The Grand Principality of Mexico

If I wanted a true and serious wank, I would've had the UCNA keep the Moorish empire. Even losing the Old World, they'd be one of the largest countries on the planet, controlling both the Mexican and Transcabralian Canals and the combined resources of everything from the Great Lakes south to around Chile. I did not want a wank, however. I wanted something plausible. And mostly, when I started writing this world as a GURPS Infinite Worlds setting, I was clueless about world history.

So of course there was a Mexico. Of course it was pretty similar to Mexico IRL. And because of sheer inertia, Mexico has existed as an independent nation ever since. But it hasn't stayed the same; the world has moved on, and the butterflies have turned it into the Grand Principality of Mexico.

The G.P. of Mexico 101

Why? Originally, this was the space-filling Empire of Mexico. After awhile, it evolved into a Bonapartist space-filling empire (on the lines of the Second Empire, which was run by a Habsburg); after that, into an ideologically Bonapartist empire; and after that, once reactionary Prussia had evolved into revolutionary Pomerania, into the G.P. of Mexico that you see here today.

• Who? Almost all the possible permutations of the Moorish ethnoreligious colonial hierarchy, with the Muslim varieties greatly reduced, under the charismatic rule of the House of Sansinger and its forest of bayonets.
• What? At one point, the UCNA's nemesis; at this point, its quirky miniboss antagonist.
• Where? Mexico and more. The G.P. of Mexico controls enough land to its south to have built the Mexican Canal, for instance.
• When? Like almost everything in the New World, the G.P. of Mexico is a child of the Great Realignment - specifically that part in the 1790s, when the Moorish colonial empire imploded. From that point, despite more and more serious turmoil than IRL Mexico was ever diverse enough to experience, it's managed to survive to the present day.

 So moving on a bit...

A brief history of the G.P. of Mexico

In the beginning, there was the Mexican Liturgical War. It was backed by French Sodalites and led by disaffected Gonzalans, and Umayyad Seville - which already had a hard fight on its hands from the last major war - was hard-pressed to put it down. It did manage to, however, officially suppressing the Sodality and restoring order...

...at least until the Moorish Civil War started at the end of 1786, when it wasn't at all clear who was in charge of the empire. By 1790, al-Mahdi had been driven into Africa; rather than accepting their new overlords, the Moorish colonies decided the time to act was now.

• Mexico was the seat of the Moorish New World, and in the beginning all signs pointed to it being the great empire that was going to come out of it... once it finished consolidating from the taifa states. (Unlike Cabralia, whose princely title arose from a republican background, the Grand Prince in Mexico [who?] claimed the title from the very start. "Prince" was chosen because he had no claim to nobility.) Its earliest rival was, oddly enough, the Yusufid states and their alliance with *Cuba; the Cubans were able to deal some significant naval defeats to proto-Mexico, and while the Mexicans soundly spanked them on land they never had the manpower to consolidate those victories.
• Part of this rise was because Mexico, unlike its competitors, was recognized internationally as a legitimate power early on. Importantly, both the Crown of All Spains and the Papal States recognized the Principality as the legitimate government.
• The Mexican Cession: In 1807, the Moorish New World (now calling itself an absurdly long name) acknowledged Mexican sovereignty in exchange for a ten-year truce. It's still celebrated as a national holiday in the G.P. today.
• The Grand Princess: The original Grand Prince saw his sons [who?] die before he did. He was succeeded by his second-oldest daughter, Teresa Maria, for a very simple reason: she was married to a Pomeranian officer named Oskar Sansinger, who was backed up by his fearsomely competent coreligionists in Axamalla, and the other contending daughter had no power base like that.
• Teresa Maria was Mexico's first peacetime leader, and is intensely loved for it.
• Reclamation: Anti-Islamic violence was widespread in the Mexican Revolt. Teresa Maria set in motion "Reclamation": discouraging explicit violence while systematically disenfranchising and dismantling Islam in Mexico.
• Oscar's Regency: When the Grand Princess died (and Mexico was finished grieving, which took more than a year), Oskar Sansinger was established as the Regent of Mexico while his son came of age. He spent this time being the counterpoint to his national nemesis, Yusuf I; both of them framed and set the stage for what their states became.
• Oscar was autocratic, and it chafed a lot of the many local elites, especially the "unsanctioned" ones. (In Andalusada's Mexico, religion tends to intersect with regional politics...) In particular, he was a Güntherite, and his opponents within the Church managed to turn that against him.
• Faced with that kind of pressure, Oscar's response was a convenient political conversion to Catholicism - which promptly blew up in his face, because a lot of his close kin up north (whose grandparents had fled the reductions of Pomerania, and saw exactly where this was going) decided that enough was enough and broke away, becoming a separate nation.
• Mexico's Muslim population had been trickling away ever since they'd started seriously losing to the Grand Principality; without the Shamalis to keep the country diversified, Mexico became more officially Catholic over the next few Grand Princes, and that trickle turned into a flood.
• By pure coincidence, the newly-autocratic Grand Principality of Cabralia was also run by a Sansinger. (300 years ago they'd fought in the Güntherite Wars together; "Sansinger" is a really generic name.) Inside of a few years they were inlaws, and the House of Sansinger was born.
• The Mexican Canal: The Sansinger princes have had more than their share of upheaval and turbulence, but it hasn't been all bad. Their single biggest victory was the construction of the Mexican Canal, the first inter-oceanic one in the New World. The Grand Principalities celebrated it hard; at a stroke (and enormous human cost) they'd dealt an enormous blow to the power of Cabralia's archrival the CRC, which has never fully recovered. (It's only been relatively recently, in fact, that the Transcabralia Canal was opened.)

The G.P. of Mexico today

As of the present day, the G.P. of Mexico looks like this:

Language: Mexican Sevillan, standardized by a state regulatory agency. (Sevillan. As part of Reclamation, it's never called "Moorish.")

• There used to be an Arabic-speaking minority. No longer; speaking it in school is punished, and it's been barred from curricula below the university level.
• Portuguese is a pretty common third language, especially if you were educated down south.

Religion: The G.P. of Mexico is officially Roman Catholic, and Mexico in general has a reputation for having its many churches completely fill every Sunday. (This is entirely true, and a carryover from the colonial period: Mexico has lots of smaller churches, because Moorish colonial policies banned them from building larger ones.)

• Because the House of Sansinger was originally Güntherite (and many of its members still are), the Holy Church in Mexico is legal. It's also state-supported, because the House of Sansinger isn't willing to risk Axamallan subverting it. (This is also why the Holy Church in Mexico is out of communion with the Holy Church in Axamalla.)

Government: An autocratic Grand Principality.

• Like Cabralia, Mexico has a tricameral legislature, which basically exists as a pressure valve for popular discontent. While it's as toothless as you'd expect, it's actually more powerful than it looks (or is allowed to be) on paper, because the legislature's become used to ignoring the law to get things done. There's a startling amount of corruption and overreach, but without reforming the constitution (and implicitly ceding much more power than is legit) there's basically no way to fix the corruption and overreach that won't destabilize society. Which didn't stop the Grand Prince from doing just that, not so long ago...
• Unlike Cabralia, Mexico officially follows semi-Salic succession, and has since the days of the Grand Princess. (It hasn't been an issue since then.)

Economy: For the first 75 years of its history, Mexico was the economic powerhouse of the New World; even when the UCNA had more purchasing power, Mexico was productive. Then the UCNA seriously industrialized, and Mexico was left behind.

• For a fair portion of the 19th century, Mexico was one of the world's major cotton producers. Increasing soil exhaustion's scaled that back considerably, but it's still better-known for its cotton than, say, the heartlands of the UCNA.

Foreign Relations: Mexico's closest alliance is, as ever, with the G.P. of Cabralia, locking both of them into complex sets of relationships based on that.

• Franco-Mexican relationships have been slightly colored by the Guise inheritance. It's not a serious issue, because Mexico has absolutely no ability to claim the throne of France, but one camp of the Guisard movement considers the Mexican Sansingers to be the Most Christian Kings and rightful heirs to the throne.