Practicing regular writing. Kind of necessary.
…
The Consolidation Wars
(2076-2102 AD)
Reach: Worldwide
Nations Involved: All
Casualties: 250,000,000 killed (estimated)
The Consolidation Wars were never called that by the nations that fought them. In fact, the great debate during that time period was over which individual conflict could properly be called “World War III.” The idea that later generations would instead see a quarter-century’s worth of insurrections, conquests, annexations, secessions, and folk-migrations as one vast, interconnected conflict would have been profoundly alien to the participants. There were no sides in the wars, after all. No sides, and no common ideologies; every fight was a local one, and only of concern to the actual combatants. Everybody else had enough of their own problems.
Origins
The true origin of the Consolidation Wars was Zeroth Contact in 2045 AD. Earth’s discovery of the Amalgamation’s automated beacon, coupled with its quick development of a prototype FTL drive, triggered a global era of optimism and idealism. The stars beckoned! Wonders and marvels awaited! Finally humanity could take its place among the other Galactic civilizations. Maybe not the highest place, but there was no shame in being students for a while. Earth was eager for revelations.
Earth did not handle well the news that Galactic civilization was now a collection of charnel worlds, with only bones and ruin to bear mute witness to the savagery that must have destroyed it. In fact, in the end that revelation proved too much for humanity to bear. It merely took several decades for the madness to erupt.
The War of ‘76
Mainland Europe in 2076 AD had been ostensibly united for decades. The inclusion of Eastern Europe (including the western territories of the former Russian Empires) had never quite been perfect, but societal inertia and a lack of crises had allowed the system to operate without much internal conflict. It had been decades since the last conflict in the European Union proper, and over a century since the last general war.Unfortunately, all of that meant that Europeans were distinctly unprepared when a civil war did break out.
The triggering event was the decision by the EU bureaucracy to finally consolidate all government agencies in France itself. This had been discussed for more than twenty-five years, only to be vehemently rejected each time by most of the EU’s eastern nations as a naked power grab. The EU’s western nations instead saw this as a petulant refusal to make the government more efficient, which inflamed them in turn. At no time did either side expect the dispute to become violent, and it is now generally agreed that, somehow, both sides attacked first.
The War of ‘76 lasted five years, killed seventy-five million people, and left a broad belt of destruction that stretched from Kiel to Venice. By its end the European Union had split into Europe de l‘Oeust and the Pakt Euroazjatycki, and celebrated their victories by immediately conquering North Africa and East Siberia. By that point, the rest of the world barely noticed.
