SkunkyArt | AlexanderNorthAH — Some Sort of a Reversal

Canada is a repressive one-party state under the Progressive Conservatives and has been for the past several decades, in part thanks to an archconservative American president interfering to shove it farther to the right in the name of combating communism, enabling its usurping (and eventual banning) of the other political parties as it tacked further and further to the right. Canada's ongoing issues with unrest and guerilla violence from the First Nations and Quebecois kicked into high gear starting in the late 1990s and hasn't let up since, which the ProgCons have decided to resolve with a combination of labor camps, reeducation camps, and straight-up ethnic cleansing. The Canadians have largely refrained from interfering in ongoing affairs within the United States so far, preferring to bide their time and see what happens for now, though Canadian PMCs have been active on the Legitimist side. Canada is close to the United Kingdom, as the friendly one-party regimes see one another as kindred spirits "defending Anglo-Saxon culture and values," and the monarchy's ceremonial role was symbolically elevated with Canada formally rebranding itself as a Kingdom. Canadian PMCs/mercenaries are held in high esteem around the globe and frequently find employment either with authoritarian governments aligned with Canada or in the numerous civil wars of this world. There are notable minorities of First Nations and/or Quebecois refugees scattered around the world, but most of them are in Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Brazil, Spain, China, Japan, and Vietnam. Japan, Australia, and New Zealand also have large minorities of white Canadian expats, and France has taken in a lot of Quebecois due to establishing a "right-to-return" rule for white Francophones.

The United States bumbled through the eighties under much further-right rule than OTL, eventually leading to a more successful Reform Party rising as the major opponent to the GOP and usurping the Democrats. With the only choices on the ballot that stood a chance of winning being the hard-right Republicans or the Reformer centrist-or-sometimes-far-right-or-far-left-or-maybe-if-you're-lucky-moderate-liberal politicians, the American left resorted to violence, only exacerbated by the Buchanan administration's sweeping "voter integrity" laws that purged millions, most of them racial minorities, from voter rolls. [1] Civil war finally broke out in 2013 after a contested three-way election resulted in the defeat of a popular antiestablishment third-party leftist amidst substantial evidence of voter fraud and vote suppression, and it's been raging for the past six years, with its initial wild array of factions having settled into a few overarching groups. The Reformers and Republicans set aside their few remaining differences and locked arms in a wartime coalition government to defeat the revolutionaries, which has been unsuccessful so far; the two parties have become one in all but name by this point, and even that might change soon. The "Legitimists" have adopted a rather unfortunate "no enemies to the right" policy that has seen white nationalists and straight-up neo-Nazis happily serving on the frontlines, though these extremists see the Legitimists as useful idiots and intend to backstab them in the event that their side wins. The revolutionaries coalesced into a coalition of lower-class Americans, racial minorities, the "Queer Nation" movement, and sympathetic whites that have branded themselves the Third Rainbow Coalition, championing themselves as a bastion of intersectional progress. The TRC is a shaky coalition more often than not, however, and in reality most parts of TRC-held territory manage themselves autonomously from the provisional government in Atlanta. Then there's the New Englanders, who somehow manage to be simultaneously farther left than the TRC and more puritanical than the Legitimists at their worst, not to mention all the practically compulsory verbal self-flagellation and the mazes of intricate social cues that make New England a nightmare for autistic people to live in. The Third Rainbow Coalition and New England do not like each other at all (the TRC thinks New England makes them look bad, and the Queer Nation faction especially loathes New England's exclusionism and purity politics on who counts as "queer enough"- if someone says they are, then they are, end of story!- while New England doesn't like the TRC's lack of commitment to ideological purity), but they have a teeth-gritted alliance against the Legitimists that will almost certainly dissolve the moment Legitimist forces are driven out of New York and Pennsylvania. The Legitimist government is mainly backed by Russia and Hindustan (both of which have sent a lot of "volunteer" troops over to help), while the Third Rainbow Coalition is backed by Mexico, China, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, and co. New England has no real overseas supporters and is either quietly ignored or incessantly used as a propaganda point to bash the left with, depending on one's political leanings.

Despite instability and corruption remaining serious problems up until the early 2000s, Mexico accomplished a successful transition into full democracy, no thanks to the United States, and is proudly distinguishable as the most democratic nation in the Americas... a feat which would probably be more impressive if democracy wasn't doing so poorly in the Americas. The best comparison from an OTL perspective is that Mexico's like a bigger, more diverse Ireland, if also a lot more militarized due to the ongoing war in America. Mexico is one of the few nations that is directly militarily involved in the war (how else do you think the TRC controls so much of Texas?), and while China and Japan have both officially sent troops over to help the TRC as well, Mexico has the most troops deployed on American soil both proportionally and numerically (China, understandably, is a bit distracted keeping the Hindustani border sufficiently militarized). Mexico has also accepted a lot of refugees from the United States, though the amount of discrimination they face varies depending on the region; conservative Mexican politicians are fond of talking points along the lines of "they should fix their own shithole country instead of running away from their problems and invading ours." Mexico's Canadian refugee community, on the other hand, having been established for a while longer, are rather more tolerated; its largest cities usually have "Little Montreal" or "Little Yellowknife" sections, and a few elements of Quebecois and First Nations culture, mainly slang and cuisine, have gradually made their way into the mainstream of Mexican culture.

The authoritarian states of western South America have banded together under the "Andean Compact," which isn't very well-named given that not all of them are in the Andes, and is united less by similar ideologies and more by similar authoritarianism. They are led by Peru and Argentina, the former of which is run by the Shining Path and is notorious for being one of the most totalitarian states on the planet, while the latter is an authoritarian Christian theocracy somewhat resembling OTL Saudi Arabia, just without a monarchy. (Pointing out how seemingly contradictory this alliance is will get you a one-way ticket to a reeducation camp in both countries.) Colombia is a narcostate which is mainly aligned with the other members of the Andean Compact because they're the only ones in the vicinity who tolerate it and its business. Three guesses who's in charge there- here's a hint, his name rhymes with "Qablo Fscobar."

Brazil's very similar to OTL, just more militarized (almost the entirety of its border with the Andean Compact has soldiers stationed somewhere) and with something of a United States-Canada relationship with Venezuela, except Venezuela is even more prone to doing the "calling them out on their shittiness while simultaneously ignoring all of its own problems by deflecting with 'well, the country to our south is worse, so shut up'" thing. Oh, well, at least there's somewhat more pressure from its allies to not slide into another dictatorship, given the current state of global democracy?

A prime minister that made Margaret Thatcher look like Bernie Sanders facilitated the United Kingdom's slow degeneration into one-party rule, and the Tories have not been ousted since, in part thanks to straight-up rigged elections, flagrantly trumped-up charges pressed against political opponents, and wanton cancellation of elections at the slightest provocation. Britain has a lot of nostalgia for the old British Empire and reuses a lot of old imperialist imagery, which anti-UK nations are quick to use as proof the British are racist (they don't give a damn, and have jumped fully into "we're not racist, but..." mode), and London has been cracking down heavily on Wales and Scotland in order to "bring them in line with Anglo-Saxon values," which has in turn earned the UK a wave of Welsh and Scottish domestic terrorism covertly backed by Spain, Germany, and Turkey. The British claim to be the center of the Commonwealth, which is by this point largely composed of nasty "we're-not-white-nationalists-we-swear" governments like Britain and Canada, unashamed white nationalist regimes like South Africa, black-run states like Ghana and Nigeria which the British reluctantly tolerate because they give them discounts, and Hindustan, which is a horrifying category all on its own that we'll get back to later.

Whereas authoritarianism took hold in Britain and Canada by the ballot, French democracy fell by the bullet: specifically, the National Front refused to accept the results of an election that went particularly badly for it, stormed Paris with a mob of FN supporters, and executed pretty much the entirety of the French government. Of course, there was international outcry and domestic resistance at home, but given that the whole planet's kind of spent the last few decades going to shit, almost everyone had bigger problems to worry about. [2] It wasn't long afterwards that the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, and Slovenia fell to French-backed coups, while Luxembourg and Wallonia got outright annexed, though a Flemish rump state was allowed to continue existing as a French puppet. One-party rule has continued in France and its sphere to this day, though guerilla violence still persists north of the Pyrenees (the Spanish insist that they're not funding the French resistance) and in Switzerland, which remains under limited French occupation.

Germany, like Brazil, is similar to OTL, just more paranoid and militarized. The Germans see themselves as the final defenders of democracy in Europe and are very repentant about not trying harder to stop their former allies from falling to dictatorship, often to the point of self-flagellation. Their allies find it a little obnoxious by this point.

While communism fell across eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Union, very shaky communist regimes remain in power in Poland, Bulgaria, and Novorossiya (formerly Ukraine) that regularly suffer from anti-communist domestic terrorism backed both by the Russians to their east and the Germans to their west. The People's Republic of Novorossiya is the worst of them all and is run by Russian communists who have given the country a gut-churningly awful system of labor camps, constant surveillance of the population, and brutal, usually televised, execution of political dissidents, with a nasty Russian-supremacist angle to top it all off, and is genuinely much more hellish than even OTL North Korea. The only silver lining is that Novorossiya is also more unstable than OTL North Korea, and the free world is generally pretty competent about getting Ukrainian refugees out of the country.

Communism may have fallen in Russia, but what took its place is arguably worse. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia took over- unfortunately for any hopes of a democratic Russia, the LDPR was by no means liberal nor democratic, and nowadays Russia is run by straight-up neo-Nazis. The only things the new Russian regime has going for it is that 1) it's not as god-awful as Novorossiya is (though the bar's so low it's practically in the center of the Earth) and 2) Russian politics are corrupt enough that a few comparatively okay politicians managed to buy their way into government early on and have continued paying off Moscow to not arrest them for being political dissidents... granted, most of these "comparatively okay" politicians are Putin types who just want to make themselves dictator instead, but by modern Russian standards that makes them basically Mother Theresa. Russia's currently heavily involved in the Middle East, where it's doing its best to prop up Russian-aligned regimes in notable oil-producing nations.

Turkey is a full democracy and in a similar boat to Mexico, in terms of being kind of like a bigger version of OTL Ireland. Given that the only democratic nation they border is Iran and how terrifyingly close Russia and Novorossiya are, Turkey is, as is something of a trend with the democracies of this world, heavily militarized. Germany and Turkey are best buds and cooperate on just about everything, and with Turkey actually being the more democratic of the two these days it's acquired a small German minority to match Germany's small Turkish minority. (At least they aren't refugees, unlike so many of Turkey's other minority communities.)

Morocco, Algeria, and Sudan are all horribly repressive Islamist rogue states. The less said about them, the better.

Niger and Benin have managed to pull themselves out of the morass of authoritarianism that most of the northern half of Africa has been consumed by and are both genuine full democracies, Niger at about OTL Canada levels and Benin at OTL Netherlands levels. Both countries have a lot of undocumented immigration from the surrounding states: some politicians are insistent that, considering how awful the countries they're fleeing are, it's inhumane to not let them in (and some of the more radical posit that they in fact have a moral imperative to take in as many refugees as possible), others are equally insistent that "the illegals" are either taking jobs and resources from proper Nigerien/Beninese citizens (while simultaneously ignoring that the main reason they're "taking jobs" is because the upper class realized they could legally underpay them and cut costs) or are part of a massive conspiracy designed to destabilize the sole bastions of true democracy in West Africa (and ignoring that the authoritarian nations surrounding Niger and Benin do not have anywhere near enough motive to cooperate nor ideological consistency for that sort of concerted effort).

Nigeria transitioned practically seamlessly into having its government run by African-owned corporations, which hasn't stopped them from indulging in almost cartoonish levels of evil, and the vast majority of Nigeria's population are underpaid wage slaves (or just unpaid- hello, private prison industry!) to one degree or another. The British, Canadians, and South Africans find the Nigerian regime distasteful- not because of the corporatocracy or wage slavery (well, Canada does a little, but not too much), but because they're doing it while being run by Africans- but they swallow their pride because the Nigerians have been content to remain in the Commonwealth for now and they care more about getting their hands on Nigerian resources than strict ideological consistency.

The East African Union is an OTL EU-esque organization dominated by Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, and of those three, Tanzania is clearly the dominant power. While Tanzania has managed to claw its way up to being democratic, Tanzanian democracy is still very flawed and dominated by the left-populist/African socialist Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or "Party of the Revolution"; still, opposition parties are completely legal and you won't be blacklisted if you vote for them, and occasionally someone other than the CCM gets control of the government for a few years, so that's cool, right? Kenya and Zambia are both more democratic than Tanzania (Kenya's about as democratic as OTL Austria and has living standards to match, while Zambia's more Switzerland-ish) but still serve as its junior partners in the EAU. Zambian politicians complain about Tanzania and Kenya not being as democratic as Zambia a lot, while Tanzanians and Kenyans usually fire back with iterations of "well, at least both of our countries are actively trying to get better as opposed to being complacent with what we already have, and also shut your up, your mom buys you Mega-Blocks instead of Legos." [3] Finally, serving as a bit of an outlier, there's Egypt, a socialistic "guided democracy" a la an ideologically-flipped version of (OTL) Singapore. While Egypt is technically on the eastern half of the African continent, it's kinda separated from the rest of the EAU by a totalitarian Islamist state; then again, Eritrea and Djibouti are separated from the rest of the EAU by Ethiopia and that didn't stop them from being admitted, so the EAU's accepted Egypt into its fold. Well, there are certainly worse allies to have.

Apartheid never ended in South Africa, white nationalists control the government, yadda yadda yadda, you've almost certainly read various iterations of this same story a hundred times by this point as crude attempts to show that an alternate timeline is worse than ours, I'm sure you don't need it reiterated yet again. Let's just move on to Asia.

While the Second American Civil War is the main subject of international news- understandable, considering how big America is and how whichever faction wins (pyrrhic as a total victory would undoubtedly end up being) will determine the fate of one of the largest and most powerful nations on the planet- the ongoing civil war in Saudi Arabia is also worth mentioning. The war's pretty clear-cut, split between a pro-democracy faction backed by the Chinese sphere and the Saudis backed by the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, none of which want to lose one of their number-one oil producers. While China, Japan, and Russia are more focused on the war in America and haven't dedicated many troops to this war, the UK and France have only sent over volunteer troops to help the Legitimists and as such have been free to pour their own soldiers into the Arabian Peninsula. Iran, too, has been putting a lot of troops into Saudi Arabia, as the Iranians would really like it if they could have another sane, democratic neighbor other than Turkey. They're also in it for the oil, and eastern Arabia is under outright joint Iranian/Chinese (mainly Iranian) occupation.

And speaking of Iran, it's one of TTL's nations that's considerably better-off than OTL; it's rather more democratic, for starters (think OTL Uruguay-ish), and it's also got some of the best human rights in the region. As mentioned above, Iran's heavily involved in the Saudi civil war, and that combined with the distance means it's essentially uninvolved in the American war. Iran has a bit of a siege mentality thanks to all the authoritarian nations surrounding it, as with many other democratic states in this reality, and as a result it's acquired a bit of a "as long as your democracy is kind of passable, you're fine" mindset. The flawed democracies of the southeastern Arabian peninsula appreciate this, even if they're closer to China, while Afghanistan (much more of a hybrid regime than a proper democracy, if also more stable and peaceful than OTL) has gladly accepted Iranian backing, being somewhat at odds with the authoritarian states that have largely filled former Soviet Central Asia.

Well, Hindustan had to be addressed eventually, might as well get it over with now. To make a long story short, it's fucking awful, and while it's technically less repressive than Novorossiya or Russia that's more than balanced out by the sheer amount of people living in poverty and terror under the ever-watchful eye of the Hindustani surveillance state. To make a long and grotesque story short, radical Hindu nationalists rose as the main opposition to the preexisting dominant-party state, took power under fishy-at-best circumstances, and proceeded to create a Hindu supremacist state that ended up turning openly genocidal. Kerala was the only part of the country that managed to successfully break off in time, claiming that it would become a true "democratic communist state," and while Hindustan seriously considered invading it decided to use Kerala as a release valve of sorts instead. Nowadays, Hindustan is a straight-up fascist, hyper-militarized hell constantly cranking out propaganda to brainwash the newest generation into fanatical loyalty 24/7. The only hope spot is that all the genocide has not, despite the government's expectations, sufficiently stabilized Hindustan: fortunately, despite the relentless flow of propaganda and forced conscription, resistance movements (covertly backed by the democratic world) exist across the Indian interior, and some parts of the country are inching towards outright civil war. Optimists hope that democracy will soon be triumphant in former India, while pessimists point out that what's more likely to happen is a devastating civil war to rival the one ongoing in America, and if the world's lucky it'll end with Hindustan splintered into several new states of varying degrees of authoritarianism... but if the world's unlucky, this hypothetical civil war will turn nuclear and either leave the Indian subcontinent an irradiated mess or drag in China, and potentially even the rest of the world, kicking off a global nuclear holocaust. Hindustan's atrocious behavior has not helped treatment of Hindus abroad- Hindus elsewhere in the world are constantly having to explain that they do not approve of the actions of Hindustan and that the atrocities committed by Hindustan are not representative of all Hindus, and foreign Hindus (in a cruel twist, most of them are refugees from Hindustan) are constant victims of hate crimes.

The People's Republic of China is a bit paradoxical, as it's not so great at defending democracy at home, but surprisingly competent at promoting democracy abroad. Long story short, an alternate/bigger version of the Tiananmen Square protests ended up forcing the Chinese government to reform, it actually underwent surprisingly tangible movement towards liberalization, and nowadays China has progressed to the point of "flawed democracy": think OTL Serbia, but still constitutionally communist and with a more socially liberal consensus. However, as stated, Beijing is a lot more competent in propping up democracy abroad; how this aforementioned paradoxical state came about isn't really clear, but the general consensus among other democratic nations is that China's trying to keep its populace more focused on all the good it's doing abroad so they neglect to notice how China's own democracy is still kind of shitty. China's current big propaganda push is its intervention in the American war on the side of the Third Rainbow Coalition, and domestically Beijing's been really pushing the message that Americans love China, constantly showing off probably-not-staged photos and footage of Chinese and TRC soldiers eating together, playing cards, watching Chinese movies with English subtitles on, that sort of thing. The Chinese government's also been playing up the poverty-/disaster-porn angle in propaganda, showing off so many images of bombed American cities shrouded in smoke and starving children lined up in front of abandoned, rotting suburban homes that most Chinese people (those not fighting in America, anyway) genuinely believe that's all there is to America and are flabbergasted when they meet American refugees who know what things like cars, refrigerators, and video games are. Of course, not everyone's fooled, and there's a decent chunk of Chinese citizens (though some of them have rather, ah, nativist leanings) calling for China to stop its foreign interventions and work on improving democracy at home instead of gallivanting about elsewhere in the world, pointing out China's ongoing usage of gerrymandering and suppression of minority votes in places like Tibet. Unfortunately, they're not taken very seriously and are often falsely called violent anti-democracy protestors by establishment CCP politicians, and while China does have de jure free speech these days, the police are prone to either slap protestors with trespassing charges and jail sentences or beat the shit out of them and plant weapons and/or illegal drugs on them after the fact, depending on how merciful they're feeling.

If there's one "unambiguous good guy" nation on this shitty, shitty planet, it's Japan. Japan's prior dominant-party state has been thrown out, with it now being a genuine multiparty democracy with a healthy back-and-forth between its several electorally successful parties, strict anti-corruption and pro-democracy laws, the best-functioning healthcare on the planet, equitable tax rates, the statistically happiest and nicest population in the world (wonder why), the most far-reaching protections for the rights of minorities, lowest levels of overall bigotry worldwide, and have voluntarily issued apologies for all of Japan's crimes in WWII. Overall, TTL's Japanese are such genuinely unproblematic and wholesome good guys, it's a small wonder so much of the world hates them. Even Japan's allies aren't that fond of how overall great Japan is, either because it makes them look bad or because the Japanese can get kind of judgemental about the rest of the world not living up to their standards sometimes. The Japanese have repealed Article 9, but they don't really use their military and kept it pretty small up until war broke out in America and Japanese troops were sent over to help the TRC. Japan's also been accepting refugees from America: unsurprisingly, most refugees heading across the Pacific want to go to Japan rather than China, Vietnam, Indonesia, or Australia (the other main destinations).

Whereas China and Japan have a more reluctant partnership in trying to maintain order in East Asia, Indonesia and Australia have a much better-functioning alliance. While Australia is pretty identical to its OTL self, Indonesia can be best described as "if Yugoslavia had worked out," having achieved full (if lower-tier) democracy and satisfied the more restless ethnic groups with varying degrees of autonomy. Modern Indonesia is stable, democratic, and a regional power, and is currently reaching out to East African markets in an attempt to further its international influence.

On a final note, according to TTL's Democracy Index, the ten (technically eleven, since Austria and Spain tied for tenth place) most democratic nations in the world as of 2019 are as follows: