1000 - 1500 A.D. Meaningless medieval squabbles over property. Duke of this attacks King of that for possession of somewhere or other. Side excursions to the Holy Land to beat up Muslims for having the temerity to own Jerusalem. Dynastic marriages are used as a peaceful alternative to battles to establish real estate titles. The Hapsburg family is particularly successful at this method, ending up owning Spain, the Lowlands, several estates elsewhere and Austria, including the top job - Holy Roman Emperor. What are now know as countries do not exist. Instead, there are hierarchies of fealty in different parts of the map. Peasants are owned by lords and lords owe their positions to dukes and princes, etc. who in some cases owe their positions to kings or even to emperors.

1500 - 1640 A.D. Bloody, bitter fights over religion. Protestants walk away from Catholics and Catholic rulers fight to regain control. Protestants purge Catholics (England.) Catholics purge Protestants everywhere else (especially France's St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and Spain’s Inquisition.) By 1640, everybody is worn out and the Protestants start getting richer than everybody else since they don't take siestas and invent the Work Ethic.

1640-1840 A.D. The Divine Right of Kings to rule is increasingly questioned. Charles I of England is beheaded as a test case. Poland becomes a republic, electing its kings rather than inheriting them. The response of monarchs is to become more macho. Peter the Great of Russia is ruthless, bashing the Swedes and wowing everybody with his flashy new capital, St Petersburg. Louis XIV of France is the Sun King wowing everybody with his flashy new palace, Versailles. Frederick the Great of Prussia terrifies all his neighbors with his flashy new army. Catherine the Great sleeps with everybody. Austria does nothing and therefore steadily loses respect, but not as much as the republic of Poland which being a Weak Power is carved into three pieces and shared out among Prussia, Russia and Austria in the late Eighteenth Century. These preposterous antics of monarchs lose them the respect of the educated merchant classes. The United States tosses out King George and France has a revolution. Suddenly the issue changes from "Divine Right of Kings" to “Law and Order” versus “Chaos and the Mob.” Napoleon, a non-aristocratic soldier, steps into the vacuum in France and restores order. Other European rulers, horrified by the example set of any old working-class bloke supplanting a true blue-blood, fight to squelch France with its pernicious Republican ideas. Napoleon, for his part, tries to install meritocratic puppet states elsewhere in Europe (especially in Italy and the Netherlands). The fighting goes on and on. Britain wins in 1815 thanks to the invention of the National Debt. Everybody else is exhausted. The French dump Napoleon. Monarchs are restored but humbled in Napoleon's former puppet states. Everybody settles down for a bit of peace and quiet.

The rest of the Nineteenth Century. The Rise of Nationalism. Prussia bullies all its German-speaking neighbors, (Bavaria, Schleswig-Holstein, etc.) into unifying with it to make a new country called Germany. Just for good measure and to try out its new strength, it marches into France (the Franco-Prussian war) which it wins and in return for going back to barracks in Berlin, demands a huge pile of gold (1870). The Italians drive out the Austrians who occupy the north, cut back the Vatican to size, and unify into a new country called Italy. Austria does nothing and continues to lose respect. The English are all in one country called England; the French are all in France; Spain is for the Spanish etc. Poor old Austria and Turkey (the Ottomans) aren't with the new program. They continue to rule large expanses of real estate full of different tribes and tongues who increasingly want countries of their own. (Hungary for the Hungarians; Greece for the Greeks etc.) How much to give in and how much to resist (for the sake of Law and Order) is the interminable debate. Devolving power can all too easily lead to chaos (France) or to indecisive weakness which neighbors take advantage of (Poland is wiped off the map).

1900 – 1945 A.D. Britain, secure in its boundaries and having long since put its monarch in his place (cf. Charles I), can afford to be the most liberal and therefore becomes Extremely Rich. Germany and France are jealous. The German Kaiser doesn't understand that Britain's power comes from liberalism and thinks it is due to its Navy. Therefore he tries to build more ships and be more disciplined than the Brits. There then follows about twenty chess moves involving the fracturing of the Austrian Empire, the Ottomans, Russians and everybody nobly rushing to defend the honor of absurd little places like Serbia and Brave Little Belgium. After millions have died in the Mud of Flanders, the Americans come in to separate the squabbling children. By this time the Monarchs are all looking really, really foolish and either abdicate (Germany, Austria, Turkey) or are shot (Russia). France, in retribution, takes a bite of territory and demands its huge pile of gold back from Germany (see Franco-Prussian war above) and Germany is driven into depression as a result. With its ugly neighbors all decapitated, Poland is reestablished, taking chunks of eastern Germany. Hitler fans the flames of resentment and like the Kaiser before him concludes that the only way to get some respect in this world is to be more disciplined and ruthless. He sets about gathering into Germany the last remaining German speaking bits of central Europe, taking Austria and the German speaking parts of Czechoslovakia without much resistance and retaking the Rhineland from France. When he has a go at Poland, Britain and France decide enough is enough. There follows World War II which is won by Russia which ends up owning one half of Europe and terrifying the other half.

1945 to present. The Western half of Europe bands together in a military alliance with America called Nato and a political union (against America) called the European Union. With the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1989, the Nato Alliance loses its point and the European Union loses its natural boundaries and common purpose and becomes ridiculous, torn between greater inclusiveness (Poland, Czech etc.) and greater concentration of power (laws and welfare) at the center, which is easy to do if you are few and harder if you are many.

Courtesy of Christian Wignall,
Capstan LLC,
April 2004