North vs South

From a map contest entitled "north vs south"...

My imagination having somewhat failed me, here is something with bits and pieces stolen from here and there...

Hardly had the HRE's effort to establish mastery in Europe and its vile plot to impose good beer and sausages from the Pyrennes to the Urals been defeated (at the cost of the Czarist regime, for which few tears were shed), when a new menace raised its ugly head. The United Commonwealths of Columbia, having tried (and failed) to take advantage of the commotion to snatch Nigarague, and seeing the triumph of (relatively) liberal democracy all over Europe, strengthened its long-standing alliance with the Brazilians and entered into a compact with the widely detested South Africans (Draka Lite) and with the backwards but hugely populous nation of Mughal India, in defense of slavery, heirararchy, and the inequality of human beings, principles which most of the world now considered not merely outmoded but downright repugnant.

In the year 1960, the world is at nuclear daggers drawn, as the slave societies face down against an alliance of democracies determined to contain them until they (inevitably, surely?) collapse. Somewhat to one side is the authoritarian (if very capitalist) Chinese empire: it modernized more successfullly than China OTL, but still had some nasty shocks, and does not see why it should risk nuclear attack to decide a quarrel as to whether or not pale-skinned round-eyes should keep dark-skinned round-eyes as slaves.

The allies include the League of Boston, which is like in DoD a breakaway NE, which was joined by NW states unwilling to stay within a state increasingly falling under slaveholder control, doing rather better militarily in alliance with the Brits: a Russia which had a better Revolution: a bigger and stronger Netherlands, which now really regrets investing in that South African colony: an Italy unified in the 17th century, which is struggling to create a truly non-racial federal empire: the British Empire, slightly less a bunch of SOBs than OTL: and an odd sort of socialistic federal Ottoman Empire, where the Sultan reigns but does not rule.

They are opposed by a "greater Confederacy", an utterly brutal Africa-based Christian-fundamentalist racial dictatorship speaking funny-accented Dutch (many of which, however, are in fact fat. They usually carry a load of guns to make up for it), a bigger and badder Brazil with a racial hierarchy of dizzying complexity to some extent moderated by money - all nuke-armed at this point - and a Muslim dictatorship in India which imported western organizational talent and technology to put the screws to rebellious Hindus. They have few allies: the most unusual of which is the Torres Holding Company, an HRE commercial enterprise running on sweated labor which became essentially an independent corporate state after the war, under South African protection (the South Africans think of them as their little brother. )

Although two of the four major Slaver powers are centered in the Northern Hemisphere, they are seen as of "the south": the United Commonwealths are to the south of Canada and the League of Boston, the Dominion of South Africa is to the south of the Italians and the Ottomans, the Mughals are to the south of the Russians. The conflict between the League and the Alliance is most often characterized in geographic terms as "North against South..."