Obviously there's no pretending, at this stage, that I have any sort of master plan in mind for Gandvik, so just about everything is highly negotiable on that subject, and I'd be happy to accommodate what seems like a very interesting idea. There would doubtless be room enough for a persistent Khazaria in an Eastern Europe which in AMW is far from the exclusive preserve of a single dominant ethnicity, religion, or nation, and a Jewish state could survive, I think, easily enough in the space between a mutually hostile Catholic Shield and Lutheran Gandvik and the various Turkic-Muslim and Uralic peoples which those two would variously have attempted to colonize and to enlist as allies against their rival.
Equally a Jewish or at least majority-Jewish state could be perfectly viable in Central Europe, for some of the same reasons outlined above. Indeed, the competition between powers would be even more ferocious, and the resulting political-military pressures might serve as a highly convenient means of building a strong and uncompromising sense of national identity.
As for a Jewish state in North America having started out as a Gandvian colony, that certainly could be made to work as well. Jews would doubtless have faced an immense level of both legal and social persecution in Gandvik, which might have continued to deny Jews full civil rights (such as they were) up until near the end of the 19th century, while various forms of folk and 'scientific' antisemitism would have remained very much in vogue until the 1950s-60s at least. Not quite to the level of real-life Imperial Russia, but definitely de-facto second-class status, coupled with a disconcerting tendency on the part of political opportunists towards scapegoating and populist violence. So plenty of reasons why Jews might have had good reason to leave in large numbers.
A North American locale would, from a strategic standpoint, offer some advantages in terms of autonomy, providing the state with greater room to maneuver internationally, though a nation thoroughly bound-up in regional affairs can be interesting as well.
As always, lots of options, and open to all (well, most) suggestions.
A properly absolutist Iberia seems like it could warm things up in the Mediterranean very nicely, and I heartily welcome the concept. Spain certainly offers some fertile terrain for that sort of flamboyant ultra-conservatism, alongside that particular ideological current's implacable enemies. I know this is a dangerous subject, but do you think reactionary Iberia might have gone Oakist during that particular war, perhaps aiming to aggrandize itself at Italy's expense in North Africa? Ever since (potentially) losing the centerpiece of my inane World Fleets project, with NG's very unhoped-for latest disappearance, I've been having this thought of Spain as the leading exponent of cruiser warfare during that stretch of time.
With respect to Valendia's proposal, it also appears to have considerable merit. I'm very much in favor of alternatives to the traditional unitary-state model, and in AMW's particular environment, lacking as it does a superpower, the European-type state might never have been imposed quite so universally as it was in real life. Even there, of course, we see what are ostensibly unitary states unraveling all the time. So I think the idea carries with it a lot of interesting potential.
Selfishly, wishing in no small part for an excuse to fill-up Parsistan's navy with the finest export offerings from Fincantieri, Bazan, and Vosper Thornycroft, I wouldn't mind an Arabian, at least South Arabian setting for this state-of-nature state, though at the same time the problem with nations scattered to some remote corner of the world is that they all too often seem to wither on the vine, being isolated from regional goings-on and lacking in what might be termed strategic context.
TCB! Are you taking all of Asian Russia??
