RE: The GZGverse UN

Ian Cotgias wrote:

>If the English can help the French in 1914 and 1939 with a Monarch who
is 
>half-German and after over 1000 years of bloody war against the French 
>then I think the Swedes and Finns can settle their differences over
WWII.

It's not so much a matter of "differences over WWII"  as a matter of 
political attitude and military capability. Sweden has a nearly two
hundred 
year long tradition of not getting officially involved in wars raging on

our doorstep, and we have neither the economy nor the population base to

raise a serious military force except by conscripting virtually everyone

able to fight (and that'll wreck our economy completely!). In contrast,
by 
1914 the UK had a seven hundred year long tradition of reasonably 
successful military interventions on the continent, and had a large
empire 
to draw manpower and other resources from (not to mention a much larger 
manpower pool at home than Sweden has even now) - it wasn't really a 
question about *whether* Britain would get involved in WW1, only on
which 
side she'd enter the war. The grand alliances weren't particularly
stable 
in the two-three decades prior to the war, after all.

So no, I don't think that Britain in 1914 is a very good comparison to 
Sweden today, or even in 2102. I consider it far more likely that
Finland 
was/will be (depending on your temporal POV) one of the founding states
of 
the NSL - Germany is a far, far more powerful ally than Sweden, and by
the 
time of the EU civil war in 2101-02 it has been Finland's powerful ally
for 
well over a century.

>Also the emergence of supra-national empires in the vicinity of the
Scan 
>countries would require an economic federation to prevent the economies

>being outdone.

We've been living next door to a "supra-national empire" for nearly
three 
hundred years, yet for some strange reason we didn't join the local 
"economic federation" (commonly known as "EU") until *after* that 
"supra-national empire" collapsed... and it collapsed due primarily to 
economic bankruptcy. Unless the (communistic) ESU proves vastly more 
effective economically than the (communistic) USSR was, I don't think
that 
the ESU economic threat is valid.

>  It would then be a fairly small step for a charismatic leader to turn
an 
> economic union into a political one.

<chuckle>. That's exactly what's happening in the EU as we speak, isn't
it? 
I must say that the charisma is really overflowing in the current top EU

leadership...

>The differences between the Scandinavian nations is surely no greater
than 
>the differences between the member states of the FSE. And they all had 
>some common ground in wanting to be out of the NSL

You have that completely backwards. "They" - meaning the NSL, ScanFed
and 
the Netherlands - all had some common ground in wanting to get out of
the 
*FSE*. The FSE is the "rump EU" - it consists of those countries which 
didn't break away from the EU in the 2101-02 war. (AFAIK the FSE member 
states haven't been arch-enemies the way Sweden and Denmark has either, 
though of course that depends on how far into the Balkans the FSE
stretches 
:-/ )

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."