Napoleon Wins at Waterloo

I decided to do some future extrapolation on an old alternate history tale, "If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo" by G. M. Trevelyan (1907), appearing in the 1931 collection "If: Or, History Rewritten." In it, Napoleon wins the battle of Waterloo, and a sort of peace of exhaustion sets in, with France maintaining it's Rhine border and sphere of control in Italy, but staying out of the rest of Europe. An aging and increasingly in poor health Napoleon gives up on war to concentrate on French internal developments.

With Napoleon still in power and France remaining a serious threat (not that France, or Napoleon, is up to a fresh round) reaction sets in in the UK, which over the next decade turns into a near dictatorship dominated by reactionary Tories and the military, leading to popular rebellions which are brutally crushed. Reaction is also the order of the day in the Germanies and Spain, whose efforts to crush Latin American rebels.

After Napoleon's death, his successor was unable to maintain control over republican sentiments, and was forced to grant extensive powers to the French parliament, starting a series of changes ending up with a fully constitutional (aka Figurehead) monarchy by the end of the century. To help keep Italian nationalism under control, Italy was (again) reorganized into three kingdoms dynastically unified with France: Padania, Latium and Naples would eventually be unified into the Kingdom of Italy, [1] which by the end of the 20th century has a similar relationship with France as Hungary did with Austria in 1914 (although without the oppressed minorities).

A move to greater democracy in France was if anything less pleasing to the reactionary British government than a continuation of Napoleonic dictatorship, since it only emboldened pro-democracy forces in Britain. The cycle of suppression and rebellion started again, ending in a final general uprising which enough of the army joined in 1848 to overthrow the existing government. Some elements of the Tory regime and a couple royals managed to escape with navy Loyalists to India, where they did a sort of Peshawar Lancers: the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha remain Indian monarchs to this day, although they've gone rather thoroughly Indian, aside from religion, by this point.

(They rather would have fled to Canada, but the US claimed dibs on that, and Australia was full of angry political prisoners)

The UK came under the control of a rather radical republican movement with strongly leftist elements, which, alas, turned into a one-party dictatorship within a few decades. Comparisons with OTLs Soviet Union come to mind, but it never quite reached the levels of tyranny that state did under Stalin, nor did it entirely suppress capitalism [2]. It did industrialize very thoroughly under government direction, 19th century technology being pretty amenable to that sort of thing, taking advantage of the UKs head start in technology and mass production: the other powers would not catch up to it until the 20th century. It also setting about modernizing it's colonies (yes, colonies. 19th century racism was still in force, and the British felt it was their mission to uplift and civilize all those backwards sullen half-child peoples, lest the poor dears get exploited by other European powers or those counter-revolutionary bastards in India.

Eventually, things would come a cropper, and after winning a few wars technological progress in other states caught up to them, and when they backed a radical revolutionary movement in Korea in an effort to expand their influence in east Asia, they got dogpiled. After a long and bloody struggle the British regime collapsed, and the so-called "Union of Peoples" broken up, England being left with just some scattered islands.

Germany had it's own problems, bloody rebellions inspired by the British revolution even more bloodily crushed with Prussian and Russian help, followed by the Revolution From Above in Prussia, and eventually the attempt by Rationalist Prussia-Poland to "reorganize" central Europe, which was defeated at great cost by a French-Russian alliance, but not before the utter collapse of Austria-Hungary. The long period of north-south division, with the reactionary League of Vienna backed by the Russians and the democratic (more or less) North German Union backed by France. The First War of German Unification, where the Union invaded the south while Russia was distracted by internal rebellion and France was a friendly neutral (democracies Good, right?). The Second War, in which Germany claimed the Rhinelands and only barely was defeated by the French. Russia and France-Italy kissed and made up, and history rolled onwards.

It's the start of the 21st century, and not all is well. France is a strongly liberal republic with a figurehead monarch, and is currently fretting about what to do about the German-backed rebellion in the Rhinelands. So far the terrorists lack general support, but that might change if Paris uses excessive force in suppressing them. The fate of the Rhinelands is complicated because the OTL German area is in this world nearly a third Francophone - many of them ethnic Germans. France leads an alliance of democratic European states, including Croatia, Hungary (rather federal and with its own, Romanian rebel problem), Denmark, Ireland, Croatia, the Catalans, etc. It's allied to Russia against mutual threats, but it's hard to say what the French would do if Russia got into a fight with, say, China.

England (Scotland and Ireland decided to go their own way in the liquidation of the People's Union) is an aggressively capitalistic and free-trading state, and has been one long enough for *socialism to come back into style, in the form of an aggressively obnoxious, if so far not very violent, anarcho-socialist movement.

Germany is an authoritarian and highly nationalist republic with a chip on their shoulder, pissy about France and Russia not allowing them to get atomic weapons, and somewhat stans of the mighty USA. It has a few allies, including the Spanish dictatorship and the Swedes. The Balkans are minor squabbling republics and kingdoms, the Ottoman (most people say Turkish: it's a secular state dominated by Turks and with a figurehead monarch) still has some juice, and Russia seems to have finally got its act together after a century of rebellions and political turmoil and very bad economics. It's now a constitutional monarchy, rather more populous than it's OTL version, and among enthusiastic young nationalists Overtaking and Surpassing the US in the 21st century is a common topic of discussion.

Aside of a few US and French enclaves, and the Portuguese colonies, pretty much all of sub-Saharan Africa came under British rule, and they tried to create a modern, industrialized Africa through intensive cultural engineering and forced labor. Outside a narrow layer of Anglicized and ideologized local, this was not popular, and when Britain was defeated in the war of the Korean Revolution, there was a general uprising. The situation was messy enough and there were enough guns floating around that the winners of the war didn't try to grab new colonies of their own, although the French, Germans, Americans, an Indians in time managed to establish a neocolonial economic hegemony over much of the former British space. Things were pretty chaotic for a while, and a number of shaky republics, warlord state, restored kingdoms, and regions of pure chaos came into being, only for those with better access to money and guns reestablishing Facts on the Ground. States strong enough to avoid puppetization exist in west africa centered on OTL Nigeria, the old Zanzibari stomping grounds in East Africa, and South Africa (where the British not only defeated the Boers, but the second time they rebelled, did a Stalin/Assyrian monarch and scattered them across the Union. Quite a few ended up in Australia). Some parts of the interior lack in useful resources have for some time been allowed to largely go to hell their own way (this world isn't that big on Third World Aid), although that may be changing.

The middle East is quieter than OTL, but not without its difficulties, with the right-wing dictatorship of East Arabia (a supposed republic, but closer to Saddam's Iraq than OTL Denmark, and with quite a bit of Sharia law in use)using Dinar Diplomacy to expand its influence and the Very Theocratic Shi'a regime in western Iran and southern Iraq planning to reunify with the eastern bits of "Persia" by whatever means necessary.

The Indian monarchy is what we would call a Middle Income nation and is populous enough to be recognized as one of the Great Powers, although Islamic separatism is an increasing issue: the government is dominated by Hindus and the Christian minority nowadays. China, which avoided OTLs Communism but also larger missed capitalism, is rather poorer. Japan, here known as Nihon, is a former British colony (although to a substantial degree self governing by the time of the war and collapse) and is currently a US-type republic with a rather weak grasp on civil liberties and a distinct lack of sexy cartoons.

An old-school British-type left wing dictatorship still dominates a large chunk of SE Asia, but the Indians pushed them out of Thailand in a war in the 1960s. Indonesia (here Nusantara) is corrupt and kleptocratic, with a variety of irredenta, while the Malay Republic prospers quietly in a somewhat symbiotic relationship with this world's equivalent of Singapore. The Philippines are noted for the Third Republic-esque instability of its governing coalitions, and Australia, while rather undemocratic, is aggressively egalitarian and prone to make threatening noises towards Nusantara, which they suspect of lusting after their northern territories, as well as New Guinea. (Australia's words are Backed by Nuclear Weapons.)

Latin America's breakaway from Spain was later and generally more radical than in our timeline, and the legacy of Spanish colonialism has weighed heavily, compounded by US-British proxy fighting. It's mostly democracies (for various values of democracy), although there's a left dictatorship in Southern Mexico and an old-school junta in Peru. The most influential is the United Provinces of South America, the heartland of the anti-Spanish rebellion, where British radicals fleeing the gallows stopped to continue the fight against autocracy. It remains a country with powerful left-democratic roots, considerably richer and more populous than our Argentina and with ambitions to create a unified Latin American block.

This is looked upon with considerable suspicion by the USA, which is a rather conservative and oligarchic republic. It currently has a "Progressivist" - heavy handed, moralizing, big on hygenie both moral and physical - government: nobody starves, but if you're destitute, you had better accept the work the government gives you, or else. The government and national elites are quite business-friendly, but also rationalist, secular and dubious about "enthusiasm", which they consider socialistic and suspect. There was a civil war, earlier than OTL (those extra Canadian free states). It was shorter than in our timeline, but there was a protracted, messy Southern resistance after the war officially ended, which ultimately led to a firmer enfranchisement of the black population: African-Americans are fairly close to whites in income and tend to vote conservative.

Technology is generally less developed than in our world, 15-30 years depending on field. PCs are a new thing, there are ballistic missiles but nobody has been to the Moon, industry rather clunky and unstreamlined and rather lacking in automation compared to our world. OTOH, big screen TVS are quite cheap and the nuclear power industry is rather safer and more reputable than OTL: nuclear weapons were developed in peacetime and have yet to be used in wartime.

[1] They keep trying to get Sicily to join up, but the Sicilians keep saying no.

[2] Karl Marx's career was butterflied. There have been other leftist/revolutionary thinkers, but none with his predominant influence.