Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 The rise of Europe changed the destiny of our world forever.\u00a0 Europe formed Western Civilization as we know it, it colonized the world, and it controlled the world for centuries.\u00a0 It is natural that Europe considers itself the center of the universe.\u00a0 It is interesting then that in the modern day, two great alliances come from Europe.\u00a0 The Western Alliance and the Russian Federation are strong indeed, but they are not alone.<\/p>\n
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Book of Civilizations<\/strong><\/p>\n Europe<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to historians, recorded history began a few thousand years ago when scattered tribes began to write symbols on stones.\u00a0 One thing I have learned while studying our histories is that our civilizations are far older than that.\u00a0 Historians tell us that cultures come and go, wiped out by new ones like a giant Darwinian experiment where only the fittest survive.\u00a0 But cultures evolve.\u00a0 A culture does not die when it stops drinking from ceramic cups and begins drinking from glass.\u00a0 It just evolved.<\/p>\n I have learned that we achieve a much more complete understanding of our history if we look at the cities.\u00a0 We all know the story of Rome, founded by Romulus and Remus in 753 BC, to become the capital of the greatest empire in history.\u00a0 The old saying was that all roads went to Rome because there was nowhere else to go.\u00a0 It is a great story.\u00a0 It ignores the fact that people have lived there since the Ice Age, over 12,000 years ago.<\/p>\n Constantinople, the other great city of the Roman Empire, has been continuously inhabited since 660 BC, despite having been through four major cultural changes.\u00a0 It was named Byzantium under the Greeks, Constantinople under the Romans, Istanbul under the Muslims, and now Constantinople again.\u00a0 It has been the same city for over 2,000 years, and is in fact The City according those who live there.\u00a0 People have lived in that same location since at least 6,000 years before the Greeks \u201cfounded\u201d it.<\/p>\n Mediterranean Europe is full of ancient cities like that, places where we built the cities we live in now over cities where we weathered the Ice Age, places that were far enough away from the ocean coasts that humanity survived when the glaciers that covered northern Europe and America melted.\u00a0 And just like on every other continent, we have found pyramids older than Western Civilization itself.\u00a0 How long have these cities and monuments been here?\u00a0 How long have our civilizations<\/em> lived?\u00a0 Not the hunter-gatherer roaming people historians say<\/em> we were.\u00a0 How long ago did we build the original cities that we live on top of now<\/em>?\u00a0 We don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n What we do know is that the Ice Age glaciers melted, and the people of Mediterranean Europe moved north, expanding into the newly uncovered lands.\u00a0 Those who moved into the harsher environments of the north had to grow stronger or die.\u00a0 They became the Germanic people who moved into the Germanies, the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Balkans, and even into western Russia.\u00a0 The settlements and towns we established all of those thousands of years ago, behind the retreating glaciers, became the basis for the modern societies that we know today.<\/p>\n While the ancient Greeks conquered the known world, the Germanic people became Celtic, Scandinavian, and Russian.\u00a0 Then Rome rose to control the entire Mediterranean World.\u00a0 And with the help of Germanic troops willing to work for Rome, it captured much of Northern Europe and even the British Isles.\u00a0 Christianity came out of Israel and used the vast Roman roads to spread the faith to all corners of the known world.\u00a0 Rome would fall of course, when Roman corruption grew too great, and centuries of darkness fell on European civilization.\u00a0 Muslims rose in the east and after a long series of wars between Christian and Muslim even The City of Constantinople fell to them.<\/p>\n But in the end, Europe rose out of the darkness with a Renaissance of thinking that propelled it into being the most powerful collection of realms on the planet.\u00a0 Spain, Portugal, England, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Germany carved out colonies throughout the non-European world.\u00a0 At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire became one of the great empires of Eastern Europe, alongside the Ottoman Empire that held almost all of the non-European Roman Empire.\u00a0 And the Russian Empire became the third largest empire in the history of the world, stretching from Eastern Europe to Alaska.\u00a0 Only the British and Mongol empires surpassed Russia\u2019s territorial control, and only the British and Chinese had more people.<\/p>\n A tangle of alliances linked the various European powers into a crazy quilt of relations that few could even understand.\u00a0 In 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria sent these alliances tumbling headlong into \u201cThe War To End All Wars.\u201d\u00a0 What we call World War I pitted the great empires of the day in a mortal struggle for survival that burned the lands of Europe and beyond.<\/p>\n The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and the Russian Empire fell to the October Revolution of Stalin, both long before the war ended.\u00a0 In peace settlements after the war, the victorious Allied Powers split the Ottoman and German Imperial holdings between them and levied crippling war reparations on the German government.\u00a0 The German economy could not afford to both pay the reparations and rebuild, and it collapsed when the world economy slipped into a Depression.<\/p>\n Hitler\u2019s National Socialist Party rose to power with a Germany First mantra and the Global War soon followed when Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia began to rebuild their empires.\u00a0 The Allied Powers reformed to fight the Axis Powers, with America and Russia joining England after Japan attacked America and Germany betrayed Russia.\u00a0 It was a long war, resulting in millions of deaths, and sinking a third of the planet\u2019s ships.\u00a0 World War II ended with the total destruction of Germany and defeat of Japan.<\/p>\n In order to stop a Third World War from happening, The Allied Nations formed the United Nations with the goal of promoting the peace by only accepting peaceful nations into its fold.\u00a0 The Europeans stepped back from their colonial possessions throughout the world, granting them self-rule again, and the UN began accepting the rash of new nations, whether or not they were actually peaceful, in an attempt to become a global government.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Europe and the world became embroiled in the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union, with a Soviet Iron Curtain separating Eastern Europe, and East Germany, from the rest of the world.\u00a0 The Republic of China and many other nations fell to communist revolutions and the massive Soviet Block became a true threat to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n By the end of the century though, the Soviet Union collapsed due to a shattered economy that could no longer support the socialist system, the Iron Curtain fell, and the new Russian Federation and numerous former Soviet satellite states began attempting to rebuild.\u00a0 Germany reformed, the nations of Eastern Europe joined the Western alliances, and it appeared as though the world was headed into a new age century of peace and prosperity.<\/p>\n Then the Islamic Jihad reared its head and the World Trade Center towers in New York fell.\u00a0 Europe went to war in support of America, sending their troops back into the Arab World in attempt to bring order to it.\u00a0 Despite their best efforts, the Muslims never truly accepted the help of those they had been at war with for over a thousand years.\u00a0 And with sizable Muslim minorities in many of the European nations, Muslim riots in the streets began to threaten the central authority of many nations.<\/p>\n When the American financial system collapsed, it was a death knell to the rest of the world economy.\u00a0 Overnight, the banks froze their accounts and went on a bank holiday, protecting their own interests.\u00a0 Protests and riots swept through Europe, destabilizing governments, and those already at the tipping point collapsed into anarchy.<\/p>\n France, Spain, Greece, and the Balkans saw large parts of their territories effectively seceding from the central governments.\u00a0 Most of the other nations saw similar actions, though they were far more localized into isolated neighborhoods in larger cities rather than large swaths of the countryside.\u00a0 The territories controlled by the Islamic Brotherhoods became regarded as some of the worst in the world, with Sharia Law enforced on all residents under their control, whether Muslim or not.\u00a0 Rapes and murders skyrocketed, a trait which the Anarchist and People\u2019s Revolution-controlled territories often shared.<\/p>\n The economic underpinning of the European Union collapsed, and the few stable nations like England, Germany, Italy, and the Scandinavian realms could not afford to bail out the floundering ones after the numerous bailouts they\u2019d given earlier in the century.\u00a0 Instead they shored up the remains of their financial systems, and Germany actually nationalized its central banks in a move that terrified bankers across the world.\u00a0 As other countries looked ready to follow Germany\u2019s example, the banks became far more cooperative in lending their money out again.\u00a0 They even guaranteed loans to some of the European nations, giving them enough money to keep the militaries and police forces paid and equipped.<\/p>\n The war in the streets against the Muslims, Anarchists, and Communists lasted for years, with suicide bombs, improvised explosives, and guerilla attacks becoming the standard tactic of the revolutionary movements.\u00a0 Greece, Spain, and Italy, near major Muslim nations in Africa and the Middle East, soon became the targets of full-scale invasions that threatened to completely destabilize them.\u00a0 They and other European governments from Portugal to the Russian\u2019s long border with the Islamic states wiped out hundreds of resistance cells.\u00a0 But there were always new bodies to replace the dead ones, and many of the former Soviet republics failed altogether.\u00a0 The Russians were happy to help their neighbors in need of course, sending in military forces to help stabilize them.<\/p>\n And in 2061 England received a wakeup call that they had an additional enemy.\u00a0 China had been gobbling up countries since the Second Great Depression started, and they had their sights on Australia next.\u00a0 England called for aid from NATO and Canada and America answered.\u00a0 Linking up with the Australian Defence Force, the four nations worked together to engage the Chinese invasion force short of the Australia coast.\u00a0 They intercepted the Chinese just outside Indonesian waters, and the combined fleets engaged each other in a long game of bluff and counterbluff.\u00a0 Over a period of months, Chinese fleets moved on New Guinea, the Mariana Islands, and dozens of other targets throughout the Pacific Ocean, resulting in several skirmishes between small task forces.<\/p>\n With the United Nations paralyzed by Russian and Chinese vetoes, and NATO membership plunging due to Russian and Islamic Brotherhood pressure, the four nations began negotiations for creating a new military alliance.\u00a0 Largely based on NATO, and generally considered to be its successor by modern historians, the new Western Alliance held the line against Chinese expansion deeper into the Pacific, but proved unable to roll back their previous conquests.\u00a0 The Indonesia-New Guinea-Micronesia Front became one of the tensest borders in the world in a matter of months.<\/p>\n The successful stand of the Western Alliance against the Chinese caught the attention of the other European nations though, and Poland quickly asked for membership.\u00a0 Other nations echoed their actions, and soon most of Europe west of Poland and Greece had joined.\u00a0 Western Alliance troops soon began striking back against the most organized enemies, the armies of Turkey and North Africa.\u00a0 The fighting did much to destroy the armed forces of the European enemies, and Western Alliance ground forces soon rolled all of the Muslim forces out of the European territories.\u00a0 Finally, in a major coup, even Constantinople, the Great City of the East, rebelled against Islamic Brotherhood rule and petitioned for inclusion in the Western Alliance as the world\u2019s largest sovereign city-state.<\/p>\n In the East, Russia effectively took over every European nation north of Bulgaria, and stormed south into the Greater Middle East.\u00a0 They secured almost the entire coasts of the Black and Caspian Seas, stopped only by Constantinople and a rising Persian Republic that had finally finished a bloody rebellion against its own Islamic Brotherhood.\u00a0 By the time Russian expansion came to an end, they even shared a short border with India next to their longest border with China.<\/p>\n As the Twenty-First Century came to an end, and both the Western Alliance and Russian Federations stabilized, they began to rebuild their economies and perform true space exploration again.\u00a0 They colonized the Moon and Mars, and placed smaller outposts throughout the Solar System.\u00a0 It was a new space race, and even if both alliances lagged behind China they kept close to their mutual rival.\u00a0 A new Iron Curtain had fallen between the Western Alliance and the Russian Federation though, with only Constantinople keeping an open relationship with them for shipping and trading purposes.<\/p>\n When China performed the first hyperspace jump in 2105, it caused a small revolution in scientific and political thought throughout Europe.\u00a0 Everyone knew the space race had entered a new stage and would never be the same again.\u00a0 They all needed to be able to ship large containers into space.\u00a0 They needed permanent Orbital Elevators.\u00a0 There were no suitable places anywhere in Europe to build them, so the Western Alliance built the Orbital Elevators at Port Harcourt in Nigeria and Panama City, enabling them to send freight into space.<\/p>\n Russia had lost Cuba to a revolution though so they no longer possessed any territory near the equator.\u00a0 With this limitation, they did what the Russians have always done well.\u00a0 They adapted.\u00a0 They offered to help Sri Lanka build a permanent Orbital Elevator at Colombo in exchange for full access.\u00a0 Sri Lanka agreed.\u00a0 This greatly helped the Russian space program, but having to send shipments through Constantinople and the Suez left their security deficient.\u00a0 Because of these long shipment times through at best chilly waters in a diplomatic sense, the Russian space program would always lag until after Contact.<\/p>\n During the Twenty-Second Century, the Western Alliance founded a dozen colonies, as well as another eight started by single nations like England and Germany, or the Scandinavian Alliance.\u00a0 The Russian Federation in the meantime colonized a mere ten worlds.\u00a0 There were of course many disagreements in numerous systems and worlds over who owned what, and some of those disagreements escalated to the point of targeting weapons.\u00a0 A few even resulted in actual weapons fire.<\/p>\n But space is a very large place to go, and humanity discovered well over a hundred worlds inside The Walls of the Terran Bubble that could support life with ease.\u00a0 Hundreds more could support small outposts, and expensive terraforming could theoretically bring more into the Goldilocks fold.\u00a0 Even limited as we were, unable to pass through The Walls, it would have been centuries before we ran out of worlds to colonize in the mere three hundred lightyears we had to work with.\u00a0 Space as they say, is very<\/em> large.<\/p>\n In 2205 though, all the worlds we lived on changed when the Peloran made Contact with a British destroyer squadron in the Terran system itself.\u00a0 They brought medical treatments that wiped out most of our diseases and shared technologies that were far beyond what we had access to.\u00a0 And they gave us hyperspace drives that could pierce the Walls and we began to explore the worlds outside the Terran Bubble.\u00a0 They gave most of those technologies only to the nations of the Western Alliance of course, but that didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 The Shang and Roderan arrived not long after the Peloran, providing the Chinese and Russians with very similar technologies.\u00a0 And the nonaligned nations like Persia and India gained most of the technologies they wanted by the simple expedient of trade.<\/p>\n In a matter of years, Earth\u2019s cultures realized they would have to adjust to the idea of people living for centuries without dying of old age.\u00a0 And then we noticed the phenomenon of the Ageless, those who stopped aging at all when they received the final Peloran treatments.\u00a0 At first they appeared in the Celtic populations of Great Britain and America, but then we began to see some of them in other regions as well.\u00a0 At the same time, Earth\u2019s technological base advanced by centuries, and Europe became a major center of the reindustrialization that would push us into the galaxy, rather than our mere collection of local stars.\u00a0 Using Roderan anti-gravity technology, the Russians built the Severnyi Polyus Orbital Elevator over the North Pole, bringing them in line with the other great nations.<\/p>\n And then a Roderan-upgraded Russian squadron confronted an old American fleet over a contested colony world on the far reaches of colonized space.\u00a0 The American fleet commander didn\u2019t even know we had made Contact yet, and had no reason to believe that the six Russian destroyers would be any threat at all to his entire fleet.\u00a0 When he declined to leave the colony, a single Russian ship fired, lancing an American destroyer with gravity cannons that ripped the engines out of the ship.\u00a0 The Americans returned fire, but the gravitic-powered Russian ships performed maneuvers that no old reaction drive vessel could hope to match, and not a single one of the American ship killer missiles could track them.\u00a0 Only the American lasers found their targets, but gravitic deflector arrays twisted them away without so much as a scratch.\u00a0 With no chance of winning, the American surrendered the colony, and the Russians allowed him to grapple the crippled destroyer before they left.<\/p>\n That was the beginning of the new Great Space Race, far more aggressive than any other.\u00a0 Anti-gravity drives became easy to build, and the Europeans spread to the stars in an unorganized rush that no government could control.\u00a0 Where different nationalities claimed single worlds, they called in their alliances for aid, and the fleets came far more quickly than ever before.\u00a0 The European governments, whether West or Russian, didn\u2019t want war, but the colonists were often far surer of defending what was \u201ctheirs\u201d by right.\u00a0 Sometimes weapons fire broke out in orbit, but more often than not either fighting went on planetside between the colonists, or one of the nations arranged for an evacuation to another world within a few weeks travel at most.<\/p>\n The Chinese became less reasonable to European eyes as the decades went by.\u00a0 They wanted what was theirs, and what was theirs was anything that someone else did not defend properly.\u00a0 Especially if it was near another of their colonies.\u00a0 They held to the Lunar Treaty and the similar treaties that kept the other Core Worlds safe from attack, but in the Colony Regions it was the Wild Wild West all over again.\u00a0 The citizens of Europe heard very little about the troubles out there, because it was so far away, and most people didn\u2019t care about the people who left, unless they were family.<\/p>\n Then the Shang attacked Yosemite Yards and Washington D.C. and everything changed.\u00a0 The governments stood with their American allies and the Shang hit Fort London, Fort Paris, Fort Berlin, and so many others.\u00a0 The Chinese began to raid their shipping, even in the Core Worlds, and then both the Chinese and the Shang hit Alpha Centauri.\u00a0 It was a wake up call to all of Europe and her worlds, in the Core and beyond.\u00a0 The War Europe had spent centuries avoiding had come for them and would not let them go.\u00a0 To their credit, the nations of Europe answered the call.<\/p>\n Russia on the other hand has so far stayed out of The War.\u00a0 They have no qualms with sitting back and watching as the West and the Far East fight.\u00a0 They hold to the Middle and wait to see what will happen next.\u00a0 Some people call to bring them in to The War.\u00a0 Some people do not.\u00a0 After all, they might choose the wrong side.\u00a0 Russia always looks after Russia after all.<\/p>\n In question is the future of Europe.\u00a0 Will it continue to command a position of power in the galaxy or will it fall under foreign influences like so many other civilizations have?\u00a0 Only time will tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 The rise of Europe changed the destiny of our world forever.\u00a0 Europe formed Western Civilization as we know it, it colonized the world, and it controlled the world for centuries.\u00a0 It is natural that Europe[…]↓ Read the rest of this 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