Europe 2.0

Illyrian Confederation 2.0

The mountainous terrain of Southeastern Europe lends itself to interesting railways, but comparatively few have been built in the region (likely due to the cost of doing so). The Illyrian Confederation changes that with a cohesive rail system for the territories of Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo. The turbulent history of the region in the early twentieth century offers the possibility that such a state might have emerged as a communist construction following WWII.

In this alternative history, the Illyrian Protectorate was formed out of the ashes of WWI in 1920. The Balkans had suffered through nearly a decade of war, beginning with the Balkan Wars and the Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian conquests of the Vardar Macedonian region. WWI had devastated the area, and lingering instability remained. Albania was still occupied by Italian troops, and Serbian leadership was working to consolidate much of the Balkans as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

While 1918 had brought peace to much of Europe, there were a series of violent uprisings in the Southeast as the nascent postwar political environment evolved. The Christmas Uprising, led by those opposed to the unification of Montenegro with Serbia, kicked off early in 1919, and soon led to a full-blown civil war. The Albanian and Bosniak populations of Sandzak, then split between Serbia and Montenegro, soon erupted in the Plav Rebellion with similar objections to becoming part of Yugoslavia, which quickly spread to the majority-Muslim remainder of the South Serbia province. Adding to the instability was the Greco-Turkish war, which also started during this time.

Italy, with territorial claims over Albania and coastal Montenegro from the 1915 Treaty of London, took advantage of the chaos in the region, the exhaustion of Serbia and Bulgaria, and the distraction of Greece, to invade the area, declaring it a protectorate of Italy. The Italians looked to the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference to legitimize their rule, but Italy was only granted the Illyrian Protectorate with control over foreign affairs. The uprisings slowly fizzled as leaders accepted that this, unfortunately, was the only way they could avoid being split amongst neighboring countries. Under the protectorate, the Illyrian government retained substantial control over their internal affairs, including their railway building program.

Railways in the area were first built by the Chemins de fer Orienteaux, a French/Ottoman company, but the emerging railway era was significantly hampered by the Ottoman Empire’s bankruptcy in 1875. The next major expansion was during the invasions of WWI, when hundreds of kilometers of narrow-gauge military railways were built by Bulgaria and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during their occupation. Shortly after, having understood the national security advantages of railways, the protectorate government standard gauged its new lines, and began a railway building program that extended the reach of the country’s network substantially, albeit at a cost of substantial debt. As Montenegro had fought on the side of the allies, some German reparations contributed to this effort.

Italy returned to full control when they invaded in 1939, and WWII proved extensively disruptive for the country. The successive Italian and German occupations created considerable damage, but the local communist partisans were able to expel the Germans without Allied support. They then took control, but then struggled against the Yugoslav partisans for independence, which they eventually won. Seeking safety in numbers, the diverse populations of the Illyrian Confederation crafted a loosely organized state bound together (a bit like Switzerland) by the desire to remain independent of neighbors. They pursued a strategically non-aligned form of communism that saw it maintain relations to play off both East and West, and, crucially, fend off the continuing efforts of Yugoslavia that sought control.

Postwar, railroads were the primary transportation method until the fall of communism in the 1990s, and so the railways were invested in substantially with further expansions and upgrades. Some large-scale infrastructure projects were completed, including the Belgrade-Bar railway, funded as a joint political project with Yugoslavia. Capitalism proved to be a very different environment, however, and the freight side of the rail system was privatized, while the relative importance of the passenger system decreased.