Phantom Borders - When That Damn Kazakh Border Becomes And Remains A Social Reality
The term "phantom border" describes the "continuing existence of a former territorial entity in present-day spaces" with electoral preferences and their geographic distribution as a prime example and that "borders themselves aren't nearly as important as the spaces created inside these former domains due to societal processes". An old train station inside former Hapsburg domains will look different from a train station inside old Ottoman domains inside the same country.
This is not especially new news, most people getting the AH.com are inclined to stuff like that. I'd just take a recent example to show even newer phantom borders that cater to a similar crowd as AH.com, from the 1950s to be exact. MV = Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. I actually have a friend from my hometown out there living in Rostock and doing her master's degree in CS studies.
"Auferstanden aus Ruinen, und der Zukunft zugewandt!" is the anthem playing in your heads right now but not the spirit of the shown papers (which also tend to cater to right-wing sentiments, mind you) and the reason why the nascent KATAPULT magazine and publisher also wants to delve into the daily news market to offer a non-hateful alternative to said local monopolies and create more competition in this field. The ox stands for Mecklenburg and the raptor stands for Pomerania and the latter's popsicle shows the flag of the modern state.
KATAPULT magazine was founded in 2015 by a politologist who was nearly bankrupt and is successful with a concept that seems like the nightmare to any business consultant. You want to establish a new print magazine in THIS digitized age? Way out there in Greifswald in one of the most desperate parts of former East Germany? Well, they succeeded against all odds and are growing, buying an old school building to become a publisher and now in a progressive crowdfunding process to establish an own local newspaper. They'll start out online only, mind you, but I can readily imagine that this will become a daily printed newspaper as well that you'll at least find in the shops at the local train stations and universities. I've become a subscriber to their quarterly magazine that costs me less than 20 quid a year and I withdrew from quite many paywalls in the days before as I became saturated. One night and I cancelled subscriptions for about 85 quid a month (2 weekly quality papers, 2 daily newspapers, 2 streaming services, oh, and the catch-up TV service from the RTL Group), keeping Amazon Prime in the process and otherwise replacing quantity with quality. The KATAPULT magazin is kinda like a National Geographic for social sciences or, I'd put it, like a print version of the geopolitical magazine Le Dessous Des Cartes made by ARTE France broadcast in French and into a German dub, the graphics also adapted into German after Jean-Christophe Victor died and the entire thing was relaunched on the way. They've recently finished phase I of their crowdfunding campaign a five-man state-wide editorial team. Phase II is supposed to fund city editorial teams for Rostock (4 guys/gals), Schwerin (3 guys/gals) and Neubrandenburg (3 also) and phase III is about funding one editor for each small town shown on that map. The bullet point list had 20 numbers with such a small town each.
You see that there's a clear local distinction between the three regional newspapers and one of them isn't necessarily describable as compact and there's a reason for that. Look at the towns where city editorials in phase II are supposed to be established. They were also the capitals of the first-tier administrative districts created in the GDR in 1952 to replace the states of the GDR. Just as the
Neues Deutschland or ND for short used to be the republic-wide party newspaper or, more precisely, "central organ of the SED", there were also "district organs" than ran the show in any such district and the local newspapers in this MV state are direct descendants or rather renamed former central organs.
Ostseezeitung and
Schweriner Volkszeitung didn't even see a rebranding whereas the
Nordkurier is a re-named
Freie Erde (literally "Free Earth" and telling of the overall agrarian nature of Mecklenburg and Pomerania and the entire former East Elbia). In this case, I remember that there's also a neo-Nazi music magazine called "Rock Nord" which featured 50 Cent on its page 1 with the subtitle "Hip-hop turns white faster than you think" and this only shows how much neo-Nazis remain the prime example of an almost ironic form of cultural appropriation if you remember that the original skinheads were far from being right-wing.
How Rostock became the biggest winner of the German Division and remains so
Rostock used to be a Hanseatic City and it's still in its title. Rostock threatened the pole position that Lübeck used to have by the mid-19th century as a Baltic Sea port and that's why the free city states of "Free and Hanseatic City" Hamburg as it's still called today due to being a state of Germany and the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (also a city state until 1937 and never returned) closed a deal with Denmark that used to possess the Holstein territory (until 1864 when the Germans sacked it and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 ended with all of Schleswig and Holstein becoming part of Prussia) to build a railway between these two cities in order to make Lübeck a preferable Baltic Sea harbor for Central Germany again. Rostock was far away from any other major population centers that had more viable alternatives for a Baltic Sea port handy. Lübeck is close to Hamburg which sits right at the Elbe River and Berlin was close to the Oder River anyway, whether by canal or railway, which pre-destined Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland) as the natural deep-water harbor of Berlin. After World War II, Berlin and Central Germany found themselves inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation that later became the GDR and neither Hamburg and Lübeck (British Zone and later West Germany) nor Stettin (People's Republic of Poland) were part of it which meant that these areas lost their natural links to the rest of the world. After an initial reluctance to practically accept just being a zonal puppet government, the deep-water harbor of Rostock was finished in 1960.
The districts of the GDR were created in 1952 when five states became fourteen districts to become something like the
oblasti of the GDR and, like any artificial form of territory not unlike the departments of France, were all about breaking the links to the past and being closer to nature and, just to be expected in a Communist country, to adapt to the logic of a centrally planned economy. There was a desire to adapt the borders of the new districts to a geographic vision of division of labor. Former Central Germany as it's been called in the Reich and became the south of the GDR was a heterogenous industrial landscape whereas former East Elbia that became the north of the GDR was an agrarian landscape to be retrofitted into an industrial society where some stuff had to be built anew because the classical courses of their products available in the Reich weren't inside the new borders. Sodium was spread out between Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt (and also Hesse in West Germany) in a way that made a combined district impractical, same goes for textiles in Saxony running the entire Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains, makes for the entire border between Saxony and Bohemia, then East Germany and Czechoslovakia, now just Saxony and the Czech Republic). The Lusatian parts of southern Brandenburg with the brown coal pits around Cottbus which had to replace the black coal from Upper Silesia and the Ruhr were perfect for creating a Cottbus district as a coal district. The steel smelting works were concentrated in the Frankfurt district (Frankfurt/Oder was the capital, but there's also a town called Eisenhüttenstadt meaning "iron smelting works town that used to be Stalinstadt before and was an enlarged Fürstenberg/Oder and that's where the steel works were). Rostock district was that one other industrially specialized district that really shows, what with being the entire Baltic Sea coast of the GDR which enabled to concentrated regional management of the entire fishery and navy of the GDR. So the distorting logic behind the Rostock district made the most sense among all the districts in East Germany. The former state shipping company eventually became part of the British P&O and just as with the French Elf Total getting the Leuna refinary in Central Germany, I am quite content that this industrial asset went to a Western company that's not from Germany because it reduces the risk of getting downsized as an undesirable "internal" competitor and rather getting treated as the German HQ of the company.
I already mentioned in the beginning that I friend out there in Rostock that hailed from the other end of the country just like me. If Rostock was the division winner in the east, is there also a division winner in the west? Yes, you could argue that the entire south of Germany or, more precisely, what used to be the American Zone of Occupation won big time. Any zone largely ran its affairs as they used to do at home. The Soviet forced their Communist system onto its zone, the British were centralist-democratic and come from a country that just elected its first Labour PM, the Americans were federalist-democratic and applied their, albeit New Deal-inspired, laissez-faire economics habits onto that zones. Carl-Zeiss Jena came to Oberstendorf in eastern Württemberg, Audi in Zwickau came to Ingolstadt in Bavaria, AEG whose Berlin plants in the Spindlerfeld found themselves in Nuremberg again, Siemens found themselves in West Berlin and yet created a second HQ in Munich just in case which actually became the main HQ etc. If had to name one big winner in West Germany due to the division, it's Munich. It started as the man behind man (Bavaria behind Prussia) and became the third million-people city in Germany, featured the third U- and S-Bahn after Berlin and Hamburg and hosted the Olympic Summer Games 1972 and became the most expensive city in German and its eternally governing CSU could grow to afford being arrogant.
Is There Still Such A Thing As The ONE East?
Counter-question: Was there ever one?
This in an essay by the left-wing taz paper from Berlin that you cannot just say there's one East. Yes, the differences between East and West are, of course, won't cease in the immediate future. And yet there are even deeper phantom borders inside this east. They put a special emphasis on the fact that voters in former Mecklenburg vote more progressively (or just less right-wing) that the rest of the country or, more precisely, the neighboring Pomeranians who they share their state with with the AfD becoming the second-strongest force right behind the CDU in Pomerania wheras Mecklenburg only voted the AfD third in European elections (2019) and just fourth in municipal elections. I also remember from the 2000s that the SPD used to win the majority seats for the Bundestag in Mecklenburg unlike Western Pomerania where the CDU won and it's no miracle that one of these Pomeranian majority seats belong to the constituency where Angela Merkel used to run. Used to, she will retire after the next election. That's because Mecklenburg never saw any humiliation comparable to other parts of the country. It used to be the last feudal state, the last pre-constitutional state of the German Empire until 1918. The end of the monarchy and the ensuing republic were the first big improvements. The end of Prussian glory was never an issue for the Mecklenburgers. When Bismarck was asked what he'd do when the end of the world is near, he's quoted to say that he'd go to Mecklenburg because everything happens there fifty years late and if somebody was a Prussian insider, it was Otto Fürst von Bismarck who's quoted in German just as much as Mark Twain in American English. Of course, every German state and especially in the former East has its fair share of AfD state MPs, but some have argued (whether fearing or hoping so) that Thuringia could've become "the German Carinthia with Jörg Höcke (the most pronounced and prominent fascist in the AfD) as its Jörg Haider" (Carinthia is hotspot of the FPÖ, the big role model for the AfD) and it's been the southwesternmost part of Saxony (with the hilly Vogtland in the Erzgebirge wearing the V licence plate and being right next to the Bavarian region Upper Franconia) where the AfD was decidedly strong in the 2014 European Parliament elections even compared to other parts out the southern former East and this mirrored quite nicely how the DSU (the middle partner of the Alliance for Germany partnership with CDU being the senior partner and the DA where Angela Merkel started her career as its junior partner) that styled itself as the "true sister party of the Bavarian CSU in the East" performed extremely well at that place too. It's been a quite neglected part at the southern periphery of the GDR and Central Germany near the Iron Curtain and especially the CSSR that became an ethnic border where there used to be a German-speaking Sudetenland. The Christian-fundamentalist PBC (party of bible-faithful Christs) also has a stronghold there. Saxony is infamous for having ignored its own neo-Nazi problem for years, and the same source also has an explicit explanation that translates as "Saxony is kinda like the Austria of Germany: It used to be a proper kingdom back in the days and now it's just as small state" and they don't mean Austria vis-à-vis Germany, but vis-à-vis Europe.
There's been another study that updates another known link. Places where anti-Jewish pogroms used to happen more severely than elsewhere in the region used to vote more for the Nazi Party than the others and people of comparable wealth also invest less in stocks than the others, so you can speak of some kind of cultural and social reproduction. The update is this: Is there a link between former Nazi votes and modern AfD votes. The answer is: Yes, but! There are two factors that have reshaped the areas in question. First of all, lots of refugees and expellees from historical Eastern Germany that lost their homelands at the end of the war remember who they had to thank for that negative breaking point in their lives. They married into local families and broke the local tradition of cultural and social reproduction and reshaped the voting patterns. This is seen almost everywhere to some degree, but places like Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania saw their population almost doubled due to the population transfer and saw the biggest reshape in this regard. Places like Rhineland-Palatinate where the occupiers were from France and didn't want any new Germans inside weren't reshaped as much if at all. Second, the migration of so-called guest workers and their descendants made many places, especially in metropolitan West Germany, more cosmopolitan and therefore naturally less xenophobic and this effect is more pronounced in the West than in the East. What the researchers noted in that study also was that the areas where the AfD was comparably strong were also areas where voter turnout was comparably low before the AfD rised. That segment of the population, if they didn't vote for any other party beforehand, were alienated enough from modern political Germany to not vote at all and found a new home in the AfD that stands for another kind of Germany: a reactionary one.
Yugoslavia Under Tito - Re-Imagined Internal Borders And Tipping The Balance
Between the world wars, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1929 onward was divided into so-called banovinas and whereas one of them was clearly Slovene-dominated and two of them clearly Croat, the other six were clearly dominated by the Serbs and gerrymandered in this way on purpose. Especially the Muslim minorites, whether Bosniaks or Albanians, were divided among several of them in order to assimilate or otherwise dominate or get rid of them. After the partisan war of World War II, Socialist Yugoslavia was designed on purpose to become an ethnic federation. The Slovene-Croatian ethnographic border was well-established, the rest was less so. The Macedonian republic and nation-building was both a way to counter Bulgarian demands to Vardar Macedonia on the one hand, creating a new balance against Serb domination on the other hand and also appeasing the nationalist sentiment in the region as well. The historical Bosnian and Hercegovinian borders were handy enough to create a "Yugoslavia inside Yugoslavia" where none the three later so-called "constitutional nations" of Bosnia and Hercegovina could dominate the other. When the Croatian Spring rose in 1974, Tito decided to go two ways, crushing the spring and fulfilling its demand as we're at it so that the Serbs are appeased and are ready to swallow some pride by being partitioned again by creating two autonomous republics inside the SR Serbia that would also have a seat in the collective presidium at the even Tito died. Kosovo's borders were knew and you could argue that the Serb-majority northern Kosovo was especially apportioned to that autonomous region as a compensation for not assigning Albanian-majority Presevo to it as if Tito forsaw that a breakup of Yugoslavia was plausible and wanted to prevent issue at this vital lifeline in the Balkans. Vojvodina was established as a former part of the Kingdom of Hungary, however, and the Danube already made for a convenient border between Croatia and Vojvodina in Serbia anyway. The German authors about the concept of "phantom borders" say that the want for autonomy in Vojvodina which is 70 percent Serb is actually a form of Yugo-nostolgia for the good old times under Tito which is only packaged under monarchist auspisces. So it goes two ways in the end: Tito used imperalist borders to impose a balanced ethnic federation. People in Vojvodina use this balance weight from Titoist times to become a special snowflake once again and if the non-Serb minorities feel less majorized in the end? In the meantime, the SR Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic renounced the granted autonomy my republic-level amendments in 1989 which allowed him to appoint puppets in these SARs that, together with the Montenegrin republic, allowed the Serb side to have four in eight seats in the collective presidium to have a blocking minority (or rather a blocking stalemate) to amend counter-measures to the all-Yugoslav constitution which accelerated the dissolution of Yugoslavia once the Iron Curtain fell. So thank Tito for the curiosity of North Kosovo.
Whereas ethnic particularism could be seen as counter-intuitive to a leveling ideology like Communism, Lenin was supportive because he saw it as a measure to counter the preceding imperialism in Russia. It's a way to appease the non-Russian minorites in the former Russian Empire by turning places that were colonies in all but name into republics and whether cultural autonomy was rather like "the right to pronounce the will of the Kremlin in your own language", it was better than nothing and more than most nations in the world were ready to do. The theoretical right to secede, albeit rendered moot for long by the imperative of the CPSU, also demanded provision what a SSR has to provide to become an SSR instead of just an ASSR. It had to have a well-defined ethnicity onboard and, especially, contain a part of the international border of the Soviet or at least direct access to international waters in order to have a viable international relations independent from Moscow. So even if the powers in force were definitely not prone to release the SSRs into independence, it provided for a release valve should a regime collapse actually happen. Which it did. The only reform of the Prague Spring in 1968 that survived its brutal end was the implementation of the Czech and Slovak SRs which, besides creating additional institutions to park even more politicians, didn't actually change a lot in the immediate aftermath, but provided for practical platforms when the Velvet Revolution showed how impractical the Constitution of the CSSR, even as a reformed CSFR, proved to be when the primate of the KPC was vanished and the, formerly theoretical but now very real, blockades foreseen in this basic law made it so unmanagable that these two ethnic SRs were already existant enough in their institutions that the primadonnas of Vaclav Klaus and Vladimir Meciar as minister-presidents of their respective state governments could quickly negotiate the Velvet Divorce after the Velvet Revolution and the federal institutions including the Federal Assembly were only there to nod their own abolition. Ethnic particularism as a form of tokenism where power can actually take over when the center collapses. The Russian federal subjects (oblasti, republics etc.) in the 1990s saw a gotta-catch-them-all phase which Yeltsin actually encouraged because his rule was largely chaotic. This was removed after Vladimir Putin re-instated what's largely called the "vertical of power" and that's also the scientific term I learned in the Russia course of my politology studies.
Have You Forgotten The Usual Suspects?
Oh no, that would've been just too obvious and largely known here. Yes, Transylvania largely had running water in most of its houses by the 1980s whereas the rest waited 20 years longer. Western and urban Poland that largely used to be part of Prussia and has a way denser railway network votes like a rather blue state whereas eastern and rural Poland that largely used to part of either Russia or Austria votes like a rather red state and there also a term for that: Poland A and Poland B. Vojvodina has quite some Hapsburg-style architecture in its 19th century railway station buildings. There's also something called the Hapsburg effect which means that the former border between Austrian Galicia and the Vistula Government of Russia in modern Poland also remains a divide in the populace's trust in government and administration. The north-south divide in England that creates a fissure in the Anglo-Saxon of the British isles (which is usually contrasted against its Celtic periphery) that created the separated archdioceses of York and Canterbury and made the southeast of England with its flat land and proximity to Continental Europe more prosperous that the North that saw its limelight with industrialization that made Britain become the workshop of the world, eventually to descend into abyss as a rust belt once again. Greater Aquitania was an own polity in the Middle Ages, having its fair share of heresy in its history and voting consistently Socialist whereas Alsace and parts of the Midi (Southern France) vote over-proportionally for the Ressemblement National. I know it and I see it everywhere. There are dialect maps that tell the same story. Flevoland only speaks Dutch and no dialects (on the maps at least) because there used to be know grown population to make a dialect differentiate enough. Places where Germans were expelled after World War II are maybe thoroughly Czech, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian these days, but also more of a mix, blend or patois of all the dialects in the country converging into the standard version of their common language. I thought his to be common sense, but KATAPULT was a recent example that's not running on one of my usual neuroses and so it became a valid point to introduce here.
Practical Example at AH.com: Why Cuba in TL-191: After The End votes for the Socialist Party
The Afro-Amercian population in TTL's Confederate States of America before its final defeat and dissolution was decimated in the Southron Holocaust and was largely re-settled to Haiti. One of the territories incorporated into the USA with the absorption of the CSA was Cuba, however, which didn't become a permanent part of an Anglo-American nation state IOTL. Cuba was white and had its fair share of former slaves, right, but it wasn't Anglo and became just as much a Hispanic periphery in the USA as it was a Hispanic periphery in the CSA before. This meant that there was hardly a need for an anti-Dixie reconstruction as in the core CSA and as Cuba was never as WASP as the core CSA, it's been a largely underprivileged area that didn't feel the same way of humiliation as the typical Anglo-White southerner and as the CSA was largely anti-emancipation, voting for a Socialist Party that's been largely modeled on the German SPD with all the welfare state stuff is almost natural for the Hispanic Cuban in the USA. If the core of the former CSA ITTL is like OTL Saxony, Cuba is like an ethnic version of OTL Mecklenburg. A Saxony-style former CSA (with way more genocide) and an Austrian-style Texas next to each other. Nice, lovely. And I say this as a German from southwestern (Baden-)Württemberg whose deadbeat father came from up north and died in the Saarland.
