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

Nothing about what you said is incompatible with what I said. If Brussels is pushing austerity in response to an economic crisis while the Eastern nations are all stuck on the euro and unable to perform fiscal policy, it could easily breed that kind of resentment. I don't know about joining Russia, though. There's too much bad blood there.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 12th 2022 at 2:37:25 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Though if events so far are any guide, it's more likely that the Western states will be the ones to leave the EU, leaving the Eastern states holding the bag...

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

It could happen either way: Western Europe leaves in disgust because Eastern Europe "isn't holding up its end of the deal", or Eastern Europe quits over the West being all snooty and high-handed.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I think that the scenario #1 hypothesized here are only plausible if your fiction!EU has a much stronger geopolitical aspect than the real world one, since you are talking about a split along foreign policy lines (e.g conditional vs unconditional support for Ukraine). Economic cleavage lines mostly run north vs south not east vs west, so #2 is improbable under real life economic conditions.

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

Another possibility if we go on with the economic split is that Western Europe makes itself independent from fossil fuels, while Eastern Europe does not. That could create a ripe opportunity for folks to get mad at each other. It's also a very contemporary message.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 12th 2022 at 7:22:39 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It would also be presuppose that eastern Europe has less interest/means to get off fossil fuels, which isn't quite the case. I think a breakup of the EU is more likely over social policy matters, since these are a topic where there are strong splits.

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

Interest is one thing, ability to make the transition within a specific time frame is another matter.

I already had that in mind as part of the divide, actually. The reformed Russia coming in with a very feasible solution to let the Eastern European countries not need to completely cut themselves from oil in order to combat climate change cements it further in.

People didn't believe that pan-European unity was remotely possible either until the world wars happened, the Cold War started, and the terrified western European governments scrambled to band together in the face of the rising threat of the USSR. And this after centuries of near-constant wars and feuds have torn apart the continent over and over.

And it would be a virtually empty bag, considering all the institutions are based in western Europe and the bulk of the economic power lies in the same.

These two maps don't seem to agree with what you said.

• European and bordering nations by GDP (PPP) per capita (2021)◊
• European countries by total wealth(billions USD), Credit Suisse 2018◊

Aside from Ireland and the Germanic countries, there's a clear generally west-to-east decline in economic prosperity across Europe.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 13th 2022 at 6:46:30 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

GDP and income do not make fiscal policy, however. Also the EU debt crisis was ... well a debt crisis and debt-to-GDP ratios do not rise eastward but south(west)ward.

People didn't believe that pan-European unity was remotely possible either until the world wars happened, the Cold War started, and the terrified western European governments scrambled to band together in the face of the rising threat of the USSR.

Because of World War II and its aftermath. Replicating the same thing today would require something as momentous as that, otherwise the "bad blood" Fighteer mentioned will matter more. A "Western betrayal" narrative is more likely to emerge about Western inaction against Russia, as we can currently see in Poland, Baltics etc. regarding Germany's Ukraine policy.

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

Well, what about the decades between the 2022 Russian Revolution and end of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the 2050s being marked by a plethora of natural disasters ravaging Europe (and much of the world) time and time again, and there being an obvious favoritism in the EU's allocation of reconstruction aid to the much more economically valuable countries like Germany, France and Scandinavia than in Eastern and Southeastern Europe? Already every successive year sees worse storms, heat/cold waves, droughts, pandemic outbreaks etc. happening than any preceding year in the past 1-2 decades due to ever-worsening climate change and other factors.

What does, then?

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 13th 2022 at 9:00:50 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I'm dramatically simplifying because this is not the General Economics thread.

Fiscal policy is, simply put, a government using deficits and surpluses in the public sector to compensate for changes in demand for money in the private sector. If people are unable to get the money they need due to layoffs, bank failures, etc., the government increases its spending to put money into private hands. If the economy is overheating with signs of inflation, the government reduces its spending to drain money out. In other words, Keynesianism 101, but this only works if the government controls its own money supply. Eurozone nations do not.

The 2008-2010 Great Recession in Europe triggered a "balance of payments" crisis. So-called "debtor nations", mostly from the south of Europe, found themselves with rapidly shrinking economies that caused them to be unable to repay euro-denominated debt. Since they were unable to issue new euros, they were forced into austerity measures, which further shrank their economies and made it harder to repay the debt.

Several US states found themselves in similar crises during the same period, but because the United States practices aggressive fiscal policy, the federal government helped to cover their shortfalls until the states could bounce back. The Eurozone specifically does not do this, and so exacerbated the problems in the affected nations.

It was so bad that Greece briefly considered withdrawing from the Eurozone. So if this crisis were to recur, say over energy policy, and the Brussels regime (effectively controlled by Germany) refused to help, conditions could get so bad in affected nations that they secede, either explicitly or de facto.

It is unclear to me how or why this would take the form of a hard geographic split between East and West, though. It implies that there has been an economic shift and/or that the crisis is triggered by something extrinsic, such as energy supply.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 14th 2022 at 2:04:58 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It could be a matter of settling debts.For Example, Eastern EU nations might end up owing Western EU nations such massive debt that they could not possibly repay it all but the Western EU aggrees to forgive some or all of the debt if the Eastern EU nations leave the EU. There's a number of motives for this but the Eastern nations would have had to have been very, very bad.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Jun 14th 2022 at 9:49:33 PM

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

Edited by Belisaurius on Jun 14th 2022 at 11:23:21 AM

Sorry, I posted this in the wrong thread.

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

Or widespread damage across Europe from a slew of unusually devastating storms, wildfires and other natural disasters over the course of a handful of years back to back, along with one or more new pandemic outbreaks further stressing the countries' systems from both dealing with rising domestic cases and international trade being once again disrupted for a prolonged period (which itself would exacerbate the already-ongoing real-life shift from continuing the pace of economic globalization and instead seeking regionalization). The Eastern European countries are left to fend for themselves as Brussels either refuses to give aid or only gives too little, preferring to focus on supporting the much more economically valuable countries of the "Big Five" (Germany, France, the UK^note Yeah, it's back in the EU, much more humbled and no longer with special privileges, just every other EU member., Italy and Spain^note Looking at the EU's and UK's economic data, these five countries have consistently held GDP numbers in excess of €1 tril over the past 14 years, with the next closest (the Netherlands) trailing behind Spain by as much as ~€400-500 bil. Makes sense that you don't want those to crash, right? Now consider how badly the Eastern European economies would be performing if they had been battered hard by borrow from the ECB to deal with one crisis, only to go into further debt to deal with the next blow, rinse and repeat. And this doesn't figure in the possibility of Duda/Orban-style regimes coming into power at some point and ruining their countries with bad economic policies.) and the Scandinavian members.

... Actually, if you combine the nominal GDPs of all of Eastern Europe now, they would still trail behind the UK's current GDP by over €1 trillion. Now that's making me think: What if the UK was still in talks with the EU over rejoining when the crisis hit, and the EU focused the bulk of its disaster relief aid on the aforementioned countries, then when the betrayed countries threatened to quit en masse over this bias, Brussels responded by not only ignoring the threat but announcing the finalization of the UK-EU negotiations over Britain's return to the bloc (not necessarily with special privileges, mind you)?

EDIT: I had to add two manual line breaks to circumvent this strange issue that posts have been having ever since the last big site update.

EDIT #2: Also, on the subject of bad blood... I'd like to mention that Timor-Leste had been occupied for over 20 years by Indonesia, during which it endured a lot of oppression and even genocide, and yet ever since regaining its independence in 2002, the bad blood between has apparently not been enough to prevent the two from seeking better relations with each other, to the point where Indonesia is the principal supporter of Timor-Leste's bid for ASEAN membership (which is contrasted with the tepidness of the other ASEAN members).

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 15th 2022 at 6:07:25 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Dude, you deserve some kind of world building award. Have you written any of the narrative yet?

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

1. Is that sincere praise? Forgive me for my skepticism, it's just this is a surpisingly high compliment compared to what I'm used to.

2. Can you elaborate on what you found praiseworthy?

3. No... and probably not for a long time. All I have are some scattered development-stage notes and such.^note Long story short, blame a hectic and irregularly shifting clash of my diverse personal interests on the other hand, and family obligations, a so far fruitless search for a job that has an aceeptable level of financial stability, time consumption and which I won't hate every second of my life (that last one basically rules out the vast majority of jobs that the market here throws at me), and other real-life issues on the other hand.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 15th 2022 at 9:54:19 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

No, I'm being sincere. The sheer level of detail you are going into is truly impressive. However I worry that you are falling into the trap of expending all your energy on world building and nothing left over for writing the story.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Well, I almost never have the luxury to spend my free time on writing (I only managed to write and release a handful of very brief fanfic snippets), and I am plagued by the knowledge of several fanfics that truly held great promise but either ended up being abandoned entirely by their writers because they've made the mistake of writing by the seat of their pants too much and ultimately hit insurmountable writer's blocks, or had to go back and heavily rewrite large swathes of the story because — again, due to very insufficient planning of the story — they belatedly realized that a huge amount of contradictions and plot holes had piled up.

Also, I like world-building. And to be honest, much of what you've been seeing here didn't take me much time to come up with; I spent a lot more time figuring out how to properly write the official long and short names of Miroslavia in Interslavic and the Cyrillic script-using Slavic languages (still need to go through the Latin script-using ones), the design of the flag and coat of arms.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 15th 2022 at 8:18:56 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

You are the best judge of how to spend your free time. However,

"ended up being abandoned entirely by their writers because they've made the mistake of writing by the seat of their pants too much and ultimately hit insurmountable writer's blocks, or had to go back and heavily rewrite large swathes of the story because — again, due to very insufficient planning of the story — they belatedly realized that a huge amount of contradictions and plot holes had piled up."

Is a bit of a misunderstanding I think. To write a story well pretty much requires all that stuff. Lots of authors write by the seat of their pants (google "pantsing", it's an actual thing) but with the understanding that any good story requires significant time being rewritten. Methinks rather that those would be authors simply didn't understand the commitment it would take.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Umm. I strongly recommend against Googling "pantsing", unless the definitions of words have changed a lot in the past few years.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

To clear up any possible confusion

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Wiktionary claims that "pantsing" in that sense is informal in the field of writing, so I guess that might be why Fighteer and I didn't know about it. That, and maybe "by the seat of your pants" sounds better (if only to avoid confusion with the more common meaning).

I find it funny that you assume I don't already know about the "pulling down of a person's trousers" meaning of "pantsing".

I shall take that into consideration.

That aside, you never did answer my second question.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 17th 2022 at 3:45:38 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I was making a joke in the form of "Don't Google X!"

I am aware of three definitions of "pantsing". First: pulling someone's pants down, second: applying the Draco in Leather Pants trope while writing, and now this third: writing "by the seat of one's pants" — i.e., not meticulously planning one's story in advance.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 17th 2022 at 11:17:20 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I did: "The sheer level of detail you are going into is truly impressive."

Also, perhaps I am hyper-aware because I am myself a pantser (in only one sense of that word).

Here is some more information: though I think there are other forms of "pantsing" than simply not using an outline. I think it's a spectrum from hyper-planning to complete writing without any planning at all.

More advice. Pay particular attention to this bit: "The truth is that pantsing involves just as much hard work as plotting. Because pantsing is not “making things up” as you go along. Its real name is intuitive writing, and what it actually involves is the writer going deep within themselves, bypassing the logical side of their brain, and using their intuition to pull images out of their subconscious (or out of a different reality, depending on the writer’s belief system), and then translating those images into words, which are then recorded on the page."

I write very intuitively, and find it impossible to follow a pre-planned outline.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."