Where? The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. China has been moving towards a free market economy since the 1970s. North Korea's spiritual leader Kim Jong Il according to Japanese intelligence (albeit pandering to foreign sources) has been in hospital since September after suffering a seizure.

Communism is neither alive nor well.

Except when American policy makers (specifically right-wing Republicans) want to invoke a safe evil.

The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.

Unification is just an invitation to balkanization, and balkanization is just an invitation to unification. There is, of course, a relatively stable center, but too much of one will inevitably lead to the other. All it takes is one charismatic guy to bring an empire together, or break it apart.




Your perspective on this is, flawed, to say the least. Persons can be rational, and ofter are. People, on the other hand, a vicious, dangerous, stupid animals that act solely on emotion and instinct.

All one has to do to control a constituency is to evoke certain emotions. Control the constituency, and you control the country. But, some emotions are so strongly tied to certain things that one cannot help but evoke them when dealing with those things. Forget about WWII; its trivial. This goes all the way to the Austro-Prussian war and even before that, really.

If your great-great-grandpappy beat up my great-great-grandpappy a centurn and a half ago, then I'm going to revenge that slight be beating you up. It's nothing personal, but just a matter of pride. And that sort of pride an easily be evoked when dealing with the historical rival of over a century.

I thing the easiest way to realize why Austria and Germany will never reunite is fear. The world is still somewhat afraid that Germany will bust out the war card again. Germany and Austria reuniting is what everyone will view as "the first step" towards something like that. Even though Germany is not a threat anymore no one wants to see Germany have any kind of power ever again. Germany doesn't want it, Austria doesn't want it, and the whole freaking world doesn't want it. I mean why does Japan still not really have a military force? Oh yeah... because we don't want them to.

Anyways... many concepts that SR uses is somewhat odd and quite outdated. The fact that corps from Japan have like three AAA seats is somewhat silly when you look at how Japan is not as heavy a hitter as it used to be. Personally I say play the world for what it is. A continuation of a universe that was based on the predictions and architecture of the 80's. You could try to make predictions of how the world will be based on with predictions you could make today, but they will probably be just as wrong as the people looking into the future 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. Shadowrun is supposed to be about cyberpunk, and cyberpunk was all about the 80's so take it for what it is. They tried to change the landscape of Shadowrun with each new addition, but still there is only so much you can work with w/o destroying the whole landscape of the world.

I mean the biggest thing that gets me in this setting is that the matrix crash 2.0 happens and suddenly everything goes wireless. Yeah.... because that is a great way to contain AIs and no one would crap their pants if the world went that way.... I mean it only has happened twice before with terrible consequences....

= /

*shrugs* maybe nothing to be proud of, but we germans pride ourselves in being good in what we do . . and when war is what we do, then why do it any different than the way it works best?
oh, and don't forget about the us of a when it comes to war . . combined, their war efforts more than trump the two world wars i think . .
as for germany not having any power . . you do realize that there are several american military bases which may, or may not, house nuclear weapons? even if they are american, some little bases in a whole country deciding to go to war will most likely not be able to stop germany from obtaining some of them . . and of course, if we're allready at it, there are francais WMD's too that can be conquered and commanded . .
we may not have carriers, and our naval forces might be quite small compared to most other nations, but our submarines and other ships are above standard technological . . and our combat divers can be compared to navy seals . . i actually have quite a few friends in the german military . . and nothing the USA have does come close to our tornado crews . . last maneuvre i heard of, the americans had to forst restrict the overall size of the maneuve place, then had teo up the lower limit the pilots were allowed to fly on, so they could not do the close to ground flying anymore . . and then they had to limit certain pieces of equipment, untill in the fourth try they were able to beat the german crews once . . and after that, they got beat again by the germans . .

... That's not the best example ...




I mean, Japan doesn't have a military; It has a Self Defense Force. With ranks and uniforms and guns and bombs and tanks and battleships and aircraft carriers and missiles and.... No, not a military at all.



Germany and Austria were never united. Germany invaded and annexed Austria. Big difference.

... about 240,000 personnel - which makes the JSDF #21 on the list of militaries sorted by number of active troops. USA is #2, Germany is #18.
Source.

It's also #4 worldwide in Naval power. Behind the US, Britain, Russia. Being an island country....

They are, it should be pointed out, hilarious. Honestly, some of them are more unfit than the average guy on the street. I'm sure some of them are incredibly frightening and on par with the SASR, but the ones we met were a joke.

How long did it take Japan and Germany to finally have some sort of standing army? Everyone always watches them out of the corner of their eye. It's not going to happen, because no one wants them to gain any kind of power they once had. Japan also has to call what they have a defense force, not an army. Also doesn't a defense force sound a lot less threatening? The U.S. also has quite a few bases stationed in Japan, and you would think if there was total trust there wouldn't be such a large foreign weapons cash there.

Yes Germany came into Austria with a military force, but amount of combat that took place? I mean there was more flag waving and celebration then there was actual combat. It is a fear, and everyone is always reminded of "what Germany did." Austria will not be merged with Germany, just like Japan will never have the Philippines. It's just not going to happen.

However SR is a fictional world with fictional outcomes. Don't base it on reality or predictions, because it's just trying to use a circular peg in a square hole. Hell the only nations that have actually taken over or enveloped by another nation recently is China, and maybe you could make an argument for Iraq for a very brief moment. It's just foolish in the end, like trying to explain magic. The whole reasoning they use NAN taking over what it did is because they were one of the first to use magic again during a time when the U.S. was no longer the super power it once was in the setting. Does it make total sense? Does it have to? Why do nukes not really work anymore? Why magic? Why is it everyone has issues with a science fiction/fantasy world when most people would accept either the science fiction or the fantasy? Just because SR uses a world somewhat similar to ours I just view it as a different universe that had different outcomes (or maybe a metaplane.) It makes my brain not hurt as much.

Everyone has a Defence force. Its the 'Australian Defence Force'

Germany does not.
Germany has the German Federal Armed Forces/German Armed Forces/Federal Armed Forces.
Die Bundeswehr, which is what got built out of the Wehrmacht after the second World War . . in german, it sounds a lot more defensive. and it is only used to defend the german borders all around the world as the old joke goes . .

are you kidding? you must be



you're saying that germany would be able to conquer some foreign military bases on it's on ground to have nuclear weapons? what's the point with that? I just don't get it



is this some "mine-is-bigger-than-yours"-thing?



germany has a lot of power, but fortunately it's not military power anymore.



you can't exactly translate Bundeswehr, its either German Federal Armed Forces or German Federal Defense Forces. Anyhow, by constitution it is only allowed to take military action for self-defense or within a case of collective self-defense (e.g. the NATO which effectivly and legaly makes it a defense force.

9 years for the former and 10 and 11 years for the latter, give or take. Not bad, really.


No, they don't.



Wow. Just wow. Never before have I head a statement that demonstrates such incredible ignorance of political reality.

The JSDF is called so because Article 9 of Japan's Constitution states "[...]and, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." This provision was added unilaterally by Japanese drafters of the Constitution without encouragement from the Occupation Forces. In fact, the USA was not pleased with this at all, and pressured Japan to develop military forces, anyway, in order to enter into a mutual defense agreement. Japan first created a paramilitary national police force to satisfy its obligation to protect itself from internal threats under the The Security Treaty of 1951, signed after Japan regained its independence. And the United States were always hoping that Japan would take a larger role in its own security and encouraged Japan to find a way around that pesky Article 9. When the United States had to pull troops out of Japan to fight in Korea, and with China's massive PLA starting a nuclear weapons program, the time was ripe to sell a creative reinterpretation of Article 9, which led to the creation of the "Self Defense Force" with fairly large restrictions on its armaments and activities.

The Uncle Sam was never particularly pleased with these restrictions, and really hoped that the Japanese people would see fit to amend their Constitution, because the JSDF would have been very useful in any number of armed conflicts. Their absence was a detriment to the cause of freedom, particularly during the Cold War's many proxy conflicts. It took a great deal of political prodding over decades to finally get the Diet to relent and reinterpret Article 9 to allow the deployment of JSDF troops overseas for "peacekeeping" under the UN banner and another 13 years of pressure to get them to deploy units under their own flag to assist in "reconstruction".

It is essentially a game of word interpretation with Uncle Sam favoring a more liberal interpretation almost constantly, much to the chagrin of Japanese pacifists, who are still more than a bit angry at their own government for the whole World War II thing, particularly the getting nuked part.


And as for Germany. Everyone in NATO wanted West Germany to rebuild its military fairly quickly, except for France (Which was reasonably pissed, but stupid). And even France was eventually persuaded to relent because .... fuck.... there was this thing called the Soviet fucking Union. While the Soviets were pressuring East Germany to rebuild because they were the first line of defense against NATO invasion.

Once the Cold War hit (we're talking Berlin Airlift time, 1948) every sane person on both sides of the Curtain wanted their Germany to get rearmed fast. And as soon as the Communists took over China the next year, it was apparent to all that the very idea of permanent Japanese disarmament was stupider than horse shit. Have you ever seen a pile of horse shit take a standardized test? Well its scores aren't good, I'll tell you that.

The US military bases in Germany and Japan aren't there to keep an eye on anyone those countries. They're there to keep an eye on the nearby countries of Russia and China, and to provide military support if either Russia or China decides to expand in the wrong direction. And to shoot down North Korean nuclear missiles.

No one is actually nervous about it. That doesn't mean that the Austrian people merrily spread their legs and accept the potentially oppressive thumbs of German government up their collective asses again . Some would say that once is enough, thank you very much.


An interesting thing about the JSDF's rules of engagement in Iraq. I saw a documentry about it on PBS. As a Japanese official was explaining, the JSDF troops cannot start any engagement and can only act in self defense when fired upon. But they don't have to wait until they are actually shot at, that would be stupid. They can assume that an enemy with a raised weapon intends to fire and respond with by firing, or if an enemy is begining to raise his weapon into firing position, or if he appears as if he is doing so.
But, even if they have been shot at, their cannot shoot to kill the enemy. They are only allowed to shoot the gun out of his hands, Vash the Stampeed style. If however, they are attempting to shoot a weapon out of a hostile enemy's hands and instead accidentally hit his heart or his head, this is regrettable but acceptable.

In other words, one can shoot and kill an enemy who may be hostile, but one needs to navigate a byzantine labyrinth of flimsy justifications to do so. It is all a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to follow the letter of Article 9 while totally violating its spirit.

As has been described, they stand for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It's well worth watching GitS and GitS:SAC if you're into CyberPunk but not gritty street-level stuff.


I imagine the overarching nation would fund and govern the police forces to prevent armed conflict between these small communities? Sounds like a decent source of income for starting runners... >.>


California banned gay marriage?? Double-you tee eff...


Communism has never actually been put into practice (except possibly in small communities in western countries in the 60's/70's and in ancient tribes). You're thinking of socialism that called itself communism so that the public would accept it, and as mentioned previously, even that is neither alive nor well.



I think it's a real shame that pressure from the US and threats in the form of North Korea / China perverted that pacifistic notion. I'm actually quite proud of Japan for Article 9.

Total pacifism is great, if you're a little girl who lives in the magical land of make-believe with fairies and unicorns, candy clouds that you can eat, rainbows that you can walk on, and magical happy dust that mommy snorts makes everybody become friends and makes all of your problems go away. Unfortunately, we do not live in that world. We're living in Pan's Labyrinth, at best.

In the real world, we have the Joker conundrum. Brilliantly demonstrated in the pages of Batman comics, while pacifism is admirable, there comes a point where you cease being a principled person who refused to stoop to violence and become a fool who enables violence though inaction. When Joker-related-violence is very close to beating out heart disease as a leading cause of death, one has to wonder if it is not just irresponsible to let him live to kill another day. Whether you've got an evil empire bent on world domination or a local warlord doing ethnic cleansing half the world away, doing nothing is tantamount to endorsing their actions. And refusing to fight when an enemy is at your gates is nothing less than suicide.



GitS (manga) is great reading just for the philosophical and sociological issues. GitS (movie) is a must-watch for any cyberpunk fan for the intrigue and action, in addition to the philosophical and sociological issues, which are treated with less depth than in the manga. It is also one of the few works that seriously explores the necessary reality that comes with having an anatomically-correct stealth/combat body that can become invisible. (I understand that Masamune Shirow likes to draw naked women).

GitS: SAC, sadly, does not have the cyborg boobies, being a television series. It does, however, have more depth than the movie, and is less byzantine than the manga, which does delve quite a bit into transhumanist issues that can make it hard to follow.

Don't get me wrong, I've no delusions regarding the current world situation, but I can still dream of a day when the political stage is quiet enough that pacifism is a viable option.

Actually, yes, I was referring to China. Though, in that case, you are right, I should have just said "alive". And, the only reason it's lasted there as long as it has is because China has been a mostly collective society for about four thousand years. However, if you go to any American or European college campus you'll find that it is indeed still doing quite well, at least among the self deluded. In fact, those seems to be the only places where it is still considered a viable political theory. Just goes to show that education has no real influence on "wisdom". Then, of course, there's South America....

Has anyone else noticed that just about the only real difference between American and Japanese Navy uniforms are the decorations/insignia?

What amount of combat took place? Very, very little. When the portion of your army that is able to directly respond is the size of a motorcade guerrilla actions are the only choice...and they DID happen. There were waving crowds in Paris too. Yet somehow I doubt they were happy about it either as a whole.

And since then, the warmth between most Austrians and their German neighbors could be used to store sides of beef.


Isshia

Actually, when it comes to Navies the uniforms of pretty much all countries look very similar...

In January 1857 the decision was taken to issue complete uniforms to petty officers and seamen. This included features which can still be recognised in the Class I uniform of ratings in the modern Royal Navy - notably the wide blue collar with whites tapes, a black neck kerchief, white lanyard and blue or white jumper. The flared "bell bottom" trousers disappeared after World War II.

Because of the global dominance of the Royal Navy from Trafalgar to World War I RN uniforms became the model for virtually all other navies. While certain distinctive features emerged - such as the red pompom worn on the crown of the French sailor's cap, the open fronted jacket of the German Navy or the white round cap of the U.S. Navy - the overall pattern remained standard until the development of specialist working or protective rigs during World War II.

Actually, until Fredrick the Great came along Germany was a collection of different States. He led his Prussian army against the French to defend Hannover (his only Ally), Austrians for control of Silesia (SP?), now in the Czech Republic, took over. He also fought the Russians for Poland. Bismarc was the one credited with finally creating the modern German nation state (which included parts of present day Poland, Czech Republic, France, Netherlands, Denmark). Note that some of these areas did not join becasuse they wanted, but because Prussian troops were all over it.

Austria later became Germany's Ally due to the contant threat of France and Russia. Britain only became worried about Germany when Germany began to develop a sufficient naval force, the tipping point being when Germany used Belgium as a shortcut to Paris.

One of the reasons Anschluss happened was the fact that Hitler (an Austrian by birth) was the leader in Germany. No historical claims by either country support unification. Another interesting not was that many of the Prussian Generals were not too fond of Hitler.

-Back on topic:
Yes, having large super states would work. It would make smuggling easier, as there would be fewer and larger borders to cross. There could be a reason for the use of deniable assets, particularly if MAD is in effect. But I think the shadow community would be significantly smaller (fewer players), and it would be better to run them as having a patron (either government, corp, organized crime, or policlub.

Hmm, I see the thread is perfectly able to get off track without me, so I might as well add a few quips on that.

The German national-liberal unification movement in the 1800s and the 1848 liberal-national revolution proposed two great models: Grossdeutschland (including German Austria) and Kleindeutschland (without). Even after Bismarck was eventually able to unify the nation according to the latter model, the former lingered but could not be fulfilled since it would require the breakup of the Habsburg Empire, which Austria led and therefore was reluctant to separate from as long as the empire was vital. After the latter collapsed at the end of WWI, the Austrian people saw no further motive to resist completing the unification, and they had grave doubts about the long-term viability of the Austrian rump state, so they voted to join with Germany. This was vetoed by the Entente powers in the peace treaties, under threats of military intervention. Austria was forced to set herself up as a separate state, which soon became a satellite of fascist Italy, but the sentiment for unification lingered. After the Nazi movement took power, it seized the Grossdeutchsland idea and made it one of their objectives, and the Nazi Austrian movement grew and attempted an insurrection in 1934, which failed when Mussolini threatened war. They tried again in 1938, when Italy had allied with Germany and removed their veto. A combination of internal Nazi insurrection and threats of German military intervention led to the collapse and of the Austrian regime, which threw the borders open to the Germans and surrendered with no resistance. A plebiscite soon ratified annexation of Austria to Germany. Now, since neither Austria nor Germany were democratic at the time, it is difficult to ascertain the popular will of the Austrian people about the unification with absolute certainety. But several factors, such as the fact that a widespread popular sentiment for unification had existed for a century, the fact that democratic Austria had voted to join Germany in 1919, the fact that no organized separatist resistance to German rule ever developed in Austria, the fact that levels of patriotic cooperation with Nazi Germany state or resistance to the Nazi regime were indistinguishable between German proper and Austria, all strongly indicate that the vast majority of the Austrian people either supported or were indifferent to union with Germany.

After the war, confronted with the enormity of Nazi crimes and the disaster that Hitler had brought upon Germany, the Austrain people sought escape from the collective guilt of cooperation with the Nazi by retroactively inventing for themselves a separate national identity that had not yet really existed till then (there were strong regional differences between Austrians and the other Germans just like they were, and are, between Bavarians and Hannoverians, Lombards and Sicilians, Texans and Californians, without being separate nations) and the false memory they had been just like all the other nations invaded by Hitler, an unwilling victim overwhelmed by superior military force and reluctantly cooperating under brutal cohercion. The Soviets and the Western Allies went along with the self-deception by re-establishing a separate neutral Austrian state for their own strategic reasons (the Soviets wished to use the Austrian example to lure Western Germany outside of the NATO into a neutral united Germany, the Allies wanted to end Soviet occupation in East Austria). Decades of existance as a neutral state strenghtneed the budding national consciousness of Austria, until they came to see themselves as related but separate from Germans, rather like the Swiss.

Now, had the Allies and the Soviets not agreed upon on setting up Austria as a neutral buffer state between the blocks, it is quite likely that no such process of separate national self-identification would have taken root. Western-occupied and Soviet-occupied halves of Austria would have remained separate and united with respective German states and eventually been a part of German reunification. However, history did not went that route, so nowadays any realistic chance of (re)unification between these two entities must come as a part of the larger European unification process into a federal superstate. That has still rather good chances of success and would effectively accomplish everything the 1848 Grossdeutchsland liberal-national patriots sought to accomplish and much, much more for most or all of the continent.

However, if an event so extreme as the SR timeline would happen, all bets are off. Peoples are easily shaken out of their political complacency and nationalistic inertia in these conditions and easily prodded into such radical changes as the birth of UCAS, so why should we assume that something similar would not happen in Europe ?

Now, if you wish my honest feelings on that, personally I am persuaded that Balkanization and "small countries" stubborn nationalism are a serious evil that typically has wrought much more harm for mankind than any good and is totally counterproductive to face the global challenges of the 21st Century. So I root for (and therefore prefer to play a however otherwise dystopic futuristic setting where) as much political unity as possible can be accomplished on the (supra)national level all the way up to setting up huge continental federal superstates, and any decentralization being accomplished as local/regional subunits of the federal superstates. In this PoV, I strongly root for European unity, North American unity, South American unity, and deeply regret that history stillborn such near-miss national unifications of centuries past as USA-Canada, Danemark-Sweden-Norwegia, Germany-Austria, Netherlands-Belgium, Peru-Bolivia, South Africa-Zimbabwe, (and caused the breakup of the Roman Empire, the Carolingian Empire, the HRE, the British Empire, etc). With all due respect for the feelings involved, I do regard the separate countries which arose from the failure of such unions as mistakes of history, countries that ought not to have been. Does it look so strange, then, that I wish to get rid of them, and as much Balkanization and useless small countries, as I can, in fictional settings ? And Nazis have as much to do with this as Martians or Mayans.

Maybe I'm too close to see it clearly but I don't think so.
"Fatta l'Italia bisogna fare gli italiani", done the Italy, you must make the italians.
That statement tells about my people, we have always been italians, yet we've never been. For most of our history we've been divided and being italian was what can be being european today, however starting from the renaissance there always has been an italian identity (as nebulous as it might have been); with the unification of the Italy people of different (but similar) cultures were brought together. Once together peoples went on with their lives as they could, than the 20th century with the diffusion of the radio, the WW1 , the advent of the fascism, the WW2, the reconstruction with the migration of peoples from south to north looking for work, the diffusion of the television, a whole lot of thing that shaped our identity as a nation. To this day every italian has two, or even three identities: one tied to the city in which was born or raised, (possibly) one tied to his region, and one tied to our nation.
Reguarding the secessionist movment, lets call it with its name: Lega Nord. This is a xenofobic political party (think a mini-humanis policlub) that lived from the rejection of the immigrants from the south that came to work to the north, later (following the processes for corruption that decimated our political system and the recession that followed) they escalated it trying to take the richest region and drop all the rest. This didn't sound too well at the ears of most of people so they took a hit and put aside (while keeping stressing us with this fictional Padania) their secession and focused on obteining the emanation of law against immigrants.
I can assure you that our national identity is young and still shaping up, but is pretty strong and there's no risk of secession anytime soon.

Two words baby: Silvio Berlusconi.
You still think it's only an american thing?

Well... technically speaking... I assume you are referring to the Austro-Prussian war of 1866?

Few points.

1) Prussia (and a bunch of Italians) won... Not only won, but cleaned the Austrian's clock.
2) It was not to determine if Austria would be a part of some sort of unified "Germany" but rather to prove to the rest of Europe that those dirty Papists in Austria weren't top dog anymore.
3) I believe Bismark is actually quoted as having said. "We should keep marching south and put up the boarder markers when we start seeing Catholics."

I said 1). And the war was about the hegemony in Germany - Prussia favored a "Kleindeutsche" answer to the "German question", meaning a united Germany without Austria.

Bismark? Really? Strange thing for him to have said when 90+% of the Austrians at the time WERE Catholic.

Germany and Austria can not be united; period. One (Germany in modern days) might conquer the other, but that is not unification.


Isshia

Removing balkanization sounds pretty dull to me.