by Euroskeptics, which ultimately leads to the EU's collapse and Europe becoming divided between the European Federation in the west and the Volduravian Union in the east.

Edited by MarqFJA on Mar 28th 2022 at 9:52:52 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I think the question is how to get to that revolution. The Russian Revolution in 1905 occurred after a trouncing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in a country that was already weak, and was ultimately unsuccessful; I don't think either condition (weak and trouncing) is satisfied in the current conflict.

Really, I can imagine only two scenarios:

• Putin has a Villainous Breakdown and begins to openly flirt with a nuclear first strike. His sycophants realize the full implications of having Minuteman III missiles raining down on them and decide that their chances in a coup are better than their chances in a nuclear war.
• Russia sends so many national guard and police units into the Ukraine meatgrinder that when protests erupt, there is no longer enough force available to suppress them. But even that would require large scale protests.

---

I think such an outcome is marginally more likely in my own setting. Like Reality, Unless Noted save for a country spanning the Sahara but centered on an archipelago in the North Atlantic, to which I'll refer to as the Mountain Archipelago. It's a heavily Europeanized constitutional monarchy (think Norway) that spent some time as a puppet state of the Soviet Union but had no regrets - until the Syrian Civil War came and a lot of Syrian refugees came into the archipelago.

Now, fast forward to 2022. As with Real Life, Russia is carrying out an invasion in Ukraine and the Mountain Archipelago has decided to play both sides - they openly allow/endorse evading sanctions but at the same time sell various weapons systems to Ukraine. Back in its puppet state days the MA became a powerhouse in consumer goods and rockets/missiles industry and some of these missiles are now being sent to Ukraine and reducing Russian railway stations, flagships and bridges to smoking craters.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I like the idea of Putin going so far off the deep end that he tries to order a first nuclear strike, only for the commanders of the relevant sub-branches in each branch of the Russian Armed Forces to openly defy the order on either moral grounds or knowing it would be a suicidal act, and the news of both Putin's order and the universal mutiny against it by those who received it becoming a major impetus for the revolution.

That said, do note that this revolution is supposed to involve the bulk of the Russian Armed Forces that had been assigned to the invasion of Ukraine mutinying more or less en masse by the 2nd or 3rd week of the conflict due to the troops having their loyalty to the regime shattered by the sheer deception that they had been subjected to and the horrific nature of the orders that they're being given ^note Basically take all the real-life surrenders/defections of entire units of Russian troops in the ongoing conflict over those same reasons, and make them afflict the overwhelming majority of the invading troops. The mutinying forces would then split between those who help Ukraine crush the Russian regime's loyalist forces (including the ones in occupied Crimea and the two breakaway republics) and those who march towards Moscow fully intent on bringing down the regime (news of which galvanize what remains of the populace that hasn't already risen up to take to the streets).

Here are a few other factors that I've thought of:

• The Putin regime's propaganda in this worldline is not as successful as it has been in ours, so unrest among the Russian populace is boiling just under the surface and the Kremlin is none the wiser. This would make it more plausible for a civilian mass uprising to happen in a largely spontaneous manner.

• Similarly, the various Russian security forces' loyality to the regime has been eroded over the years by not only witnessing its excesses and oppression but being made to enable it. About the only security agency that's more or less entirely loyal to the regime is the Federal Protective Service (FSO).

• A combination of incompetence and overconfidence in the cybersecurity of the Russian government's surveillance on domestic communications leads to anti-Russian hackers finding a major flaw in the system that they then exploit to repeatedly sabotage it, allowing them to spread crucial news and messages across Russian social media and organize a popular uprising.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

You had me up to this: "The mutinying forces would then split between those who help Ukraine crush the Russian regime's loyalist forces (including the ones in occupied Crimea and the two breakaway republics) and those who march towards Moscow fully intent on bringing down the regime (news of which galvanize what remains of the populace that hasn't already risen up to take to the streets)."

The problem here is logistics. The army invading Ukraine is (and would be in any realistic scenario) entirely dependent upon supplies and other support from the home country. Without this support, once they run out of their own supplies, the overall military structure dissolves, and the force as a whole loses any ability to redeploy troops or accomplish long term goals.

On the other hand, if the logistics support structure (all the way back to the factories producing the items) is in the hands of the mutiny already, then the coup is essentially complete, and there would be no need to "backwards invade" your own country. All that would remain at that point is shooting the old leader and declaring an indefinite state of emergency.

More plausible is that an unpopular and unsuccessful invasion motivates the generals in charge of units defending the home territory to overthrow the leadership and declare themselves the new government.

Edited by DeMarquis on Mar 29th 2022 at 11:04:56 AM

Okay, so most of the mutinying forces on the invasion front surrender/defect en masse in a domino effect manner (starting from one division and spreading like wildfire as the news reach others on the frontlines, which is made even worse when Moscow furiously orders other units to punish the "deserters" and those units refuse to shoot their own comrades), prompting a now unhinged Putin to order other forces that are still on Russian home territory to mobilize to Ukraine and bring the "traitors" back in line, prompting the disillusioned commanders of those forces to not only defy said orders but march towards Moscow with the intent of deposing him (and shoot at any loyalist military and security forces that try to stand in their way).

Does this work?

They're not "backwards invading" their own country, they're heading straight towards Moscow without bothering with anything else in between (aside from hostile loyalist forces).

Edited by MarqFJA on Mar 29th 2022 at 2:45:22 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Sounds like an invasion to me. But your revised scenario sounds reasonable.

Another thought occurs to me: One of the reasons pan-Slavism ultimately failed is that Russia has an overwhelming population advantage over the rest of the prospective member states. That being said, even when considering only the former Soviet republics, the non-Russian populations combined hold a slight majority over ethnic Russians, which can be increased further by counting all the various non-Russian ethnic minorities within Russia (including a sizeable number of ethnic Ukrainians). Add in the various other prospective members of this hypothetical union, both Slavic and non-Slavic, and Russians would only form a plurality at just ~30% of the total population. Would this be a good start to mitigate concerns over Russian domination of the Union?

Edited by MarqFJA on Apr 22nd 2022 at 2:51:29 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Frankly, the first thing that comes to mind is to set ethnic quotas for the central government. A central government dominated by Russians is much more likely to cause trouble. I don't think that such nationality conflicts are primarily a matter of percentage; they are mainly about one group getting an undue amount of attention.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Yeah, good point. A consociational system based on a mix of both nationality and ethnicity proportions would be what you're suggesting, correct?

Edited by MarqFJA on Apr 22nd 2022 at 3:08:22 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

More or less. The USSR's central government was heavily dominated by Russians and that I think was a mistake.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I suppose it would also make sense to add a de facto confessional dimension to the consociational system to ensure that the many member states with Catholic, Protestant and Islamic majorities don't feel threatened by the Eastern Orthodox majority dominating much of the Eastern European members (including most of the Russian plurality). But would that conflict with maintaining strong secularism?

Edited by MarqFJA on Apr 22nd 2022 at 3:38:38 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Also, in my contemplation of a few alt-history and future history scenarios, I've come to wonder... How much potential for becoming a regional power does a Central Asian Union actually have, assuming that everything goes right for such a union to become as sustainable as its local material resources and potential human capital allow, from resolving the worst of whatever disputes exist between the prospective members to fixing the most crucial problems that afflict them?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.