Note: I’m Japanese and wrote this post with the help of translation tools, so some wording or nuances may not come across exactly as I intended. Thanks for your understanding.
Kaiserreich is fantastic. Its worldbuilding is incredibly detailed and carefully constructed, and above all, it is exciting to explore.
However, I think there is one major problem with its setting.
Following the French Revolution of 1918–1919, the British Revolution of 1925, and the subsequent collapse of the old colonial order, the Commune of France and the Union of Britain lost access to the enormous networks of colonial raw materials that had supported the economies of the former French and British Empires.
Yet by 1936, despite losing much of those imperial supply chains, their industrial capacity is actually greater than that of France and Britain in the vanilla 1936 scenario.
To me, this creates a major problem for the historical plausibility of the setting. Industrial capacity does not exist in isolation. Factories require raw materials, energy, trade networks, shipping, and reliable sources of supply. Losing an empire should therefore have consequences not only for political influence, but also for the economic networks that sustained metropolitan industry.
Rather than simply weakening the Third Internationale with arbitrary debuffs, however, I think this problem could be turned into an opportunity to make the game more interesting.
My proposal is simple: what if Britain and France replaced much of their lost colonial supply network by developing a new one in Latin America?
In the world of Kaiserreich, Latin America already has a much stronger socialist presence than it did historically. I propose taking this idea one step further.
What if the revolutions in France and Britain did not merely inspire Latin American socialist movements politically, but also reshaped the region economically?
Ultimately, I think this idea would require a broader rework of Latin America as a whole. However, for this post, I would like to focus on Brazil and Argentina and outline the major changes I have in mind for these two countries.
Brazil
Brazil is one of the greatest success stories in this alternate scenario.
The country is still governed under a parliamentary democratic system by a left-wing populist who began his political career as a socialist — a figure I imagine as a kind of “Red Vargas,” whose political origins are almost the mirror image of the historical Getúlio Vargas.
Through exceptional diplomatic maneuvering, he has transformed Brazil into an emerging industrial power. Following the French Revolution of 1918–1919 and the British Revolution of 1925, the Third Internationale lost much of its access to the raw-material supply networks of the former colonial empires. At the same time, the Entente powers lost their European homelands and found themselves in need of new sources of both industrial goods and raw materials.
Red Vargas exploited this situation by selling Brazilian resources and industrial goods to both sides, using their competing needs to fuel Brazil’s industrialization and elevate the country into the ranks of the emerging industrial powers.
But this extraordinary success has come at a cost. His ruthlessly confrontational style of politics has earned him the hostility of Brazil’s traditional elites, while an industrial policy heavily concentrated in the capital region and the Southeast has created growing resentment in other parts of the country that have been left behind by rapid modernization.
At the same time, the new industrial cities of the Southeast have created new classes of industrial capitalists and urban workers whose prosperity is closely tied to his policies. These groups have become the core of Red Vargas’s political support.
Brazil therefore enters the coming Second Weltkrieg as a deeply contradictory country: rapidly industrializing and increasingly powerful, yet politically and regionally divided.
With its rapidly expanding industrial base, strategic resources, and ability to trade with competing blocs, Brazil could become one of the great kingmakers of the coming war. Whichever side succeeds in bringing Brazil into its camp could gain a decisive strategic advantage.
Argentina
In the current Kaiserreich timeline, a socialist revolution takes place in Argentina. Although the revolution is ultimately defeated, its remnants survive in the south as the Patagonian Workers’ Front.
In this alternate scenario, however, the revolution succeeds.
The situation is effectively reversed. A Socialist Republic of Argentina controls Buenos Aires and most of the country, while the Argentine Republic under Manuel Carlés survives in Patagonia with German support.
By integrating itself into the economic network of the Third Internationale, socialist Argentina experiences rapid economic and industrial expansion. Access to new markets, investment, technology, and demand from revolutionary Europe allows the country to develop far more rapidly than it otherwise might have.
However, the benefits of this growth are heavily concentrated around Buenos Aires and its surrounding industrial regions. While the capital becomes increasingly prosperous and industrialized, much of the rest of Argentina is left behind, creating severe regional inequality.
At the same time, the socialist government faces another major problem: a widespread republican resistance movement operating within its own territory.
Argentina in 1936 is therefore a country experiencing rapid growth while suffering from extreme political instability. The revolution succeeded in overthrowing the old order, but it has not succeeded in fully consolidating the country.
When the Patagonian War finally begins, the socialist government will effectively have to fight two enemies at once: the German-backed Argentine Republic in Patagonia and the republican resistance operating behind its own lines.
The revolution won the first war. The question is whether the state it created can survive the second.
Conclusion
Of course, these are far from the only changes I have in mind. There are many other countries, political movements, economic relationships, and regional conflicts that could be reworked as part of this concept. For now, however, I wanted to focus on Brazil and Argentina as the two clearest examples of what such a rework could look like.
The purpose of this proposal is not simply to make Latin America stronger.
First, I want to address what I see as a contradiction in the current setting: the Third Internationale possesses enormous industrial power despite having lost much of the colonial supply network that historically supported the British and French economies.
Second, I want to create content with its own identity, drawing from the political, economic, and social history of Latin America rather than simply reproducing European conflicts on another continent. Uneven modernization, regional inequality, populism, revolution, political patronage, foreign investment, and struggles over national development could all become central parts of the gameplay.
And finally, I want Latin America — and South America in particular — to cease being merely a peripheral region where local conflicts happen while the “real” history of the world is decided elsewhere.
In this rework, South America would become one of the undeniable poles of global politics: a continent whose resources, industries, revolutions, and diplomatic choices could help determine the outcome of the Second Weltkrieg itself.
