For starters the 99% in Western Europe and America. What incentive is there for the development of a welfare state to appease the masses without the threat of Communism?
Oh how about the rest of the world? No USSR weapons or diplomatic support to anti colonial movements. Colonialism never ends. In 2021 the British continue to say "Whatever happens we have got the maxim gun fuel air bomb and they have not." Most of Africa in the 2020s makes the Belgian Congo look tame.
That is a quite obvious and likely possibility, at least
if Europe is able to weaken its working classes’ class consciousness. Would the European ruling classes then try to do in the 1920s what the world’s ruling classes did from the
late 1970s – shift virtually all manufacturing out of the Western world to low-wage authoritarian regimes and thereby eliminate the possibility of genuine democracy, which as
Jacobin Magazine have pointed out many times is dependent almost entirely on the unity of the non-elite against the rich. To do this, as Sebastian Lamb noted
here, the western ruling classes would have a powerful tool in
racism, as Lamb illustrates dramatically for the United States, where he shows that white workers have been virtually completely tied to the ruling class throughout American history. If Lamb be correct, then if the colonial powers in Europe could ally their home working classes with the rulers against the nonwhite populations of the colonies, they would permanently eliminate the threat of independent socialist parties either producing revolution or the compromise of a welfare state.
How easy this would be is unclear: in the early twentieth century, British textile workers led campaigns to exclude Indians and India from the industry, but such rules could never have been permanent unless wages in the colonial powers stagnate. Entrenching racial laws in a manner akin to the resource states of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia – which until after World War II all possessed extreme
de jure and
de facto restrictions on nonwhite political and civil rights –is a probably more likely plan of action for Britain and France. So is trying to make their colonies completely integrated politically with the home country – à la French overseas departments today – with the goal of making poorer white people not see their ruling classes as their enemy.
In the resource states themselves, a White victory not succeeded by a later successful and permanent workers’ revolution would have more definite effects:
- no nonwhite civil rights movement(s) in the United States
- alternatively the ruling classes would suppress them with mass incarceration at an earlier date than the 1980s
- quite probably the Fifteenth and Fourteenth Amendments would be repealed fairly soon after a White victory
- such repeals were widely proposed in the two decades before 1917 and probably strongly favoured by most white Americans
- however, the ruling classes had always been worried about the political consequences where a small number of black votes could influence statewide elections
- after the Russian Revolution, although repeal likely remained popular amongst white Americans, the rulers were extremely afraid of present or future unfavourable international political consequences if repeal were proposed
- with a reactionary ruler in the Russia, it is quite probable that the United States ruling elite would become favourable to repeal as they were aware of how beneficial racism was for them (sse Sebastian Lamb link above)
- an earlier and more severe apartheid in South Africa, as the European powers would be extremely favourable rather an ambivalent and there would be virtually no countries of colour or Stalinist countries rigidly sanctioning and refusing to recognise the apartheid state
- no citizenship for Natives in Australia and Canada as actually occurred in the 1960s
No USSR support for the KMT, China gets a conference like the 1884-5 one for Africa. China is divided and colonised permanently (with “open door policy” just like the Belgian Congo.)
Complete colonisation of China is a possibility I have never considered before. I imagine that it would necessarily mean China would be
split, as you note.
Jared Diamond implied in his
Guns, Germs and Steel that China is much more naturally united than India, but Diamond also believes this natural unity resulted (in part) from China being much more difficult to invade than India. China being impossible to invade was probably due to China’s western border being an extremely solid barrier due to repeated sequences of mountains and deserts plus the lack of a sea route like India had via the Arabian Sea. If the Allied powers divided China, Russia would insist upon logically get Manchuria, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and Japan would insist upon and logically get some part across the Taiwan Strait. Given that Taiwan is as poor in natural resources as Japan itself, the Japanese might be very insistent upon getting a substantial part of China. The question is who would get the north, central and southwest regions in this colonial (Allied) carve-up of China? Britain would logically get some of it with its Hong Kong colony, but would all the Allies accept a three-way division?
Then, assuming there is no decolonisation, how much would the different regions of a fully colonised China diverge in this scenario?
