"Since the re-establishment of the Bonaparte dynasty in 1848, the great powers of Europe have spent a large amount of blood and treasure ensuring that the center of the continent - the wide sweep from the Rhine to the Vistula - is as fragmented as possible. The cast of characters engaged in that effort has changed, but the effort itself has been relatively consistent...
"The First Great European War, which the participants themselves refer to as the Prussian War, saw a rising Prussia threaten Austria, at the time dominant over the German Confederation. French aid to Austria allowed it to compete with Prussia's technologically superior army, thus allowing Napoleon III to expand his influence over the Rhineland regions his uncle had gained and lost; British attempts to contest the region only served to divide it further, initiate a series of proxy wars, and send a stream of refugees who inadvertently helped bring about the Texian Revolution.
"The Second Great European War (or Italian War) was similarly fought between Austria and a rising power, in this case the new Roman Empire. This time, foreign support from Russia allowed the rising power to take on the falling one - the Roman Pope's armies annexed Tyrol, Carniola, and Dalmatia, while Bohemia, Galicia, and Transylvania declared independence with Russian support. But Italian hegemony was little more acceptable to the great powers, most notably Britain and France, than the status quo had been - the 1905 death of Napoleon Joseph, whose adroit political skill was coupled with a deep passivity in foreign affairs, allowed a change in policy, and the coordinated invasion of the Piedmont and Roman Africa prompted dissension between Italian and Slavic nationalists and eventually allowed the independence of Austria's former 'captive nations' and the division of Italy between French protectorates and the British-aligned Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. When British control was broken, first by the effects of overly-aggressive Protestant missionaries and then by the British Revolution, Russia moved in to pick up the pieces.
"With division from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the Third Great European War was fought instead by choice. Fearful that Russia was consolidating its control over Central Europe, radical members of the Royalist Montagnard League first engineered a provocation in the form of a largely-invented spy scandal in coup against Napoléon Alexandre, resulting in the Dual Monarchy under General Emmanuel Forestier and Princess Hélène, then supported Polish independentists, Pannonian irredentists, and Swedish Occidentalists in the hopes of pushing the Jancović line east. It worked when a group of the latter successfully launched a coup against King Oscar III - in other words, the recent beneficiary of a coup started a coup in order to check the power of the beneficiaries of a long-ago coup. The result was a eight-year war along a frontline that stretched from icebound Spitsbergen to arid Persia, one which claimed more than ten million lives on four continents - and to no real effect. Both France and Russia claim the Third Great European War as a victory, but neither claim it as a particularly honorable, meaningful, or decisive one, though individual heroes and villains receive their own credits.
"Now, half a century after the Treaty of Richmond, what does European grand strategy look like in the XXIth century? It is clear after two decades that Constantine's War had little effect on Russia's long-term aims - an ideological commitment to autocracy has given way to Georgy Rublev's formulation of a 'democracy of the
demos' in which each country is formally sacrosanct in its internal affairs, but the view from Petrograd (or, for that matter, Sevastopol, Turku, and Vladivostok) remains fundamentally the same. In France, the same is true - Empress Jeanne's presidential rule has changed the methods of politics from the hands-off governance of her parents, but the goals and effects of that politics remains substantially the same to foreign nations. The substantive changes, instead, have pertained with the second rank of powers. The British Workers' Republic's longstanding insularism has given way to a new generation eager to deal with the Continent. The emergence of Poland, cordially hostile to Russia but far from a mere protectorate of France, has upset the balance of Germany and Slavonia alike. Egypt and Spain also seek to assert their independence from France, and Turkey from Russia: between them, they have transformed the Mediterranean from the 'red circle and purple slice' of Durand's graphical histories to a far more complex situation. Periodic crackdowns on unificationism in Germany and Italy increasingly only water those forbidden fruits; in 2012, for the first time in a century, an explicitly unificationist party (the People's Liberal Party) was allowed into government in a German state, albeit Hanover. And China increasingly puts its hand in, as well, to the consternation of diplomats in the Kremlin and the Élysée alike. It is clear that a bifurcated Europe will no longer be an accurate model."
-Hannibal Student Ponce de León,
A Student's Guide to Geopraxis (2015)