Thanks again for the comprehensive reply. It gives me much to think about, but also a great deal to unpack, meaning that I’ve had to compose a bear of a response myself. Which I’ve no problem doing, though it may be best to quote some of your paragraphs out of order and answer them accordingly. There are various points you make I’ll defer to, since you seem more knowledgeable and better able to recall critical information at will than I am. Nonetheless, I also think there are spots to either add to or clarify what’s been said so far, so that’s what the bulk of this response will be about.
Just to clarify what has happened to non-EU citizens inside the affected areas - have assumed that their brought along for the ride - and also any EU people outside the region, including ships at sea? If the latter is not brought along then both Britain and France will have lost at least one SSBN that is out on patrol but also the issue of people abroad which there will be several millions of for Britain alone I think.
Well, I thought it was a no-brainer that anyone inside the ISOT’d area would be brought along for the ride. Naturally, that includes lots of non-EU citizens, a significant share of whom probably won’t willingly head back to their countries at this point in time. Among their number will be various foreign military assets and personnel, as you’ve said, though it’ll be ambiguous as to how much loyalty they’d have to nations eighty years removed from what they’re used to. Obviously, there are plenty of private persons and possessions whose situation would also be up for debate, which I’d be happy to discuss further downstream.
Since you brought it to my attention, I’ll ask Skippy to be a tad more merciful and have seafaring EU personnel and assets who are not within the area itself be sent back, too. In addition to the aforementioned SSBN and other such overseas entities, that also includes the various satellites and
undersea cables that underprop our telecommunications infrastructure. However, considering that lots of them are transcontinental--meaning that the 1939 counterparts of various countries, such as the United States—will find themselves controlling one end of multiple ocean-crossing cables whose purpose will need an explanation all its own, maybe it’d be best to just send the cables between EU countries back. Which will entail many problems of its own, most of which I don’t have the expertise to anticipate myself.
Even so, Skippy’s not willing to be too lenient, so I assume that lots of content and connections will disappear as a consequence of this. Definitely a first-world problem for people whose favorite websites have gone permanently down, but a love tap compared to the other shortages and severed connections now afflicting the EU.
On Brexit I think the issue is that OTL, as well as weak leadership Britain has the problem that a lot of strings are in the EU hands as they have deals with the rest of the world they can use to hinder Britain making new agreements with 3rd parties, which diplomatically and practically will be prolonged as well with the complexity of modern agreements. There will still be issues here with matter like quality control, especially for food imports.
A little digression here, but I’m reminded of the constant asterisks that pepper the various clauses within the EU’s legal code. That, and since international law is labyrinthine on its own, it’ll still pose a hassle to make and uphold relatively straightforward deals between a small handful of players.
Intuitively, I’m less dead-set on Britain wanting to leave the same year it arrives, again due to "We’re all in this together!" being a more important slogan than ever for the uptimers (my real-world stance on OTL Brexit notwithstanding, of course). I can also see Remainers and EU proponents from abroad using that line of attack against Brexiteers who stand firm, though how much success they’d have is unclear to me.
If a general election still occurs later in the year, Brexit will definitely have an affect--probably more so than even in IOTL, though I’m still reluctant to discuss the particulars or potential outcomes here.
However its a world used to a Britain that - albeit with some tariffs at that point - is one of the most open markets in the world and also has access to goods from colonies and also close trading arrangements with the dominions and a lot of other nations large and small around the world. IIRC despite its much smaller economy Britain had a larger share of world trade than the US still. As such there will be options for making quick deals to arrange trade with such parties rather than the isolated position Britain was in OTL. The EU will also have opportunities but apart from being a totally new entity, compared to the multitude of nations that the down-timers are used to its bureaucratic practices, both in terms of internal decision making and the sort of deals it would want to negotiate with the rest of the world. In those ways I think it would be easier for Britain to make a clear break rather than the half in half out mess we're in now. One other advantage Britain would have is that if it only affects the 2019 EU and associated waters say there's going to be assorted assets Britain will have, possibly most importantly a very large merchant marine which can help Britain adjust to trading with the world again, as the large modern container ships will be largely useless for some time for trade with the rest of the world. Of course it would need some ports in Britain being downgraded to handle such tramp steamers but that's probably a lot easier than adjusting one, let alone a lot of 1939 ports for huge modern ships.
Early 20th Century Britain being a leading light of free trade also crossed my mind, though my impression up until now--unfounded by actual evidence as it may have been, regrettably--was that this tradition was on the decline, with the empire weakening in the aftermath of World War I. Perhaps I’m wildly off-base there, though how trade relations will go with its various downtimer colonies is also up for discussion.
At first, I wondered if certain downtimers, seeing how uptimer Britons are way less imperialistic, would seize the opportunity and cut themselves loose completely. But, considering all the shiny toys those same Brits have to offer, they may make the pragmatists in their rinks more amenable to trade deals and maintaining close ties with the UK. If Brexit is successful and it feels confident enough, maybe it can go all-out and form a multilateral trade network with the rest of the Anglophonic world, up to and including colonies that it technically renounces, but still maintains good relations with.
Of course, Britain’s not without work to do itself, so it can start by apologizing to then-oppressed colonies and treating them as actual human beings with just as many rights and privileges as the citizens of UK proper. India in particular springs to mind, though I’m sure there are plenty of other places where the empire’s human rights record has massive room for improvement.
Current overseas possessions aside, I also speculate the Brits would want to establish a new trade deal with the United States, both for raw materials and out of a desire to bring back the Special Relationship between the two nations. While I know little about him personally and have yet to read a good biography of the man, I suspect Roosevelt would be receptive, at least in principle. How he interacts with Johnson in doing so--or, perhaps, Theresa May, depending on when in 2019 this happens (I’d say January 1st)--is another matter entirely.
There's going to be a huge economic hit anyway because so much of the 2019 European economy has lost access to resources it depends on. To take an obvious if relatively unimportant example what would be the state of the internet and where is the server that this site and associated software uses? If its not in the affected areas then "Hello, is any there? Please speak to me. Anyone?"
We''re going to lose all the satellites and a lot of stuff we depend on. Don't think there's any significant computer chip production in the EU so until something's set up once a computer or mobile phone breaks down, or anything that uses such items is going to be dead and I suspect there will be some impacts fairly quickly.
Indeed, crippling shortages via severed trade links are part and parcel with how the modern global economy works. Per my point above, I’m being semi-merciful and allowing the EU to have people and infrastructure that weren’t necessarily within its borders at the time of the ISOT be sent back for the ride. However, since infrastructure that’s physically “shared” with non-members doesn’t come along, the technical issues you referred to will still stick in the uptimers’ craw (if to a lesser degree).
I don’t know as much about international computer-hardware production as you probably do, but judging by the slew of news articles that popped up for me on Google, it seems you’re right. Which will force the EU to accelerate its plans to develop a robust domestic computer-chip industry, though exactly what they’d need to get it up and running—raw materials, factories, pre-assembled components, the works—I’m even less qualified to comment on.
In terms of Stalin he will be unhappy but he is overall a cautious man so he may wait a little. True his paranoia will be heighten by the loss of his spy networks in the EU. However news from Russians and communists in the EU area, although they will be strangers to him and many Russians might not want to 'return' to the USSR and I suspect most non Russians won't, is likely to give him pause. Especially when he received news of the existence of nukes and that Britain and France both have active ICBM systems. While he's unlikely to want to except their existence he only needs to be uncertain enough to pause before doing anything drastic. If he does attack then things could get very nasty, especially for some of the Soviet cities.
You make a series of good points here, and by and large, I can’t really argue with them. I suppose that, him being a pragmatist who’s less of an internationalist “loose cannon” than Trotsky, you can probably count on Stalin to be mindful of the capitalist powers on his left flank. Certainly, you’d have many prospective warmongers brimming with too much “revolutionary zeal” for their own good, but given what happens to those who fall out of line or question Comrade Stalin’s wisdom, they may very well keep their mouths shut. If if any of his immediate cabinet members float the option without inviting his wrath, I think it’d have to be done with utmost tact and subtlety, as well as argued with a silver tongue that’d convince pretty much anyone to go against their best judgment. Never mind a ruthless son of a bitch who knows his way around cutthroat politics, as it is.
Actually, that makes me wonder if the EU would be the aggressor, whether it’s the whole union that declares war, or an individual member state(s) that aggressively pushes for it? Poland--and at least a few other Eastern European nations that have been sent along for the ride--had been brutalized by communist rule for decades IOTL, and I assume the grudge they’d inevitably have towards Stalinist Russia would be easy for more interventionist, fervently anti-Soviet uptimers to capitalize on. It may not be reversible, but purges and GULAGs aside, the Holodomor hasn’t happened that long ago, and news of how Ukraine got crushed via an artificial famine that killed several million people would really tug at peoples’ heart strings. Stalin may want to avoid war for the time being, but there’s a good chance a critical mass of uptimers will not.
Should push come to shove and the EU succeeds in forcing a Soviet surrender and forcible restructuring of their government, I think it’s safe to assume they’d implement a process of de-Sovietization--far,
far more forceful than what we got IOTL. Hopefully, the following decades would see a well-adjusted, economically integrated Russia about as repentant as modern-day Germany, with communism kicked to the curb and relegated to the dustbin of history before it can make its gains in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. But that’s for much further down the line.
One other issue here is that 2019 borders don't match 1939 ones. For instance a large proportion of eastern Poland in 1939 is now in Belarus or Ukraine so that still exits in its 1939 status, see
here, especially the maps on the right. Ditto with
Bessarabia being part of Romania at this stage and the lands that Finland lost in the winter war and then at the end of the Continuation War. So it still has
those territories in 1939. As such other than in the Baltics there is a layer of 1939 territory between the EU and the USSR. A further complication is that what's now the
Kaliningrad_Oblast is in 1939 part of the old E Prussia which is going to cause some problems for the EU as its an overwhelmingly German territory under Nazi control but isolated from the rest of Germany which is now west of the Oder river! As such there's going to be some issues in the region as to what happens to those down-time fragments. Finland and Romania will probably seek to 'protect' those regions and Poland might see a desire to do likewise but apart from a few regions most of the population is non-Polish. What happens with the German enclave around Konigsberg as it was then know is also going to be a divisive issue.
Maybe it’d wouldn’t be as much of a logistical nightmare as full-scale war with the Soviets, but this should also be difficult. I’m not sure how many Nazi forces were stationed in Konigsberg or the Kaliningrad Oblast at this time, but I imagine they’d be far easier to deal with than the Red Army, numbering far less than the Russians and all. Oppressed downtimers who get integrated into EU society would no doubt be fervently anti-Nazi, though whether they’d be able to adapt to other aspects of twenty-first century life is up the air.
I’ve also a feeling Finland and Romania would want to reclaim lands that were once controlled by their downtimer counterparts, and given the choice between liberal-democratic uptimers and Stalinist oppression, I don’t think that’s a hard choice.
One other issue of course will be the arguments over assets. What are the status of assets of countries like Britain in the 1939 world, with a lot of British owned companies around the world and to a lesser degree for other EU nations and of say US, Japanese, Chinese etc assets in the 2019 EU? If Washington tries to claim some sort of control of say Amazon facilities in the EU? Its going to be even harder for other nations as Japan is a militaristic dictatorship, China is in a mess, S Korea and Taiwan aren't even in existence as independent states. Ditto with the status of 'EU' nation downtime assets.
Possibly an even larger issue will be national and private debts between the 1939 and 2019 world's.
I’m no lawyer or legal scholar, but I’ll bet my bank account on uptimers who work in the legal industry becoming very rich once the dust settles.
To answer your question more directly, I imagine that if it has any sense, Washington wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to try and claim American assets within EU lands. Aside from the fact they have no concept of e-commerce, they’re also dealing with a continent-wide superstate from eighty years into the future, so they’d best tread carefully, unless they’re fine with looking foolish.
The most realistic path forward I can see—at least, for the time being—is those assets going their own way, with European branches of foreign companies splitting off the become their own, self-contained business entities and electing new leadership. Or, assuming the ISOT doesn’t drive them out of business or force them to sell off too many assets, they may just rebrand themselves. A few who keep the original name and “mojo” may even be lucky enough to bounce back in the post-war world, though far be it from me to predict the who’s and how’s there.
Intellectual property will be a bitch to deal with, too--courtesy of both a) how many copyrights, patents, and trademarks have expired from the uptimers’ perspective and b) how easy the internet makes it to impermissibly disseminate media on a global scale. The former doesn’t need much explanation for downtimer artists, inventors, and policymakers to at least understand, but the latter sure will. What kind of agreement the parties involved will arrive at, aside from downtimers being strongly advised to capitalize on rampant content-sharing as best they can, remains another great unknown to me. Perhaps someone with legal training and an eye for realpolitik is more fit to speculate, if anyone with such a background exists on Alternate Timelines.
Possibly an even larger issue will be national and private debts between the 1939 and 2019 world's.
There was this one TL, called
As One Star Sets Another Rises--
see the TV Tropes page for details, if you're willing to risk spoilers--that begins with a mutual debt write-off, given how what the US owes massively eclipses anything it's owed by the uptimers. At a glance, it strikes me as plausible that the EU will pull something similar when negotiating with Roosevelt's America, though anyone more well-versed in international relations than myself is free to dispute that.
Having said that, I hope this was a thorough and sufficiently well thought-out response for your liking. As you can see, it turned out to be a real bear, and probably the largest I’ve posted on Alternate Timelines up to this point, in terms of raw word count. Should future exchanges between us call for them, I don’t mind writing lots of essay-length replies in the future, though there may be delay, since they still take a while for me to outline and compose for real.
If you’d like to keep discuss this scenario--or even turn it into its own thread, given the smorgasbord of divergences it’d unchain--let me know whenever is convenient for you.
Best regards,
Zyobot
We''re going to lose all the satellites and a lot of stuff we depend on. Don't think there's any significant computer chip production in the EU so until something's set up once a computer or mobile phone breaks down, or anything that uses such items is going to be dead and I suspect there will be some impacts fairly quickly.