Game of Shadows

Submitted for AlternateHistory.com's Map of the Fortnight contest.

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The PoD is the prophet Mohammed being born female, removing Islam from history. The migration period goes radically different and Christian Egypt and Byzantium go on to be the rivals of Zoroastrian Persia.

The world has undergone two revolutionary periods. The first was the rise of the Libertist movement, which gutted the old Bavarian Empire and replaced it in 1745 CE, or 0 Z.d.A (Das Zeitalter der Aufklärung), with the Bavarian Confederation. Libertism is what we would identify as classical liberalism IOTL, but more critical of democratic politics, which they see as a conduit for interest groups to seize government and impose their unjust tyrannies on everyone else. Libertism is a very revolutionary ideology, promoting the overthrow of all non-libertist governments. A more radical strain has appeared in the New World, which actually abolished the Celt-colonized government there, only to replace it with an armed Libertist Party and a cabal of plutocrats. The "provisional government" is a skeleton organization that exists for diplomatic reasons, which they don't use often as they have had a falling out with the rest of the Liberty League. The Liberty League itself isn't particularly nice; they're almost all one-party plutocratic states that prevent any other political parties from arising and becoming tyrannical.

Harmonialism is an authoritarian ideology that transcends the left-right political spectrum of OTL. Descended from the Platonic concept of a philosopher-king government and Chinese legalism, harmonialism teaches that free will is inherently evil as it allows people to stray from the path to unrighteousness and ruins societal harmony, which is the ultimate good. It is up to the tianguo de ren, or "celestial person," to wisely keep society peaceful and static. This "celestial person" is to be unquestioned, even if they are wrong; to question is to cause discord. As a result, harmonialism typically adopts traditional beliefs and religions; the Harmonious Gupta Realm is a Hindu theocracy, as are many harmonialist powers. Harmonialism is equally fervent in spreading its ideology as libertism is; discord festers in all societies that are not harmonialist, and these could spread to harmonialist societies and destroy them. However, they do not encourage the discord of revolution; harmonialists prefer to send missionaries to other societies to spread the message. Governments are not to be overthrown and replaced; instead, existing governments should be made harmonialist. However, if a particular society contains too much discord, it is justifiable for a harmonialist state to seize it by force.