Country: Formally, the Commonwealth of Northern Socialist Republics. Informally, just Norden.
Head of State/Leader: Norden's Head of State is Thorvald Stauning, State Minister of the Northern Commonwealth
Location: Northern Europe. Nominally, it includes territory within the 1914 frontiers of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Kingdom of Sweden, the Kingdom of Norway, and the Grand Duchy of Finland. In reality, however, the Commonwealth's control over the very thinly-populated rural regions in northern Fennoscandia, Iceland, and especially Greenland are highly tenuous at best and its ability to stop mercenary armies and warlords of the Russian Civil War from plundering the Karelian border towns highly lacking.
Government Type: Norden is a devolutionary, syndicalist, part-parliamentary and part-direct, and constitutional democracy. It is a devolutionary state, with sovereignty invested not in a single government, but in a variety of state organisations of regional, local, and interregional natures. It is a syndicalist state, with an economic structure that, while still ultimately a market economy, recognises strict limitations on private property and with poor distinction between the state, the economy, and civil society. It is a constitutional state, with inviolable norms of governance set down in writing in the Charter of the Commonwealth. It is a part-parliamentary, part-direct democracy, where ultimate decision-making power rests with the instrument of national referenda but representative institutions are nonetheless maintained for the day-to-day management of the country.
Capital: Copenhagen
National Debuffs:
Kanslergade Agreement
The Kanslergade Agreement of 1933 was a landmark multi-party agreement for social and economic reform in the Commonwealth. While generally popular, being credited for keeping the prospects of want and starvation from haunting the great cities of Northern Europe and keeping Northern society healthy as the European Continent slowly disintegrated in war and plague, it has also been extremely costly not just financially, but also administratively and politically. The massive expenditure on social security and new public works projects have drained funds away from defence and security, which many concerned observers point out might be dangerous as the Great War continues to rage on, and the concessions given to various regional or civil society in order secure the funds necessary to continue the implementation of the Agreement are starting to undermine the sovereignty of the Northern state.
Stauning's United Government
Since the Stock Market Crash in 1925, all major centrist and left-leaning political parties within the Commonwealth have banded together into a solid coalition government, the Samlingsregeringen, pledging not to let internal disputes weaken the state in a moment of crisis. While certainly a boon to stability at a time when dozens of countries are collapsing into civil strife, the National Unity Government also comes at a cost. With the war raging, and the consequent dawning realisation that the national emergency was not so much a temporary emergency as it was a new and semi-permanent state of affairs, internal dissent is rising and the willingness of parties to continue cooperating slowly sapping away. With the need to get almost the entire political spectrum onboard to institute any major legislative change, the government has been paralysed throughout most of the mid-1930s and the demands of trying to keep a coalition of such disparate and contradictory ideologies together is seriously taxing the capabilities of State Minister Stauning's cabinet.
Karelian Frontier
With the ascension of Finland into the Northern Commonwealth, the Commonwealth has been left with a border over a thousand kilometres long with the Russian warlords. With such a long and poorly-developed frontier and little ability to patrol it, people and goods continue to flow across this flexible frontier unchecked. Not only does this undermine the Commonwealth's protectionist trade policies, but it is also a political and military nightmare. Volunteer-soldiers from Finland and Sweden filter into Russia, diplomatically incensing any warlords finding themselves on the other side of their rifles, while plundering mercenaries, armaments and radicalism flow in the other direction, from Russia into Finland, hampering the organisation of Finnish society along Scandinavian lines and emboldening suppressed extremists within Finland. The government must stamp down on this cross-border traffic and do it quickly, or the worst-case scenario of re-igniting the still-warm embers of the Finnish Civil War looms on the horizon.
GDP: The Northern Commonwealth has a real GDP of 127.7 billion dollars (Int'l$, 2010). While international trade has been severely disrupted from 1914 onwards, the neutrality of the Scandinavian nations in the Great War has kept the northern economies out of the direct fires of war. As a result, the Northern Commonwealth has emerged as one of the most prosperous areas of the world and the Commonwealth krone has emerged as one of the most stable and reliable currencies in Europe, second only to the Swiss franc. There are, however, strong regional differences, with the thinly-populated northern regions and Finland still recovering from civil war being mired in poverty while the more prosperous cities of the Scandinavian mainland continue to forge ahead.
Population: The Northern Commonwealth has a total nominal population of 15.93 millions. Regionally, this breaks down into 6.21 Sweden, 3.52 Denmark, 3.20 Finland, 2.88 Norway, and 0.12 Iceland. Finland was hit particularly hard by the Spanish Influenza, but the rest of Northern Europe was not exactly spared either.
History: The Great War put considerable pressures on the Scandinavian kingdoms' relationships with their respective monarchs. The tension was highest in Sweden, where the King's explicitly conservative and pro-German stance, as noted in the Rearmament Crisis of 1914, Swedish-German alliance negotiations of 1915, and the Luxburg Affair of 1917, gave rise to serious concerns that the King was seeking to violate Swedish neutrality and drag Sweden into the violent bloodbath that was Central Europe, while the conservative Hammarskjöld government's unenthusiastic response to Norway's proposal of defensive military cooperation and unwillingness to open further trade with the Entente during a period of food and fuel rationing further inflamed social and ideological tensions. In the backdrop of huge socialist public demonstrations that the police were growing increasingly unwilling to simply suppress, the Socialist-Liberal coalition won a landslide victory in the 1917 elections, immediately pushing forwards measures aimed at the establishment of universal suffrage, the abolition of the monarchy, re-opening the dismissed defence negotiations with Norway, and asserting its neutrality from German diplomatic pressure (Swedish point of divergence here). While Sweden's attempts to forge a "Third League of Armed Neutrality" asserting the inviolability of their civilian activities with the other maritime neutral powers of Europe - Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal - ultimately came to nothing, it did succeed in concluding a defence agreement with Norway and passing several key social and economic reforms. Another socialist landslide victory in 1920 established a mandate for the government to continue pressing for changes and, following an attempted coup by the military tacitly supported by the king in 1921, Sweden expelled the royal family from the country.
Unlike Sweden, which was primary driven by internal political dynamics during the early years of the Great War, Norway's drive towards strict neutrality and closer relations with Sweden stems from international pressure. While all parties nominally recognised Norway's neutrality in the war, the British government continued to put increasingly heavy pressure on the Norwegian government to suspend export of critical resources - most notably food and raw metals - to Germany. Dependent on British exports of coal, which Norway feared might be put into jeopardy should Norwegian-British relations deteriorate, Norway caved to these terms. With Britain's willingness to press Norwegian neutrality thus having been made clear and German hostility made evident by the expansion of unrestricted submarine warfare to Norwegian vessels later that same year, concern over the fate of Norwegian neutrality in the seemingly never-ending war pressed Norway to enter negotiations for a defence agreement with Sweden in 1917. The seeming inability of the liberal-conservative government to protect Norwegian neutrality led to a strong surge in popularity for the liberals and the socialists in the 1918 Norwegian parliamentary elections (Norwegian point of divergence here) and the ensuing demonstrations by outraged socialists - who won nearly 40% of the votes but only won 20 of 126 seats - delegitimised the political system and forced several electoral reforms. These sentiments only continued with the continuing inability of the re-elected liberal government to shift British or German foreign policy and the need for Norway to cooperate with its neighbours to defend its neutrality became clear. While Sweden's attempts to forge a Third League of Armed Neutrality ultimately failed, Norwegian enthusiasm during these negotiations and landslide socialist victory in the 1921 parliamentary elections prepared the country for future integration.
Denmark, with a more stable political scene than Sweden or Norway, did not see an immediate crisis as a result of the outbreak of war nor was it a particularly eager participant in the negotiations for a Third League of Armed Neutrality. The first seeds of trouble in this quiet kingdom was sown with the offer of territorial gain made by the Entente, tired after years of bloody war and desperately eager to open up a new frontier elsewhere, to press for the return of Schleswig-Holstein, lost from the Danish crown in 1864, back to Denmark in exchange for a Danish declaration of war against Germany (Danish point of divergence here). While the proposal was summarily rejected, the Danish government unwilling to throw their country into the costly war, this diplomatic incident raised questions of whether Denmark should make it a point of foreign policy to press for the return of this territory. Disputes grew between the conservatives and the liberals, who sought to enshrine Danish claims towards the entirety of the former Duchy of Schleswig in Danish law, and the far more timid stance expressed by the social-liberals and the socialists, who only desired the return of Danish-speaking areas in Northern Schleswig and had no desire to press any official territorial claims at all. The King's willingness to intervene in Danish politics and dismiss cabinet ministers in order to advance his vision of a greater Denmark stretching to the Danevirke outraged the Danish populace, and socialists in particular, that launched mass public demonstrations during the Easter holidays of 1920. With almost hysterical fears that any official Danish claims on German soil would result in Denmark being forced into war, and seeking to sever the highly conservative institution of monarchy from Danish politics entirely, the Danish social-democrats and social-liberals both insisted on the establishment of a republic, precipitating a political standoff that lasted for months until eventually the conservative caretaker government capitulated, establishing a republic in Denmark.
Thus, as the year 1921 came to a close, Sweden and Denmark found themselves republics led by social-democratic governments, Norway a highly delegitimised constitutional monarchy with a socialist government, and Finland a centrist-agrarian leaning republic watching the ongoing Russian Civil War with no small amount of fear and trepidation.
Denmark parlayed themselves into the defence negotiations between Sweden and Norway in 1920, which resulted in a binding defensive agreement in the winter of 1920 followed up by a joint policy on economic and trade neutrality in 1921. An inter-governmental ministerial panel for the coordination of economic, diplomatic, and military policy was established later that year, followed by an advisory international parliament in 1922 - the latter of which is nominally the beginning of the Commonwealth of Northern Socialist States, although at the time it was not called that. Nominally a nationalistic project aimed at the closer integration of the "Scandinavian peoples", the real purpose behind these institutions, and the reason why the three Scandinavian nations went into them, was to project a united diplomatic front against both the Central Powers and the Entente in assertion of their rights as neutral powers in the Great War. Eager to secure continued access to Scandinavian natural resources, Germany agreed to suspend submarine warfare against Danish and Norwegian vessels in 1924 and agreed to allow free export of coal to the Scandinavian states in the event that Britain suspended their own exports, in exchange for Scandinavia agreeing to the free export of food and raw metals to Germany. The ascension of Finland to these agreements in 1925 were made for similarly pragmatic reasons. Finland feared an invasion from one of the Russian warlords and thus desired the benefits of the established diplomatic position and neutrality of the Scandinavian states. Scandinavia, in turn, desired access to the large and experienced Finnish Army for protection in the event of a violation of neutrality. Swedish volunteers for the defence of Finland from the communists in 1918 was soon followed up by the resolution of the Swedish-Finnish Åland dispute in Finland's favour in 1921, and closer integration between Finland and Scandinavia began soon afterwards leading up to the aforementioned ascension of Finland to the Commonwealth in 1925.
These early years also saw a continuing shift in the internal politics of the Commonwealth. With the politics of the signatory parties growing increasingly integrated, and thus republican pressure from the east intensifying, the Norwegian monarchy agreed to abdicate in 1926, although unlike in Denmark and Sweden, the royal family continued to be relatively highly respected and, unlike in Sweden, was allowed to live in the country at public expense. With the horrors of the Great War continuing to mount, internationalism increasingly emerged as the only viable cure to this affliction that was war, and anti-militarist movements spearheaded by the socialists gained increasing ground across the region. This was only compounded by the Stock Market Crash of 1925, which resulted in widespread agreement that the status quo was unsustainable and unacceptable, that something needed to change and change drastically. The National Unity Government formed in the aftermath of the 1925 Crash, initially including only social-liberal and socialist parties but later expanding to include agrarians and liberals, implemented wide-spread social, economic, and political reforms naively aimed at ending the ails of war between states and the troubles of a market economy. While new diplomatic policies, aimed at settling the southern border against Germany by agreeing on a border drawn on cultural lines and establishing permanent non-aggression treaties with the Russian warlords threatening Karelia generally failed, internally the reforms were much more successful, leading to a fairly rapid stabilisation of the Northern economy and society after the chaos of the 1925 Crash. The formal secession of sovereignty to the Northern Council from its constituent nations happened soon afterwards, in 1928, leading to the devolved distribution of sovereignty under which the Commonwealth is administered today.
In the years since, however, the initial optimism and naivete of the National Unity Government has started to run against some harsh realities, as infighting within the government continued to increase over conflicting ideas on how best to address the numerous internal and foreign problems confronting the newly-minted Commonwealth. Fourteen years have passed since the establishment of the Northern Council, the eventual fate of the Commonwealth of Northern Socialist States still remains uncertain and fragile...
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